The Mind of Privilege

People in general tend to shy away from conflict. Persons born into privilege are able to avoid the daily interactions and interpersonal struggles that force conflict and teach us its lessons. This avoidance goes beyond interactions with others and extends to internal psychology.

The most comforting belief system for weak-minded people born into privilege is the one offered by the modern left. The human mind needs to remain active, and receives pleasure from positive feedback. Charitable giving makes all people feel good about themselves. The modern left offers privileged minds positive feedback through a similar mental mechanism.

On the level of personal interaction, these people also like to feel as if they are helping. But, since they more often than not, have little to offer, they have to fix in their mind that the people they are helping are stupider than they are. Which provides them a purpose as well as a calming self-superiority mechanism. Childless females are especially prone to this mindset because of their unfulfilled nurturing nature.

These people are irrelevant in oligarchies and dictatorships. In democracies, they are used as tools of the powerful.

Our Little Experiment

“No Nation will benefit by driving down the fortunes of another.”
-President George W. Bush, this morning

And Bill’s Corollary;

“Taxing the Citizens of a single Nation to save the world economy doesn’t work either George. Leave it alone.”

George Bush’s legacy will likely be as the man who tried to spread democracy throughout the world, only to lose it at home.
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The fact that has been kept silent is that Henry Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs when the CDOs were being engineered. Goldman originated a large percentage of the CDOs. As Goldman was not holding the CDOs when they went bust, Paulson likely had knowledge of fraud.

Brick Oven’s conspiracy theory is that Paulson was placed at the Treasury to transfer the bad debt from Wall Street to the American taxpayer, shielding his associates from financial losses and himself from civil and criminal exposure.

The Stock Market and National Health

There is talk of the drop in the stock market, and some associate that number with the status of the health of the Nation. While there is some correlation, it is not a close correlation.

The stock market represents the perceived value of a group of corporations. These corporations, once American entities, have evolved to become extra-national entities. The reason for this is because the job of the leader of a corporation is to maximize the rate of return to shareholders. So the corporate legal entities are set up in places with low taxes, and the corporate labor centers are set up in places with low wages.

National health is the ability of a country to feed itself, defend itself, and project and expand its belief systems and population. There are powerful forces, well-meaning and otherwise, internal and external, that are working to weaken the national health of America-2008. In many ways they have succeeded. Evidence of this is seen in the financial markets and at the shopping mall.

But the path that these forces have used is an unsustainable one, because it consumes more wealth than it generates. Because corporations are able to shelter themselves from idealistic and well-meaning, but socially and economically-flawed laws, corporations are much healthier than our nation. Which is a mouthful.

One aspect of our nation’s health is the observable financial one. Despite all of the inflation data manipulation, and the engineered currencies, it can be observed that we are broke. Our government, in its current form, will not be able to change this. It will, in all likelihood, accelerate the fall.

And when it falls, Americans will start over and return to national health. We will succeed because we have a surplus of farm land, 400+ years of liquid fuel in the form of oil shale, lots and lots of widely-held military hardware, and the American spirit, embodied in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the first ten Amendments, for all to see.

A fascinating time to be alive. The Founder’s concept of freedom will continue for those with the awareness to appreciate it, and the character to defend it.

You Are Evicted

The government is now our biggest landlord. In the 1960s, Mifflin Street seceded from the Union. Madison landlords hired the Hells Angels and the rent checks started coming in again. Self-discovery types did not match up well against the Hells Angels.

The federal government cannot hire the Hells Angels to evict tenants, the Hells Angels do not have a work order number. Blackwater does. The electorate will not tolerate Blackwater, or the army, evicting voters.

Housing values are about to plunge.

Boats

A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier costs $4.5 billion, after all of the fraud, waste, and abuse.

The Wall Street Bailout, at $850 billion, equates to 190 new aircraft carriers. We bought 8 more carriers today at 5pm Eastern with the AIG expansion.

I think we’ve been sailing twelve around for the last decade.

Some Plato

“When such men are only private individuals and before they get power, this is their character; they associate entirely with their own flatterers or ready tools; or if they want anything from anybody, they in their turn are equally ready to bow down before them: they profess every sort of affection for them; but when they have gained their point they know them no more.”

“They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship.”

Obama stands no chance of pulling off a tyrannical government. But the desire is there to observe.

OK, What Is the Stock Market Really Worth?

Well it’s looking more and more like our $3 trillion in residential real estate losses has been a good estimate. We’ll estimate another $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate, and still another $1.5 trillion in credit cards, car loans, etc. So that is $6 trillion total in debt losses.

Someone mentioned that the 777 point DJIA loss equated to something like $1.2 trillion in lost wealth, so we’ll make the assumption that the loss of 3000 recent points is a $4.5 trillion loss, part of which is already included in the $6 trillion in debt losses, part of which is not. So we’ll add $2 trillion to the $6 trillion for a total aggregate loss of $8 trillion.

Going back to 777 points = $1.2 trillion, the other 9400 points are worth around $15 trillion on paper. But since the smart guys on Wall Street have everything leveraged 30 times, the $8 trillion in real losses means that $240 trillion have vanished, which equates to 155,400 DJIA points.

So, the true value of the DJIA is thus 9,400 points minus 155,400 points, or…

Minus 146,000 (satire, kind of).