700 Billion Dollar Bail Out Plan Does Anyone Care?

[AlohaSteven]

"Geeze it is really not as complicated as it seems! Just get rid of the Rothschild and we would be able to take care of ourselves!"

"I am strongly in favor of going back and hanging those who got us here, from each party."

Well, taking that approach there is going to be a long line standing at that gallows and I think, ultimately, each of us would have a turn stepping up on the trap-door and being fitted with a jute necktie.

Except for the children and innocently childlike among us, we adults are not totally powerless victims in this mess. We have participated quite thoroughly in all sorts of ways. How? From using fiat currency to how we vote on election day to staying potted in front of TV sets chuckling on cue with the sitcom laugh track instead of bothering to educate ourselves [just 47 minutes, folks, and a better education on the topic than years of business classes would deliver: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...2583451279 ], feeling outrage, and then marching in the streets, boycotting, and doing whatever it proactively takes to end CEO's making hundreds of times the average employee's salary, corporations having the same --if not more-- legal rights as citizens, corporations grabbing public resources (from water, mineral, timber, fishing, and grazing rights to airwaves and bandwidth) and then selling them back to us and/or using the land, water, and air as a free open sewer for waste disposal, and using our taxed wealth to fund a demonstrably corrupt military-industrial complex which keeps this insanity growing like a malignant cancer.

$700 billion? What matters more is that around 54% of every tax dollar goes to support the military.

Certainly the greedy and incompetent CEOs and venal politicians who were glad to captain the helm while we served as crew should not be rewarded for running our economic ship of state onto the rocks, but we could have spoken up, taken control, and changed leadership (...and, therefore, course) at any time. Example: instead of Dennis Kucinich on the progressive left and Ron Paul on the conservative right (both of whom are a huge threat to the corporate/military status quo) we collectively allowed a media blackout and marginalization of them both even while blind testing nationwide showed most Americans felt much more closely either as Kucinich or Paul do than as the corporately-backed options now eligible for office say they stand on the same issues. What does this have to do with Hawaii? This is an example (with names I can actually use here) to suggest that Big Island voters in general and Puna voters in particular would benefit from close scrutiny of the candidates for local office: on both the progressive and conservative ends of the spectrum who will work best toward achieving a genuine transformation of the current system?

Time after time in the past when a revolution has happened, from France to Russia to Spain/Italy/Germany to Cuba to China to Korea to Nicaragua to Rwanda to you name the place, a whole lot of folks have been hanged, beaten to death, and burned alive in the streets. It is happening right now in many places in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa particularly, even as we write and read these words.

All of these folks were motivated by economic theory run amok, and dead wrong: Chairman Mao thought getting rid of landlords and intellectuals would be a good move, Stalin thought getting rid of millions of kulaks would be an improvement for forced collectivization, Hitler thought if only the Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and disabled were eliminated it would be such an improvement for regaining control of the banking system, and the examples go on and on. This matters to Hawaii in general and to Puna in specific because if the day ever comes when there is such a crash that we are on our own out in the middle of the planet's largest ocean and with no oil, are we going to follow that same pattern? The name of a dictator is just a sanitary label for the reality of mobs of former neighbors going out and brutalizing other neighbors, grabbing their property, and hanging them.

In Indonesia after WWII the Dutch (who between the German occupation and Allied bombing could themselves barely stand up again) tried to reassert colonial mastery of the East Indies archipelago. The USA threatened to with-hold the aide of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe from the Netherlands unless the Dutch gave up claim to colonial mastery of Indonesia. The Dutch caved, withdrew, and the Indonesians promptly dispossessed of their property and eliminated (in many cases, killed) the educated and experienced class of bureaucrats, merchants, and other "collusionists and collaborators" who had served as middle management under the Dutch and then later the Japanese. In consequence, for decades Indonesia was incapable of locating it's butt with both hands because they had killed off and dispossessed exactly those literate, well-trained, and experienced workers most needed for making progress. If push ever comes to shove in Hawaii then it will be most shortsighted and counterproductive to hang the bankers, CEOs, and their ilk. Scapegoating them will solve nothing while potentially making matters even worse down the road.

We are all responsible for this mess we are in, even though few of us have enjoyed such benefits from the flawed system as that bunch. Our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids will not care who was the damnable banker and who was the damnable bank depositor, only what sort of solution we came up with. I am sure the folks on Easter Island were not thinking about who --several generations or more back-- was to blame for their situation when Roggeveen sailed up in 1722; they were too busy hunting each other for food and hiding in lava tubes. There are viable Hawaiian solutions for preserving the environment and quality of life on the Big Island and neighboring islands no matter what happens in future if we are not lazy and do not cast blame elsewhere but rather work to educate ourselves and pull together on solving local challenges great and small alike.



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"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

Pres. John Adams, Scholar and Statesman


"There's a scientific reason to be concerned and there's a scientific reason to push for action. But there's no scientific reason to despair."

NASA climate analyst Gavin Schmidt

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