Before Oil

I was talking with my right wing co-worker one day and she was going on and on about how we don't need any government interference and handouts, and I strongly agreed with her, since the government had just taken part of my land in order to widen the street and let cars drive even faster, endangering my family and animals. Screw that!

She stared at me. "Well, no, the government needs to make roads! How will we get to work?"

I thought that was a bizarre question for someone brought up on a farm. There are people who have it in their living memories around here, of only going to town once a year, to get supplies.

But, apparently, she was too young to know that it used to be different. She assumed that the government should make roads, although it shouldn't make sure that people had food or medical care.

My grandmother lived in a small town in a valley in Utah. There were so few people there that the phone book had pictures of the families, as well as their phone numbers.

The only non-farm work there, when I was a kid, was turkey ranches, but a very old woman told me that she used to ride her horse up in the neighboring mountains. (Which seemed really far to ride).

My dad finally told me that there used to be a coal mine, open only in the winter, called Winter Camp (creatively enough), where the farmers would work after harvest.

So the old woman, when she was just a child, would ride with her father in the fall to the camp, and then bring his horse back home with her. In the spring, she would lead his horse and ride back to the camp to get him.

That is how they did.

When my parents got married, my father took her to meet his family, but one brother was herding sheep up in the mountains (where he stayed for months), so they saddled up two horses and rode all day into the mountains looking for him. Then they next day they rode back. My mom told me she was so saddle sore that she never got on a horse again.

One time, we went over the mountains in a car, to get to a town on the other side. It took us hours and hours, because the dirt road was narrow and rutted, and you literally could not go faster than 10 mph.

But now they tell me that that small town has spread and there are thousands of people living there. That town over the mountain is the one where the NSA data center is, I think, and the government put a paved highway over the mountain.

So these people are considered ''rural'', although they don't herd sheep or grow hay or ranch turkeys. They just live out in the middle of nowhere and expect the government to provide roads and gas and electricity, so they can drive 50 miles to work each day.

That is how they do.

Post Office Shutdown

The Post Office will not deliver mail on Wed. Dec 5th, in honor of George H. W. Bush. This is rather bizarre. I have never seen this before and hope that they don't make a habit of it.

However, if they restrict the honor to only those who were born into Nazi-trading families, who joined the CIA in its early years, who participated in the 1963 coup, who became head of the CIA during the 70s investigations, and helped destroy evidence, who then ran the White House for 12 years, running death squads and drugs through Central America to the US, who helped bribe corrupt officials in the USSR to destroy that union, and then profited from the looting, not just of their gold stockpiles, but of oil, Siberian timber and other riches, who then had a son put into the White House in time to preside over the WTC and Pentagon attacks, pushing through Homeland Repression and endless wars, starting with Afghanistan, which led to an explosion of heroin trafficking and then moving on to Iraq, to get the oil......I guess it's a limited list of people who qualify.

Factory shutdowns

Announcement of plant closings are treated in the US like predictions of hurricanes...something that is coming and cannot be stopped, a Force of Nature.

But, of course, they are not forces of nature, they are decisions made by humans.

Like hurricanes and tornadoes, however, plant closings are destructive and tear apart families, homes and communities, leaving child abuse, suicide and boarded up downtowns in their wake.

Enough is enough. A decent country, that cares about its citizens, will no longer put up with this kind of human-made human misery.

The factories must be handed over to the employees, at no charge, to be run by them on a not-for-profit basis, with all debt cancelled.

The taxpayers have bailed out the car companies enough. They are ungrateful and careless with human lives.

The workers deserve to take hold and operate the factories that they and their ancestors built and have run for all these decades.

Enough is enough!

How Will Our Rulers Create More Prisoners?

The US has 25% of the world's prisoners, although we only have 5% of the world's population.

These prisoners provide profits to prison and other corporations. But there are mostly men locked up. How can our government work with the corporations to provide more prisoners to the gulag system? Especially the young, healthy prisoners that they prefer? The marchers now coming through Mexico will only add a few thousand to the system.

They could double the prison population, increasing profits, if they found a way to turn women into prisoners, especially young and healthy women. How to do that?

It is estimated that 30% of pregnancies end up in spontaneous abortion. That is a potential profit base that could make any prison stockholder drool with greed.

Hence, the push to criminalize abortion, both medical and spontaneous.

The Persecution of Julian Assange

In 2006, the site Wikileaks was started. It was a response to the vapid state of the imperial ''news'' media, and was set up to provide a place where whistleblowers could release important information anonymously.
It has never published any inaccurate information.

In 2010, Wikileaks released information about the illegal US invasion of Iraq, including a video dubbed ''Collateral Murder'' which showed American soldiers causally murdering Iraqis on a street, including 2 Reuters journalists, and then murdering a citizen who stopped to help them, along with his children.

Ordinary Americans on the Democrat team cheered this release, and lauded Julian Assange as a hero. This is because the murders happened when the president was on the Republican team, so the Dem team was supportive of truth in journalism, free press and the rights of whistle blowers.

The Democrat team in charge of the country at that time, of course, had no such loyalties. Their loyalties were to the Empire (like all teams in the White House) and so they prosecuted and imprisoned the whistle blower, soldier Manning, and went after Julian Assange.

Famously, Hillary Clinton demanded to know why they couldn't just send a drone and blow him up with a Hellfire missile.
The US approached Finland, which refused to cooperate, but Sweden agreed, and issued a warrant for investigation into two sex charges filed by women who had had consensual sex with Assange that they didn't like. Assange was out on bail for 2 years, but in 2012, he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, as Sweden was pushed into more aggressive extradition attempts.

Team Democrat continued to support Assange right up until 2016, when he released files showing that the DNC was corrupt and had fixed the primaries to make sure that Hillary Clinton won. The DNC and the media took the outrage that rank and file Dems had over this, and turned it onto Wikileaks. (And Russia, of course.)

The US Empire continued to be stymied by Ecuador's support for Assange, and the rumors that Wikileaks had files stored that could destroy high level flunkies, to be released by trusted associates if Assange were snatched up to be taken to the US, (where everyone agrees, he will be in great danger).

Late 2016, Professor Gavin MacFadyen, a co-founder and trusted advisor of Wikileaks, was found dead.

In early 2017, Correa left the presidency of Ecuador and a US stooge was put in.

In Jan of this year, another trusted Wikileaks member, James Dolan, was found dead. He was ruled a suicide.

In August of this year, a third Wikileaks insider, Arjen Kamphuis, disappeared in Norway.

Now, the US, this time under Team Republican (also supporters of Empire) has moved against Julian Assange in the final blow.

Team Dem plebes, not noticing that their leaders are the same as Team Rep, are now cheering on the persecution of Julian Assange. Bizarrely, they claim that an Australian who has never set foot in the US, is somehow a "traitor" to the US, because he published crimes of a private corporation, the DNC.

They aren't known for their logic.

Corrupt CEOs

Every year we Illinoisans are told that we owe another $10 billion or so to the state pension fund. Wow! Those pensioners must be getting some major raises in their monthly stipends!

No, that isn't it. It is going into the fund, not into pension checks. OK, well then, let's drop the fund and just institute a pay-as-you-go system, since current workers are providing 2/3 of the funding that goes to retirees anyway.

Oh, no, we can't do that! The law says we need a fund. Well, isn't that a happy thing for Wall Street? I wonder how that law got passed.

Meanwhile, in the land of corporations, trillions of dollars that should be going to shareholders (like the giant pension funds of Illinois, California, New York and the 401K funds like Vanguard) are going to corporate buy-backs of their own stocks. They want to keep the stock price up, because CEO pay and bonuses are based on that, not performance as a corporation. Except that means that returns on the stocks due to the funds don't happen. We are told that "returns are disappointing".

What, you say? We, the taxpayers are being told we have to pay more to keep CEOs bonuses up? And then we are told to be happy that the Dow Jones is at all time highs? And then we are told to pay more to our 401Ks, because some day, far, far in the future, we will have to live off those funds.

Except who thinks that anything will improve by the time Millennials retire? The CEOs aren't suddenly going to live frugally. The corporate boards, where compliant politicians are rewarded with seats, are not going to stand up to the CEOs. Those 401Ks will be worthless to Millennials as they are to the Baby Boomers, (a lot of whom already cashed out due to unexpected expenses, giving a huge cut to the government, who enforces forced savings by that manner).

And the millennials are being groomed to expect that the massive Social Security fund should also be turned over to Wall Street.

And they are falling for it, just as George Carlin predicted.

This Bus Is Going Over a Cliff

I took a Greyhound bus from Austin to Houston two years ago.

I saw what passes for a skyline approaching and then it disappeared. I didn't know what that meant. Just because you are on the bus doesn't mean you know what is going on.

At some point, the man behind me became agitated. He started yelling ''You're going the wrong way''. The driver denied it. The man got madder. More and more people on the bus started yelling, in English and Spanish. It was a cacophony. The driver pleaded for calm.
The man behind me threatened to kick the driver's ass if he went over a bridge, and the driver pulled over. Eventually, he turned around and got us into Houston, through instructions from the passengers.

We are on a bus hurtling to doom. There are people on the bus who are raising their voices in alarm.

Unfortunately, our bus has a big sound system, distracting the people in the back and assuring us that everything is fine. Some people on the bus are being paid to go the wrong way, and they are screaming to let the driver go forward. There are other people on the bus trying to drive, but most of them want to keep going the same route. And most people on the bus are arguing about whether the seat covers are suitably attractive.

We are screwed.