On The Money; What’s Wrong With Economists

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What’s Wrong With Economists

Most economists write for policy wonks, not regular people. While they study consumer behavior and worker productivity, they have little, if anything, to say to consumers or workers. They might have something to say to voters, but only because they endorse a policy favored by a particular candidate. Economists write their books for the candidates, the political think-tanks, the rich and powerful and their advisers, but not for us, the 99%.

 

While economists may have some respect for you as a voter, as a worker, producer and consumer, you are simply a pawn to them. Something to be pushed around by fiscal policy, corporate coercion, and government taxation. Your life, energy, time, creativity and spirit mean no more to them than so many barrels of oil, tons of molybdenum or bushels of corn, and they don’t write economics books for bushels of corn.

 

To economists you are just a commodity to be bought and sold, consumed and discarded, just another anonymous drone, toiling away at meaningless work, in an empty life that you fill with pointless consumption. They don’t want you to read their books. They want you to go shopping, and let them, along with Americas smartest and greediest, worry about what’s best for the economy.

 

As a result, we now have an economy engineered entirely to help the richest and greediest acquire more. This economy demands that the rest of us sacrifice more and more of our lives, and our planet, every year, for their benefit. No, economists don’t want us to read their books, they want us to spend more time at work, more money for housing, and more money for health care. They want us to accept lower wages, give up job security, and to get used to being disposable.

That’s how they save “the economy”. As soon as we get used to working longer and harder for less, accept the destruction of the environment as a necessary evil, and learn to step around the human garbage left in their wake, the economy will be fine. Isn’t that great! As long as we’re willing to sacrifice our lives for it, the economy will be just fine.

Yet, too many of us still worry about “the economy”. Is it growing? How fast is it growing? Are prices rising? How’s the stock market? Who worries about us?

Why does it cost so much, just to have a place to live? How do the long hours I spend at work affect my family? How much of my current lifestyle would I choose, were I not economically coerced into working full time? How will global climate change affect my quality of life, or my children’s? Mightn’t I appreciate a clean environment more, if I had more time to enjoy it? Should I participate in a system in which I have no value, except as an exploitable resource? Why should economic growth trump all of these real human concerns? Whose job is it to think about these things? Not economists, that’s for sure.

How can you leverage maximum productivity from employees? How will environmental regulation effect energy prices? How does depression and suicide effect corporate earnings? That’s how economists look at these problems, and that’s why economists suck.

In On The Money, Economics For the 99%, I take the radical position that economics is about people, and how they interact with each other and the environment. Instead of simply looking for ways to help the rich and powerful increase, and accelerate the flow of money into their own bank accounts, On The Money; Economics for the 99% exposes the fundamental flaws in the capitalist system that have led to the gross inequality, and catastrophic environmental destruction that define our time. On the Money; Economics for the 99% shows you how to reclaim your life and liberate the world from the greedy clutches of the 1%, one step at a time.

ON The Money; Getting Emotional

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Getting Emotional

In our culture, reason reigns supreme. In school they teach us to value reason, logic, and rational thinking, but they teach us to control our emotions, to keep them to ourselves, and not to let them interfere with our work. While the rational mind constantly gets rewarded through good grades, high-paying jobs, etc, our emotional responses, especially negative emotional responses, invoke scorn and discipline. We learn to override our emotional responses early in life, but we have emotions for a reason, and often they carry a lot of wisdom.

 

We learned to override our emotional aversion to school, which made it easier to override our emotional aversion to work. Pretty soon we start to recognize the thump of our heart, as it hits the bottom of a pit of despair, as the call of duty, and we do what we’re supposed to. We learn to expect life to suck. We rationalize it. We invent ethical codes and religions around it. We say it builds character, but have you looked around lately? I see more shallow, greedy, status conscious, small-minded idiots every day, and we here in the US work harder than anyone in the developed world. Is that the kind of character we need more of?

 

We learn how to pretend we like it, saying we love our job, doing extra work and kissing ass to prove it. We learn how to cope with life as a wage slave, while our desires, hopes and dreams turn to bitter resentment. After a while, when your emotions finally realize that you’ll never to listen to them, it all turns to depression. Depression sells pharmaceutical drugs like no other condition on Earth. If you have it, its why you can’t afford to be without health insurance. If you don’t have it, its why you can’t afford health insurance.

 

Depression, refers to the complete loss of enthusiasm for life. You may think emotions are inconvenient, silly, or irrelevant, but when your emotions give up on you, nothing else matters. Your emotions are smarter than they look, but they deserve close scrutiny. If your emotions are telling you to buy something, chances are they are being manipulated.

 

After almost 100 years of subliminal manipulation of our emotions through advertizing and mass media, we often find our emotions working at cross-purposes with our best interests. The 1% uses your emotions against you through a campaign of very sophisticated psychological warfare, carried out through advertizing and media. As a result, the more media you consume, the more inadequate you feel, the more needy you feel, and the more stuff you want.

 

Watching TV instantly turns you into the ugliest, poorest and dullest person in the room, by filling the room with sexy, witty, well-dressed people who completely ignore you. Don’t invite them into your home! Even though they seem to ignore you, everything they say and do is designed to take advantage of you, and use your emotions against you.

 

Not only has the field of psychology completely failed to help the millions of people who suffer from serious mental illness, they have induced mental illness in millions more by collaborating with business to manipulate buying, voting, driving, smoking, or any other kind of behavior they choose. Psychology is not about understanding the mind, psychology is the study of behavior, and how to manipulate it. Right now, thousands of college educated psychologists, with mortgages and student loans to pay off, are telling their bosses how much they love their job, and really knocking themselves out to find new ways to manipulate your behavior, by using your emotions against you.

 

While real rich, snooty obnoxious people might make snide comments about you while they drink all your booze and grind their cigarette butts into your carpet, they wouldn’t have an army of mad scientists orchestrating every word and movement purely for the purpose of taking advantage of you. It really pays dividends in your sanity to strictly limit your exposure to mass media, because that’s how the 1% turns your emotions against you, and you need your emotions on your side.

 

Its worth examining your emotions, because sometimes they well up from the very fiber of your being, and that emotion always has your best interest at heart. Your heart instinctively knows what’s best for you, and it will tell you so. On the other hand, if your heart’s not in it, get your body, mind, time and money out of it as well, and quit telling yourself how much you love it. Remember “the pursuit of happiness”? You will not find happiness by plunging yourself headlong into misery, day in and day out, no matter how much it pays, how proud it makes your parents, or how secure it makes you feel.

 

While you read On The Money; Economic advice for the 99%, pay attention to how your heart reacts to the ideas in this column. If you hear that little voice inside you say “Yes!”, “Right On!”, or even “That’d be nice.” when you read the ideas I present here, it’s because these ideas resonate with who we are as human beings, and our hearts remember what it was like to have meaningful, satisfying lives, instead of working ourselves to death for meaningless stuff.

 

In On The Money; Economic Advice for the 99%, I show you how to break out of those destructive habits that define our sick culture, and help you reclaim your life, your time, your dignity and your humanity, the things that really matter in life. On The Money;Economic Advice for the 99% represents a completely original and revolutionary approach to personal economics that challenges conventional thinking in a way that reveals the deceit, cruelty, and violence of our current economic system, and shows you how to turn the tables on the 1%.

 

So, read this column with an open heart, and realize that economics is bigger than money, its bigger than goods and services, its bigger than “the economy”, in fact. Economics is about how we live, how we exchange goods and services, and our impact on the environment, but economics is also about how we think and feel about our lives, and those things matter a hell of a lot more in life than the GDP, the unemployment rate, or the movements of any stock index. There’s a view of emotions in economics that’s On The Money.

Vote Zombie Rodoni For Second District Supervisor

Vote Zombie Rodoni For 2^nd District Supervisor

The Second District deserves a supervisor that reflects the earthy character of of this rural community. Zombie Rodoni has spent the last four years under the earth in Humboldt county. Zombie Rodoni’s got Humboldt County under his nails, in his hair and stuck between his teeth. Yes, Zombie Rodoni springs from the very ground he inhabits, and no one has a more intimate relationship with the grassroots in Humboldt County than Zombie Rodoni.

 

Remember, Zombie Rodoni didn’t vote for the draconian new “Emergency Ordinance” to stifle political dissent, oppress the poor and silence the occupy movement, like Clif Clendennen did. Zombie Rodoni would never vote for that measure. Zombie Rodoni would pick the protesters brains for a solution everyone could more or less live with.

 

Zombie Rodoni doesn’t work for the greedy real-estate bloodsuckers that got rich off of the housing bubble, wrecked the economy, and now want to make Humboldt County a more expensive place to live, like Estelle Fennel does. No, Zombie Rodoni knows what it is like to wander the streets day and night in relentless torment, in search of the sustenance his body craves.

 

Yes, Zombie Rodoni knows what its like to be homeless. Zombie Rodoni knows what its like to have mental illness. Zombie Rodoni knows what it means to have a substance abuse problem, and Zombie Rodoni knows what it is like to be dead. Who is better qualified to make those life and death decisions that effect all of us here in Humboldt County, than Zombie Rodoni? No one, I say.

Zombie Rodoni has name recognition. Zombie Rodoni has the experience, and Zombie Rodoni has a track record as one of Humboldt County’s most colorful supervisors. Now, Zombie Rodoni is back! Lets put him back where he belongs.

Before we try to decide which of these two dish sponges is the least slimy, Fennel or Clendennen, lets dig deep in the mud for the man in the black cowboy hat, and make Zombie Roger Rodoni our next 2^nd District Humboldt County Supervisor.

Zombie Roger Rodoni is ready to tackle today’s challenges. This isn’t the same old Roger. His years underground have changed him. This is the new walking undead Roger Rodoni. He’s ready for action, and knows how to get things done. Asked recently, “What will you do about the General Plan Update?” Zombie Rodoni replied, “Arrgh…urgle…chomp…BRAINS!!!…gorgle….ahhhgh” as he killed and partially ate a Times Standard reporter.

When Zombie Rodoni says “Arrgh…urgle…chomp…BRAINS!!!…gorgle….ahhhgh” He means “The GPU is like a horse without a cowboy. It isn’t really going anywhere, except to the next green patch of pasture. It’s time we rode this horse around awhile.” Zombie Roger Rodoni still has that colloquial wit and charm that made him an unbeatable force in the 2^nd District before his untimely death.

Zombie Rodoni has a bold new plan to get things done in Eureka this term. Dubbed the “Eat Brains Now” strategy, Zombie Roger Rodoni plans to, one by one, eat the brains of his fellow supervisors, starting with current board chairperson, Virginia Bass. Wouldn’t you pay money to see that at your county Board of Supervisors meeting? Wouldn’t that be worth the drive from Whitethorn, or wherever?

Zombie Rodoni will balance the budget. Zombie Rodoni will finish the GPU. Zombie Rodoni will eat Virginia Bass’s brain. In these troubled times, can we afford not to call upon the dark forces of the undead? At the moment that we need him most, Zombie Rodoni is here for us.

Zombie Rodoni needs your support. Support the Elect Zombie Rodoni Campaign by giving generously. Support the pro-Zombie Rodoni Super-Pac; I’d Vote For A Brain-Eating Zombie Before I’d Vote For Either Of Them, and don’t forget to write in Zombie Rodoni for 2^nd District Supervisor on your ballot this June.

On the Money, Beyond Civil Disobedience

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Beyond Civil-Disobedience

It’s great to finally see large-scale outrage over economic injustice here in the US. This outrage is of course completely justified and long overdue. However, as outraged as many of these people are about economic injustice, they seem even more outraged that anyone involved with this new movement, would choose a course of action other than that of strict non-violence.

These Non-violence Nazis become livid with rage at the idea that anyone would besmirch their movement by resisting arrest, destroying corporate property or doing anything active to prevent the cops from brutalizing them. For them, civil-disobedience is the only disobedience that they will tolerate.

They think that practicing non-violence makes them better than other people, and they vilify those other people as inferior spiritual beings. Its a religion with them, and like most religious fundamentalists, they are stupid and wrong, and they want to exploit you every bit as much as those Wall St. pigs.

They’ll trot out Gandhi and Martin Luther King as their great examples of the power of non-violence, and try to bludgeon you to death with them intellectually, but neither man’s ideas really hold water in our current situation. Let’s take a look at why that is.

Let’s start with Martin Luther King, since we will celebrate his birthday next Monday. Truly MLK ‘s life deserves celebrating. This remarkable man, a great thinker, speaker and leader served his people in a way few have, and paid for it with his life. Nothing I can say will diminish the contribution he made to people of color, this country, and humanity. However, Martin Luther King led a very different movement, with very different goals than the protesters involved in the “Occupy Movement”.

What King wanted was civil-rights, equality under the law, and desegregation. King did not seek to overthrow the government, he sought to make it more inclusive. If you want your civil-rights recognized, it makes sense to show that you will remain civil, even when violating the law. So, non-violent civil-disobedience made perfect sense for that movement.

At that time, nearly everyone, including Martin Luther King, thought that civil society was good for people, as long as everyone could participate. King believed in democracy. King believed in civilization, and Martin Luther King prayed for world peace while yet another unbelievably brutal, technological war raged on in Vietnam. But, things change, and at some point, the ideas you once hung your hat on, reveal their flaws.

Today, things look different. Civil society has been laid bare as nothing more than the machinery of exploitation and oppression. Civil society no longer offers workers the promise of a suburban home with a two car garage, for willing participation. Now all civil society offers workers are lives of abject slavery with no hope of home ownership, no access to health-care, and no chance of getting ahead of monthly bills. Yes, civil society is what made the 1% so obscenely, filthy, stinking rich, and the rest of us into their slaves.

The only reason we live as one nation, is to serve the needs of industrial capital. Every year we sacrifice more of our time, our power, our freedom and our dignity for the benefit of civil society, usually called “the Global Economy”, and every year, corporate interests use it all against us, to enslave us further.

Human beings function most effectively in small groups. The more we try to function as a single global entity, the less meaningful our lives, as individuals, and the more despondent we become. Who wants to be just another cog in a giant machine that you have no control over. No one! We only do it because we serve the 1%. Don’t forget this. There’s nothing noble about civilization. Civilized people are not better, smarter or more interesting. They are just more cooperative servants.

So, if civilization is the enemy, civil disobedience makes no sense at all. We don’t want to be recognized by civil society. We want to do away with civil society. We want to end the stratified economic system, the environmental exploitation, the mass consumption, and the waste. We don’t need to become better people, or even prove that we are good people. We just have to stop them from killing us, and the best way to do that is to disable the machinery of exploitation and oppression.

Luddites Smashing Machinery of Oppression

Those Non-violence Nazis don’t respect your rights, won’t stand for your freedom and won’t treat you with any more dignity than the Wall St. bastards who have been beating us down for generations. They expect you to sacrifice your freedom, human rights and dignity for their benefit. They want you to submit peaceably and willingly to arrest and brutality, not for freedom, rights or dignity, but for their new, kinder, gentler mass fascism. You sacrifice your body. They make the decisions.

Look at them, they’re already telling you what constitutes acceptable protest. They’ll decide on the acceptable terms for a compromise, and they’ll tell you when a deal has been made. Do you think they will ever stop telling you what constitutes acceptable behavior? Will you ever stop listening to them?

Why do you think they are so concerned about remaining “civil”? They don’t want to see a breakdown of civil society, or of the control and enforcement mechanisms of society. They just want those control structures to change hands, leaving them in charge. If you’ll sit there passively while a cop beats you down, because they told you to, you’re probably dumb enough to do what they say when they take over, right?

Martin Luther King is not leading this movement. This movement is led, if it is led, mostly by disaffected middle-class white people who know how to manipulate people to get their own way. Most of them would be quite happy to live in a world fraught with economic injustice, where workers live lives of endless despair and toil, as long as there was a good paying job in whatever field their college degree prepared them for. So don’t let these weasels bully you intellectually, by bringing up the name of the great Martin Luther King.

Now let’s talk about Gandhi, and his struggle. Under Gandhi’s leadership, the Indian people drove the British colonial empire out of India. An amazing achievement, certainly, especially for a very poor and unarmed population, but clearly not the only way to get rid of the Brits.

George Washington also led his people in a successful campaign to excise the British Empire from a colonial expansion.

The Afghans also successfully ejected the British. Clearly, a diversity of tactics can work effectively against the tentacles of a colonial power.

We are not challenging a tentacle of power here. We are challenging power itself. This empire has nowhere to retreat to, so it will fight to the death. A colonial power can always retreat from a colony if the endeavor becomes unprofitable. History teaches that both military resistance and non-violent resistance can make a colony unprofitable, leading to a withdrawal of the colonial power.

So, again, civil-disobedience is not a morally superior choice, or even a tactically superior choice. We choose tactics based on the ultimate goals of the movement, and on our own goals as individuals. So, if you believe that peaceful assembly and civil-disobedience are the only acceptable forms of protest, that probably means you also believe in laws, and cops and prisons and a stratified, specialized society structured for the purpose of maximizing economic activity. In other words, a fascistic oppressive regime, just like the one we have, except that in this new one, you enjoy a privileged status.

You just can’t have civilization without oppressing the masses. We have ten thousand years of evidence to back this up, by the way. We will never all live together, peacefully, as one big happy global family. There are a lot of reasons for this.

Biologically, human beings are small-group primates. In our natural environment, you almost always find humans in tribal groups of 15-40. This form of organization has worked for humans for something like three-million years, and it still works today. Civilization, on the other hand, has been tried dozens of times, and failed each and every time, and it’s failing again now. Just as the Incas eventually abandoned the city of Machu Picchu, its time to abandon the pyramids, ball courts and human sacrifices of our own “advanced” civilization.

Group dynamics tells us that the larger a group becomes, in terms of numbers of individuals, the more energy must be devoted to communication, before the group can act coherently. At some point, a group can become so large that communication consumes all of the energy available to the group, and the group becomes incapable of any action beyond maintaining itself. If it grows still further, it will collapse, because it will take more energy to communicate enough information to keep the group integrated, than the group generates. Civilization has become such a group.

The idea of a global, peaceful, egalitarian society is just a fantasy, concocted to keep us in line, just like the American Dream. In reality, both civilization and the American Dream of a middle-class lifestyle for everyone, oppresses people, destroys the environment, and can never be made sustainable. So, if you believe that non-violent civil-disobedience is the only acceptable form of protest, then you also support global oppression and ecocide, or at least the fantasy that perpetrates it.

I don’t think people should sacrifice their freedom, human rights or personal dignity for civilization. I think it’s high-time we sacrificed civilization, reclaimed our personal power, freedom, dignity and rights, and saved the planet from the rapacious onslaught of global capital, and our lives from the endless servitude of work.