Indeed, the young are tethered to a slumber land of no ideas or ideals. Shackled to the beasts of debt and endless consumer-rent-mortgage-fee-levy-tax-fine-surcharge-hidden add on Capitalism. They amble to the nearest Starbucks and find the plastic putrid world and shitty coffee essence safe, conformist, the place to snuggle in with Twitter-Snapchat-Instagram-Facebook-Spotify.
Add to that the general malaise of wanting nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with hipster joker-a-second crap they have downloading and meandering through their apps, and we have a country of no serious thinking. Tapped into the spine of the controllers, the brain centers micro-processing the emotions of the dictators.
Not to say the oldsters in US of A aren’t the same – ambulating in the grand isles of Costco and Walmart, and, yes, juiced up on a triple-shot foamy caramel latte. The faces of red-white-and-blue are the hollowed-out skulls of the zombie culture of wanting-getting-having-buying-discarding-paying it down through the ka-chang of the ever-present ATM.
I worked hard as a social worker-case manager-breeder of anarchy with old and young, now the young, kids in care, state custody, plied by the champions of bureaucracy, who have some shekels and grants here and there to help them get way past the eight ball they are behind.
Shuffled from foster home to foster home, many intersecting with the juvenile injustice system, and many bouncing from school to school, no foundations, no biological link to a put-together family, whatever that is these days in the land of ballooning debts and general anxiety disorder over the simple disparity of why the gap of accumulation of wealth is getting bigger and bigger. With fewer haves than can be imaginable, and mostly haves not wondering how each and every public service had now been captured by the MBA Gestapo and elite SS forces of financial felonies. That is the anxiety of the rebellious like me.
Youth having to make a choice of learning how to weld metal for a living, at the community college, then hunkering down three to a room, or five to a living room. Rents are criminal, and available places for kids coming out of state foster custody are about as rare as a wild living trotting wolf in Wyoming. Kids go from state custody to homelessness . . . or variations on a theme . . . sometimes back to the very mothers or fathers that state bureaucracy yanked them from in the first place for heinous crimes.
We play charades with these youth, with their minds, their dreams, their futures, their lives. We de-link ourselves from screaming at the top of our lungs – “The systems are broken, gone, because we let the billionaires and millionaires set policy, hold sway over states, cities, regions, denude all agency for a public commons, public good, public health, public economy and public investment track.” We have tuition debts in the hundreds of thousands per graduate student (AKA mark, sucker born every nano second, PT Barnum, yeah!) after a few years past the undergraduate degree. We have a beleaguered youth who know nothing but the logo-brand game, know nothing but what they might want on top of their triple-decker quadruple-supreme, triple-dipped seven-scoop ice cream Sunday.
Conversations are about things, about stupid shows, about video games, about the nothingness, zilch of the inhumane celebrity-actor-musician-athlete culture.
And, is it their fault, these Gen Z kids, when we have ball-and-chained their barely burgeoning lives and decades of future absurd toil to the whims of the murderous marketers and money mongers? I have youth who can’t hitch a ride on public transportation because it’s buggered up, runs one bus to the hour, or never makes it out to rural or suburban locales, and then they have to throw down for Lyft or Uber just to make it to their shit jobs where they are cogs . . . .
I was just talking to them about how screwed up Uber is . . .
“I didn’t even think about getting workers’ compensation,” John said. “Uber wasn’t paying for anything.” John knew what many drivers know: that Uber fights tooth and nail in courts and in front of labor boards from New York to California to classify its drivers as independent contractors, in part to avoid having to pay for workers’ compensation payouts to its more than 300,000 drivers, a workforce comparable to major employers like Home Depot and Target.
. . . . or how rotten Google et al are
The Highlands Forum doesn’t need to produce consensus recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a shadow social networking mechanism to cement lasting relationships with corporate power, and to identify new talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare strategies in absolute secrecy.
Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.
Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.
… or how felonious Amazon has always been, continues to be, and will forever be a curse to all humanity if we do not just stop using it, and taking the big guy to tax court, like the courts of Inquisition taking youth to court if they fudge on their housing subsidy, or the court of Scarlet Letter for daddies in arrears for child support . . . . Yep, I try and tell the Latte Lads and Lasses that Amazon is the criminal enterprise, maximum security vanguard of all bad things . . . .
As Amazon spreads around the world selling everything and squeezing other businesses that use its platform, is Jeff Bezos laughing at humanity? His ultimate objective seems to preside over a mega-trillion dollar global juggernaut that is largely automated, except for that man at the top with the booming laugh who rules over the means by which we consume everything from goods, to media, to groceries. Crushing competitors, history shows, is leads to raising prices by monopolizers.
Consumers, workers and retailers alike must be on higher alert and address this growing threat. You have nothing to lose except Bezos’s tightening algorithmic chains. To start the conversation, you can wait for Franklin Foer’s new book out this September, titled World Without a Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Until then, a good substitute is his 2014 article in The New Republic, ‘Amazon Must be Stopped.’
I tell my youth to look into it, how the billionaires’ club is made up of perverts – hating man and woman kind, hating the poor, the downtrodden, and certainly hating foster youth or recovering adults, and the homeless, and the working poor looking for a decent clinic to set a broken bone from working like slaves for these millionaires and billionaires. Our youth are prime victims of agnotolgy – the deliberate erasing of facts, truths, beliefs, but truly, history. The Jewish Nakba scrubbing. Holocaust deniers in Zion, and the new Zion, the American continent. How Canadians know nothing of their own terrible rape and murder of first nations peoples . . . their support of African despots . . . their terrible homegrown devils of international mining and arms sales . . . . Agnotology, the Two Minutes of Hate, a la Orwell, the fabricated Emmanuel Goldstein. Youth who know nothing of North Korea, of Vietnam, of any of the truths of their own womb . . . truths scrubbed by schools, by the controllers, facilitated by the Media and Publishing, and consumed by overworked, overwrought parents. Youth that hate government but love the big boys and girls running roughshod over our-their own survival: the business class.
I find it interesting that Ralph Nader goes on an attack of Just Jeff Bezos (Amazon dot conned) without footnoting his piece that ALL the Fortune 1000 captains (Goose-stepping toward the vaults of shekels) of industry-finance-military-real estate-technology-media-energy are dirtier than the Mafioso, dirtier than any El Chapo, dirtier than any den of pimps and pornographers.
Is there a clean, good one on the lists below? And think of the investments, the power these people wield to determine global financial-military-cultural future:
Bill Gates: $86.0 billion, United States, Microsoft
Warren Buffett: $75.6 billion, United States, Berkshire Hathaway
Jeff Bezos: $72.8 billion, United States, Amazon.com
Amancio Ortega: $71.3 billion, Spain, Inditex, Zara
Mark Zuckerberg: $56.0 billion, United States, Facebook
Carlos Slim: $54.5 billion, Mexico, América Móvil, Grupo Carso
Larry Ellison: $52.2 billion, United States, Oracle Corporation
Charles Koch: $48.3 billion, United States, Koch Industries
David Koch: $48.3 billion,United States, Koch Industries
Michael Bloomberg: $47.5 billion, United States, Bloomberg L.P.
Or the entire DNA strains of the World’s Richest Families, they any better than Jeff Bezos and Monopoly Amazon?
That’s the rub is it not, that the poverty my youth suffer, the poverty I suffer, all these shell games played with our social right: national health care; real social security; public schools and colleges; libraries for the people; banks of the states; water, air, land, food, press/journalism part of the public commons; the right to a roof over your head and a light bulb and plate of slop and a flicker of heat in the dead of winter; the vast collective right of nature to persist, excel, and evolve.
This country is set ablaze by the entire Little Eichmann and Big Himmler and Ugly Zionist and Crusader logic of pain and theft. My small charges, 16 to 21, are caught in a web of psychological-physiological-economic-educational-medical-spiritual deception, and they have nothing to turn to than the ebbing and flowing corpuscles created by the generators of multi-syllabic, three dozen hyphenated things they consume, all nano-particled and sliced and diced with the magic of the chemical still.
We have kids with ticks, kids with obesity-lethargy-lingering intelligence and cognition. We have children who are the essence of the Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience, except his was an experiment on authority, lab coats and Yale basement authority, whereas today, the Milgram experiment is fluid, directly wired into Facebook-Google-Anything Digital. Today, youth and the old are kettled to consumer and be all they can be based on a giant interstellar Madison Avenue-PsyOps experiment to lobotomize-confuse-disassociate-deny humans in this country.
Imagine, no rebellion, no running through the streets, no daily Molotov’s thrown into the limos and onto the doorsteps of the millionaire and billionaire murderers.
Milgram examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – that they were just following orders from their superiors.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).
These finance-foisting, tax-robbing, war-creating, debt-inducing, human/child/ecosystem-sacrificing pigs are given more than a trillion get out of jail cards. They are running things, playing editor like Jeff Bezos, ruining everything like Mr. PayPal –
My joke about Thiel’s “Brownshirt Combinator” isn’t as funny now, is it? ‘Transition Adviser Peter Thiel Could Directly Profit From Mass Deportations’:
Palantir Technologies, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition adviser Peter Thiel, will likely assist the Trump administration in its efforts to track and collect intelligence on immigrants, according to a review of public records by The Intercept. Since 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations has paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to help construct and operate a complex intelligence system called FALCON, which allows ICE to store, search, and analyze troves of data that include family relationships, employment information, immigration history, criminal records, and home and work addresses. […]
Working closely with a president-elect who has pledged to dramatically expand ICE, Thiel’s varied connections to the immigration agency place him in a position to potentially benefit financially from a deportation campaign that carries highly personal stakes for millions of Americans. […]
In addition to containing information on family relationships and immigration history, the records FALCON collects can also include photographs of subjects, employment information, educational background, and “geospatial data.” […]
Last month, it was reported that Trump and his advisers are drafting plans to launch a campaign of workplace raids across the country to find undocumented immigrants. With a mandate to enforce laws relating to unauthorized employment, HSI has been identified as the primary component within ICE that conducts such job-site raids. This past October, after a lengthy investigation, HSI agents raided several Mexican restaurants in Buffalo, New York, arresting more than a dozen workers, some of whom were charged with criminal counts of “illegal re-entry,” raising an outcry from immigrant advocates. In 2013, after an HSI raid on carwashes in Phoenix, more than two dozen immigrants were reportedly sent to Enforcement and Removal Operations officers for possible deportation.
ICE can conduct such raids even in so-called sanctuary cities that have refused to allow local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE in finding and removing undocumented immigrants. […]
Palantir, which is backed by the CIA’s venture capital arm, did not respond to a request for comment regarding its ICE contracts and concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Peter Thiel spokesperson Jeremiah Hall declined to comment on a list of emailed queries, including a question asking whether Thiel has yet signed the Trump transition ethics agreement.
While Ralph Nader is huge in so many ways, and I worked for his campaigns and was lambasted by colleagues in journalism, education and the environmental movement, the real rub is how he at his wise age can even stomach ANYTHING the billionaire class says, does, and infers. His Utopian thing, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, was and is off the mark, big-time –
In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television in early September 2005. . . . On the fourth day, he beheld in disbelief the paralysis of local, state, and federal authorities unable to commence basic operations of rescue and sustenance, not just in New Orleans, but in towns and villages all along the Gulf Coast. . . He knew exactly what he had to do. . .
So begins the vivid fictional account by political activist and bestselling author Ralph Nader that answers the question, “What if?” What if a cadre of super-rich individuals tried to become a driving force in America to organize and institutionalize the interests of the citizens of this troubled nation? What if some of America’s most powerful individuals decided it was time to fix our government and return the power to the people? What if they focused their power on unionizing Wal-Mart? What if a national political party were formed with the sole purpose of advancing clean elections? What if these seventeen superrich individuals decided to galvanize a movement for alternative forms of energy that will effectively clean up the environment? What if together they took on corporate Goliaths and Congress to provide the necessities of life and advance the solutions so long left on the shelf by an avaricious oligarchy? What could happen?
America is a country of the dead. As is Israel, and note that not ONE cute-real-serious-well-acted-poorly- acted movie about the perfect Milgram subjects – Israelis – has ever been made, produced, shown on the Media, one clearly hoisted by Zionists – in some of their own words, as Gilad Atzmon lends some weight to this,
In his recent address to the ultra-Zionist and war-mongering Stand With Us, Alan Dershowitz said, ‘People say Jews are too powerful, too strong, too rich, we control the media, we’ve too much this, too much that and we often apologetically deny our strength and our power. Don’t do that!’
Elder Zionist Dershowitz who acquired for himself the reputation of a “remarkable liar” (Chomsky) and a “serial plagiarist” (Finkelstein) probably decided, just before he meets his creator, to give truth one last try.
In our world, no one can deny that Jews are “too powerful,” “too rich” or that they “control the media.” Yet no one can ignore that Jews themselves are rarely apologetic about their extensive and overblown power. In fact, as with Dershowitz, most Jews tend to boast about the various facets of Jewish domination and, while boasting, use every trick in the book to silence anyone else who points to that power. As I have been arguing for several years, Jewish power is the ability to suppress the discussion on Jewish power.
Actually, Dershowitz’ approach here is rather refreshing. He admits that Jews are overwhelmingly powerful yet insists on presenting a rationale as to why Jews should never apologize about this overbearing and abusive power.
‘WE (the Jews, presumably) have earned the right to influence public debate, WE have earned the right to be heard, WE have contributed disproportionately to success of this country.’
One may wonder who is included in that ‘WE’ that has contributed so much to the ‘success’ of America. Is he referring to his client and close friend Jeffrey Epstein who pimped under-aged girls for the elites? Does Dershowitz’ ‘WE’ include Alan Greenspan who led the country to class genocide? Or perhaps his ‘WE’ denotes all those Wall Street Jewish bankers, like the Goldmans, the Sachs and the Soroses – those who, on a daily basis, gamble on the American future and the global economy. And almost certainly, Dershowitz’ ‘WE’ includes Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson who have managed to reduce American politics into merely an internal Zionist affair.
These are daunting times, the entire globe sucked of its telephone calls, its computer messages, all the uploads and downloads, every human individual defecation and urination and climax cataloged in these nuclear-powered cloud servers. Battened down, these surveillance hatches. Young people are now the cows, bred to follow the orders of Old Navy and any new shiny merchant of duncery and death; to pay for their cell phones, diligently, to pay-pay-pay for the poisons going into their brains and bellies.
They are taught to not question or to not rebel, or to not just sit down and start a ruckus. Daily, the power of corrupted commercialization is like s drug resistant tuberculosis eating at our next and our next generation’s soul. Until there is no resistant antinode or antibiotic to stop the final solution drawn through the elaborate algorithms of controllers – massive forgetting, massive insanity. These demigods — the monopolies — supplying every microgram of humanity’s needs, now that we are sealed in this fate of capitalism – addicted to goods and services unnecessary, and willing to watch all good and common needs vanish with each new libertarian sucking the blood from us all like the vampires and nematodes of the capitalist elites.