Friday, July 6, 2012

When Safety Nets Capture

"The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people. "
Cesar Chavez


I feel an agrarian revolution is not only required but is imminent. I love reading Forbes Magazine for the self-satisfied interviews of bright people who molded themselves perfectly into the insulated, blind, fool on hill paradigm of Modern America and make six and seven figure salaries basically shuffling decks of digital cards so other people (web site owners) can read the information and decide what works on their dog sweater website. So, basically you can make a million dollars by being several steps removed from actual tangible skills and products. (some might say, that's the only way to make a million dollars.)  These are not jobs, they are gimmicks that will exist for a blink of an eye before we realize they have no value. These phony CEOs go to the store, buy 3 mangoes for a dollar and probably complain when the milk goes up a dime for every gallon. Those days are going to be short lived and I don't need to hire a financial forecaster to tell me that because common sense would tell you that spreadsheets are not as tangible as cotton. (Yeah, economists will argue differently because their job is on the line but I'm not fooled) The trick has always been a moral slight of hand that decreases the value of a mango farmer and elevates the value of internet commerce analysis (I really hope I live to see the day this hoax is exposed). I've really pondered why that is true and it basically comes down to the fact that most people don't actually want to live honestly by their own means and so they rationalize their own superficial careers to justify an exploitation of farmers and farm workers, honest people of the earth who produce tangible and required products, whose common sense prevents their entry into flim flam currency trading or the hedge fund black hole. (That sense isn't a flaw, it's an asset that think tank employees have defined as a flaw in propaganda.) That rationalization snowballs into a mass movement of exploitation and then into a vortex of cause and effect that produces systemic poverty (that requires billion dollar doctoral research groups to understand) and so on until the basic cause (lazy smart people) is completely buried in a pile of research papers and decades of accusations until the poor mango farmer is the "lazy dumb person" in the eyes of society. And that's the natural progression of an astounding lie: the Board of Irony defines the opposite as true and defends it with glossy think tank lies.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.