PittsburghThoughts

Oh, woe is us in this "all or nothing" land. Since only a few at the very top of the food chain, Goldman Sachs jumps to mind, do have it all, the rest of us are left with the shards, scraps and virtual nothings of a country coasting on its glory days, coasting to a stop and a quick reverse.

 

Goldman Sachs earned $3.2 billion in the third quarter, as revenue from trading rose fourfold from a year ago. "Revenue from trading." Here we go again. No Factories, no steel plants, nothing that would insure employment, wages or health care for the ragged plebeian but "trading". I'd like to do some trading of my own, first, I'd trade all those SEC regulators that cut their teeth at Goldman Sachs for some outside people, maybe put Elliot Spitzer in charge of finding and hiring them. I'd trade the concept of "too big to fail' in for a new phrase, "just too big period", as Robert Reich was so fond of saying. Then I'd make the rich pay, they use more of their share of the public commons than anyone else: the courts, the roads, the air waves the waterways and are all polluted by their stench. If they can't buy it, they lobby to have the regulations made favorable to their selfish usage and of course there's the "good old boy" network to keep things in check should all else fail.

 

These things are prevalent on all scales of government, but the most heinous are reserved for the federal governmentt, i.e., our shadow operations: the CIA, military intelligence, and a thousand other unknown and unheard of acronyms meaning one thing, find em, round em up, use whatever means to get information and then either bury them or send them of off to foreign prisons where they can struggle like rats to survive.

 

Billions in boxes shipped to Iraq, October surprises and arms, arms, arms, always arms shipped to the highest bidder, today our ally, tomorrow our enemy. War engenders so many illicit ways to make a fortune, no wonder we never stop finding reasons to keep bombing, killing and in our endless piques of self righteousness, thumb our nose at any international organization that we helped form to keep checks and balances on nations that would do, had they the might, the very things we do.  

 

Am I crazy? Am I seeing conspiracy theories under the bed? I'm afraid not, one needn't look too far to find factual information that most of our babified media won't report. In Harpers this month there's a story of attrtion:The intelligence factory: How America makes its enemies disappear—By Petra Bartosiewicz (Harper's Magazine) about how we winnow away our threats, mistakes and contrivances through the use of force, torture, prematurely faded memories and out and out lies, we condemn, mostly mid-easterners that won't comport to our way of life and may or may not have terrorist connections to beatings, shootings, death and imprisonment all in the name of Home Land Security, that lovely catch-all that we use to legitimise thug mentality. It's happening all over the world and we are behind it. 

 

But here at home we are in Happy, Happy Land at least we try to be and the medical establishment, which has become no more than a high stakes drug pusher, does it's best to insure that we are. Goldman Sachs be damned, rising poverty levels be damned, foreign interloping be damned, our souls? Damned along with the rest.

 

So we end up poor and hated worldwide. What will the rich do that they haven't already done? Build internment camps? Brand us on our foreheads? No, they will always need us to fight their wars. To propagandise, to see how far they can push the human envelope before it folds. To wave their flags and cry don't shoot until you see the green of their money.

 

Enlistment for all branches of the military is up from last year. No job, no college, why not spin the wheel of death and see what happens? Can it be worse that living in squalor, without a job, car, money or hope? The boys roll out, the coffins roll in. Some mother in Pakistan just lost her son in a drone attack. Another family will hate us forever and we say our boy died for your freedom, don't you feel guilty, shouldn't it have been you dying for your own freedom?  Ashamed and disgusted,   Gene