The Ponzi Dream

Terrible, terrible news. Humans are no longer spawning at a replacement rate and in a matter of decades we might be down to about nine billion of us, all told. It's a catastrophe.

Here's what I read: "Population growth is vital for the world economy. It means more workers to build homes and produce goods, more consumers to buy things and spark innovation, and more citizens to pay taxes and attract trade." If we don't keep pumping out the babies, the experts say, the economy will not be sustainable. It will not grow. It must always grow. How can it? It can't. But it must. 

 

A constantly growing economy is, of course, not sustainable any way you look at it, and maybe we should be placing our chips on a plan that doesn't depend on using up all our resources and cooking the planet and poisoning the water. Because that is truly unsustainable. (To explain what it means to be unsustainable in a way even Matt Gaetz can understand it, it means you can't keep it up.)

But the people who worry about the baby bust say there will soon be too many old farts and not enough young people, and then who will pay the taxes? And take care of the old farts?

Thus it is revealed that the entire vaunted world economy has been a Ponzi scheme all along.

Well, I suspect if money is the problem, maybe we should set things up so that everyone has at least enough to trade around and nobody has way way way too much. Even out the spoils a little. You can still structure it so you have really rich people if that's what you want.

A lot of people, though, will go to the mat to defend the rights of billionaires to keep all their money. Boy, what a con job! Somehow the fat cats have got the little people believing that wealth is its own proof of virtue. What about all the jobs Bill Gates created? Did he? The way wealth actually works is you might have to suck for a while but once you've got the siphon going, it will just keep pulling that wealth out without you having to lift a finger. After that, you might still suck, but it's optional.

They don't mention the Waltons, whose money originally came from destroying manufacturing jobs and family businesses by having their products made on the cheap in countries that utilize slave labor and have no environmental standards; that's Walton The First, and Waltons Two through Eight got their billions by shooting out of a worthy Walton womb.

Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, siphoned plenty by destroying his competition, in much the same manner as Walton did with Walmart. The third richest woman in the world got her pile by divorcing Jeff Bezos. #49 is a pig breeder, speaking of unsustainable practices. Tons of resource extraction on that list too. We're running the human operation into the ground so fast that people (like Elon Musk, #2) are suggesting we move the whole franchise to Mars, and they're not even kidding. Damn! A whole new planet to mine.

So. There aren't enough babies. This catastrophe is brought to you by birth control combined with educated women who are shirking their duty to pump out more consumers. Even Italy is slated to halve its population this century.

Ah, those blessed consumers. Consumption, of course, may be vital for The Economy, at least for a few more years, but it's otherwise a losing game. So it stands to reason that a falling population would be good for the planet. Fewer people, less consumption. And it is: except that it's the consumption that is the problem, more than the number of people. A dozen rich dudes can do more damage to the planet in a long weekend than some entire African tribes will do in a year. Wealth is the culprit. And most of us who like to complain about the population explosion are ridiculously wealthy by any reasonable standard. We've run through more energy in the last fifty years than in all the years since the first ape stood up. We'll destroy an ecosystem to pull a mineral out of the ground to operate a plastic talking Bob Ross Bobblehead for a few weeks before we chuck it in the ocean, and not give it a second thought. We're the problem.

Relying on rampant consumption to run the world economy is like finding a faster car to drive off the cliff. This has been fun, but we're running out of choices and time. There will have to be a better way to manage things. A less showy but more intimate way. We'll build our shelters smarter, we'll generate our power on site, we'll grow more of our food locally, we'll feed and entertain each other in person. Even without the bobblehead, we'll probably be happier.

Gravity 101: Mad Mike Edition

The world was shaken by the death of daredevil Mad Mike Hughes the other day, or at least the portion of it that his rocket smacked into.

Mr. Hughes was attempting to shoot himself 5000 feet into the air in a homemade rocket in order to see for himself if the earth was flat, or more on the rotund side. He was not the sort to take other people's word for anything, although he might have done well to take a tip or two from rocket scientists.

A former limousine driver, he had not previously succeeded in killing himself despite many attempts to do so, including a world-record 103-foot jump in a stretch Lincoln Town Car.

The generally accepted model of our planet, according to the Flat Earth Society, is a disk rimmed in a wall of ice the rest of us call Antarctica. This closely resembles the design of the United Nations logo, only with ice in place of olive branches, and in fact the UN logo is taken by some to be further proof, for some reason, of the validity of this model. The designer of the logo had to fiddle with it to make it fit on the head of a lapel pin and not leave any countries out.

Flat Earth theory, in contrast, merely has to fit in a pinhead.

People believe the earth is flat because they don't want to be the ones hanging upside down from China. Their entire notion of "gravity" comes down to things being either "up" or "down," and as long as you're on the"up" side of the disk, you're in good shape. There's no suspicion that people might just float off (or "up"). If nothing else, Mad Mike contributed a stunning demonstration of gravity, here defined as the degree to which the disk sucks.

I am among those skeptical that Mr. Hughes was, himself, a Flat Earther. I think he liked to do scary things and didn't have enough dough to make them happen. I am assuming he was let go from the limousine company after he launched the Lincoln. He had tried to raise enough money to make a crappy rocket in 2016 but netted only $310. Not until he signed on with the Flat Earthers did he reach his financial goal.

In other words, Mr. Hughes claimed to be a Flat Earther in the same way others of prominence claim to be Christians in order to be elected to a position of power and wealth. If Mad Mike had contacted a random Koch brother or Vladimir Putin he could have had the hell funded out of him. They'd be all over that flat earth business. Flat Earth people believe NASA's space program is a hoax, and anything that leads people to distrust experts, scientists, and government agencies is red meat for a libertarian or autocrat.

The fact is, you can get people to believe any fool thing. Already you have people believing billionaires earned their money, and their shitty kids did too. You could have a president say "I don't know, maybe the earth is flat, who knows? People are saying that, you hear people saying that. We'll see." And whammo, just like that politicians will win office by promising to shim up the world just enough that the icky greasy people slide out of America.

Poor Mr. Hughes. I'm told I shouldn't make fun of the dead, but nobody says I can't right up to the moment of impact. In any case I believe it would honor him to have him buried at the very edge of the disk, with the planet rolled up over him like a burrito. This is not currently possible because of the fifty-foot rim wall of ice otherwise known as Antarctica. But the ice is on the way out, happily, thanks to the efforts of more gullible people and billionaires, and he should be easy to maintain in fresh condition at the ice wall until it disappears altogether.

The Billionaire Protection Party Playbook

There are 4,398 candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for President. It's a sharp bunch. There are some differences in their proposals but they're all operating on the side of goodness. You should pick one or two you really like and toss them a few nickels and see where it all lands. What you shouldn't do  is worry too much about something called "electability."

Because every single one of them is electable. Most citizens do not like Donald Trump, and do not like him hard. Even most of the ones that do like him don't care for him personally, because he's rude and childish, but they like how that gets liberals all worked up. Of the remainder who really, really like him, a significant percentage will fall down go boom or soil themselves on their way to the polling place.

So if you really like one of the leftmost candidates (formerly known as Eisenhower Republicans) but think you'd have a better shot with someone beiger who can't be pinned down to any position, think again. It doesn't matter who we pick, because the attack machine will be the same for any of them. If we nominated that flamer Jesus, he'd get the same treatment. The massively-endowed think tanks and focus groups that champion the Billionaire Protection Party never let the truth get in the way of a good tactic.

The eventual Democratic nominee will be called a socialist. Doesn't matter that there aren't any socialists running, or that people don't know what socialism is. Most of the ideas Democrats are espousing are very popular. You call the very same platform socialist, and the public turns on them. There will be very sophisticated memes out there proliferating, depicting the candidate as crazed or drenched in red or wearing horns, because that is how we choose a President these days. If you ask the average voter what a socialist is, you will be told that it is a person who wants to take all you have worked for and give it to someone who doesn't deserve it. That's actually what the billionaires are doing, but the Billionaire Protection Party has plenty of cash to devote to confusing you about these things.

Once they've gotten the public all heated up about socialists, they'll start hammering away on the idea that our Democratic candidates not only want to take away what you have, but they want to make fun of you or shame you. They'll say they're coming after your favorite light bulb and your drinking straw and they'll force you into a skinny little car you don't want. They will say this is taking away your freedom. Focus groups have found that Freedom plays really well with Americans. Americans will happily ride the last glacier to rubble and pull the last fish from the sea as long as they still have their freedom. And they hate to be scolded. They will jam a dozen plastic straws in their sodas and blow black exhaust out of their big rigs just to stick it to the scolds and know-it-alls. This is exactly what a two-year-old would do, but the Billionaire Protection Party can afford to shower them with Legos and cheap candy so Mommy and Daddy can go out and paint the town red.

So go ahead and nominate a real grownup. You might just as well. The public might even surprise you and elect them.

The Mandatory Arugula Proposition

I hate to be an alarmist, but y'all are going to be hearing a whole lot about hamburgers now. More than you really want. It's already started.

That is because about ten years ago the libertarian billionaire squirrels sitting on their massive piles of nuts noticed that they weren't getting the affection they deserved from the little people, who had been waiting in vain for their nuts to drop. They realized if they were going to be successful in their plan to get almost all the nuts, they'd have to repackage their message, because their actual message was self-serving bullshit that even a nitwit could see through. The nitwits needed to be softened up by appealing to their core values.

The focus groups and think tanks and libertarian institutes got to work on the project and finally concluded that unregulated free-market piracy that has resulted in extremes of wealth and poverty would sell only if it were recast as freedom. People like freedom. Especially people in America, which has a long-standing devotion to the concept of freedom. Just the concept, of course, not any kind of actual freedom, which is why there was such a big to-do over the freedom to own slaves. Shit, man, people used to argue that one without any sense of irony at all.

So now everything from union membership to vaccination to fair taxation is pressed through the filter of sweet, American liberty. By gum, we've got people all cranked up about their fundamental right to earn less and less, but save on union dues; or to be able to choose which health insurance giant should scrape the profits off their medical care, without questioning why the insurance industry exists at all. And now, friends, it's hamburgers.

Yes, fellow Americans, "they" want to take away your hamburgers.

Who are these dreadful people who want to confiscate our hamburgers? Well. "They" are people who support the Green New Deal. But their primary motivation is not actually to make life miserable for meat-eating Americans and bring on an era of mandatory arugula. They have a much broader perspective, a common side-effect of education. They understand that the carbon-sink forests of the Amazon are being razed for soybean farms to fatten hogs and cattle. And that the factory farming of animals and modern food production, with its manure lagoons and synthetic fertilizer and soil depletion, is a greater contributor to global warming than even cars and coal plants. And that a pivot in favor of smaller, more diverse farms that employ more people and sequester more carbon is not only sound policy--it's crucial. Crucial to our way of life, our freedom, and our continued survival on this planet. Because our current path is utterly unsustainable. [That means we can't keep it up, Mister Man.]

But people so morally beggared that they can't see past their own nuts are now actively rewriting reality for us. They say the Green New Deal is a threat to our liberty and our hamburgers, when what they mean is it's a threat to their money. And that's all they ever cared about.

Two questions, America: in the face of this, are we really going to burn down the house for a cheap hamburger? And, if so: are we two-year-olds?

Save The Billionaires!

Hey friend. Again with the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meme? That's getting to be a habit with you. I know I asked once, and you said you just don't like her. I'd rather have more to go on than that, but okay, fine, you don't like her. I think maybe the only things you think you know about her are on these little propaganda hit pieces you keep posting, brought to you by the same folks who said Obama is a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. I don't know if you bought that too, but if you did, I'd say you're ripe for the picking.

This meme at least has a bit of substance to it, and isn't just trying to make AOC out to be a daffy uneducated bimbo. She's about as far from that as you can get, but evidently all you have to do is mock someone like that and people will gleefully spread it far and wide as though it were true. Just like you did! But this one cites a complaint about her involvement with a political action committee. The Federal Election Commission is looking into it, and I'd wait to see what they find out, myself--but hey, you go ahead on, and post the meme.

It's rich though. Really rich. The PAC she's involved with deliberately courts small donors. It's harder to come up with the millions it apparently takes to run a campaign when you're doing it that way, instead of tapping the billionaires, but it's the principle of the thing, and a fine principle it is for a working democracy, in my opinion. And the people ultimately responsible for ginning up the propaganda you lap up aren't bothering with the small donors.

They're probably starting with DonorsTrust,  through which they can make unlimited philanthropical (wink-wink) donations anonymously. And those untraceable billions, a.k.a. Dark Money, go to little grassroots (wink-wink) organizations like Americans For Job Security and All Votes Matter and Right To Work and other blatantly political outfits, many of which the original donors designed themselves. It's by far the biggest slush fund the world has ever seen, and look what it has accomplished! The defeat of universal health care in favor of the for-profit insurance industry, the rollback of taxes on the super-wealthy, and--most impressive of all--they were able to turn the tide on any effort to curb global warming, by paying off a few scientists, submitting a new script to their propaganda arms, planting irate citizen-actors in town halls, conducting focus groups to learn what particular line of bullshit would appeal to Mr. and Mrs. America, and good old-fashioned threats to pull funding from legislators--that sort of thing. Thus they were able to secure enormous private fortunes for another twenty years or so while threatening the future of every man, woman, child, fetus, and wombat on the planet. Bless their stony hearts, they may well have killed us all.

So. This is the group infiltrating your social media feed. This is the group working so hard to bring down this young freshman Ocasio-Cortez. And it's easy to see why the billionaire boys' club doesn't like her. They hate everything she stands for: Democratic Socialism, through which they might be relieved of the grossest excesses of their wealth in order to make life substantially better and more secure for people like you and me. And support for unions and a livable wage, both of which cut into their profits but which produce the actual job-providers. (You didn't buy that bit about the billionaires being the job providers, did you? Oh honey. It's normal people with enough security to live modestly with dignity, and pay each other to paint their houses or their nails. We keep each other afloat. And unions used to make sure we could, even those of us who weren't in one.) And, most urgent of all, she stands for getting us the hell off of fossil fuels and into the economy of the future before we have no future at all. Fast. Too fast, too extreme? As someone recently said, we're not in charge of the deadline: physics is. Ocasio-Cortez knows how imperative this work is, and how disruptive, and is working to make sure the poor and the shrunken middle class don't bear the brunt of it. She is not extreme. She is absolutely right.

So that's who's behind all this nastiness and mockery you like to spread around. I know exactly why the billionaires want to destroy this young woman. What I don't get is why you want to carry their water.