Category Archives: Crime/Corruption

The Soul-Sucking Ur-Obsidian Ceiling

I posted this to Facebook yesterday.

billionaires

Got some interesting comments, but came away feeling like I needed to elaborate a bit.

Chris Rock explained to us the difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq is rich. The rich white man who signs Shaq’s check is wealthy.

That’s what I’m thinking about – the wealthy, not the rich. Because you can become a millionaire a lot of ways, including by being smart and working hard. Yeah, it helps if you aren’t born into poverty, but you can be a wonderfully moral millionaire. I’m lucky to know a few myself. I sometimes wish I were one.

But there’s a point where it’s not clear a person with a soul can pass. It’s like a glass ceiling, except maybe it’s made of some kind of humanity-sucking ur-obsidian. I’ll never forget Michael Milken in the ‘80s – a hypermillionaire cheating little old ladies out of their social security checks. Pure pathology.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway used to have an argument. Hemingway believed the “very rich” were more or less regular people with a lot of money. Fitzgerald disagreed. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” he said.

They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

William Gibson took it a step further: first with the Tessier-Ashpools in Neuromancer and then with Virek in Count Zero, his argument was that they weren’t really human at all anymore (or that they won’t be in the relatively near future).

I look around the world today and wonder just how human our billionaire overlords really are.

Maybe this is why the idea of lizard people doesn’t scare me.

Do Billionaires Get a Bad Rap?

Monopoly-ManA famous man once said “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I thought about this as I was talking with my friend Bryan yesterday. The subject was NBA and MLB players striking in protest against the attempted murder of Jacob Blake by the Kenosha PD, and Bryan was saying that it can’t always just be the players. The owners need to stand up, too.

He’s right, but I have very little faith in owners. Read more

Defund the Police? Good Cops, Bad Cops…

defund-the-police_lg

The individual tells you nothing about the system. The system tells you nothing about the individual.

The issue isn’t whether you respect Black Lives Matter. It isn’t whether you respect the Police. It’s whether the Police believe all are equal under the law. Recent weeks and months (and years) have set before our eyes a wealth of evidence answering that question. Read more

Who Are The “Protesters” in Black?

Watch this video now.

Whoever these people are, they are not protesters.

The optics are bad shooting up peaceful gatherings so it’s important for authority to establish at least the illusion of justification. By whatever means necessary. So if the protesters won’t loot and burn, then maybe somebody masquerading as a protester has to do it.

The real protesters confronting the guy bashing in windows at the AutoZone suspect he’s a cop. That’s my first guess, too. Hopefully proof of his identity will emerge. If it’s not a cop it’s an unusually well-dressed white supremacist militia yahoo.

In any case, somebody is looking for an excuse to start shooting. Any excuse.

Heads up out there.

Video credit to In the Now. Follow them on Facebook.

Uber “Greyball” scandal: it’s time to consider the death penalty for corporations

delete-uberUber says they’ll stop using Greyball. But this is only the latest outrage from America’s most incorrigibly corrupt business. Time to#DeleteUBER. As in, delete the company. Permanently.

You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one

The American corporation exists for one purpose: to “maximize shareholder value.” Thanks to a variety of factors, including a Supreme Court decision that codified this particularly sociopathic view, employees don’t matter, communities don’t matter, the environment doesn’t matter, and really the only commandment when it comes to bending the rules is “thou shalt not get caught.” Read more

Everything you need to know about the Sessions controversy in a few short paragraphs

The Attorney General should resign – whether he’s guilty or not. Here’s why.

Jeff SessionsBy now you have probably read a good bit about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and whether or not he unlawfully met with the Russian ambassador to discuss the 2016 Presidential election. There is a great deal of lawyering on the horizon, but for the moment here’s what we need to understand.

In his confirmation hearing Sessions was asked directly about contact with the Russians by himself or the Trump campaign. At that moment, there were a couple of ways to answer.

If his goal were transparency, he’d answer something like this: Read more

WTF is the NC GOP up to with the attempted “Bathroom Bill” repeal?

The people who passed HB2 now want to unpass it because they hate teh queers, love the money and fear the people.

[Note: Please forgive the snark in this post. I’m in one of those moods, but despite the tone this is a wholly factual analysis.]

The yahoos who run my native state of North Carolina have been a marvel to watch in recent months. Their latest act was to convene another of their dread “special sessions” for the purpose of repealing the state’s infamously discriminatory HB2 – the “bathroom law.”

Of course, things fell apart. If you’d like a self-serving blow-by-blow from one of the perps, I highly recommend the narrative from NC District 41 (that’s Lincolnton, I believe) Senator Jeff Tarte. If you can’t stomach that, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

  • Charlotte passes ordinance to outlaw discrimination against LGBT citizens
  • Republican lawmakers pass HB2, which makes it illegal to interfere with civil rights violations against gays, lesbians and transgender citizens
  • The world shuns NC, costing it untold millions of dollars
  • Now, on the way out the door, Gov. “One-Term” Pat McCrory decides to repeal the law
  • However, the repeal fails because apparently it was predicated on Charlotte repealing the ordinance that started the legislative ball rolling in the first place

So, what’s the GOP’s motivation here? Read more

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