Capitalism IS Bullying.

 The road to nowhere is already paved.

In a moronic piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, the writer opined that, "The hard work of ridding our culture of sexual harassment begins". But, you see, sexual harassment is a form of bullying, and a militaristic Capitalist hegemonic culture is in fact Based on bullying: exercising Power backed by Force over those weaker than you. It's part and parcel of the package. Profits are only the pretext to Market Domination. A Target set for the specific and only purpose of then allowing a Corporation to bully the very customer base it depends on to pay whatever that market will bear. So-called Price discovery a thing of the past. There is none, the market mechanism by which it's decided having been eliminated along with the competition.

No editor wanted to put his name to this piece, so it was written by the "Editorial Board", I guess that means it's a plank, although it sounds more like a prank:

"Such talk (what talk, I'll get to later) distracts us from the work we must do to create a society that respects the individual, uplifts our communities, supports our values, and establishes a new cultural order to ensure our future prosperity."

What are they talking about? America has been the Sole Superpower for more than a generation now, and on every one of those metrics the US has worked hand-in-glove with American Corporations to do exactly the opposite: to deny there even IS a society; to denigrate the individual; crush communities; destroy our most cherished values; while establishing a cultural order that, far from ensuring our future prosperity, ensures we will instead have no future at all.

Where do you see evidence that this country is making the least attempt to "create a society that respects the individual?" The one that throws those individuals out into the streets for buying a house the Fed took pains to encourage them to risk everything to purchase? Or is it the one that uses the onerous burden of student loans to create a revenue stream into Federal coffers and pump up the salaries of teachers, administrators, and especially Presidents, of universities to such gross figures that if every worker in this economy got those kind of wages, it would be inflation, not deflation we'd be worried about.

Or maybe it's those individuals who are snapping up all those 3-ton SUV's from the showroom floor with 7-year-term loans who are unaware that the pace of Climate derangement is so torrid, their vehicle will be undriveable by 2020; not because of the fines levied on drivers of SUV's but because the current oil boom is built on such a foundation of vapor that it'll have blown away by then, as fleeting as the NatGas surplus they have been busily building the infrastructure to ship overseas (while simultaneously garnering your support for destructive fracking by promising "Energy Independence" ... which is true, US Corporations will have sold off all the country's energy resources, so, in a sense, it will in fact be Energy Independent), following the well-known, but never mentioned, Republican strategy of driving energy prices into the stratosphere by fanning yet another get-rich-quick speculative fever that will again make filling up at the pump a burden that will prove unsustainable. The polity will then be forced to sell their living room on wheels, and find that the price they can get for it is far less than what is needed to pay off the balance of the note they took out, and it is extremely difficult to drive an underwater vehicle sans fuel.

Or maybe it's the individual who is sitting in the waiting room of a major City Hospital waiting for someone to sew up her work-place injury and the fear they harbor of the $9899 bill they know they can expect to receive, but have no ability to pay, since their employer, in its effort to "uplift our communities, supports our values, and establishes a new cultural order to ensure our future prosperity", grants them no sick days, the fact that they injured themselves on-the-job being considered irrelevant, and will fire them. After all that's how our beloved leader became famous: Turning the act of Firing workers into a bloodsport for your entertainment. One you cheered callously between episodes of Punked and Breaking Bad.

Is the extortion of monies from individuals via Payday Loans and foisting VW portable gas chambers on them the method we're to use to "uplifts our communities"?

The answer to that, of course, is "Yes". Ask your local police department as they confiscate anything not nailed down whenever they arrest someone on trumped-up charges of drug possession. And they know just where you have it hidden: they planted it there.

Having kicked out the local enterprises that actually pay taxes, and freeing the Useless Rich from the onus of taxation, confiscation's all that's left. The Corporations now demand so many tax breaks and other easements (corporatese for "let the hoi polloi pay!") to either locate/stay in a given location that  it costs to have them in your community. They create jobs, and the jobbed pay taxes, so the municipality can afford to pay the land use, clean-up, and other costs associated with having a business in your community. It's more like what having a military base used to be like (something far fewer Americans are familiar with nowadays, since the vast majority of our military bases are located, along with the economic stimulus they provide, overseas, thanks to the first Bush president's "Peace Dividend" that was nothing more than a pretext before yet another military build-up).

But the real kicker is "supports our values". What values do you suppose they mean? Our National Values, or our local ones? Our national values are currently represented by  this:

The avatar of bullying, a braggart, liar and scam-artist, a serial bankrupt, who nevertheless lords it over everyone in The Presence like he's some gift from god. See this picture?

The humble trappings, the simple fare (and not a plastic bottle of water in sight, how do they do it? Such privation!) the body language of the participants as they (as we would insist on terming it in the West) HAMmer out an agreement, which of course, they don't do, but Americans must have their beloved violent imagery infesting everything.

Now interject the picture of Trump into this conference, and you see the affect it would have to place this smug, "I'm the King around here", autocratic (or as some of Putin's supporters would have it, he's "authoritative", not "authoritarian", which in Putin's case may be correct, he has decades of political experience and international dealings from which he can derive his authoritative stance. Trump has none of these. His is an authoritarian personality, as there is nothing backing it up but raw Power) and unyielding, he literally brings nothing to the table but his cans of Diet coke and insufferable condescension.

In the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, the story-line revolves around one Hannah Baker's attempt, via tapes she recorded while contemplating her self-prescribed demise, to blame everyone other than herself for the decision she made to end her life. Arguments abound online as to whether it is ultimately her own or others' fault for her suicide, but they never discuss the underlying metaphor, the one making the the connection between her life and that of the town she lives in and the  high school she goes to and the economic milieu in which they're acting their personal little dramas in is, although we're practically hit over the head with it during the series, never mentioned, debated or analyzed: The Bullying, as the saying go, rolls downhill:

The Bakers own a pharmacy in a sunny California town that's the story's setting; they are Hannah 's parents; Hannah being the bright beautiful girl who takes her own life. They have only recently moved to town, having fled the suffocating milieu of their previous existence from which Wal-Plex, has played a part in forcing them out. In their new hometown, they'd opened and had been running a successful Drugstore, until, guess who, none other than Wal-Plex, moves in and starts undercutting their prices and staying open all night, doing what all monopolies do: Dominate and drive the smaller entities out of business by using profits from hundreds of other stores elsewhere, in different markets, to sustains the losses from the new store until all competitors are either bought out or fail, then raising prices to levels higher than what the Mom and Pops were charging before they were systematically eliminated.

It is no accident that the bullying from the Corporate monster is on a parallel track with the bullying experienced by the teenage girls at the hands of, not only the jocks, whose abuse is physical, their reaction to objections raised about the liberties they take, dismissive, if not downright thuggish, but of the brainy bunch as well, who, left  to simply ooh and aah at the pretty creatures they dare not approach, must of necessity yearn after them from the sidelines. From where they stalk them, betray them, harass and exploit them.

Because High School better reflects the society in which it exists and mirrors the economic system that in no way respects the individual, and does its best to undermine our communities, and far from supporting our values, debases them to force their own down our throat.

So why are we are left wondering how come our schools are the epicenter for bullying and harassment of those weaker by the those stronger, never looking at our own attitudes toward the violence we export, the arms industry we live off, making us all Merchants of Death, the terror (or if you prefer, the Shock and Awe) we deliver around the globe so that we can drive ourselves nowhere so much as insane, in vehicles that sap the very essence out of our lives, our economy, and our children's future. A Mad Max future we gladly accept for the pure adrenaline rush of speed derived from controlled internal combustion-enabled explosions so we can fly by the seat of our pants in our magic car pets, whose maintenance and upkeep we unquestioningly invest more money in than our own offspring. Because, when it comes right down to it, the offspring we can live without, the automobile? Not so much. As in NEVER! You may deny this, insisting you cherish your children, but what individuals hold to be true is belied by the aggregate effect of their individual actions: Environmetnl destruction on a worldwide scale, acidification of the oceans and alteration of the relative concentration  of the gasses in the atmosphere so extreme it means the next generation has no lifeboat to escape the ship of fools spaceship earth has become (Elon Musk idiocy notwithstanding).

NRA opponents  have made the, "Not from my cold dead hands", their rallying cry, oblivious that they have the same emotional attachment to their own weapon of mass destruction, in the form of the family motorized vehicle. And whereas a gun is used relatively rarely, even in gun-toting, shoot-em-up-just for the pure pleasure of it America, the WMD SUV is used every day for hours and hours, spewing poisonous gasses into the atmosphere for the entirety of its existence, from the moment the metal it is made from is forged until the first door panel is attached until the day it's smashed to wreckage in the car compactor after which yet more fuel is then burned to carry it off to somewhere where more fuel will be burned to re-use its precious metal.

 Of course, parents will decry such accusations, NRA opponents insist that a car is not a weapon. The same people that you see at the Women's march, or a Bernie rally, all arriving in their own vehicles, all knowingly poisoning the air, even unto our own extinction ... but give me free Healthcare, its MY right! So what if it has to be paid for by bestriding the globe like an international dictator and despoiling every tract of land under which oil is sequestered. Not my concern. And not, unlike the President, denying that the very vehicles they drove there are the self-same entities that are destroying the very atmosphere needed to sustain life. THEY DON'T CARE. That is why the Deplorables aren't . They at least adMIT they don't care, they have no need for the Donald's Climate Change is a Hoax nonsense. They know it's not a hoax, they simply don't care. But those who say they DO care are the real culprits here, because they are liars every bit as much as The Doonald is. They only care insofar as you or industry or farting cows can be blamed, and therefore have their self-righteous opprobrium heaped on your head.

But the economic system necessary to build the factories to manufacture that vehicle, the one that  delivers it to your driveway, the system needed to provide the fuel to power it and the system required to pave the trillion miles of keratin-soaked roadways necessary to allow the automobile to soar at such speeds across the landscape, is exactly that system we have: One with the necessary Nuclear-bombed-backed Bullying might to wring out the profits necessary to buy the ruling class in all the nations that harbor those resources necessary to run an entire economy to meet the needs of machines. Guns, Motor vehicles, and computers, are all of far more importance to the economy than the humans whose well-being they were originally designed to abet.  Fossil fuel-derived energy-enabled power to leverage our own human power, has been turned on its head, so that now human power is being used to leverage the machines' ability to crush humanity beneath its AI-enabled Robocop Jackboot.

To paraphrase that favorite of the gun lobby, that Guns don't kill, people do, Cars don't pollute, people do; cars don't run people down like dogs, people do; cars don't spew so much CO2 into the troposphere that it's endangering life itself, people do. And jocks in high school aren't acting out of character when they bully those in their thrall, they are acting exactly as a society that is based on  destruction has taught them to. Instead it's as though they're parents of Nazi youth and are shocked, SHOCKED!, when their kids turn out to be nasty self-centered little monsters. It's certainty not anything THey did. And without self-awareness, the only people with the power to change this trajectory, the Women's Movement, will remain a sham. Their complaints about their own harassment at the hands of the avatars of this heartless system completely undermined by their unwavering support for The American Way of Life. You know, the one that snuffs out life as thoughtlessly as a candle. The way of life that insists you'll have to pry the steering wheel from my cold dead hands. It's most profitable GSE's those that design ever more sinister death machines. Who knew the sadistic, murderous aspects of the AK-47 until it was used in domestic terrorist attacks? And more to the point, who cared? We get to watch the mayhem we inflict from the comfort of the driver's seat, the despoiled environment but a blur, something to be sped through, not seen, far less enjoyed. Crushing beneath our ATV wheels not only present life, but the very ability of life itself to exist on this planet in any recognizable form, simply to satisfy our driving ambition: to drive our children away; to drive species into extinction; to drive cultures based on age-old traditions into the ground; and to drive our own economies into stagflation, depression, and collapse.

As James Kunstler would say, "Happy Motoring".