Greed vs. Tragic Ignorance: Occupy Wall Street (101)

▼Inside Jobs, Tax Shenanigans & American Political Economy▼

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This previously unpublished Blog was written before Steve Jobs died and in the interest of integrity, the reference to him will be kept intact. Importantly, it was written before the Occupy Wall Street movement went mainstream in America before going global. And the careful reader will notice that as well.

America is not in the economic predicament she finds herself because of some "liberal", "socialist", Black president "comrade Obama" who is "the worse ever" and should be "lynched" or "impeached".

The insatiable thirst for easy-to-hijack buzzwords or rubbish characteristic of netizens and oft-cited by Bill Maher is the self-same tragic ignorance CNN's Granderson calls "stupid voters". After all, why should one feel bad about the poor attention span of netizens and voters who can't understand that when I, or President Clinton (while addressing NYU graduands, not just below), or President Obama (facing some would argue a "mostly" bigoted electorate that doesn't care for the truth) advocate a "strategy for Shared Benefits" or "an economy of Shared Prosperity", or cooperation between Government and Private Sector", it is called pragmatism, not Socialism?

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Well-orchestrated disinformation, greed, lies, hypocrisy, and loads of both tax shenanigans and bigotry of people who will not tell you it is impossible to balance a budget recklessly run with wars and wastage in addition to tax cuts for the rich, on the back of no growth, is a key reason. And when you clearly (à la Dick Cheney and Palin addressing the Tea Party) want your President to fail but want your country to succeed; care less about an America default or record poverty, isn't that stupidity, if not newfangled bigotry? Don't take my word for it.

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Remember, we addressed the growth issue in the previous installment days after which David Frum confirmed my argument. Forty years in the making but accelerated in the the last decade by state-of-the-art legal tax evasion shenanigans while paying lip service to "job growth" and economic growth and hypocritically pointing fingers at a President who came in after the extent of the mess became clear (in 2009), corporate special interest and the Financial Industry generally speaking, together with Congress has done the American people a great disservice.

Pragmatists like myself aren't interested in intellectual sideshows over tax codes, who knows more about what the Killer B, Outbound F, Deadly D, Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich and the like and how to impress others. Lie to yourself or ignoramuses who can't distinguish fact from disinformation or speculation but that won't change reality.

Long before Occupy Wall Street, many were concerned about corporate greed, grinding poverty, the obfuscation and legal obstruction of those in government as well as rich who exist to advance or maintain the status quo.

○ ○ ○ The financial industry is a service industry. It should serve others before it serves itself....Why should a financial engineer

be paid four times to 100 times more than a real engineer? A real engineer build bridges. A financial engineer build

dreams. And, you know, when those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it....Most people would

sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.Without a strong 'body of knowledge' the more time we spend looking at

things on screens, the less smarter we become...Finding information on computers is important only if you

have a body of knowledge' that enables you to judge what is true and what is not...Rampant ignorance

and a positive contempt for evidence exists...You can't depend on your judgment [or eyes] when your

imagination is out of focus...The perfect sucker understands that pigs can stare at pearls

but doesn’t realize he can be in an analog situation...The problem with America

is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity...

It's a Wall Street government....The time for thinkers has come...All good

is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity

[平常, 平庸之才] is easy. Stay away from easy...Facts do

not cease to exist because they are ignored...

Meaning is the enema of information.

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RELEVANT MISC. THOUGHTS

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Highly Recommended #1

for optimal understanding of blog ○ ○ ○

Analysis of former Intel Chief Andy Grove's piece on

Growth & How to Create American Jobs

(Click above to listen)

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Juxtaposed against each other, these two

(i.e., Grove and Drucker's)

best represent my own.

Highly Recommended #2

for optimal understanding of blog ○ ○ ○

Jesse Drucker on

How Companies Legally Avoid Billions in Tax Through Offshore Tax Havens

(Click above to listen)

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Like Obama's initial Budget Proposal, the American Jobs Creation Act Of 2004 (Investopedia will confirm) was supposed to many good things for American economic growth:

Introduce a new tax deduction for manufacturers

Prolong advantaged Section 179 expensing for small businesses

Accelerate depreciation for restaurant improvements

Substantially revise rules for S corporations

Simplify international taxation

Increase tax shelter penalties

But what happened instead? Do your research. Some don't have to because they were busy filtering the lies from the truth all along.

The fallout from the necessary, but as Stanford University Professor Michael Boskin appropriately called it, "experiment of great uncertainty" back in 2009; otherwise loosely termed the $700 billion bailout, and substantively known as TARP was an attempt to fix the past.

As long as I have breath I shall continue to call out those (including privileged online commentators and bloggers) who engage (or know people who engage) in shady financial and tax dealings while having the audacity to level innuendo-laced "socialism" and "welfare" charges at Have-Nots either hard at work or unemployed and searching, as if this were a class warfare.

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And yet, as President Clinton rightly points out above, shenanigans involving the voting rights of the Have-Nots —the same group that is "often the last of the last to be hired"—is being codified in such a way as to conveniently and successfully frustrate their ability to vote in the 2012 Presidential Election. All this, coinciding with both the ongoing and precipitous decimation of the Black middle class. Not just in America, incidentally.

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Those of us committed to painstakingly remaining well-informed rather than darting about online on a helium of highly charged emotions and reductive fallacy pontificating on both Politics and poorly sourced issues on which little or no time, effort, and discipline has evidently been expended investigating, distilling, understanding and double checking, are well aware that there is a persistent, well-organized effort underway the likes of which was last seen in the 2000 Election. And therein lies the unbeknown complicity and sadly, political illiteracy of the majority of the bottom 99.9%, and effectively, America's multi-trillion economic meltdown. Next,

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Inside Job

To be continued

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Greed vs. Tragic Ignorance (Other Iterations)

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