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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Monday, May 26, 2014

Nationalism = Asperger's Syndrome Writ Large: You Can't Buck Rodger's Over and Out.

A Sharpener Image.

Okay, this isn't blog-worthy, I suppose, but before I start writing this post, I just have to mention the fact that a total stranger just called me on the phone, working for a private Corporation's phone harassment system, euphemistically referred to as Tele-Marketing, and started his conversation, and I use that term lightly, (harangue being a more apt description), by saying, in heavily Spanish-accented English, "Hello this calla is being monitored for quality purposes"....at which point I did what everyone should do upon hearing those words ... which is hang up immediately. For a company to advise you that they are recording your conversation when you call them is one thing, but for them to call you and tell you right off the bat that a call you never made and never wanted is being recorded for "Quality purposes", which is corporatese for, "Anything you say can and will be used against you," is a whole new and different form of the Corporate face-slap.

Which brings me, on the heels of yet another mass-killing in gloriously sun-drenched, water-challenged and kindle-wooded (they used to use redwood/pine "shake" to make roofs here ... seriously) California, to the topic of this post, which is the utter impossibility of escaping the consequences of our self-inflicted climate dilemma. It's partially addressed, and is in fact, though unplanned, illustrated by the above parenthetical comment (which there are myriad examples of in our Kamikaze Kultur) namely, externalities.

The structure of Kamikaze Kapitalism being such that anything that Corporations cause, such as the intense fires raging ever further and hotter and more out of control because the product you sell and assuage all your customers' reservations about with pseudo-science, is simply an "externality", your investors need never concern themselves that what you are doing will burn the entire neighborhood to the ground, because, after all, as pointed out in todays NYT article, written by Yale professor, Robert Shiller, that's what insurance is for. IE, forcing the entire polity to pay for the damage wreaked on it by profiteers who simply walk away from the suckers they looted with a great big smile on their faces: They weren't stupid enough to put their own families into incipient incinerators.

In an article that could have been written by our mass-killer of the week, Eliot O. Rodger, one of the more renowned Shillers for Kamikaze Kapitalism came out to suggest that "global warming needs to be addressed by the private institutions of risk management, such as insurance and securitization", you know, those two forms of legalized racketeering wherein, as in the subprime housing fiasco, companies such as AIG rake in huge amounts of Kapital, or what was referred to in the parlance of the 'industry' as "sucker's cash" to insure against a loss for which they had made absolutely no provisioning for, necessitating the public to cover their bets, while they ran off with the loot. And that was just for the Credit Default Swaps part of it, known as derivatives, but is in reality just another form of insurance, that the Shiller for Kamikaze Kapitalism proclaims they need to use to deal with such grand-scale issues.

Like the housing crisis itself though, the Shiller conveniently forgets to mention that the Corporations created the very crisis that they now plan to use to swindle the public yet again, using the blandishments of "economists", the high priests of the KKK (Kamikaze Kapilaist Kultur), to pave the way with incantations and gobbledygook such as, "They have deep experience in smoothing out disasters’ effects by sharing them among large numbers of people", which we will then dutifully believe, despite the fact that without FEMA, without the US Treasury, ie, without public institutions that were still solvent, there would be, (per Timothy Geithner, their most ardent acolyte) no more ATM's, AIG, GMAC or any of the Monoline insurers that the Credit Crunch squeezed to a painful death.

What the ex-head of the NY Fed, and the last US Treasurer has said in his attempts to publicize and sell his self-serving tome is that since without government backing up all the liabilities of the insurance industry and all of the banks, including the investment banks that, despite Volker and all the detractors of Clinton for signing Phil Gramm's gift to the Banks in the form of the repeal of Glass-Steagel, were never covered in the first place, so what's the use of separating them from commercial banks by an Act of Congress, such as Dodd-Frank, when the Fed can simply override said act and force the Taxpayers to bear those liabilities, with no clawback of the enormous sums that company exec's and insiders shoveled into their respective bank accounts, with the full blessing and outright complicity of Timothy Geithner by the way, for all the risks taken (ie money collected in the form of premiums) but never provisioned for, as the suckers' cash was all pirated away, by the Osama Binsurance companies.

So now, instead of all this needless worrying about Climate Change, much like the California Fires that raged all the more intensely because of Redwood shake roofs, or securitization that to any one with an analytic mind makes the home buying market, not Regional as BS Bernanke was insisting right up until the financial collapse (literally, he was still spouting that nonsense in July, 2008), even as securitization itself was making it exactly that, worse, in fact, it made it not only national, it made it international, and calling Climate Change just another "externality" of the KKK, which under no circumstances, must we consider altering in any way whatsoever, as if we do, the sky will fall (or the ATM's won't work ... ps I haven't used one in years, they are completely inessential, it is only habit that makes these dispensers of cash seem so necessary that Geithner, in speech after speech on his egotistical circuit, hung that over our heads like the sword of Damocles ...but ya know what? the world would go on and the service would be provided ... it was THEIR world that was threatened, ours would have readjusted, exactly what they and yes, there is a they, were afraid of. Instead the economy continues to bleed, as that particular open wound has yet to be cauterized).

The Shill goes on to claim:

"In short, we need to worry about the potential for greater-than-expected disasters, especially those that concentrate their fury on specific places or circumstances, many of which we cannot now predict."

Indeed we do, and when we do, such as in California with Earthquake insurance: If you want
coverage, private industry refuses to offer it, as the risk is too great, so they slough it off onto the State. Same with student Debt, hence Sally-Mae, private insurers refuse to touch it unless it's guaranteed by the government, ie, it's YOU, the Taxpayers, who are ultimately responsible for the risks, the insurance companies being nothing more than administrators. On and on: Flood insurance, Mortgage insurance, any insurance that is sold is ultimately passed onto the public, the latest being Obamacare, whereas it is private industry that rakes in the fees and enormous piles of cash which it then funnels to its shareholders. The formula is easy to work out:

War is a Racket
Capitalism is, by capitalists' own definition, creative Destruction
Capitalism's ultimate expression is therefore War, the epitome of Destruction
Capitalism is a Racket.

In the ultimate of scams, the very event for which coverage against is billed, is now nothing more than an externality, and like, Asperger's syndrome, societal claims outside the corporations' actuality simply don't exist. Like the "little professors" of Asperger, they site cant, but can't sight reality. You, and your insurance claim, to them, although an insurance corporation that gladly takes your money, simply aren't part of their reality. "Your call is important to us", because it validates them and gives them an opportunity to make a sale. The reason you called in the first place, however, is never a concern. Because dealing with it and you eats into profits as they have to use reources oto address them. Customers are now mo more than CO2 exhaust: externalities.

Everything in our Brave New World run by and for the KKK only, is an externality to Corporate America, and therefore, of no importance to the bottom line: "we need to worry about the potential for greater-than-expected disasters", the Shill says, but only insofar as they can then use that anxiety stoked by climate prophets to 'earn' climbing profits; but to mitigate its effects, or better yet, take steps to avoid them? Not so much.  The Shill shills, "Each country has a strong individual incentive to take a free ride on the rest of the world — benefiting the individual country while hurting everyone else" (to see his real meaning, merely substitute the word "Corporation" for "country" in that quote) but that pain is just another externality. If the balance sheet makes the world more and more unbalanced, it's the world, not the balance sheet that must change. And it will. But no amount of insurance against that change will do anything but squander our resources by placing them under the control  of those who are the least likely to do anything about it: Corporations.

AIG, anyone? Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, MCI, Lehman Bros., GMAC, Global Crossing, Goldman Sach's, Bear Stearn, JPMorgan, Radian, Marathon, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Countrywide Financial, Merril Lynch, Indymac Bankcorp, Fidelity Insurance, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Dexia, HBOS, Merit Financial, ACA, AMBAC, MBIA, American Century Financial, HSBC, MGIC, Ameriquest, etc, etc. All of these "companies", ie inCorporated scam machines - inCororated for the sole purpose of extending legal protection to insulate their financial officers from paying a price for their illegal deeds, so that their defalcations never threaten their own fortunes -  had investment-grade ratings from agencies that are still doing business right now.

 So let's just do as the KKK's Shiller advises, trust the future impact of Global Warming to corporations extending a hand to help make Catastrophic Climate Change nothing more than another form of creative destruction, just another profit center. Then, far from mitigating disaster, they help assure its occurrence by encouraging the risky behavior of pouring ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere as though it will then disappear (much like Fuckyoushima pouring a tsunami of radiation into the Pacific Ocean). Now, like subprime lending, it can be, in all good conscience, categorized as just business as usual. Why worry? We've got insurance!  It's called FEMA: Feed Every Madman's Ambition, I'm from a Corporation and I'm here to help myself. They shoot looters, unless their wearing a Corporate logo.





















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