didn't vote for either of them. They were both so bad. I could not vote for either of them. The job outsourcer or the reality TV actor pussy grabber. Both were molesters.

I hope that someday this shenanigans will be no more than a bad dream we went through and over. And that we will be able to vote for policies and not politicians. Who as we see are the weak point in the chain. We're currently being run by a neoliberal cult.

I think we are getting an education in the fallibility of our current system that you couldn't get any other way.

I am posting a lot of links. Even if you don't have the time now, you should visit them when you can.

I just read this, which I thought was appropriate to cut and paste to here.

"We’re living through a discontinuity. This is Steffen’s core point. “Discontinuity is a moment where the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work,” he said. “It is extremely stressful, emotionally, to go through a process of understanding the world as we thought it was, is no longer there.” No kidding. “There’s real grief and loss. There’s the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened.”

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its in the NYT Magazine article this week and its about California but it also applies to US politics. There is a necessary recalibration going on and we cant just go on assuming that things are as they were. If you fall for that people are there to take advantage of you, and they will.

read this;

For a deeper understanding of how migration could equalize the price of labour in two trading
countries, consider figure one (from Senior Nello, 2005:145): There are two countries, Home
and Foreign. The total quantity of labour in the two countries is shown by the distance OhOf.
Before a fully free migration is allowed the distribution of labor is OhL in Home and OfL in
Foreign. The marginal product of labour is higher in Home than in foreign because the
capital/labor ratio is higher in Home. This is shown in the figure by the higher position of the
MPLh curve compared to the MPLf curve. Because of this the wage is higher in Home, at Wh
compared with the wage in Foreign at Wf. In short: Home symbolizes a developed country with
high automatization and high wages and Foreign a less developed country with abundant supply
of labour, low automatization and low wages. If migration is fully free between the two
countries and the workers are identical workers will migrate from Foreign to Home in pursuit of
higher wages. The migration will finally result in an equalized capital/labor ratio in the two
countries and thus equal marginal products of labor and equal wages, illustrated in the figure by
the wage level W’ which could be seen as the world market price of labor as the world only
consists of the two countries Home and Foreign. The migration is illustrated in the figure by the
distance LL’ which is the amount of workers that will move from Foreign to Home so that the
new distribution of labour becomes OhL’ in Home and L’Of in Foreign.
Wages will thus decrease in Home and increase in Foreign resulting in a loss for the indigenous
workers in Home illustrated in the figure by the area a but a gain for the capital owners of the
areas a+b. In Foreign the workers get an increased income of areas c+d+e while the capital owners lose areas d+e. The result in total is a net gain for the two countries by areas b+c which
is a gain in profits to both sets of owners resulting from higher efficiency in the use of the total resources of the two countries. Efficiency gains. How can layoffs lead to higher profits, thats how. This is why they say the net effect will be gains. As they put it its inefficient for expensive workers to do the work. Now the Internet lets them remote almost all jobs, and that is their full intent. Show me one law that breaks.

The jobs that are stable are the ones where the workers supply an irreplaceable benefit to their employers. Something they cannot get anywhere else. Our job is to be that worker. The worker who is worth all that money. Many do. But can all be that worker? No. If they cant do that then its their job to be the cheapest worker. Anhd work more more harder. Like John Henry did. He won the contest. But he regrettably died.

----- there you have it---

The deal has changed in fundamental ways as the power of the humans is taken away and given to the corporate oligarchical state. Every two years the WTO and similar organizations meet at different intervals and reasons. In the WTO's case it meets in order to push for more progressive liberalization. Its like a noose, that gets tighter and tighter. Progressive to them means more and more corporate ownership of everything. More financialization, more monetization. More profits, they hope. So they frame it all as a gain. And hope to exploit what they can. We've fallen for a huge trick. For example, the ol buildings that used to be public are being bought up and sold as for prodit housing. They can never build any more poublic housing so its worth much more now. The people in cities could never afford them. Thats their core value. Since people will pay $000 month for that two bedroom apartment, thats what it must rentfor. Buy or dont. Always forward to more privatization, less regulation, more privatization. Its locked in by A ratchet that clicks. And the jobs are being funneled to the firms in the third world that broker the work of subcontractors, They pay so little they must put their workers up on partments they rent, and pass that rent on to them, marking it up a lot. This is happening globally, taking as much as half or more of their wages. Its immensely profitable. I could I suspect put a tent in my back yard and rent it out for $1000 a month. Tighten the belts. That we are told is the future of work. And housing. Progressive liberalization. A one way street. The ratchet effect. Capitalism wins, we now owe them much more. Debt multiplies exponentially. As we have to pay for the money by creating more and more debt and debtors. The poorest oligarchs, too. so more third world millionaires can become billionaires. Its only fair. Africa is the future. Enterpreneurial power in Africa is incredible. Thats where investments are heading. The lowest wages and the hioghest yields inthe world. What could be more American than that. Its a matter of fairness. The old deal which the poor and "minorites" existed under is being repudiated and deprecated. But America is rusty, used up. Grumpy. They have other people they need to help now. Their new workers, for example. It was promised to them in the 70s under the label NIEO, then later again as the Doha Round, and then both of those promises were broken. Their "check" from the US came back marked "insufficient funds", when they had done what we asked and dismantled social services, public education and healthcare, we didn't give them the market access to America, the jobs we had promised. Now its time for us to cough them up. They have millions of young people who went to college so they could do these jobs. Thats what we asked of them. Meanwhile, our students defaulted on their college loans and got divorced and evicted instead of having children. They demanded higher wages even as the value of their skills stagnated. They bought $500 iphones, And they dropped out of college in three or four years. This is what they say. Our expectations are unrealistically high. Its bidens job to tell everybody everything they want to hear, and put their damands off. As long as he can. Stonewalling. GATSlighting.

The story of John Henry is informative. Our system is set up to make the already rich far richer, their wealth growing exponentially. And its also set up to give less competition by culling the infirm, the so called "zombie firms" WHose presence its claimed makes markets unprofitable as they struggle to syat alive when lowering prices when they cannot afford to. Corporate raiders, they say should come in and buy up the assets and put them out of their misery.

The strong survive, meaning the people who could afford to compete. The world has changed and the people who run it now detest the ideas of equality and fairness. Thats not how they think.

They have no problem with bribery, or rigging the system. To them we are stupid not to face the fact that "thats how the world works now" as they put it.

Like John Henry, fighting the railroad tie laying machine, and winning, but paying with his life, we have to pick our battles, avoiding the ones we cant possibly win. We dont understand Moore's Law, or how knowledge and unpredictability is increasing exponentially. What that means is that business is rapidly growing more unpredictable. Investors want governments to assume the risks, and funnel them the profits, thank you Sure its unfair but poverty is unfair. Its always been the case that people died because they didnt have some needed thing. So whats wrong with paying $1000 for a pill when your child is dying, its worth that to you. Why should it matter of that pill costs $0.15 to make, or less. What matters is that life saving drug is being provided, if you have the money. This is the new world order. If you have the money. This is the new America. Where those with capital make unlimited amounts of money.

Others? Often they cannot win, nor can people compete directly with machines that often work thousands of times faster. Their wages are falling. Whose capabilities are improving exponentially?

The engineers and data scientists who understand how to optimize the supply chains. Since I was a small child I have mused about what date would computers surpass us. Long before then the number of jobs where humans are the fastest supercomputer available at a given price will have shrunk to fractions of what it is today. Who is getting ready for that date, the neoliberals are. I dont think its that far away. For quite a while my guess has been moving towards 2035-down from 2045. You know, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg collaborated on a real masterpiece, AI, the film. Its very good. You all should watch it.