Wal-Mart Fires Jean Valjean And The Toady French Ruling Class Files Felony Charges For Stealing Cookies… And Other Examples Of The Dumbing-Down Of The Corporate State

Is this really any surprise?  Wal-mart is the poster child for social violence in our nation - nonliving wages, little to no benefits - other than eating cookies in the stores - and short work weeks to keep workers from being classified as full-time.   The felony wrap sheet says the total loss for the perpetrator’s crime was $3.98.  As a relative of mine said of austerity over the holidays, if people don’t make enough money, they are going to be forced to steal to stay alive.  Paying a nonliving wage is austerity.  It is a form of violence.  Violence begets violence as Jean Valjean, the Oreo-stealing employee, proves.

As a commenter at this post remarked, this is right out of Les Miserables – sending Jean Valjean to prison for stealing a loaf of bread because Marie Antoinette told him to pound salt or eat cake.  Bread, well… and cookies, are only for people who can afford them.   You remember what happened next?   The abolishment of the French monarchy and The Reign of Terror.   In other words, contemptuous feudal lords, kings and queens who shit all over the poverty-stricken had a permanent bad hair day as the guillotine became the French national pastime for quite a few years.  History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.   Just sayin.

Okay, I’m taking liberty with timelines and Les Miserables but it makes the post more interesting. 

How about a few more heart warming stories from our corporate masters?

Obama Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew was paid by Citi to seek high level political appointment.  The revolving door of fascism continues.

New Jersey’s newest casino goes kaput. I have been writing for a long, long time that the casino economy is headed for disaster. We have been trading jobs that create wealth for jobs that consume wealth for decades.  It’s just a matter of time.  If you don’t produce any wealth, you sure as hell can’t keep consuming it.  We are a nation of gamblers because of the free-lunch gambling propaganda that Wall Street creates with their endless Ponzi schemes.  Casinos are a manifestation of that mindset.  They are a tax on society’s wealth just as Wall Street is. 

Some people have a hard time discerning money from wealth or capital. That’s one of the problems I have with gold money advocates who have it exactly backward. They support a feudal monetary system of control where money is the definition of wealth. Money is NOT wealth and I have a sneaking suspicion we just might get to experience what that very fact meanns at some point.   If so, as noted on here before, don’t expect gold holdings to protect you. 

Let me make a simple illustration everyone can start to think about as it pertains to wealth creation.  If I take a deck of cards to Somalia and you and I sit down and start playing cards, do the people of Somalia become more wealthy?  Does their poverty disappear?   Of course not.  That is ridiculous.  Well, a casino is nothing more than a corporation that plays cards.  That’s it.  There is zero wealth created.  All that happens with a casino is that money is shifted into this racket.  And, that money is worth the same as it was before that casino was opened.  In other words, if that money was worthless, it’s still worthless with the opening of a casino.  That’s why the mob loves gambling.  That’s why Wall Street loves trading.  It’s a license to steal.   Casinos and Wall Street steal legally with the backing of the force of the state.  It’s a form of covert social violence against our citizens that casinos have become so instrumental to the functioning of our state governments and schools.

So, what does create wealth?   In its purest sense the economic monetization of science and its outcome, productivity.   That does not include what capitalism terms as productivity – reducing wages, cutting benefits, dumping more work on fewer employees, sending jobs off to sweat shop labor, buying your competitor to reduce competition, etc, etc.  In a more esoteric sense, wealth is the manifestation of the empowered and enlightened human mind and its intent of discovery and truth.  That includes science, art, literature, philosophy, music and other expressions of the mind’s freedom and divinity.  Unfortunately, the dumbed-down, proletariat, corporate state has politicized and destroyed the purity of discovery or science.  The major drivers of this dumbing-down are both political parties who attempt to manipulate, distort and twist science for their own intents of ego-motive and control.

Now, if you want to have casinos in society for enjoyment, well, then have at it.   But, then what is really enjoyable about taking yourself out of the moment to pin your hopes on a gambling scheme that is nothing more than a regressive tax?   Just realize gambling is a corporate-controlled, state-enforced tax on democracy aka fascism as it is is practiced in the U.S.; one that violently preys on the people least able to pay it.   It is no different than the corporate-controlled, state-enforced tax that is ObamaCare.  I can’t open a gambling business in the U.S.  Only corporations blessed by the state, aka cronyism or favoritism or using the force of the state to pick economic winners and losers, can open a gambling business in the U.S. 

Corporations advise closing public schools in favor of private, for-profit, corporate-run schools.  As noted on here many times, money is an institution of the ego and serves only one intent – control.   Money as a defining factor in the education of our children is a form of covert violence that perpetuates class disparity and systemic poverty.   All children in our nation should have access to the best education available.  That includes every single child with special needs.   That cannot and will not happen once private, for-profit schools start considering the bottom line as more important than our children just as corporations today consider the bottom line more important than our citizens.  

“Land grabbing” by foreign investors – mostly corporations and the uber rich who have made their money looting via corporations.  This is a crime against humanity and will most certainly end up being invalidated at some point.  By the way, the same thing has happened in the U.S. as corporations and elites have grabbed all of our land and physical assets. 

Corporations should be forbidden from owning any land in a democracy.  Period.   Instead 10, 20, 50 year leases or whatever could be granted to companies.  Their terms of rent could be granted that would allow corporations that serve democracy to be sustainable.   And their lease should be renewed or denied when their corporate charter is reviewed or denied by democracy for renewal.  ie, If you aren’t serving our democracy, your charter won’t be renewed.  Period.  And, poof, your corporation no longer exists.   The first to go should be Wall Street, Wal-mart and Monsanto for preying on democracy.

Property rights should be limited to citizens of democracy.  That means Hosni Mubarak or communist China or Saudi Arabia, three examples of horrendous human rights abusers, shouldn’t be able to come to our nation and use the money they stole from the citizens of their respective nations, or stole from our citizens through the deregulation of capital, to then buy U.S. mansions or assets.  Not only that but no one person should be able to buy up a million acres or a thousand houses and turn American citizens into renting serfs.   That creates zero wealth and is a form of social violence.  We need reasoned, just laws on property rights.  Just laws that protect democracy and out citizens.   As I noted on here before, George Bush was right about the ownership society.  He was wrong to believe private, for-profit banking criminals could execute that vision.

Lastly, this is just f*cked up.  Talk about giving me the creeps.