As gold broke below the psychologically important level of $1,200 an ounce late in December of 2014, the mainstream financial media burst with headlines like this one from Marketwatch: “Gold’s Safe-Haven Role is Over.” The Nobel prize winning economist from the New York Times, Paul Krugman, penned a wicked missive on the ‘barbarous relic’ by invoking Key
Awake night suddenly not night four AM. Three figures bedside: Short Man; Tall Surly Man, aka “Mr. Personality;” Thin Woman. Long white lab coats aqua scrubs. Young.
“This is him. Here’s his chart,” Mr. Personality.
“Amazing,” Short Man.
“Freak me out,” Thin Woman.
“I’ve never heard of anyone born with The Condition. I thought it just happens. Toxic exposure or something like that. They see it in kids on the Enemy side,” Mr. Personality.
“Which Enemy? I forgot which Enemy of the Nation we’re out to get this week,” Short Man.
It’s the 25th, and I am thinking about my buddy Jacob. He’s 25, riddled with PTSD, Battle of Fallujah, Marines, young spirited, radicalized at boot camp and then in country. It was a big scam, but one that ate at his heart. Scam, lie, bullshit war, and now, another year goes by, and the Gitmo madness of our cognitively sapped politicians, intellectuals, rot-gut CEOs and media moguls.
It’s that Ebeneezer and Grinch time of year. Hooverville. The great American fat crocodile tear with stories of legless troops getting a bag of groceries and free big screen TV and compact car. All those bags under our collective eyes watching brute felon sports professionals (sic) run by their brutish Mafiosa coaches and owners. We are ready for that extra 15 pounds, those romps in those wonderlands of Consumopithecus Anthropocene union-busting box stores, those nanoseconds looking at the homeless, pennies for their crimes. We will feel good about Tis the Season.
Precaution. Stop shifting the baseline. Stop mucking around because you have no common sense but plenty of computer engineering ADD-ADHD or what have you, on that autism spectrum. What have you, stop enlisting these money changers and game changers to define community.
In science, a theory is abandoned or substantially modified if it does not concur with the emerging facts, fails to predict important events, or is contradicted by experiments. That, alas, does not seem to apply to economic theories.
Free-market (neo-liberal) capitalism has been the dominant type of capitalism for the last three decades; it failed spectacularly to predict the 2008 global economic crash, the second largest economic crisis in history, after the great depression.
Here it is, really – the bold-two/faced lie of the liberal class, the 19 percenters holding up their share of the pain for the rest of us. We make paltry livings and have zero benefits. We see the cuts to food assistance, see the massive funding of transfinancials through our hard-earned work. We see the dumbdowning of America, the dog-eat-dog reality of these rabid souls. You can name them in your nightmares, or see them on Charlie Rose.
Fire Bush. Dark, but no Indian. Surely. Obvious. Called himself Indian, claimed “The Assistants” were Indians too.
The Assistants: Chicken Killer, elderly in denim; floppy hat pierced with an old, dusty feather; weathered skin; faded illegible tattoos.
White Buffalo Woman, or “Buffalo Gal,” almost young and almost beautiful; white suede dress and moccasins; hip-length black hair; weary eyes.
The two (Missing?) Young; seventeen and sixteen; male and female; Smashed Deer and Fidelity Desire.
Jesse Freeston is a filmmaker and video-journalist based in Montréal, Québec: In the absence of a trustworthy process, those who took power by force in 2009 will stay in power.
The PISA scores are out and American students are ranking pretty low. All who follow the corporate line are up in arms and blaming our educational system. For once they are right. Although American students have never scored high in these international tests, it only goes to show that the billions upon billions of dollars spent the last dozen years on testing, testing, testing, curriculum writing by non-teachers, privatization, charter schools, etc. have failed in their mission to remake our public school system for the better.
