7) Avarice: The Meme: What and Why We Are

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7) Avarice

You shall not steal.]

{You shall not steal.}

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Profit in society is achieved by feeding the Meme.  Reducing or mitigating the Meme equals penalty and poverty.  The Poor are most likely to rebel so religion is used as the major redress. 

The seventh commandment forbids theft.  As with killing and sex, there are exceptions.  Stealing ceases to be a violation of the commandment when the systematic civilities of corporations, financial institutions, governments or religions are extracting the assets. 

Tithing is not theft.  Taxation is not theft.  Price-gouging is not theft.  Profiteering from a pharmaceutical or a medical device or disparate health coverage is not theft.  Evicting a family from their home due to excessive finance charges in taxpayer-subsidized debt instruments which mitigate the free-market risk inside a bank’s profit-equation in a wasteland lacking affordable housing is not theft. 

One could imagine the United States of America as a single European heterosexual white man rooting a flag as claim to the abdomen of an entire continent flushing the indigenous womb with a scalpel and giant ice cream scoop extricating native humans and the guilt in one simultaneous purchase and extinction event.  Memory is removed in colorblindness to a flag’s colors threading national borders as the theoretical auspices of that which can be controlled without untenable uprising by a people. 

The Meme makes borders and connotations of citizenship.  The anti-Meme is a nationless being in the universe inhabiting a planet understanding the scale of empathy in one’s volition is the fulcrum of the interconnected whole playing out in limitless iterations rejuvenating in a balance of love or fear.  The anti-Meme understands all distinctions of nation are unnecessary arbitrary illusions we place on ourselves to foster the appearance of pockets of order amongst uncontrollable chaos.  The anti-Meme is borderless. 

As Rousseau said in On The Social Contract, “to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of ground, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labor and cultivation...”  “How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and keep it from the rest of the world except by a punishable usurpation, since all others are being robbed, by such an act, of the place of habitation and the means of sustenance which nature gave them in common?”

We conquer each other draped in the sanctity of a sovereign nation or religion.  We are this, killing and staking flags, writing books that whitewash Rousseau’s first rule of the occupier.  We hoard under the terms own and legal to twist truths over the second.   We cultivate slaves or Poor to administer how the third is accomplished.  We are both evil and good.  Almost everything is stolen from someone along the way.  Getting to a river first does not entitle one to drink all the water or to profit gouge like Nestle.

When the immense territory is the preponderance of global capital rebellions become forced in the abdomens of the Poor, the Middle, and the other ninety-nine percent.  This is what is happening now.

Capitalism requires market controls to provide mutual assurance to encompass full costs into net profit.  The absence of these controls creates systematic disparities, which can appear as a merchant selling his goods in fair trade, but in reality is an unbalanced equation.  

We previously discussed environmental damage and healthcare, but let us speak in more basic terms.  Exploitation of the Poor that neuters the average-waged laborer from achieving self-sufficiency despite working full-time should be viewed as taking a portion of the expenses that should be inside a corporation or an industry’s income statement and placing it in the debt of the taxpayers.  Taxpayers are forced to pay increased housing, medical, food, and basic living subsidies to fill the gap when minimum-wage laws do not keep pace with inflation, employee benefits are treated like free market goods when they are not, and labor markets are kept increasingly desperate as the wealth of society becomes more and more consolidated in fewer humans.

The optimum system is a capitalist democracy with socialist controls over healthcare, renewable energy and utilities, transportation infrastructure, massive-level agriculture, public safety, education, courts, and public governance with a malleable tax system to correlate capital with productive value.  The reason these particular industries require socialist controls is because they are the easiest to exploit on a global or national stage because they are the most heavily subsidized by the public in any “free market” because they do not engage in what is often called free-trade.  This is a function of necessity and economy of scale for non-optional encumbrances of civilized society.  

Free trade is a microcosm pertaining primarily to retail goods with more easily determinable supply-demand price interactions where the free market succeeds.  When the price of corn and soy beans is so significantly influenced by tax subsidies and patents to serve corporate interests, the free market is broken.  When the National Institute of Health research capabilities and health insurance tax deductions serve corporate interests to dominate the price of a pill or a hospital bed, the free market is broken. 

When colleges create false demand for massive administrative costs that provide incomplete education and garner trillions of dollars in profit to finance-companies and enlarge governments and schools, the free market is broken.  When the price of a barrel of oil is squeaked out by cartels and surrogate cartels in the form of multi-national energy corporations and those parties dominate the political process to repress renewable energy, the free-market is broken.  When we have no idea if our supply of weapons and safety is ever sufficient and corporations which sell us bombs own our senators, the free market is broken.  When crony capitalism cannibalizes a democracy into pay-to-play politics commandeered by lobbyists and boards of directors the free market is broken. 

To say the free market is broken is to say, the free market is ineffective at mitigating exploitable behavior by firms both private and governmental in the market without defined, enforceable, comprehensive rules.  These rules can either be global, national, or local.  One can see that the larger the firm, (i.e. Walmart, BP, or the U.S. government) the more likely international rules will be vetoed, blocked, lobbied against successfully, or ignored.  The U.S. relationship with Israel can be seen in such ways, as Israel is like an elbow of America in terms of picking and choosing which rules to follow.  Smaller countries are generally not afforded such dexterity. 

Political Action Committees of industries and Super P.A.C.’s for candidates after overturning Citizen’s United bully democracy.  Lax campaign finance laws with the same cronies play puppeteer with P.A.C.’s like Move On.org and The Chamber.  The NRA, the Sierra Club, ExxonMobil PAC, Dominion Resources PAC, Goldman Sachs PAC, Citigroup, Inc. PAC, Tito PAC, PhRMA, Pfizer Inc. PAC, the AMA PAC, Ernst and Young, PAC, Tyson Foods PAC, Comcast Corporation PAC, McDonald’s Corporation PAC, K&L Gates PAC, Walmart Stores PAC for Responsible Government, RJ Reynolds PAC, IBEW PAC, and you name it there is a political action committee for it.  This is the true U.S. legislative body of representatives with less than half a percent of the people driving ninety-nine percent of Congress.  Legislators spend half their time focused on this slice that funds their campaigns.  Play-ball fundraising equals access.  The root of the Meme’s influence is money. 

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The outlawing of property ownership of a communist manifesto is impractical and faulty.  Humans need to be rewarded for the incentive to labor.  However systematic inequities due to market costs which should be internalized to an industry rather than externalized to the public heavily distort the excess rewards provided to the owners of industry while simultaneously decreasing labor’s self-sufficiency.  The Meme distorts any dosage of socialism into a malignancy often to its benefit.  Communism as an overdose of socialism is particularly maligned as it is convenient for the Meme to deal in absolutes.

Let us evaluate why the U.S. protests communism and nationalist uprising.  Here is a simplified, insufficient, and quick playbook to highlight the major points for the United States domination of the global economy post WWII.  The rest of America’s industrialized rivals in the First World were crippled physically and fiscally.  The United States homeland was never damaged outside of Pearl Harbor and domestic capacity more than tripled.  America had the world at its mercy to set the stage for an empire. 

America had a disproportionately high level of wealth for a small percentage of global population.  The key issue of the empire was how to maintain, if not, expand this disparity.  The Meme flourishes in such petri dishes of control.  (We will focus on America, as the United States represents the greatest modern-protagonist of the Meme, as Britain became the junior partner in the firm.)  The level of social order, patriotism, and systematic control in America’s post WWII action-plan is the most significant example of the Meme and rationalized exceptions to commandment seven in modern history. 

America deemphasized discussions of human rights, living standards and empowerment within any Third-World country or within its domestic Poor.  These groups represented America’s labor encampments.  Access to cheap labor and raw materials was and is paramount to maintaining the empire.  One can look at the expanse of Central and South America, Africa, and East and Central Asia as America’s foreign plantations to go along with its Alaska, Nebraska heartland and red-state South. 

America’s corporations would produce goods in these foreign farms and then sell them to an engineered consumerist culture in the first worlds of the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and Canada.  China and Russia remained relatively closed for much of the post-WWII timeframe because these countries were playing their own communist versions of America’s playbook inside their regions. 

Post-cold-war China and Russia’s position has primarily changed only in the post-9/11/01 weakness in the United States and Western European economies.  This weakness mirrored WWII in Europe in some ways.  The physical destruction in Europe dislodged consolidated Euro-wealth in a way the Atlantic Ocean prevented in America.  In 9/11 the fiscal weakness was self-created by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on terror draining taxpayers, but leaving the upper Meme profiting in many cases.  Economically this is a reverse disparate illusion of weakness.

Taxes were lowered on the rich in war.  The terror war was financed on debt.  WWII clobbered the Euro economies with the wealthy using up significant generational wealth to endure the war.  In the terror war wealthy America simply had their stocks in oil, defense, and healthcare companies etc. appreciate while working class taxpayers financed the wars.

Governments need an enemy to rationalize the taxes collected.  Even the threat of war can do this in the Soviet Union.  Thomas Paine pointed out in Rights of Man, “(England) seeks in Russia the enemy it has lost in France…’if nobody will be so kind as to become my foe, I shall need no more fleets nor armies, and shall be forced to reduce my taxes.”

The Meme particularly under Reagan used the combination of expanding military spending to create a deficit to enhance fears over debt in the national populace as a lever to get the average citizen to blame social aid programs and peel back New Deal reforms.  The Meme wants to split ranks to pit the Middle against the Poor to distract from the Upper.  The true economic shift is the lack of tax revenue collected on the profit the Upper is keeping, not social spending for the Poor due to repressed real-wage growth.  The Meme wants hysteria over the debt, but intentionally creates the debt in ways that the Upper profits from the existence of the debt: bond ownership, the stock price of Boeing, and the Dow Jones.  W Bush after 9/11 emulated Reagan.  Why did the U.S. invade Iraq; the Meme saw Terror could be used like the Soviet’s as an excuse to create the military spending, blame on the Poor, and profits for the rich.  Cheney was the damn CEO of Halliburton pre VP. 

The global residency of the major corporations profit from the design of the Meme empire by abandoning the domestic superpowers in terms of unpaid taxes sheltered from offshore profits and the economies of intellectual property rights like computer systems, patents, and financing which do not need substantial brick and mortar footprints to harvest massive amounts of wealth.  The consumers of China and Russia, and to a degree Brazil and India, are now shifting inside the Meme to a quasi-citizenship status inside the consumer bin rather than the rival or labor bins, but hold massive structural wealth divides. 

Post WWII Germany and Japan became subordinate factories for the United States.  One would think the two major enemies who “lost” WWII would be left at the bottom of the economic pile, but the opposite is true.  Since America was and is the default military for these countries deemed unworthy of holding a military by the Meme, Germany and Japan were allowed to become middle-men for the United States empire as long as America could have military bases in their countries and each posed little military threat.  Only in 2015 with North Korea posturing nukes and China’s unsustainable economic growth in jeopardy does the world hear Japan discuss expanding its military.

The Meme encourages the apex of the Meme the United States to distance any military threat from its borders.  Thus Canada, Mexico, any of the Central or South American countries the Meme dubs Poor cannot have a military that can threaten the U.S. (i.e. missiles or large transportable fleets).  The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 after the failed Bay of Pigs U.S. invasion in 1961 nearly toppled the globe for this Meme insecurity.  The U.S. can point missiles at the Soviet’s from Turkey, but the Soviet’s cannot have missiles in Cuba.  The Meme in turn will commandeer military forces in Poor countries, particularly in Central and South America to control the threat of chaos to the U.S or prosperity for their Poor.  Thus the Meme through the U.S. perpetuates the drug war. 

Britain and the U.S. continue the ‘special relationship’ as the former and current Meme apex.  (The U.S. did not get involved in stopping fascism by Italy or Germany until Britain was significantly threatened.  The Poor in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa injured by fascism were irrelevant to the Meme and to some degree the fascists were encouraged by U.S. support in the 1930’s.   

Germany in Eastern Europe and Japan in Southeast Asia regionally anchor the Meme’s influence through the United States.  The Third World supplied resources to rebuild Europe and Japan with the United States corporations harvesting profit.  This dynamic is a major reason why each country is a step above its region’s peers economically today. 

America in the post-WWII landscape became obsessed with access to these cheap bastions of labor and raw materials.  This is why the Vietnam War happened.  The Meme, to maintain the empire’s control, had to thwart the idea that a government has a responsibility to its citizens’ direct welfare, which if initiated increases the cost of labor and reduces the profit equation of those exploiting labor and the empire’s crucial disparity ratio.  Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were to oust the French oligarchy for nationalism.  The dominoes would fall and push out foreign access to profitable resources.  

The Meme could not tolerate insubordination to submit to the Western master’s whip.  If Vietnam went communist and carried out the true threat, the equivalent of a labor strike at a factory, then the notion of uprising could spread to the region and then create a Red globe.  The Christian West risked its perch atop the Meme against the atheist Soviet communists.  The Meme and Western empire are very much concerned with such chaos; the death of humans in a war not so much. 

In modern times global national corporations operate without the Red-threat.  The breakup of the Soviet Union and the semi-privatization of commercial China allow the Meme to usurp almost all world governments for firms to exploit Labor and natural resources anywhere on the planet.  Look at Apple’s Foxconn suicide nets in China and the lack of factories in America.  Why did Joad go to California?

The police still hunt Tom Joad before Dick Fuld.  Steve Jobs is canonized.  Maybe Warren Buffet and Bill Gates participate in The Giving Pledge, but to give billions away when the method it was collected is drenched in such Labor and natural resource practices one cannot escape the volition of the dollar’s origin.  Maybe that makes Buffet or Gates less Meme than the Koch’s, but it is about the systems we engage either passively or actively and individual volition, not the name of the humans at the apex of the system, but choice in how we do what we do that matters. 

To think otherwise is blind absolutism towards only blaming the ‘evil doer’ at the top as if once the figure-head was disempowered the system would fall and a manner of equality piñata would release its prosperity candy and confetti.  This absolves one from the universe.  This clings to the ego as being Poor one is not also responsible for the reconstruction or pre-planning.  One cannot simply look at dysfunctional systematic injustice, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency and resort to nihilistic annihilation of all that is without participating in the consciousness of what are we to become.  Sometimes humanity needs a riot to push us to the brink to reclaim the system to the collective.  Maybe we go extinct, maybe we don’t grow back, but the test of the riot is, “Do we have the empathy to choose to survive?”

Like a forest our economic and social systems require both water and fire to grow.  Fire injects nutrients back into the soil.  The Meme sees these nutrients as the constant degradation to constrict the pressure to output desperation for cheaper Labor from the Poor and cheaper natural resource acquisition from the Poor’s representative governments.  Sometimes in the anti-Meme the fire is protest or riots to better communicate the reality of systematic, not only injustice but the mutual detriment the Meme inflicts upon our species and only inhabitable planet. 

A Fox news viewer may see the drug store burning in Baltimore, Los Angeles, or Ferguson and voice “Get a job.  I worked for what I got.” or ask “Why are ‘those’ people burning ‘the only businesses in ‘their’ neighborhood?”  Given the pressure in the system and the natural cycle of the forest sometimes a building has to burn when other means have failed.  This is anarchy to the Meme.  It is not the ideal first path, but how often is the protest or direct civil disobedience the first path? 

The American Revolution and the French Revolution are little different than the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1960’s or the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter movements today except for variables of the Meme like skin color.  The Meme writes history with the pens of the victors.  The Meme dresses police in body armor and shields like Star Wars’ storm troopers facing off against unarmed protestors based on what might happen.  The threat of chaos floats above the crowd ready to break as the Meme squeezes pressure on both sides.  The protestors burn what is logistically close.  The cops display aggressiveness to enforce order on what is logistically close.  The animal on both sides kicks into action. 

Post Katrina New Orleans is a city of humans who want to be in New Orleans.  The city has its challenges.  The infrastructure is aged.  The city is poor and historically corrupt.  The per capita murder rates are at the top of the nation.  The incarceration rates for the state are at the top of the planet. 

The scent of death applies what may appear to be a bizarre aroma to the city, it makes the residents appreciate and celebrate the preciousness of life even more.  The August 29^th annual recycle bombs an acorn of stress that falls from every oak from St. Charles to City Park to the East to St. Bernard that concusses the skull of most residents: refugee or denizen that the Gulf will just unearth another Kraken.  The pith of the plant roots into ventricles like yank-kudzu tugging at memories of the uncontrollable wrath swashing homes, photo albums, and bodies like a titan-hand slapping landfall.  The city knows almost everything can be taken away again and individuals feel a powerless vulnerability that surfaces in a smile masking pain.

Everything changed.  There are moments speckled in mold dots like a Rorschach ceiling test of the parallel life one might have lived if the storm had not been.  There is a bitter appreciation for the help, some of the love that came back to aid problems that existed before and beyond the hurricane, systematic corruption, poverty, housing, mental healthcare, schools, social services, blight, racism, jobs, and crime are all mixed in a bucket of black smudge and a lake of bleach.  Some shit is better; some is a mutated federal experiment of gentrification and northwestern blue in red state south using art as a respirator plugged into the Bamboula rhythms marching out of A.L. Davis Park as Jindal rim-job’s Grover Norquist behind the bleachers.  Culinary migration and class diaspora milked tribes to Texas and Georgia like a bizarre yat-creole trail of tears.  It ain’t der no more cawed at a beleaguered squadron of waterline souls.

New Orleans has a long history of slavery, mixing African, European, and Native American cultures.  Once in the top five largest cities in the U.S. because of cotton and the correlated slave markets streaming throughout the city building its wealth.  The modern joy of jazz and robust exuberance of blues and art are commensurate with digesting that pain. 

Read about Congo Square escaped slaves living and trading with indigenous members of the native nations, common music and rhythms of the drum flowing into the Wild Magnolias on Mardi Gras Day.  Look at Rampart Street and the definition of the word rampart.  Look at the birth of jazz in the French Quarter past that wall.  The drum rhythms go back to the indigenous people of continents.  At the root of the drum is mathematics.  Math is the language of the universe.

Those who stayed and reinvested post Katrina flushed roots even deeper.  Those who relocate today are attracted to those roots and the echo of the drum.  There is a symbiosis, a unique magnetism compared to most other American cities Tennessee Williams did not mention in his trifecta with New York and San Francisco.  There are cities like Dallas where humans flock for economic prosperity, but are tumble weeds of cotton candy roots.  New Orleans has elders, hearts in a powerful flawed tribe.  In New Orleans one talks to neighbors as part of the anti-Meme to look out for one another, to break down the Meme’s divisions of race, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity like few places in the world, let alone the American South.  The anti-Meme is “how can I make my community better today, to contribute?” 

New Orleans sees the swirl of the circular herd and attempts its own rhythm.  These are present in other places too.  By no means is New Orleans a paragon of virtuosity, but there are places in New Orleans’ beautiful ugly that get it right more than any physical place I have ever been, almost despite its state government.  Hurricane Katrina and the massive flooding caused by levee breeches spotlight that empathy of what humans do when mutually threatened.  The systematic injustice was more obvious looking at bloated bodies floating with shoe strings tied to street signs to stem the drift and others praying on rooftops while the Federal government took days after skies had cleared to respond.  The modern Black Lives Matters movement is in no small way rooted through the idea that the government responded to Katrina differently because of the number of black bodies in need.  The world watched.

New Orleans replenishes the anti-Meme every year at Mardi Gras.  This cascades into Jazz Fest, the Saints, festival season, crawfish boils, go cups, music clubs, second line funerals etc.  The Poor and rich intermingle.  Black and white intermingle.  Music and food, these are how one judges the vibrancy of a people whether in Louisiana or Lebanon. 

The cops on parade routes are in standard uniforms or plain clothes.  There is no riot gear.  There is very little over-reaction.  That escalation to fear is quelled by the mutual communication of individual volition.  Yes, sometimes people get shot on the parade route, but most don’t.  Some eat sausages, some yams.  Humans still come, drink, sing, dance, celebrate that yes we are animals and we are equally divine and capable of a beauty beyond any one of us in a grand interconnectedness pulsing in the simple act of choice.

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The Meme with Vietnam correlates with the American Civil War.  The Meme understands that its power is tied to access to exploitable cheap labor.  The American Civil War was not about the morals of racism; it was about the centrality of economic power under the Meme being located in Washington D.C. versus Atlanta, New Orleans, or Charleston and how dangerous the South’s asset of Poor-labor was to the North.  

The Meme uses slogans, compulsory military service, marketing campaigns, and all manners of patriotism from the glorification of soldiers with medals who are later left to interstate underpasses, wheelchairs, body-bags, or suicide notes to the unending economy of funding safe is never safe-enough inside the behemoth military-industrial complex and the U.S. defense budget.  Enemies are labeled terrorists and evil.  Internet posts with a picture and story about a six-year old girl holding a flag retelling how her soldier-father could not make it to daddy-comes-to-school day because he is in heaven mirror the rationalization of every country believing god (righteousness) is on their side in war. 

Memorial Day in America lauds the Wounded Warriors as heroes for peace though violence.  The Meme says, ‘If not for this sanctioned death, there would be more death.’  The Meme encompasses the paralyzed veteran and marketed-to civilian asked to cry at the soldier’s mangled body with a flag.  Prioritizing the healthcare funding for that Frankenstein-puppet is not the priority of the Meme, the commercial with a county music Trace Adkins song is.  The fields of Vietnam, the sands of Iraq, the mountains of Afghanistan why was the U.S. there?  What peace was created?  Why did America initiate participation in the manner chosen?

Why were or are we there; is the question the Meme most desires to obscure.  The Meme requires humans especially First-World Poor to misunderstand this as peace, bettering the homeland, and relieving the persecution of the Third-World Poor in some general lump as if our bombs only hit the ‘bad’ humans.  The anti-Meme acknowledges the mental and spiritual failure of choosing the external over the internal method in combating whatever social conflict well-intentioned soldiers appear motivated to lay down their lives to assist is ultimately a marketed veil over what the Meme is.  The mass genocide of the Holocaust is so far past that line of requiring a physical retort, but even the fuel behind Hitler is the same mental Meme of humans failing to acknowledge our interconnection under a lust for specialness.  The anti-Meme is to be a citizen of the world and the universe.  Any patriotic holiday divides rather than coalesces that bond.

A byproduct of the Poor being systematically funneled to remain isolated in poverty, infighting, and ignorance is the cultivation of soldiers.  The Meme needs bodies to fuel war.  This is even more paramount with the elimination of the U.S. public-draft after Vietnam.  Economic desperation and Southern culture have served as replacements for mandated service.

The red-state American South can be seen as a breeding ground for the Meme’s purposes in this regard.  Fundamentalist Christianity, red-white-and-blue flag appeal, good-ole-boys like my daddy, pick-up trucks, hunting-culture, battle-reenactments, myopic heritage, mud-riding, and the racism fueling the economic cascade of the Civil War aid the Meme’s recruiting.  This is paired with the historical anti-big government Confederacy-rebel culture. 

One would think the South would be less supportive of the National military.  Instead the never-achieved Confederate-victory is tied to Southern culture’s higher per capita military participation inside the Meme including racial minorities and elevated rates by the Poor.  “I am a Southern boy.  I’m tougher than a Yankee.  Look how great we are.  We’re real Americans!  Look at how many flags I have on my house, my truck, my t-shirt.  I have both.”  This example is for the most part hyperbole, but the roots are old America.  This is also the human ego in some instances desiring to be right rather than happy. 

This comes from an inferiority complex in the South to the North.  In part this is the result of Caucasian-guilt over slavery in our spiritual memory which cannot be explicitly expressed inside the Meme.  To vent this sentiment it comes out in a distorted mirror.  It appears as a pride compensating mechanism in the superego of compartments of the culture to be able to articulate the segmentation between slavery as an economic tool of the Nation and not just the South compared to the collective participation of the North in the reprehensible moral volition of the Nation in choosing to use slavery for the Meme.  The Meme understands this and manipulates the decision trees of the South accordingly. 

The North and West are in return more “liberal” in general related to the commensurate Caucasian guilt.  Both sides understand that the Civil War was about economics and not morality.  According to Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty First Century, in 1800 there were one million slaves compared to one and half million whites in the South.  In 1860 that ratio was four million to six million whites in the South.  It is estimated the value of slaves around the time of the Civil War was two and half to three years of national income.  Slave owners in America controlled more wealth than the landlords of old Europe.  If you added all southern wealth the value was greater than the total value of capital in Britain and France.  The North with almost no slaves had about half that wealth. 

The Meme however would prefer we speak in rhetoric rather than the empirical ration for our volition.  Our inability to label racism as secondary to economic exploitation led to the second-class citizen status of racial minorities after Plessey versus Ferguson and the seventy or so years of disparately-funded segregated systems that followed to the Civil Rights Act of the 1964 and the slow progress still trickling today.  (We discuss this further under Commandment Ten.)

The Meme represses human ability to understand, eliminate, and acknowledge racism and racism’s role in economics.  This correlates with how Western corporations treat the Third-World and how “illegal” immigrants are treated in California farms and working in the industries like construction, hotel house cleaning, and restaurant kitchens.  These modern iterations of economic-exploitation in the Meme are the same as the Civil War.  The exploitation is done collectively by the Nation.  The profits go to corporations who battle on Wall Street rather than at Gettysburg. 

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America’s most consistent play throughout the modern slave-lands (Central and South America, Africa, and East and Central Asia) is to use military force or funding to support the overthrow of regimes which threaten the Meme and insert conservative hardline dictators or police-states.  Next the United States will offer foreign aid or financing to the puppet regime to create dependency.  Like a master-slave relationship this ensures order, control, and the perpetuation of the disparity with access to labor and raw materials.  Neoliberalism occurs through global corporations syphoning the resources and their CEO’s and board of directors act like a Senate to determine the fate of Poor nations.

Communism goes against every one of these objectives of the Meme, although it typically creates an oligarchy of party leaders.  (The crony capitalism in the dissolution of the Soviet Union made Russian billionaires based on the same basic access equals wealth premise.  Also see the semi-privatization of modern China.)  Whether it be Cuba, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. the laundry list of open or covert U.S. intervention to prevent socialist nationalism is well documented.  From Woodrow Wilson to John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bushes, to Barack Obama nothing has truly changed in the one-party Meme system.  

In Europe following WWII America conducted similar installations.  The U.S. facilitated inserting Nazi collaborators in certain post-war governments to quell the anti-fascist populist movements.  Darlan was put in French-North Africa, Klaus Barbie in Germany, Walter Rauff in Chile, and Badoglio in Italy.  The Marshall Plan put billions of dollars into Europe to spend on U.S. exports from friendly regimes. 

The list of military actions by the United States to preserve or ensure similar trade dynamics is long.  Look at Korea in 1945, Greece in 1947, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and 1963, Laos in 1960, Brazil in 1964, the Dominican Republic in 1963 and 1965, Chile in 1973, Grenada in 1983, and Iraq in 1991 and 2003 etc. etc.  These are a long chain of Vietnam-style conflicts attempting to prove that even the smallest country attempting to rise up or dictators not following the plan will be quashed. 

The specter of the Soviets made some of these campaigns easier to market.  The opposition made each side’s version of the Meme (democracy and communism) easier to market on the other side of the globe.  The U.S. could argue the Soviet-creep.  This was like the potential spoiling of one bad apple.  The Meme wants assurance for the ruling group of humans.  The United States inside the Meme wants foreign enterprise in all of these armpits and nose hairs of the Earth.  If nationalism takes root the Western-based corporations lose a percentage and the disparity so crucial to the Meme is hindered.

The Meme through the United States and countries like Britain will champion conceptual freedoms for the people against the evils of communism.  The top-countries expect their domestic audiences to not be privy to full history and to grow quickly exhausted to follow the story as media cycles rotate.  The Meme creates a surveillance state from COINTELPRO to the NSA to monitor and tilts media to spit out sound bites to manipulate.  During the brief focused message pertinent story lines are spread.  Good and bad characters are etched in the psyche of the population to avoid further inspection.  Marketing keeps order.

Some might confuse the repression of communism as the Meme supporting democracy in the Third-World.  Democracy is a tool of the anti-Meme in Third-World countries and of the pro-Meme in First-World countries.  Third World countries are the equivalent of entire swaths of Poor.  The Meme, through the First World, installs or supports dictators either through direct financing or tolerance within a threshold of acceptable co-benefit.  The Third-World cannot be trusted with the outcome of democratic elections and are therefore granted dictators to provide certitude and order for the Meme.

The lack of separation between politics and religion can also keep true democracy from succeeding in most of the Third World as it did in the advent of modern-Europe.  Political voting blocks of fundamentalists can lead to theocratic law where basic human rights associated with gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion etc. can be criminalized or marginalized in a sanctified form of fascism costumed as democracy.  See Iran or Saudi Arabia or sometimes Alabama.

The Meme has two major fronts of attack, dictatorships and conservative regimes supported by foreign interests and religious ideology to get the masses to either vote against their self-interest or to become distracted in meaninglessness to allow the Meme to operate in the background unabated.  Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have all taken turns around the globe participating in these tyrannies.

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The First World will not tolerate dictators.  There are too many resources and profiteers of the global Meme as a percentage of the population.  First-World rebellions to a dictator would produce a net-loss to the Meme.  As an alternative strategy inside the First World, the Meme installs the illusion of choice through a democratic system perpetuated through marketing propaganda where rhetoric can supersede facts.  Marketing is intended to pacify first to instill placated obedience for the public to not ask about the Meme or their common allegiance.

The U.S. two-party system is two sides of the same coin alternating who is on top, but producing the same fundamental result.  This is in reality a one-party system.  This is a mob with a vig on a boxing match.  Red trunks or blue, no matter who wins the bookie keeps the cash.  The R’s and D’s are false enemies.  The Middle Class is taught to hate the Poor in distraction. 

Obstructionism by one party against the other is confused as a lack of cooperation.  The grid lock is actually the intended result of the Meme.  The Meme wants a frustrated apathetic populace.  Each party considered eliminating the sixty-vote filibuster in the U.S. Senate the “nuclear option.”  Ending clogs would stop part of the Meme, although the Democrats finally pressed that button.  The Meme does not wish to resolve social problems.  The Meme’s power is rooted in these inefficiencies manipulating the daily lives of the Poor and appearing unsolvable or insurmountable.  

The Meme wants segregated fiefdoms across regions so that the corporations can act as a myriad of human enterprises whether they be profiting in the First or Third worlds.  If humans were to coordinate with each other across borders explicitly then the total profit collected by all the separated enterprises feeding from the Meme would be reduced and prosperity more equally shared.  Humanity could be seen as one giant economy of scale.  See the state-based exchanges inside the Affordable Health Care Act. 

Corporations can be gargantuan, but not labor-cooperation.  International corporations can pick and choose laws and pit the lowest common denominator labor and raw materials source against each other.  Nothing is wrong as long as the practice is intended to increase profit.  If labor set international standards to reduce exploitation and common rights the Meme would veto, destroy, or deny such integration.  The populace rarely connects Walmart’s profit margin is substantially created by the reduction of self-sufficiency in its lower-rung employees and vendor supply chain forced to comply to get on the shelf.

Profit-centers inside all the industries of government-subsidy in areas like national defense, healthcare, energy, and agribusiness etc. would be sacrificed to both national and international governmental cooperation on a finite planet that prioritized citizens over firms.  Although creating efficacies in basic safeguards to assist the Poor and Middle Class might seem like creating order, this form of interrelationship actually challenges the very foundations of fear, faith, patriotism, ritualism, and blame that fuel the systematic disparities that keep people placated through centralized control. 

True economic interrelationships playing out which do not syphon out vigs, tithes, and tolls to parties who do not add fundamental value to the prosperity of the masses highlights the leeches’ superfluous nature.  This threatens to divulge that we are not that different.  A human could be just an animal no matter his or her religion, country, or social status.  Death is just death.  We only have our volition and there is no grand protection from the volition of others.  The Meme would die.

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Occasionally installed despots get power-drunk over the resource the Meme is exploiting such as with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  The U.S. will take greater military action to maintain order.  The elite of Saudi Arabia understand this premise well.  Other U.S. backed murderous dictators have included: Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ceausescu in Romania, Marcos in the Philippines, Duvalier in Haiti, and Suharto in Indonesia.

Other U.S. supported leaders posing as trade partners who may be populist are turned against when convenient like Noriega in Panama in 1987.  The U.S. finances corporate profits through criminalizing drugs.  The laundering of drug money is a gigantic profit center through global banks.  Noriega helped the U.S. against uprising in Nicaragua in the early 1980’s, but once Panama sought independence from the U.S., Noriega’s brutality and string of stolen elections, which was a non-significant issue before, became international crime. 

Economic sanctions begin and foreign characters join the ranks of a most-wanted list to the American public: Quaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Noriega.  Opinions are framed, the U.S. role in the long-term equation becomes murky and history continues inside the Meme.

The U.S. supports regimes often allowing what Orwell called ‘doublethink’ communication.  The local leader criticizes the U.S. exploiting or bombing the population in the local media, but behind the wizard curtain is complicit or agrees with the U.S. controlling policy.  This way the leader’s regime better suppresses domestic unrest and the possibility of being overthrown.  Almost all of these dictators are overthrown given time.  Overthrowing a dictator is anti-Meme.  Saddam Hussein would have probably been overthrown without the second U.S. invasion and hung by his people just the same if not for the economic sanctions stunting Iraqi’s middle class.  The U.S. needs to market its place of order in certain strategic places on the globe.  Iraq and Afghanistan are two of those places. 

America is obsessed with the perception of the country’s exceptionalism.  Any assertion to point out the insecurity of the global police state is a direct result of both the American military and the American people’s preoccupation with controlling or manipulating the activities of foreign nations is rebuffed by the Meme. 

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America and Western Europe’s obsession with the Middle East is tied to its dependence on crude oil and adoptive ownership of Israel as the assumed origin of Jesus.  The billions in annual diverted funding from the governments and citizens of these foreigners to Israel is the greatest evidence of this Meme at work.  The actual physical threat is greater to Western Europe compared to the isolated United States.  However the linkage through the Meme trumps rational threats for a mental one.

America therefore backs Israel, which includes the repression of the Palestinian intifada with the Jewish occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip beginning in 1987.  The Meme and America’s policies to support the enhanced militarized state of Israel and not a two-state solution is a direct result of the Christian-Jewish biblical tie inside the Meme and the idea if Jesus were to “come back,” the dominate world Meme would want this patch of desert in the control of the Jews rather than the Muslims, if Christians are a non-option.  

This is only-important for Meme reasons.  The U.S. would have more practically offered the Israeli Jewish settlers portions of Utah or Nevada, but because of the Meme this would be preposterous, yet make logistical and practical sense.  This perverse priority system traded the PLO for Hamas, led to Hezbollah in Lebanon and other increased terrorism shrouding the post 9/11/01 globe and creates the apartheid of Palestinians by Jews through U.S financing.  Just as Regan dubbed Mandela and the African National Congress terrorists, the threat is chaos to disrupt the forced order of the Meme. 

The Meme’s favoritism does not label the state of Israel as imperialist.  Israel, like America created a Diaspora of dark-skinned natives. To confront this hypocrisy threatens the Meme.  So it is avoided as labels are applied about water rights, land use, and rhetoric-driven triggers that will increase Western political (i.e. fiscal) subsidization of Israel through lobbies like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  Israel serves as a U.S. military outpost and island of the Western-meme.  The U.S. also uses the Israeli military or Israeli Special Forces Sayeret or the Mista’arvim, etc. to do jobs that are politically complicated at times to be done under the U.S. flag. 

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The Afghan war and 9/11/01 terrorism consciousness are directly related to the rebels the United States installed to combat the Soviet threat during the Cold War.  The Soviet Union threated to take over as the lead-protagonist of the global Meme or to bring about mutual annihilation.  The U.S. defeated the Soviets through economic suffocation through an arms race.  The collateral damage done by the United States to itself made the Cold War a Pyric victory.  The Cold War, like the Vietnam War before it cascaded into the trillions in national debt America owes.  The Terror War like the Cold War were/are both financed by debt and disproportional regressive taxes rather than increasing the tax burdens on the wealthy.  America is incapable of considering shrinking rather than expanding its military that dwarfs the next fourteen combined militaries on the planet.  This represents the number one threat to topple the empire, but not the Meme.  

One should also note that current U.S. federal defense spending is approximately half on healthcare for active and retired military personnel according to statements made by U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.  The spillover inefficiencies of the inflated healthcare system hide inside the mathematics.

If this cost disparity causes U.S. economic collapse, the Meme would naturally resurface and feed off the desperation to refuel itself.  The United States spot at the top of the Meme may temporarily weaken but may never be relinquished given nuclear war or environmental unsustainability. 

Modern Russia led by Vladimir Putin installs a neo-KGB suppression of speech, art, and sexuality to insulate an oligarchy of billionaires draining the Russian people.  Putin’s not so secret invasion of Crimea may be a show of force to the Russian people to stem internal rebellion in the paranoid actions of a functional dictator over a corrupt and often fascist state.  In lieu of the Cold War and the globe’s shift away from the fossil fuels at the center of Russian wealth, Putin and the oligarchs he represents have something else for the Meme to market. 

Putin like so many parallel Meme enforcement position-heads sees the reality of the Hunger Games bubbling in the we-are-the-media internet the Meme cannot fully suppress.  Russian people make more insane death-defying act internet videos than any people on the planet (setting a self on fire jumping off a building into a pile of snow, Pussy Riot, hanging from a bridge by their hands, etc.)  This is the human call for rebellion to challenge the Meme, to claim invincibility in the frozen harshness and lack of empathy in generations suffering derivations of starvation.  This is the same concern around the throat of Marie Antoinette or your average political rally for a potential United States Republican party presidential nominee.

China, the next largest military, represents the apex-predator of the U.S. in the global economy, but also an indispensable economic partner.  America lets events like the Tiananmen Square killings go functionally un-criticized.  If China could maintain domestic stability it might have a chance to overtake the U.S. given the leveraged debt the U.S. owes in banks and imports of raw materials and labored-goods from China’s Poor.  

However, China is in the process of reducing its low-wage advantage as thresholds of middle and upper-class status are exceeded.  China is trending towards free-market principles inside a state-run economy that basically functions as an assembly line for the rest of the globe.  Chinese affluence breaks traditional conservative political intransigence of the communist party to permit more private company presence to satiate a growing consumerist Chinese population.  However China still suffers from massive overpopulation and swaths of Poor.  Look at the empty new apartment buildings in empty cities next to Poor living in the street in China.  Maximum birth rates are maintained.  Overpopulation is China’s and most of the world’s greatest weakness in comparison to the United States.  

When America was formed the immigrant Europeans committed genocide against a native population, imported an exploitable slave labor force from Western Africa, and had the world’s greatest free land grab which was naturally insulated by oceans from invasion.  The low population to wealth ratio created from the natural planetary advantage coupled with its relative infancy, a meager two hundred years to China’s thousands, is an almost insurmountable lead that keeps the United States as the longest-tenured empire in the modern history of the planet.  This is also basically true in comparison to any European country.  After WWII and even despite the European Union, the United States is a ten-foot man forcing the world to play basketball.  Howe else could the U.S. run such inefficient healthcare, education, national defense, and energy industries and still dominate the world if not for these inherent advantages?

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Domestically inside the United States, the Meme uses classism, racism, patriotism, holidays, the adulation of military service, and class warfare to create untruths, inferences and systematic disparities to keep a cheap labor market at home.  This is growing ever more prevalent as the average level of wealth in foreign countries inches upward.  Western corporations are re-computing financial equations to utilize a greater share of domestic production which was so quickly shed a few decades before. 

The Meme inside industry naturally manipulates the wealth-gap differential through marketing, positioning, compensation models, and politically lobbying to expand the Meme’s control by gathering resources.  Ninety-Nine percent of the World is a cattle-lot of cheap-labor awaiting processing.  The Meme wants the Rich to buy politicians through campaign donations.  Democracy morphs into plutocracy in such ways.  

Corporate advertisers preserve the Meme.  People watch commercials during television broadcasts and follow the advertisement’s instructions to achieve profit and churning the Meme.  We are influenced in what to buy, think, wear, eat, and how to view subjects and others and ourselves as beautiful, ugly, threatening or normal.  We are offered partial information and easily digestible conclusions.  Goods are traded for currency and a greater portion is retained in fewer hands each time. 

Television as a paradigm is dying.  The media is shifting to a more egalitarian user-elected viewing platform bucking the notion of ads or payment for content.  Online streaming media is left in a battle of self-cannibalization for clicks as the quantity of content balloons, but the advertisements inside that content diffuse and mutate.  Television media faces a similar cliff as record companies as Generation X and under cut cable chords and circumvent the marketing inundation wherever convenient. 

The system built to profiteer off that marketing is obsessed with two issues: consumer spending and economic growth.  Absent more humans retiring than attempting to enter the workforce on a given day the economy needs to grow to avoid expanding unemployment.  Much of the heightened exploitation in the current markets around 2013 is due to the threshold of Baby Boomers yet to retire due to the timing of the end of WWII and the cheap available labor of the large number of over-educated and underemployed Gen Xers, Gen Yers, and Millennial’s in America and Europe combined with the non-living wages constraining large portions of the Poor. 

If the Poor and Middle Class do not consume and purchase goods, the economy would crumble.  The Middle Class wage earners work harder, produce more than ever before and get nowhere.  Digital technologies increase the productive value of an individual worker.  Wage rates are flat.  Generally employers keep the difference of the higher production in terms of profit.  Inflation, college costs, healthcare, and childcare, with dual incomes and eighty-plus hours a week and people are barely breaking badly even.  Almost all of the post 2008 recovery has gone to the top one-percent. 

Consumer spending is the circulatory oxygen in the economic bloodstream.  The top percent consolidate wealth like an expanding blood clot in the arteries of the economy.  The Poor are high-blood cholesterol.

The Poor and Middle Class need to have resources to spend and do.  This churns the economy far more than the top one-percent because this money moves.  If money does not move (i.e. it sits in banks) the economy has the equivalent of cardiac arrest.  If the Poor cannot make ends meet the entire body of the economy dies and those which are on top of the Meme are blind to see why.  This usually results in the Meme blaming the Poor for poverty. 

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The Meme will become myopic on shorter-term, month and quarter based analysis on dividends and returns to owners.  One month’s net loss may be part of an annual or decade strategy that results in a net profit.  If the economy of the Meme focuses so intently on extracting profit to stockholders and upper management then the true macroeconomic stimulator of the large number of employed worker-bees getting a paycheck which is predominately spent is overlooked.  The idea of stakeholders is ignored for stockholders.

A net-loss in a 10K report for a company which paid its employees a living-wage is punished by the Meme even though it is benefiting the greater human economy.  The Meme plays the prisoner’s dilemma on a firm-basis in such ways.  Corporations merge to gain size to avoid being the last prisoner without a deal.  The Meme sheds jobs, crafts dependency in the masses, and consolidates resources.  Victory becomes confined to and derived by piling up bricks of gold into locked vaults.

The economy suffers even more mightily when the market is hijacked by sentiment over math.  Accountancy becomes a form of synthetic fraud-insurance for the trade-pits that someone, somewhere looked over the numbers.  Brokers make quick-decisions based on the name of the horse in nanosecond computer algorithms based on market trends of how it looks, not its record.  The Meme wants us to see ourselves as able to become a get-rich-quick lot, by betting on long-shots that flash rather than sustainable practices. 

Enforcing laws in a game where cheating is the norm is protested through lobbying for industry exceptions.  Like Lance Armstrong doping EPO through seven Tour de France victories around a valley of testicular cancer in a river of drugged-fish asking us what is victory when there is no regulation?  Do you blame the cyclist or the road itself?  Is it the ground we agree to define as solid or fair or the right of umbrage that we are most concerned?  Who is to blame for the lack of systematic regulation in an ocean of noise inside societal conch shells telling us what we want to hear?  Do we press those exoskeletons emerged from the pool we evolved so tight over our cochlear processing mammalian hairs squinting our eyes to hear what is convenient that we fail to see the epic liquid enveloping our beings? Like David Foster Wallace once offered do we ask, “What is water?”

One can argue firms have an Adam Smith/Milton Freedman free-market absolute obligation to maximize profit.  However firms are humans in a coordinated society who get caught up in and manipulated by hype.  Firms break and sidestep regulations in win at any cost mentalities that can externalize errors.  This becomes the rule and humans become nationless beholden to the Meme rather than humanity.  This is the cognitive dissonance that attempts to adorn personhood to corporations and money to equal speech. 

Rules of taxation rates, finance policies, and labor laws etc. provide mutual assurance to adapt global markets so that the majority of money keeps circulating rather than buried in a bank or investment-fund.  The Meme fights these assurances in our legislative and political systems and demands profit the same way an animal will eat his pride-mate if it believes this equates to his survival.  

Investment markets have shifted from a preponderance of long-term to a majority of short-term speculation-based instruments.  Investment houses are more concerned with accelerating computing power to be a nanosecond ahead.  Look at the Flash crash May 6, 2010.  A kill switch based on exchange volatility in a given time period and registration on high frequency traders with the SEC would help.

So much wealth is held by a small number of humans.  The change in use and the total dollars in trillions are higher and further towards non-trade (non-circulating) uses than ever.  This creates deflation to craft global markets of low-growth and low-wages.  When governments try to stimulate the economy like in 2008, the effect is severely hampered by this deflationary censure.

Around 2025 to 2030 the global stock markets risk a second major collapse as the housing markets caused in 2008, as a preponderance of American and Euro post WWII Baby Boomers are required to liquidate a greater portion of their equities in retirement vehicles to pay for healthcare and basic living expenditures.  This will liquidate a lot of the uncirculated cash in investment portfolios, but if that health system is dominated by international corporations rather than taxpayers, the freed money will reconsolidate instead of recirculate.  The act of healthcare is a dissipating service which does not for the most part produce a tangible good with a long supply chain.  The need for the U.S. economy to grab this cash could finally bring about single-payer healthcare in the United States, which is a threat to the Meme.  If not the power and wealth of the healthcare industry will be even more staggering and could represent half of GDP in 2030, which would destroy the global economy.

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If single-payer healthcare is done correctly with a digital universal web-based interface allowing patients to sort themselves and communicate with doctors with fluctuating Internal Revenue Service (IRS) adjusted gross income-linked deductibles and copays including a factor for historical earnings under a modified health care tax in-place of traditional insurance premiums, America might stem the tide from economic collapse as the national debt swells.  The IRS could offer health tax-credits for attending an annual physical and additional credits based on the lack of additional health costs.  This combines preventative common sense with emphasizing health.  If a person is over the cost threshold they receive no health credit.

Doctors could advertise under a central web-hub to schedule appointments and communicate the number of procedures they have performed, training accomplished, accreditations, memberships compared to national standards in field with personal videos of the doctor speaking in a two minute clip.  Since the cost to the patient fluctuates based on availability, this would be a truer free-market way of facilitating medicine, because it links patient choice, patient knowledge, and patient cost. 

Lesser experienced doctors demanding lower salaries should cost the public less.  More experienced doctors would have to curb their salary demands to remain competitive through lower pricing-equations inside such an open system.  This would create leveled compensation structures in medicine more similar to Europe where a doctor could make an excellent living, but not an exorbitant one.  Although one should note the salaries of doctors and nurses are not why the U.S. healthcare system is so costly.

Doctors and medical facilities could have dynamic prices posted on the web to categories of American citizens based on an annually determined semi-generic classification for that human based on historical adjusted gross income and age.  Therefore if you knew, “I averaged $45,000 on my prior three federal tax returns and I am 42 years old,” then you are in class E.”  Class E for this service is $30 today.  If the doctor is less full the price might be $20 like the pricing systems for the perishable product of a hotel room.  A website can communicate the market and book the appointment.  Prices of drugs are determined somehow by the hospital Chargemaster lists.  These would be required to be upfront on the website.

Procedures offered, medical devices, and prescription drug prices could be negotiated on a national level.  This is the mega-profitable pharmaceutical and medical device industries worst fear.  The pharmaceutical companies’ profit-equations have to come out of the shadows.  The concept of highest cost equaling best care must be overcome based on unbiased doctors creating and communicating best practices to the general laymen public.  Otherwise impossible arguments of no price is too high for a five percent better chance at life occurs.  Patients would get web-displayed prices for procedures based on time estimates of actual procedures given complication possibilities, medical devices, laboratory services, therapies, and prescription options.  Patients could compare in a live digital exchange, but depending on one’s historical income reported through the IRS the prices would differ within ranges.

Currently many Americans focus myopically on copays rather than the full employer plus employee premium, the lower salary employers pay because of it, the taxes to support the Poor, retired, and governmental employees healthcare, and the profit margins of the industry exploiting the purchase-decision disconnect between patient and service. 

Patients have little idea what we are being charged or sometimes even what we were charged after health insurers get involved.  Thus there is little motivation by disenfranchised patients to lower healthcare costs under such helplessness.  Behind these numbers doctors often trade what does a patient need for what will the insurance fund.  The Meme would like us to avoid the math and focus on the idea that under some fiscally healthier scenarios these copays may increase, but the total debt-burden of the nation to support the current system may decline. 

The reality is cancer calculus exists for patients.  Can I afford to live?  The financial stress of ten thousand dollar a month drug treatments after insurance pays its share forces patients to ask can I afford that recommended chance at survival.  Medical bankruptcy and declining to go out to eat with friends on the day your stomach allows you to eat are a cancer calculus reality of the fiscal meeting the biological.

The Meme wants Americans to be ignorant of the chargemaster pricing lists in hospitals with forty dollar boxes of band aids and hundred dollar blood-pressure checks.  If doctors and hospitals had a predictable interface under a single-payer system such mirage pricing schemes would not be necessary.  The Meme wants us to feel like we got a deal when a drug company charges four-hundred for a twenty dollar bottle of pills and our health insurance got it for one-hundred on top of our nine-hundred dollar monthly premium of which we only see a third on the employee share.  We pay more, but are happy about it like a thirty-percent off coupon on a good marked up four-hundred percent.

Most medical procedures are not matters of life and death and can be pre-evaluated in such ways.  Even under major care decisions, a human should be able to choose to spend or not spend one’s life savings to potentially sacrifice a spouse’s livelihood or an offspring’s inheritance on two months of life.  Digital cards could be read in seconds to communicate medical and IRS data classification for pricing to doctors.  Billions are wasted on the hedge-maze of archipelago medical billing administrations drowning doctors and patients.

America’s current health system is motivated to promote sickness to cultivate profit; Canadian and European public systems farm preventative planning to reduce costs.  The collective nation of taxpayers negotiates as one.  If there is only one bidder on a stock, the price goes down.  This is the crucial crux of the U.S. cost anomaly in the industrialized world.  Flipping this disparity would devastate the Meme.

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One should be able to elect economical, painless, non-terrifying helium inhalation euthanasia if one so wishes after the age of eighteen.  Require a sixty or ninety day waiting period outside of other emergency medical conditions or a legal will with a Do Not Resuscitate order.  Those with long-term illness or those over sixty-five or some senior-type age should qualify for a shorter waiting period as little as immediately.  This balances a rough-day with rational life-planning for sick and older humans.

Much of the problem with euthanasia is the necessary Hippocratic Oath.  The most logical place for the near-dying to elect or carry out the act is in a medical facility if the decision is say prompted from a car accident and avoiding a $100,000 last week of life.  Non-profit death with dignity services could be organized to provide the self-administered equipment to the individual or a friend or family member so the nurse, doctor, or aid could be exempted from any direct participation.  There is a line of legalities and ethics, but this can be overcome with rational priority of the volition of the human seeking relief of life through death.  This may be done at home.  It happens all the time with barbiturates and firearms etc.

For everybody else over eighteen, offer counseling information at the suicide-clinic and links to alternative services for walk-ins.  Do not require the counseling.  Suicide is a selfish act, but humans own their life.  Death can rip the fabric of despair and ripple into other humans who love the deceased.  However the elected suicide is owned by that person alone. 

The Meme denounces even discussing such options.  The Meme wants to spread the illusion of an absolute respect for life.  Such hypocrisy hangs a judgment day over every moment as an absolute to not perform every medical procedure the Meme purports to offer so kindly.  This is a subtle tool to keep the Poor from transferring generational wealth and an assertion of authority that one must pay a toll to die without the Meme’s permission.  The reality is the Meme markets fear of perdition.  If the Meme has humans seeing other humans willing to ease their own pain by initiating biological death without fear of hell, then humans will be harder to control through fear by other means. 

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The current healthcare system of bill boards and television spots markets based on rhetoric and stock-price.  The anti-Meme applies the empirical to create a choice that integrates supply and demand in instances where the choice in the current system is an illusion veiled behind health insurers offered by one’s employer.

If healthcare is confined to employer-linkage, the corporate-section of the Meme can control healthcare and partition winners and losers.  Healthcare then becomes like a lottery ticket.  The price of the ticket and ability and options to purchase health are part of the submission Labor must pay Owners.  One will take a lower wage and more hours to keep health for one’s self and offspring and spouse.  The lottery commission always profits.

The ticket must also be purchased in advance.  One can only purchase insurance at special enrollment times during the year, not the day after an accident.  Before the Affordable Healthcare Act previously existing conditions could make one an absolute pariah.   No new tire after the blowout on the interstate.  You have to wait six months and pay $10,000 for this tire and then next January you can get on a tire plan and get a subsidized tire for $400.  Sound good taxpayer-laborer with a body, no?  Well we’re your only option.  If you don’t buy a ticket you risk bankruptcy and losing the meager wealth from every lifetime hour of labor if you or any spouse or offspring spends a few days in the hospital.  The Middle Class is forced to buy blocks of monthly-tickets only on special purchase-windows.  The Meme blames the purchaser or non-purchaser in this situation, not the Meme’s exploitative healthcare system.

Larger corporate entities benefit to become even bigger.  The more mammoth the risk-pool inside a corporate-group the better the health-expense rate is.  (The logical extension is that it is best for the collective to be in one large group.)  Small business and the self-employed are ostracized.  Each governmental entity is sectioned off causing taxpayers to pay more.  This is designed for the Meme to tear away volition and the options for humans to assert volition in health. 

On the under darker side of this theft of volition is the idea the Meme wants the Poor to suffer.  The Poor should stay subservient and the Meme knows that less healthy people are more dependent, easier to control, and will die off like disposable tools.  This breeds fear.  This keeps the general population away from science.  A health system based on prevention, patients asserting more volition in choice of care, choice in cost incurred to get that care, and healthier lifestyle choices to not have to aid the profit of the corporate health system to achieve better health are all anti-Meme.

Inside the health insurance policies one is limited to few choices and a similar legal “you will take this and if you complain you get nothing” in context to what is covered.  No mental health, “Oh well that stay in the emergency room is not covered.  You paid your premium, but it does not cover that test; so you might have a tumor, but that is not cost effective for us.  Use our lab services with our hospital and we will profit inside the inside of the giant incomprehensible chargemaster bill.” 

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The Meme tries to redirect taxpayers to focus on the massive funding of Social Security and Medicare as being the problem rather than the question why does healthcare in the most privileged nation on the planet cost the most?  Why would taxpayers want the profits created from the differential of their younger years not subsidizing the same system all taxpayers support to cover all taxpayers in their senior years (Medicare?)  The positive variance of younger typically healthier humans should ideally flow into the same pool their inevitable older less-healthy negative-cost-variance will be paid.  In America it doesn’t; it goes to Wall Street.  The Meme does not want Americans united in solidarity or to do the math.

The positive variance goes to private health insurers who subsidize the pharmaceutical, medical device, and hospital administration industries by sheathing their profits through an indirect commercial exchange from the end consumer.  This is extracted from taxpayers forever, who in turn pay for the most costly humans excluded from the private system.  Humans with significant health issues are cast out as spoiled raw materials for a Meme whenever possible by health-insurers.  This can be through pre-existing conditions or simply by the grand banishment of the Poor and the old.  The Meme divides and pits humans against each other where survival must be paid for like one-hundred-thousand dollar life rafts. 

Universal healthcare in most European countries and Canada is possible because Labor fought for the systems through a national political-party process.  The American system’s greatest battles came in segregated labor-unions inside industries and corporations.  This limits the availability and permission for access to be determined by corporate-authority.  Those outside corporate discretion are health-pariahs.  

The greatest victory Owners have made against unions was segregated rules for government employees than private employees.  When government employees failed to band together on a national level that was one level of Labor failure, the second was failing to band with private unions on a national level.  In modern America if Labor through the Democratic Party could ever organize by trading government pension obligations into 403b individual defined contribution plans in exchange for a national health care system this would be a win-win for taxpayers and Labor.  The Meme keeps this from happening by having divergent rules for government that echoed in the 2008 market crash, most obvious in the automobile industry, but truly cracked in the flush of cash into 401k’s in the dot com boom around 2001, which serves as a motivating tool for the population to value Wall Street over communal wellbeing of the nation or the planet.  The defined benefit government employee pensions keep government employees underpaid in the short term and overpaid if they hold out in dysfunctional systems at the cost of exploding national debt and poor governmental services.  

America bans the importation of Canadian, European, and Indian pharmaceuticals etc. purportedly for weaker foreign Department of Health inspection standards.  If such drugs from universal healthcare countries were available via the internet the U.S. would experience a free trade problem, which would threaten Big Pharma’s profits on Wall Street in an area the Meme is exploiting. 

Corporations can run the healthcare sector.  The profits harvested by the healthcare industry combined with the disparate tax-benefits afforded to the employer-side of expenditures in non-healthcare industry business equates to a positive-differential for the business and the Meme as a whole.  In doing so, the Poor and the Middle Class pay more than they would compared to a universal system.  Business is therefore allowed to pay a lower total percentage of total healthcare costs. 

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The true power of the American one-party system comes in pro-business Democrats and disgruntled Middle Class Republicans who blame the Poor to keep the Meme.  Elected Democrats do not go far enough to help Labor because of wanting business money to fund campaigns.  Middle Class Republicans are tempted by religion, patriotism, and classism to focus on sentiment rather than mathematics. 

The Poor are so spited by the Middle Class that America would rather pay an exorbitant amount more in total based on the idea that the Poor are a problem that is both ignored and blamed.  Single-payer does not give healthcare to the Poor or the old; it puts the Middle (Working) Class in a better economic negotiating position and increases their buying power.  However what gets marketed by the Meme is the opposite.

The Rich want the current American healthcare system because it worships individuality in the Meme.  A top-Meme human is special.  One’s wealth should be able to purchase a fountain of youth in the form of privatized-exclusive top-dollar healthcare.  The Meme makes the top-percenters feel entitled to this access to such elixirs and procedures as a way of segregating one from his or her animal status.  To suggest single-payer healthcare to the Rich under the Meme is threatening to take away this pedestaled nostrum.  The private panacea is earned by wealth to qualify a body above a Poor-human inside the Meme. 

One is somehow different from the Poor by going to M.D. Anderson in Texas and getting the premium cancer drug.  Why use the $2,000 device?  The heart valve marked up to $30,000 must be better.  The medical device industry inflates sales prices under such logic.  It has a higher price; therefore the extra infused profit in a non-free market purchase is confused as maximally beneficial. 

Top-end private universities operate in a similar capacity.  The knowledge is not really different.  The body is not different, but it looks “better” on a resume or an obituary.  Either a human possess knowledge or not.  Either a person is alive or dead.  Either a heart valve replacement works or it does not.  The Meme attaches sentiment in the form of product differentiation to these goods (knowledge and health.)  The Meme profits from this marketed false exclusivity.  The higher cost medicine is not necessarily more effective, but the prior one’s patent is expiring so this new drug proven to be better than a sugar pill, but not the prior medicine is the one the commercial is marketing to patients.

This is one reason in the psychology of the Meme, America’s Republican Congress detests and obstructs a full public-health option, despite the conclusion almost every other First-World democracy has made with healthcare.  Economically the American Congress knows single-payer is better for the country and worse for the corporations.  However even more pernicious on a psychological level, the Meme spreads the idea that government healthcare means lower-quality-medicine. 

The Meme spreads false knowledge as if Americans have special bodies.  This specialness mirrors the humans are not animals meme.  Big-Pharma’s ultimate goal and pursuit is not to find Viagra, but the fountain of youth in a pill that the Rich can buy.  The zeal for the grossly inefficient U.S. medical system is at its root the Meme’s quest to conquer death for the apex benefactors of the Meme.  The pill can be given to the Rich’s progeny.  Immortality is at stake.  If the money does not flow to these corporations this goal is further away, if not impossible.  It does not matter how farcical this may be in reality or if it did transpire the ethics of sharing or not sharing say a cure to cancer, AIDS, or the Holy Grail to reverse basic cellular putrefaction and reinstall youth like trans-differentiation in the Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish.

The Meme wants to maintain the disparities of the Humans are not Animals status through all systems, particularly healthcare.  Are Americans to die in the street?  Are Nigerians?  Are Koreans? Etc. Where is the line as a global society?  What happens if everyone is healthier under the logic of the Meme?  What happens if everybody lives longer including the Poor which outnumber the Rich at the top of the Meme?  How does that affect government budgets, corporate profits, and order and control over societies?

In these questions of life and death we can unravel the role of volition and systematic decision making inside the Meme.  In this humans can own what we choose.  In this we can see why the Meme is so vehemently against certain ideas in health and education to preserve its order.

Therefore currently the stock market becomes obligation-less and externalizes the full costs of products sold.  The profit margins on every drug, device, or bed sold and paid through a private-health-insurer in America is fraudulent.  Single-payer encapsulates this error, not perfectly, but to a greater degree.  Almost all first world countries other than the United States seem to concur.

The Vietnam / small-nationalist country example flies in the face of the Meme with healthcare.  If a small Poor country like Cuba can provide some form of workable socialist medicine, why couldn’t the United States create an outstanding form of universal healthcare?  Read something like America’s Bitter Pill by Stephen Brill for an in depth view of the financial state of the American healthcare system.

This is one reason why the Meme has driven the Republican side of the U.S. Congress to try to defund the Affordable Health Care Act over and over.  “Obama Care” is not even close to universal healthcare.  It enriches private health insurers even more since more humans will be fined if they do not purchase the private health insurance industries products and flushes the insurers with more customers paying the same inflated medical costs with taxpayer subsidized premiums.  The SCOTUS decision on June 25, 2015, might deter this, but repeal is still a centerpiece of every Republican presidential candidate’s platform.

Congressional Republicans sacrificed volition and the legislative process to Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledges like a form of catechism.  See Americans for Tax Reform (a.k.a. the billionaires that back Norquist) performing a giant Milgram experiment on the federal and red-state budgets.  Hundreds of politicians go along to damage America through economically unsound policy simply because Grover is watching.  If anyone votes to raise taxes by a dissenting dollar he or she is outed, hunted down to primary the antelope out of the herd.  This hijacks Republican votes into hysteria-based politics because wealth equals power.  No Grover equals lower chance at campaign funding. 

The Affordable Health Care Act debate is also a sub debate of the abortion debate inside the patriarchy of the Meme previously discussed under Commandment Five.  If tax subsidies pay for birth control or abortion this attacks Abrahamic monotheisms at the foundation of the Meme.  This undermines the Meme’s order.  Religious freedoms are cited by Meme carriers to trump freedom of choice.  Translated since men cannot by definition choose to swallow a birth control pill or proceed to abort a living human in their uterus religious freedom should trump women’s volition. 

Women are not at the apex of the Meme, so a woman choosing represents chaos.  Women’s healthcare is chaos.  Despite not one U.S. tax dollar funding abortion at Planned Parenthood, Republicans conduct a Salem witch trial for token Hester Prynne’s disobeying the Meme for having sex by trying to defund Planned Parenthood.  See the undercover manipulative videos about fetal tissue leading up to the 2016 Republican presidential nomination debates in the summer of 2015. 

Democrats, as part of the Meme, did not insist on the “public-option” so crucial to the Affordable Health Care Act as the ultimate fulcrum of negotiation to lower costs.  Without it the AHCA’s mirage of socialized medicine can flounder and universal healthcare in America becomes more unachievable because of the confusion inside the Meme.  The Affordable Health Care Act was a political compromise originally to expand coverage and lower costs, but special interest groups got their way to avoid losing profits.  Obama and the act can now be politically blamed for all the healthcare dysfunction particularly the exorbitant drug and facility costs the Left could not address in the bill because of Republican political intransigence.  The hypocrisy of Republicans blaming high healthcare costs on the AHCA is Meme hypocrisy that costs citizen’s lives biologically, emotionally, and fiscally.

The drug companies avoided government price negotiation or a board to assess dollar versus medical result analysis.  The medical device companies got their pittance of a tax compared to their profits rescinded.  Pre-existing condition exclusions ended and some of the state exchanges were created, but no real cost controls were created to address Wall Street.  A national exchange to better organize the ordeal directly with the IRS was sabotaged and politically impossible once Senator Scott Brown was elected.

According to Brill when he wrote his book published in 2015, healthcare is the largest industry by far employing a sixth of the country.  The healthcare industry spends four times as much on lobbying Washington D.C. as the number two (military industrial complex.)  America spends seven billion a year on artificial knees and hips.  The U.S. has 31.5 MRI machines per million people.  England has only 5.9 per million people.  We spend $85.9 billion trying to treat back pain, when maybe a third to half of that could be saved by rest and physical therapy.  This is as much as we spend on all the country’s state, county, and town police forces. 

According to Brill, Mediatronic a medical device company making devices like surgical tools to pacemakers enjoys nearly double the gross profit of Apple.  Doctors in the U.S. order 70 percent more C.T. scans per capita than German doctors do (and the bill per test is four times as high.)  Tests are profitable and defensive medicine for litigation.  Trial lawyers pay to elect Senate Democrats and keep tort reform by the Left to a minimum. 

We need to ask ourselves, why do hospitals need a marketing budget?  Then ask why they do not advertise prices.  What other product is marketed where they do not tell you the price before you buy?  When you or your loved one’s life is on the line there is no such thing as a price. Why does better technology make it more expensive rather than less if we have the same bodies?

Origins in the Meme of the U.S. healthcare system involve the anti-communist, anti-socialist post world war two and cold war eras.  In 1943 the National War Labor Board rulings led for the IRS to make health insurance benefits tax free.  This elected employers as the vastly inefficient font to distribute health insurance.  During FDR’s presidencies labor unions lobbied for the Meme in a perverse reaction to the concept of universal healthcare.  Union power nested in what could be bargained in individual union clans.  Unions focused on union prosperity over national labor prosperity.  In 1929 healthcare was one percent of GDP, 1966 six, 2007 sixteen, and in 2014 we are approaching twenty.

Health costs in this period were comparatively minor as a percentage of compensation.  The American Medical Association lobbied against universal coverage forcing doctors to become governmental employees as if it were the precursor to a full socialist state.  The AMA spent $1.5 million in 1949 to lobby against this.  The average annual income for a family of four in 1949 was around $5,300. 

In 1965 Lyndon Johnson brought Medicare to further insulate private insurers from being burdened with the highest cost iterations of the humans the industry profits from over the course of their lowest cost decades.  Medicaid carved out the Poor.  The most profitable sums are gouged by Wall Street.  The tripe-bodies go to the taxpayers.

The one-party system of the Meme achieved maybe its greatest feat of prestidigitation with the Affordable Healthcare Act.  Obama Care is Romney Care.  Mitt Romney ran an entire campaign against Obama centered on opposing the national iteration of the state legislation he implemented with Ted Kennedy.  The American people saw no problem with this hypocrisy.  The cognitive dissonance of the American people was never greater than watching a presidential election debate of these two men on this issue.  If a waiter’s cell phone video hadn’t outed Romney’s views, who knows?  Math and facts in the Meme sit idle to the rhetoric.  Romney Care was a red first, blue second compromise in the elder years of Ted Kennedy finding some way to finally address healthcare in Massachusetts. 

The question is not what is the best system, (the rest of the first world has already answered that question on a basic level) the question is why do we allow the dysfunction the Meme has created in the United States to not allow us to abandon the current for an adapted universal system linked through the IRS? 

The answer is the basic fear of death creates a synthetic sense of immortality that mirrors god’s favor in the false reality that wealth in America can purchase salvation through the Christian-capitalist current in the Meme to stave inevitable biological vulnerability.  A universal system strips specialness for an agnostic socialist blanket that death can grab anyone including those at the apex of the Meme. 

The American and global acknowledgement of this undercurrent reality is crucial to toppling the Meme.  Americans know in the current healthcare system competition does not mean lower cost for service.  The health insurance companies do not compete to lower costs because they do not set the prices.  Wall Street sets the prices based on the expectation in the market of incestuous collusion to exploit disempowered American taxpayers as a pack of drug, device, testing, and health facility industries. 

Post AHCA according to Brill in the two years from 2011 to 2013 physicians’ and surgeons U.S. income rose 1.4 percent to $187,200.  From 2011 to 2012 in one year cash compensation for the CEO’s of nonprofit hospitals surveyed grew an average of 24.2 percent to $2.2 million.  From 2011 to 2013 the total compensation paid to the CEO of drug maker Amgen rose 92.3 percent to $13.6 million.  It is not the doctors making all the money.  The other players are making even more post AHCA.

The market is that the customer has little clue what the price of the pill, medical device, or hospital administration charge will be at the time of, prior to, or often until too long after the medical necessity for what is so often not an optional purchase window has been made.  The location and pharmaceutical is often based on necessity.  The drug options are made from ignorance based on television ads and the lobbied bias of the medical professional who happens to be provided based on an insurance contract or logistical convergence with their ailing corpus. 

The device is whatever the administration at that facility elected.  These devices are often based on higher cost equates to a larger indemnity from legal or peer scrutiny.  The “best” health service becomes a judgment not on health provided with a matrix of cost per service like most industries, but dollars through the door to the total system equals more profit for everyone in the system in descending order from Big pharma, medical devices, hospital administrations, insurance companies, then physicians. 

The price paid in insurance premiums, out of pocket, and taxes is the largest expense of the majority of American households.  Medical debt is involved in almost 70 percent of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. 

A medical loss ratio of eighty percent means an insurance company pays $80 in claims for every $100 in premiums collected.  Wall Street wants a low ratio.  The extra $20 in this case would be the “administrative costs” or the profit in a non-profit health insurance company.  The average private insurer such as the big five: Aetna, Cigna, Humana, United, or Anthem (formerly Well Point) has around 20 to 25 percent in administrative costs.  Most other countries have around five percent.  Medicare operates with around one percent.  The trick on U.S. taxpayers is that these insurance companies enjoy paying higher medical costs because the higher the medical costs the higher the administrative costs (i.e. their salaries) can go to maintain an 80 to 75 percent medical loss ratio. 

In July 2015, Anthem bid to buy Cigna for $48 billion and Aetna bid to buy Humana for $35 billion.  The profiteering produced by the A.C.A. without cost mitigation on drugs, devices, and hospital administration costs is the capitalist derivation of American healthcare collapsing in on itself from greed inside the Meme.  There is anti-trust potential blockage, but consolidation actual helps the anti-Meme because the state of healthcare has to get worse before it gets better.  Coke or Pepsi, Walmart or uh?, Apple or Verizon, the cable industry etc.: when oligarchy capitalism twiddles choices to giant expanding beast A or B with a barrier to entry in the trillions capitalism becomes an incestuous deformity. 

This form of corporate culture encourages the categorization of as many expenses as possible as ‘medical’.  There are five major players in the healthcare market dictating the costs: pharmaceuticals, facility administrations, medical device companies, the American Medical Association, and health insurance companies.  Health insurance companies and doctors are the least powerful, because they control the least amount of the profit.

Health insurance companies are supposed to be the cost control mechanism for the patients.  In America humans choose their employer and their employer chooses a sliver of choice for all their employees.  The healthy young workers subsidize older workers.  The insurer keeps the difference unlinked to the older versions humans destined for another system.  Only in a single system could this ever be corrected. 

The removal of the public-option became its death knell, but Obama Care was maybe the only viable political bill and is still seen as a plausible bridge to single-payer.  That is why the Meme strives for its annihilation.  Giant economy states like California and New York will serve as the true petri dishes to grow single-payer from Obama Care to boomerang back from the states to the nation by the mid 2020’s. 

Republicans understand this potential and therefore are obstructionists.  Conservative governors like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, and Texas’ Greg Abbott refused federal support and sabotage their state exchanges at the detriment of their taxpayers.  The irony is that the majority of insurance subsidies in the AHCA go to working class white Americans disproportionally located in poorer red states in the South.  Republicans do this is in hope of postponing or preventing the inevitable math from toppling rhetoric.  These same governors and Meme politicians like them fight to exclude funding for servicers for abortions or in many cases birth control.  You see ‘religious freedom’ bills and executive orders in some cases because of this patriarchy and also from homophobia in the Meme.  Also notice how when historically black churches are burning from domestic terrorism and a religion is actually being persecuted against a group not atop the Meme these same politicians are conveniently mum.  A fetus or a requested rainbow icing cake and governor overrides their own legislators to secure ‘religious freedom’.  In 2015 a series of churches in South Carolina are burned after nine black people get murdered in a church and the Meme is silent.  The Meme’s message a white man’s fetus is worth more than a live black adult. 

You will hear rhetoric over fact with Meme buzz words like death panels and government takeover of healthcare.  The Affordable Health Care Act at one point attempted panels to assess affordable and effective not euthanasia.  A death panel is a wife talking to her cancer-ridden husband debating paying an extra thirty grand for a month in a chargemaster bill after his inevitable funeral. 

“I am dealing with a husband who had just been told he has stage-four cancer.  That is all I can focus on… You think I looked at the items on the bills?  We looked at the total and couldn’t deal with it.  So we just started putting all the bills in a box.”

A million dollars for eleven months of life, Dignity Health Systems had over $9 billion in annual revenues, Virtua Marlton part of a four hospital nonprofit made profit of $91 million in 2010 on $633.7 million in gross revenue.  One nurse might be charged out four times for an hour of service based on how many rooms the nurse hops in, four patients might bank $1,200 for one nurse for one hour for the hospital. 

Cancer drug profits Billy Tauzin and PhRMA.  Medicare has to pay six percent above “average sales price”.  Medicare and Medicaid by law cannot negotiate drug prices.  Drug companies give rebates to hospitals to inflate average sales price.  460 to 800 percent markup, Grifols sales 2.3 billion euros, profit margins on plasma products, Sloan Keating bought dose from Grifols for $1,500, sold to Medicare for $2,100, cost $250 to collect, process, test and ship.  Angela gets $20 for draining her arm for food money. 

Novartis’ Gleevac may be the most effective cancer drug on the market in 2015.  In 2001 it cost a patient $90,000 a year just for that same one drug in a treatment plan; in 2015 it costs $90,000 without any new R&D.  Novartis’ also raised the prices on all its other cancer drugs.  It is industry practice that drug prices are not linked to real expenses, but what the drug company believes it can get away with to maximize return to shareholders.  Sanofi cut Zaltrap’s $11,000 per month price in half to doctors after one New York Times article.  The torchlight made the rat flinch for a second before gorging on the dying bodies trapped on the ship to America.

Many drug companies spend more on marketing than research and development and use non-math-based R&D as a threat-lever to manipulate the public. The real swindle is when they reclassify marketing expenses as R&D expenses inside their SEC filings.  A lot of times ‘doctor continuing professional education’ gets this transposition with selected data to teach (market) drugs to physicians and facilities in ‘seminars’ or ‘classes’.  Sales commissions to doctors act as a form of bribery to incentivize doctors to push drugs on patients at as high a cost as possible. 

MD Anderson had $531 million in profit in 2010 on $2.05 billion in revenue or 26 percent profit.  Rituxan cancer drug costs hospital around $3,300 per dose.  Sold chargemaster for $13,700 or a 415% markup.  Rituxan is sold by Biogen Idec that reported $5.5 billion in sales the year before.  Biogen’s CEO was paid $11.3 million in 2011.  This is after the Affordable Healthcare Act. 

Euro profit margins much lower, but not in U.S. with PhRMA 50% higher for comparable products.  Profit margins outside U.S. still remain high.  Brill stated by 2012 the U.S. spent more than $280 billion a year on prescription drugs.  If Americans paid what other countries pay for same products we would save $94 billion a year. 

PhRMA claims U.S. subsidizes the rest of the world so drugs can be created.  Fundamentally the math says that is not true and if it were it is not the U.S. taxpayer’s job to do that.  R&D averages 15 to 20 percent of gross revenue.  Grifols spent less than five percent on R&D in 2011 with a 27.4 percent net operating profit after all expenses. 

Chargemaster opening bid used to negotiate terms with insurance companies and the uninsured if a patient without insurance is willing to quickly settle.  $77 for gauze pads, intensive care unit at $13,200 a day, critical care unit $7,300 per day, $120,116 for fifteen days, $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.  The “if you like your insurance you can keep it” marketing problem that a maxed out $50,000 payout limit is no longer a legal policy under Obamacare.  Difficulty of grasping net cost to taxpayer after subsidies in exchanges.  The Meme discourages indirect understandings and multi-level analysis.

Thirty two days in the hospital, $80,000 by day five.  161 page bill $474,064.  Room and board $73,376, respiratory services $94,799, drugs $108,663, and laboratory work $132,303.  Insurance might cover part.  The rest is house, life savings gone. 

Quest Diagnostics the largest medical testing company made $7.4 billion in revenue and $1.2 billion in profit in 2012, a 16 percent profit.  Chargemaster $400 a test, outside insurance might charge $20.  In house blood and urine testing for hospitals becomes a profit center for over-ordered over-priced tests to a captive audience of sick humans. 

Celebrex (joint pain) is Pfizer’s fourth highest seller has $2.9 billion in revenue in a year.  One pill, insurance pays $50, pharmacist charged $49.50, wholesales for $48, 80 percent profit margin.  Once insurance deductible and max out of pocket met, why not get the name brand?  Currently there is no generic from a company subsidizing the dying paradigms of the television nightly news and print consumer magazines.  According to Pfizer’s 10k, net profit by year in billions: 2014 $9.13, 2013 $22, 2012 $14.57.  Dividends were over six and half billion dollars in each year.

Ask if a drug company made a cure for Aids how much would the pill or the series of pills be charged?  $10,000 a pill and you need ten pills?  What about Gilead with hepatitis C liver virus at 84 pills to cure at $1,000 a piece?  Is it ok for Medicaid to say there is a pill to cure you but the taxpayers cannot afford it?  What if Humana says that?  What if the government said ‘drug company’ you have to charge less or allow a generic?  What if taxpayers offered every citizen of the world every preventative test to reduce life loss in the absolute? 

Brill suggests that given the political reality of America, maybe the government encouraging mini oligopolies of hospital systems as medical care delivery systems operating with their own insurance companies in major regions to align whole patient medical care by facilities with lowering costs as the insurer.  Make top hospital administrative personnel pay a reasonable multiple of the lowest paid physician in that system.  Cap operating profits at eight percent, splitting overages to less profitable rural systems.  Install an ombudsman inside each system for a streamlined patient care appeals monitoring process.  Ensure a minimum level of Medicaid patients in each system.

Limit prices of uninsured patients to what any competing insurance company is charged in transparent pricing.  No more chargemaster bills.  Patients should have in-office up-front pricing on what their insurer will be charged for a drug and what their portion is before treatment in non-emergencies.  This should be federal law.  Physicians often have no idea what a drug costs.  A uniform national rating system of medical effectiveness coordinated with price to offer a combined score of efficiency to patient should be an anti-Meme standard. 

This would eliminate patients trying to figure out in and out of network to a large degree or paying an extra fifty thousand dollars for a less, similarly, or slightly marginally more effective, but better marketed drug.  This is would align the doctor’s incentive for best care without extra procedures or Wall Street agendas as profit for the facility.  Although a full governmental system of facilities and single insurer would do the same and probably better job on a national level including using public universities as research and development laboratories.

We make choices.  Not everyone can be saved.  The Meme tries to hide this by shifting our eyes from death.  The anti-Meme looks at death and says this is the best we can reasonably do with the resources we have.  The Meme plays pretend, thus the current and historical U.S. healthcare system. 

Marketing by the Meme got rid of volition asking Americans to cling to the illusion of choice in the current system which keeps them further from volition.  It is this illusion of choice, that we have full information or availability to choose or participate in cost benefit analysis that makes healthcare so delicious to the Meme.

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Akin to a single-payer universal healthcare option inside the Meme is the cost of internet access.  The internet threatens the Meme and while some countries like China and North Korea have no or hampered iterations of the internet, the United States decides to mash the internet with other media and commercial products.  The massive profits gouged out of Americans for access to the internet are a function of congressional greed valuing Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, and Cox etc. to charge the average person fifty to eighty dollars for something that is considered a basic service like water in most parts of Western Europe. 

Americans live under a false conception of science under the Meme.  The Meme wants the people to believe massive private infrastructure is required to facilitate a basic tool of modern life like the internet.  The bones of many of these same private internet providers were hardened through public utility franchises in cable and phone networks.  The Meme tries to disguise any kind of public/private partnership as being the equity and profit domain of the private entity or that technology advances should make the cost decrease after the infrastructure is in place.  There is a fundamental blockade by the Meme to prioritize profit over the obliterated ignorance and knowledge explosion cheap democratic internet access represents. 

Access to flowing internet data is the ultimate conduit for global interconnection through open communication, resources, and enlightenment.  The Meme wants to control that portal and monetize access and restrict open access to the Poor if possible.  Since the Meme cannot hold off readily available internet access forever in the First World, the Meme will try to market what humans flow to on the internet with the same mindless distraction as television becomes less useful for the Meme.  In this way the public is inundated with information and the sources for uprising, free-thinking, and rebellion are drowned out in cat videos, weather, pornography, celebrity gossip, sports, fashion, pornography, shopping, etc.  Using the internet for public input into the government in a meaningful way would be anti-Meme. 

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The most dangerous idea to the Meme is a single sustainable individual living freely off of the energy of the sun on land, absent financing from a bank, need to go to a store, or ask for permission from the system to exist because a rational and healthy public safety net is present.  This individual may live in a self-sufficient community or family or be solitary, but the superstructure of assurances are reasonable and anti-Meme. 

This type of individual takes on the taboo of the Meme by becoming more animal-like, yet the individual retains the moral-authority of the non-killing of her species.  This evolution of human is most dangerous as she represents the glaring non-necessity of the Meme given a threshold of adoption amongst humans supported by the subtext of communication granted by empirically-sound safety nets.  Humans will have evolved into a level of potential peace the Meme by its nature deters.  The unlikeliness of humans voluntarily expending the effort to live in such a manner helps explain the prevalence of the Meme.

Early humans did not want to be off on their own.  Failure at hunting equaled death.  A broken leg in the wild equaled death.  Even a successful hunter needed to mate.  The insurance of agriculture, assistance for an injury, and communication to spur cognitive development were assets in the long term evolution of humans.  The Meme became a quotient of systematic dynamics to prioritize survival.  Humans conquered nature and all other animal predators.  The greatest remaining threat was other humans.

As farming turned into land ownership, governments and economies developed around the transfer of wealth to syphon resources to those blessed with equity in real property.  How did continents of un-owned land become allocated: violence, military force, the annihilation of “pagans” and most importantly adherence to the Meme.  Imperialism, kingdoms, regicides, and empires have flowed into post WWII America to get us to the present allocation of who owns what land.

Avarice or greed is at the center of this equation and the core of the seventh commandment.  The Meme feeds off our wanting.  Wanting creates manipulative people who are pliable and will bend desperately to acquire a resource those commandeering the top of the Meme control the supply to make scarce or abundant depending on self-interest. 

Greed controls the leaders of the cheap-labor countries.  O.P.E.C. regulates the price of crude oil and creates mega-wealthy ruling classes in countries of penniless-people living in dust.  The Meme and America prefer it this way.  The Middle East and Africa are not incapable of rising to the first or second world.  The advertising of the Middle classes that do exist in Africa and the Middle East are vastly underreported and under discussed in Western media filtered by the Meme.  However the people are systematically repressed under the avarice of selected few at the top of the Meme’s pyramid to keep the masses of these countries bickering under the guidance of religious books and the tyrannies of carefully-funded despots. 

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank utilize funding from the countries at the top of the Meme to regulate the actions and events in the nations of the Poor.  Third world countries are severed by debt.  Populations are disparately bifurcated into the mega wealthy and the Poor who serve the upper-class, the interests of foreign nations and the Meme. 

Drugs and produce are to South and Central America what oil is to the Middle East.  The United States gets its coffee, cocaine, bananas, marijuana, and sugar etc. and South and Central America get drug cartels, the slums of Brazil, and human trafficking for twenty-first century slavery to nail down Texas roofs.  Exploitive immigration laws for the “new” immigrants compared to the Euro-originals and militarized borders are how the Meme responds when these cheap resources are threatened.  Africa is treated similarly by the Meme, although due to location China is a larger player in Africa’s exploitation.

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The American Dream is a paragon of greed.  A member of the Poor is led to see social climbing as attainable.  Maybe in the post-WWII 1950’s this was more-so to achieve the silver-status Middle-Class as Christianity was paired with capitalism to undermine Labor.  This was connected to the platinum-level exponential wealth accumulations of the top one percent.  As the factors in the global economy described earlier continue to play out the gap in real time earnings of 1950’s America and 2015 America is larger.  The relative earnings of that America Dream are far more spurious and fraudulent.  

The Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous movements are only the beginning of the anti-Meme responses.  Humans like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning are imprisoned or sent to exile.  Revolutions of citizen activism like in 1901, the 1930s, the 1960’s are recurring due to the cognitive dissonance due to the wealth gap inside the fabric of the American dream fraying.  Revolution like French pitchforks storming the Bastille is at the belly of fear prompting the Meme’s current actions.  [What if what one has hoarded could just be taken, burned, or devoured and no authority is capable of enforcing order to stem the chaos?  How tightly can the Meme clutch order before uprising occurs?  What if Doctor Zhivago is forced to flee the city for a frozen countryside?]

To combat this, the Meme feeds America more promises of heaven, expanded governmental lotteries in the form of Power Balls and Mega Millions and a troth of reality-shows that serve as surrogate lotteries to reinforce the American Dream.  One can be an Idol, Talented, a Master Chef, see a Dancing Star, be a Ninja Warrior, or the last houseguest alive after Big Brother is done watching.  One can aspire to have a Duck Dynasty or be a Pawn Star.  One can cling to what one has in a vaccine of appreciation of at least I don’t have it that bad by seeing fresh traffic accidents to stare at in the form of Honey Boo-Boo, a Hoarder, a Teen-Mom, a Dancing Queen or a Jackass. 

One can see the effects of crime and the power of the law as heroes on Cops, Law and Order, CSI, or NCIS.  One can see the power of consumerism in entire channels dedicated to food, housing, music, and oceans of celebrity gossip.  One can spin the Wheel of Fortune, guess the Price is Right in an hour long supermarket ad, or engage in Who Wants to be a Millionaire? 

The Meme populates the financial institutions of Wall Street to profit from all of this wanting.  The greed at the top of the Meme explains why bankers are paid so much.  Bankers profit from profit.  Banks borrow from taxpayers and sometimes have their debt secured by taxpayers in the cases of certain housing loans and then split the instruments into derivatives where sixty-six organizations hold the mortgage on a single home or government contracts that subsidize corporate revenue streams.  

The pre-2008 Freddie and Fannie Mac paradigms imploded from meeting investor expectations combined with government housing assistant requirements.  The Community Reinvestment Act and how it has evolved since 1977, and similar laws like the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support “affordable housing lending” while purchasing and securitizing mortgages.  Did the Community Reinvestment Act known as the CRA lead to the entire 2008 mortgage crisis; certainly not.  These types of acts encouraged banks into the highly profitable and highly risky sub-prime lending practices to low income borrowers and then securitized them through FNMA and Freddie Mac, which were inevitably sponsored by taxpayers. 

The CRA created rating systems for banks that were considered to allow mergers and acquisitions inside the banking industry.  These “too big to fail” banks coordinated expansions with significant consideration of CRA scores.  This system allowed interest-only loans where borrowers paid only a portion of the interest accruing and none of the principal on a monthly basis.  The loans escalated into higher payments to make up for the difference in later years.  This system was destined to explode on taxpayers. 

These lending practices encouraged banks to make loans regardless of risk, because the risk was ultimately held by the taxpayers in so many instances.  The media bemoans the horrors of foreclosures, but these homeowners were only renters.  Translation America built too many expensive houses.  Corporate America profited from the construction and baited the trap with no money down, gave closing fees to banks, and taxpayers are stuck with a slew of poor housing assets with not enough renters or buyers in generations of stagnant wages. 

These types of lending practices that defied the core rate associated with risk principle that guides private lending markets in a capitalist free market economy were not isolated nor even in their majority lent to low income areas, but rather across America.  We saw Americans buying more house then citizens could afford and needed because lending practices were so loose.

States and cities that saw booms in the average selling price of homes from the late 1990’s to the mid 2000’s were cycling down in a devaluation of property to re-adjust to what the price probably should have been in the first place by 2008.  States that never saw such inflation in housing prices were now not suffering as badly as states like California, Nevada and Florida.  Regulation was lacking.  Current period profits were maximized at the expense of the long-term losses the risks associated with those short-term revenues created.

The Meme sat at the bar and drank profit waiting for a taxpayer bailout.  When the market crashed the Meme blamed the bartender for trying to drive home drunk.  Has intuitional reform happened?  Are any billionaires in jail?  Hell no, the bar just took a break and Wall Street is still drinking.  The capital decline in 2008 has bounced back higher and labor rates are still stagnant. 

The Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) scandal in 2012 revealed maybe the biggest outright systematically engineered colluded corporate theft in history, but it involves math so the Meme drowns that sort of crime.  This deals in trillions.  It went back over twenty years of banks lying to manipulate the rates in the derivative market to profit on trades. 

This is your mortgage and student loan becoming more expense than it should be.  Pretty much every financial instrument was involved with banks stealing from the public.  This is Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Deutsche Bank committing fraud.  The U.S. government estimates Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac lost $3 billion.  This is municipalities bonded debt more expensive and your taxes not stretching as far as they should to provide you public services in the billions.  These are the costs of deregulation.  This is ‘I think I’ll keep the difference’ profiteering.

In 2012 Barclays was fined around $430 million by multiple agencies.  In 2012 UBS paid $1.5 billion to regulators. In 2013 fines in euros: Citigroup 70 million, Royal Bank of Scotland 260 million, Deutsche Bank 259 million, JP Morgan 80 million.  In April of 2015 Deutsche Bank agreed to $2.5 billion in fines to American regulators and a 227 million euro penalty in Britain.  Some employees were required to be fired, none were charged with criminal activity.  This is the Meme: punish the physical and the upfront ignore the internal or the systematic injustice.  The Meme says do not contemplate or investigate. 

In May of 2015, U.S. and British regulators fined: Barclays, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citicorp, UBS, and the Royal Bank of Scotland an additional $6 billion for conspiracy to manipulate currency markets.  

In revenue in billions 2013 - Barclays 55.7, Bank of America 100.1, JP 108.2, Citigroup 90.7, Deutsche Bank 55, Royal Bank of Scotland 42.1, UBS 47.7.  

Net income [profit] in billions from S.E.C. 10k filings

Bank of America 2014 4.8, 2013 11.4, 2012 4.1

Citigroup 2014 10.7, 2013 15.6, 2012 14.1

JP Morgan Chase 2014 21.8, 2013 17.9, 2012 21.3 

Do you think the industry gives a flying fuck about the fines?  Put people in jail for twenty years.  These industries promote people who go with the program and accept the theft is acceptable.  How do you conceptualize this theft going out in dividends to countless shareholders and the salaries and bonuses to the entire industry?  This is the average 401k plan with a banking stock being complicit and fostering public tolerance based on having a stock-market based retirement. 

The anti-Meme is a local credit union.  The anti-Meme is demanding life sentences for the C.E.O.’s of these companies not putting a stop to this massive theft.  Some guy hold up a bank with a gun for $3,000, he’s in jail for life.  That same bank steals three grand from him because his mortgage is higher than it should be and nothing happens.  That bank does that three hundred thousand times to make a billion. 

The Libor bank cartel theft was right at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.  Banks feel untouchable like mobsters.  This was a failure of both sides of the political aisle.  Policies forced lending to the Poor on the bottom-end.  The rules encouraged banks to ignore historical levels of scrutiny to comply with Democratic-oriented mandates.  The lack of accountability for corporate banking profits appeased the banking industry.  Republican-oriented inaction led to the expansion of reckless lending and deregulation. 

Rates should have never been that low on bottom-end high-risk loans to lure people into borrowing when the banker hedged risk on the backs of the taxpayers by splitting and selling the loan into confetti.  The correct free market reaction should have been to charge higher rates, not the bait and switch which actually happened.  Markets could not really charge higher rates, because the Federal Reserve repeatedly repressed them in an escalation of commitment to our downfall to hide the mammoth U.S. federal deficit. 

The repression of the Federal Reserve interest rates represses the bond markets, which were and are the core of most governmental defined benefit retirement systems for public employees.  These pay as you go retirement systems paid benefits at the start to people who never paid in using the current to fund the previous generation.  This time gap requires economic growth to outpace the debt burden.  The pool of workers is shrinking as growth slows approaching 2030.  The excess of interest on national debt and social security payments over the correlated tax revenue streams of the younger generation risk governmental bankruptcy. 

This affects cops, fireman, teachers, government administrative employees, military, etc.  Post 9/11 this has created billion dollar bubbles in state governments across the United States.  The U.S. government could get cheaper bonds, but its investments restricted by law could not participate in the rebound of the corporate stock market during boom times.  

Too-Big-to-Fail happens when financial institutions are more concerned with the vig like a gambling house from conducting the transaction through a loan fee or prepaid interest than what happens when the loan goes bust.  CEO frauds like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom etc. are consistently linked to excessive executive management compensation as a function of stock price through options.  This creates a Wall Street culture of humans managing companies and investment firms more concerned with the short-term quarter to quarter results than the long term health of their own entities.  

We become obsessed with the idea the market must always go ‘up’.  Consistent financial return is not good enough.  A lottery win stock price growth explosion must be possible.  Consistency in sufficient service at a reasonable return equates to failure.  This dysfunction breeds a disconnect between fundamental economics and the political systems that cater to the lottery mentality of a fox chasing an ungraspable rabbit on the globes financial market exchanges.  Neither the fox nor the rabbit are allowed to rest and say I have eaten or labored enough. 

Look at the guaranteed profits of governmentally approved utility rates inside publically traded private utility companies.  These firms often neglect long term infrastructure improvements for short term capital gains through stock price accretion.  We reach a tipping point where unfettered capitalism has become economic cannibalism hollowing out the foundation of private-public industries which sacrifice effectively and efficiently meeting public needs for capital income to the top decile and most often the top centile.  This can be seen in roads, healthcare, education, and public safety.

The Meme crafts a rationalized absolute responsibility to stockholders to take that shortcut to maximize profit.  Management sees itself as stockholders due to the stock options and 401k plan.  Management is in a position to trade the long for the short term with plans to cash out.  Damages to the environment, unwitting stockholders who hold the stock after the inevitable decline and false valuations through rhetoric rather than empirically-based market capitalizations are discounted.

Lehman Brothers and Enron can fail, but the humans working there who cashed out before the crash made a fortune.  Bonuses and stock price fluctuations have become more linked to sentiment than mathematical evidence.  In the long-run 10K filings based on reality matter, but in the short these can be manipulated based on the rules of accountancy and the perceived penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the background quietly staring in the mirror of global humanity is the death of capitalism.  When a handful of companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Shell, Apple, Verizon, Chevron, Amazon, Coca Cola, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Monsanto, Nestle, Exxon, P&G, Citi, and General Electric control entire industries through massive barriers to entry, who owns the world?  If every shortcut is taken to maximize profit and technology advances to where standards of living should be elevated, but the exploitation leaves throngs unemployed when energy, food, and consumer goods should be cheaper to provide; what happens when public choice is restricted so that purchase options begin to emulate the state-owned oligarchy of the Soviet era?  Arrived at by divergent means, but a consolidation of wealth under a more honest title, capitalist oligarchs do blatantly what communist elites do on the perched name of the collective.  Either extreme requires the controls of the anti-Meme to balance labor and reward with social need and subsidy. 

The built-in obsolescence culture of material goods permeates into the ego’s thirst for perpetuation.  If the car, printer, cell phone, television, computer, or shirt is built to maximize durability and versatile repair options for the customer the purpose of the engineering designing such efficiencies is truncating the profit of her or his industry and personal livelihood.  The balance to make the phone last just long enough to fail as the new release’s marketing budget peaks is a symphony of the corporate global behemoth.  

The lie swallowed is that the average human needs the new version.  The car that works, but is old reflects on how his or her ego is perceived.  Insert pant, phone, house, dvd to blueray, cd to mp3 to any of the endless unnecessary addendums to human life to foster the illusion of need to affluent societies to continue to consume as capitalism cannibalizes itself into the extinction of humanity or a democratized evolution based on empathy to focus on the efficiencies of meeting basic needs rather than manufacturing superfluous novelty necessities.  The choice is ours inside the anti-Meme.

72

Lawrence Taylor (L.T.) is possibly the greatest defensive player to ever play in the National Football League.  L.T. played outside linebacker for the New York Giants.  Lawrence Taylor was a supreme natural physical specimen ideal to move past another gargantuan human to quickly and forcefully crush a ball carrier.  Lawrence Taylor would push the line as far as possible to enjoy his wealth and celebrity with sex, crack cocaine, and partying and all sorts of anti-order indulgences. 

L.T. knew he could stretch the rules as far as possible.  He would pay the pittance consequence imposed by his coach, maybe a small fine of his humungous salary and still play on Sunday.  L.T. would do what he wanted and then do it again.  The New York Giants and the National Football league made billions to his millions in the process.  

The concepts of lip service and unenforceable laws to present the appearance of order over themes of the commandments which large organizations denounce in theory, but care very little for in technicality was in clear display with L.T.  Governments do not care about dead soldiers if the threshold does not sway the ultimate objective.  Billionaires do not care if their star-player smokes crack as long the image of the league is not fundamentally tarnished.  One can see the change in how a video of a running back dragging his punched-out wife from an elevator gets the owners attention.  Not because of the assault, but because of the marketing on video.  As long as the trend is profitable all is good.

C.E.O.’s and management of Wall Street corporations and firms like Kenneth Lay of Enron operate in a similar manner.  If taxpayers care more about the Southeastern Conference (S.E.C.) football legalities than their government’s Securities Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) investment legalities then the Meme is working.  The company may get fined, but it does not risk going out of business.  The individual fraudster may go to prison for a short-term or be fined a small portion of the amount collected during their tenure at the corporation, but in most cases the average convenience store robber using a gun who stole a few hundred dollars is getting a longer sentence than the C.E.O. or investment banker who pilfered millions with corporate culture and computers.  This differential in perception versus reality is how we know the Meme is working.  Physical (external) crime takes priority over internal (mental) crime in the Meme.

The true consequences and costs of poverty are not internalized into the profit equations of Wall Street.  America’s federal and state budgets are being used like Enron for Enron’s Special-Purpose-Entities. (SPE’s)  The debts and costs of increased social services to meet basic living needs because of the unlivable wages the bottom sixty percent of Americans receive is a savings on Wall Street and an added burden to taxpayers. 

The same dynamic between debt and equity was in play with the housing market crash.  The American government subsidized banks and other corporations by backing bad risky loans.  The banks put their risk on taxpayers.  Enron hid its risk from stockholders.  Wall Street shifts the true costs of supporting the living wage of many of its employees by stashing it on taxpayers. 

The U.S. taxpayers held the responsibility to cover the debt on much of the defaults on subprime housing lending.  The SPE’s collateralized risky and highly profitable investments with Enron’s stock, but because of unique rules were allowed to put the debt on the SPE’s balance sheet and the reported earnings and cash proceeds in Enron’s profit equation, which made Enron’s stock skyrocket. 

Housing in this instance can be viewed like environmental issues, medical costs, and poverty-assistance programs for part time employees, etc. all of these issues are manipulated by the private sector to craft profit and shift risk to taxpayers.  The ultimate insult is that the taxpayer’s liability includes many of the giant corporations in indispensable industries as we saw with the auto bailout.  Big agriculture, hospitals, energy producers, defense, information technology facilitators, and banks etc. fall into such categories due to how entrenched the economic arteries of such giant companies are to the heart of the American gross domestic product and tax base.  Internalizing the costs into E.P.A. standards, a universal health care system, an increased top marginal tax rate and a living minimum wage are all potential redresses, but given the political climate run by the Meme in America these are all bottlenecks of intransigence. 

Another piece of the solution is to make government spending more efficient.  One way to better see the debts these processes are causing and better allocate governmental spending would be for the U.S. government to create web-based common accounting software to consolidate local, state, to federal GASB 34 accounting in a seamless hierarchy that can provide timely reporting with audits the public already pays for.  This data could be fed into per capita service ratios to award grants and projects to reward economic efficiency to state and local governments rather than spending equals a bigger budget up from taxpayer down from federal to state to local.  Currently such tools are confined to CAFR voluntary disaggregated pdf-file reporting that is limited to islands of data. 

Common web-based software for every government utility, police department, emergency communications district, fire department, hospital, classroom, municipal office, department of motor vehicles, etc. to function in an integrated cloud environment would save billions.  A reliable national internet infrastructure for small local governments to use would be an important piece of this system.

Other debt reduction tools should include raising bottom end compensation to attract governmental employee candidates but cap and disclose compensation by position in each budget year so experienced employees can stay, but not wreck the system due to COLA’s.  End all governmental defined benefit retirement, switch to defined contribution.  Ban congressional aids and congress people from lobbying congress for a decade.  Link TV and radio campaign spending to a capped per capita-based pool which requires candidate approval in any race with only two candidates.  End religion’s non-profit deduction status, require segregation for social aid.  End the drug-war.  This is all anti-Meme.

The U.S. tries to pass laws like Dodd-Frank to address this disparity from the anti-Meme, but the laws are often toothless.  Dick Fuld (Chairman of Lehman Brothers) still has two hundred million dollars.  The math and nature of the form of income over capital taxes keep it that way for individuals with mega-wealth.  The culture of Wall Street is reigning over all time market-highs.  Why shouldn’t it?  The Meme is still in place and unless logistical clogs like the massive retirement of Baby Boomers peaking around 2025 to 2030 occurs how would humanity galvanize a threshold of social activism and revolution to overtake the current Meme? 

The Federal Reserve in the post 2008 fallout reinforced massive quantitative easing (buying bonds to indirectly keep interest rates low) to spur economic growth and prevent another Great Depression.  This was to keep the flow of capital in the markets lubricated so that banks did not cascade into a constipation of non-lending.  The problem is that, because of the Meme’s preoccupation with taking care of those who guide the system, much of the cheaper capital has gone to accelerate the same consolidation of wealth at the root of the weakness in the global economy.  This is in part a function that the average return on capital increases with the more capital one has.  One can afford better help and to take more risk.

One can look at the lessons of World War II and Europe.  Between 1914 and 1945 the top one percent in Europe lost eighteen percent of their capital wealth after the second war.  The Marshall Plan brought a lot, but not all of that wealth consolidation back.  Post war also brought progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes to stem that consolidation of wealth.  These events may have delayed and prevented some of the potential disasters of wealth consolidation then that we are experiencing now and heading towards on a global level.  In many ways this ‘weakness’ in Europe helped create the American Middle Class of the 1950’s, while at the same time setting the stage for a U.S. consolidation of wealth arching into 2008 and risking implosion by 2030. 

What the average global citizen often fails to conceptualize is the mathematical realities of what the top decile (top ten percent) and what the top centile (top one percent) own as a portion of global wealth and how that wealth is created.  The highest wealth comes from capital (ownership) rather than labor (work by oneself).  The ratio towards capital wealth increases exponentially as one moves into the top centile.

In the United States in the early 2010’s, according to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, income from labor (wages) is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.  The top decile gets 35 percent of the total.  The bottom 50 percent gets only 25 percent.  The bottom fifty receives less than a third than the top group.  If this continues by 2030, this disparity will increase to half of the top decile.

Think of it like this in 2010 for every thousand Euros (Piketty is French) the bottom fifty make the top ten makes seven thousand and the top one make twenty-four thousand.  In 2030 this would shift to eight hundred Euros for the bottom fifty, nine thousand for the top ten percent and thirty-four thousand for the top one.  The middle forty would go from two thousand to 1,750.  That equals system collapse.

In Europe in 2010 the top ten percent own 60 percent and the bottom fifty own four percent of total wealth.  This is capital.  In the U.S. the top ten own 72 percent and the bottom fifty own two percent.  A billionaire might get a six to seven percent return on capital wealth in 2014 markets.  For instance take Liliane Bettencourt of Loreal (one of the richest Europeans).  She has never reported more than five million in net income in a year or one ten thousandth of her wealth (capital).  Governments could tax that five million at 99% and still miss the issue. 

The iceberg of consolidated wealth stagnates the global economy like the untouchable lower portion of an iceberg.  The capital wealth of the mega-rich lodged in investment accounts functionally shrinks the total economy because although the trillions are there on paper, for the circulation of the economy it is as if that capital wealth has been removed from what regenerates the wealth that meets the daily needs of the masses of humanity. 

One can imagine the underside of that iceberg like an artery clog or chunk of Filet Mignon in humanity’s trachea.  The global economy breathes by the flow of resources throughout our systems of governance and commerce.  When so few of the people have so much of the oxygen we need in that system, the investment accounts accreting unrealized capital gains act like that piece of steak in our wind pipe.  Respiration is hindered, our blood pump becomes arrhythmic.  The Meme will not acknowledge we are one body.  The anti-Meme is sounding medical alarms, attempting the Heimlich and CPR through protests, rebellions, and the idea that we are the media through the internet.

At one ten thousandth of wealth Swiss bank tax havens or the progressive income tax rate do not matter.  Furthermore it is all legal.  The unrealized capital appreciation that never functionally translates to a capital gain because the wealth is generationally locked inside estates causes the system to clog. 

Income inequality peaked in the twentieth century on the 1929 market crash with more than 50 percent of national income (labor and capital income) going to the top decile.  Through the Great Depression and WWII the United States weaned back against this disparity to reduce inequality.  By 1980 the top decile was at 35 percent of national income.  Reagan to Clinton shifted the slope up to 45 to 50 percent by the 2000’s.  Despite 2008, in 2010 the top ten percent has 50 percent of national income, the top one percent 20 percent of national income.  The French Revolution happened when the top ten percent had 60 percent of national income.  Piketty estimates that by 2030 the top ten percent will have 60 percent of national income and the bottom fifty percent will have less than fifteen percent of national income.

What do all those numbers mean?  The Meme is preoccupied with the threat of revolution and chaos.  There is a calculus in play to sustain predictability and order.  The perpetual organization of wealth consolidation battles entropy.  The second law of thermodynamics surfaces in mechanisms like Occupy Wall Street and the sightings of Fawkes masks in the Arab Spring.  The math will come due. 

What is the top ten percent as of America in 2010?  According to Piketty, the bottom five of the top ten make from $108,000 to $150,000 per household, the next four percent range from $150,000 to $352,000.  The top one percent make more than $352,000, of which the 0.1 percent make more than $1.5 million per year.  From 1977 to 2007 the top ten percent got 75 percent of the economic growth.  The richest one percent got sixty percent of the total.  The rate for the other 90 percent of Americans was 0.5 percent per year for those thirty years.  Despite the math millions of Americans vote against their economic interest.

In those thirty years America grew more slowly than previous decades.  The classic trickle down argument that the pie gets bigger so there is more for everybody is not true based on the math, even if those at the top were to share more equitably which is also clearly not happening based on the incontestable math.  One can also visualize the iceberg example mentioned earlier about how the circulated economy actually decreases in size with the extreme concentration of wealth.

The modern top ten percent is populated by owners and managers to a large degree.  The managers of the largest firms often attribute the production of the firm to themselves and award and set their compensation at excessive measures based on the ego.  We are this.  We did this.  In the Meme and theism in the Meme privilege and blessings are sometimes inferred as gifts from god.  To contradict wealth consolidation is to question god in the Meme.  To contemplate sharing what one is not forced is to open awareness of interconnection and interdependence and invite the chaos of the broader universe into the self. 

This is also linked to why some members of society are so ready to deny racial or gender privilege.  We want to think we solely earn and deserve what gifts we have.  We notice the immediate of what we choose, but not necessarily the platform on which we get to choose.  Too often the Meme calls that platform god instead of privilege.  In this subconscious way pointing out white privilege threatens the concept of god inside the Meme.  The Meme paints Jesus as a white man.  This dynamic hides revealing systematic causalities and the interconnection of humanity.

In the Meme the rest of the employees are segregated to a machine hoard.  The remainder can be a computerized replaceable swath of labor suited for minimum to mediocre compensation purgatory.  Humanity is purged through this idea of assigning value through money.  One’s ego assess one’s marginal productivity as normal inside the abnormal Wall Street bubble that led Marie Antoinette to suggest cake.  The high-end Wall Street compensation is like a superego shield nurturing spiritual denial. 

Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market is supposed to determine success and failure for the capitalist mistake of the excessive compensation.  However what happens when the companies are too big to fail?  What happens when the barrier to entry and dysfunctional political process derails necessary market regulation to handle functional monopolies?  What happens when the political power of the top one percent controls who is nominated for federal offices?  What happens inside the bubbles of compensation committees and boards of directors overly concerned with the current quarter when the barrier to entry to compete in most capitalist markets is gargantuan?

What happens in societies addicted to the ego where we begin to believe we control the universe?  We are a winner.  The bottom fifty or ninety percent are losers who need to work / try harder, as if it was just hard work that put the CEO in that position.  What happens when access to education is not equitable?  What happens when computers oust labor to consolidate wealth into a tiny fraction of humanity?  What happens when one is blind to the privilege and interconnected support that affords one prosperity?

Read about Piketty’s suggestion of a global wealth tax as a compensating tool in light of the tax havens, tax evasion, and the role of inherited wealth.  In mixing Piketty’s ideas with my own the combination of a progressive tax on income and a separate progressive tax on capital is required to address the threat of global wealth consolidation.  The internet and fluidity of global data transference in finance is the driver of global business at the root of the mega-wealthy avoiding traditional taxing nexuses.  Web-based cross communication and location flexibility through international cooperation through what Piketty calls democratic financial transparency is required to facilitate a progressive global capital tax. 

Tax havens like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands may be brought in from a law like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010 (FACTCA) in United States which phases in over 2014 and 2015.  FACTCA requires all foreign banks to inform U.S. treasury department about bank accounts and investments abroad by U.S. taxpayers and sources of revenue.  However there must be a global agreement through something like the International Monetary Fund to fine banks and sanction countries for noncompliance.  Currently this does not exist.

Piketty suggests a progressive global capital tax might be 0<1 million in capital 0%, 1<5 million 1%, >5 million maybe 2%.  Higher rates for over five to ten billion could also make sense.  One can rethink income taxes like this, someone has 10 billion in wealth, but only reports personal annual net income in tens of millions, but his real growth in wealth is 6 to 7% a year (that would be 650 million) in growth.  The issue is taxing some percentage of that growth on a reasonable level, not to only focus on the tens of millions in net income to link to contributory capacity. 

Under Piketty’s estimates of such a tax in Europe, this would affect 2.5% of the population and create 2% of E.U. GDP.  In 2014 the E.U. had 14.303 trillion in nominal GDP and the U.S. had 18.451 trillion in nominal GDP. according to the International Monetary Fund.  So for E.U. in 2014 that tax might be around 286.06 billion and in U.S would be 369.02 billion.

This is a solidarity labor union type issue of the demand of the 99% of people.  A functional form of a global progressive tax on capital should probably be the goal of the Occupy movement.  This requires global cooperation and education through the internet.  The Meme is directly opposed to every brick in the foundation of the human cooperation, communication, and diffusion of centralized authority disseminating power to the people such a tax would instigate.  Such a tax would have to function in the mathematics of global growth and the science of our ability to communicate. 

The Meme wants us to see this as too complicated and allow the debt on our political systems to rise and social needs to be unmet while the logical acceleration of prosperity consolidates into internationally isolated capital wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of humanity.  This is the same logic that puts the authority in the mind of a priest or distances one to default volition to god.  In the anti-Meme we must initiate change to assert volition with the fulcrum of mathematics, science, and empathy. 

73

The Meme inside Wall Street externalizes the entropy created by paying labor below living wages, profits in subsections of itself through an inflated dysfunctional pharmaceutical and medical sector, and the increased incarceration, depression, violence, and angst created from desperation from working humans still unable to make ends meet.  This is at the root of America’s potential bankruptcy and the bankrupt and near bankrupt governments already seen in the European Union in countries like Greece, Cyprus, Spain, and Italy etc.  This is the Meme collapsing in on itself. 

A living wage to support families is honorable, freedom, and an American bumper sticker.  Stockholders keeping the difference deliver state welfare and federal disability in scores of people dubbed demonized freeloaders.  The two are entwined; the human condition is the same.

The most direct redress is increased progressive income and capital taxation.  The Meme’s standard response is if the public taxes the rich more, the rich will charge the Poor more for products.  The Rich will also jump ship from country to country (state to state) seeking the lowest common denominator. 

Economies do not function so elastically, because the top marginal tax rate for example does not go from 36 to 75 percent, it goes from 36 to 45 percent or 39.6 in American reality, yet so many middle and lower class humans believe this farce.  This is often because once people hear math they often quit listening.  Our educational systems often teach math through rote memorization rather than as a systematic methodology of thought as the common language of the universe.  This makes us feel alienated from math.  See how the Meme torpedoes how the Common Core tries to change how Americans learn math.

Corporate deductions morph bottom line tax rates.  The percentage of capital gains income increases exponentially in the top one percent.  These are separate tax rates the Meme carves for itself and represses.  Empirical data is disregarded and avoided by the Meme.  The Meme prefers the rhetorical.

The public’s reluctance to raise effective progressive income tax rates, net of common personal and business tax-deductions correlates with the idea that tithing brings favor or benefits under the third commandment.  People demonstrate faith in the trickle-down and appear oblivious to the idea the firm owners would consistently keep the difference each time profit expands.  To demand assurance from owners under the Meme is to demand assurance for the existence of god via god demonstrating presence through evidence as if god actually answers or listens to prayers.  (I.e. to challenge the trickle-down equates to stating theistic prayer is feckless.  God will just keep all the prayers and never release trickled blessings or at minimum appreciation in the form of admission to paradise.) 

Labor’s trust in corporate profits being shared by the owner parallels the blasphemy to get a yes or no answer from god for a prayer beyond anecdotal coincidence.  Labor knows demanding direct answers to questions equates to banishment (termination).  This is why trust in trickle-down economics and trust in prayer often overlap inside the Meme in top-down power structures. 

The Meme’s responses are: austerity, cut the budget, keep progressive and capital gains taxes low, raise regressive taxes, we need to use national defense and big-agriculture and other such industries to spur economic growth.  Regulation kills business.  Socialism is the great evil.  This is despite the Bolsheviks placing power in Lenin and Trotsky and not the people.  This is despite Israel trading the secular nationalist PLO for terrorist fundamentalist Hamas.  The Meme prefers fundamentalism to nationalism. 

The Meme says: pray, blame, polarize, divide and remain desperate.  The trickle-down theory is championed.  The Poor will persist on the table scraps.  Quit taking the glazed carrots off the Rich’s steak plate or the Poor will never eat.  Throw another filet on that pile!  Let them eat a sliver of gristle!  The idea of the Poor eating the Rich’s feces becomes palpable.

Deregulate that industry.  Take the compensating controls off to let British Petroleum (the Anglo-Persian oil company) breathe.  Put Shal Pahlavi in.  General Electric cannot pay its light bill because the union goes to the doctor too much.  Put the gonads back in Glass-Steagall of 1933.  The Great Depression of 1929 happened for a reason.  The Gramm-Leach-Bililey Act of 1999 is economic poison from the Meme.  July 2015 the Greek people vote to stem the tidal wave of austerity pushing twenty-three percent value added taxes.  Austerity does not work.  The shift in labor in Greece to Croatia, Northern Africa, and the cheapest denominator that has bankrupt pay as you go pensions is a function of the global economic shift where tomorrow’s currency was utilized to fund yesterday’s indulgence.

The water running into the sewer drains of American and the remainder of Western Europe’s streets mirror the sheen. If the Euro zone allows Greece to default Spain, then Portugal, then Italy would likely teeter in a cascade of an un-held line with Germany as the pillar of continuity.  The trend is not sustainable and spending will freeze. It is bad economics to throw the Greek people off the boat.

Greece like Portugal and other poorer Western European countries are a function of the global economy whoring itself to nation-less corporations exploiting labor to retain the difference. The aging of the post-World War Two population locked into pension subsistence is a global trend in most countries which participated in the international conflict.

When we see Greek people rioting, voting to stop the austerity and their government is tied into a system dragging out the inevitable bust, ask where is the Meme? Ask where is the economic activity which was, but is no longer?  The issue is far bigger than Greece.  See the IMF and the World Bank and Wall Street. Digest the reality of government defined benefit retirement plans promising undeliverable returns forced into low risk investments which were traditionally bond based when the U.S. Federal Reserve artificially holds interest rates at next to zero.  Look at the math and the billions of dollars in gaps in the pensions of almost every U.S. state.

Titanic iceberg, Greece is a symptomatic trickle of a common ailment nesting in publically traded entities saying, “Nah, I’ll keep the difference.” and labor refusing to relate pension payout with pension risk and return in too many government benefit programs.  The Great Depression of 2029 is looming!

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Pro-Meme political organizations like ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) which claims to be a nonpartisan group that supports federalism and conservative policy, drive the American legislative process.  Tax deductions are made through multinational corporations to hold the purse strings of Republican politicians to accomplish these tasks.  The list of corporate tax loopholes, voter suppression, expanding guns to broker fear, private school vouchers, anti-abortion, anti-living wage, anti-union, anti-right to work, anti-renewable energy, anti-stem-cell research, anti-euthanasia, and anti-socialized medicine are the foundation of ALEC and similar organizations inside the Meme.

ALEC has supported and seen-passed hundreds of bills across America to meet these objectives in the biggest corporation of them all, the United States government.  Major structural reform can be glossed over with debt ceiling debates used as leverage.  The reasons the debt is so substantial in the first place are framed in the rhetoric of the pro-Meme rather than the reality of the anti-Meme. 

The debt is used as lever by the Meme to scare the Middle of the Poor by fear-mongering social spending so the Meme can consolidate (order) power (wealth) into the coffers of the Upper.  The mathematical origins of the debt are hidden in consolidating private bank accounts.

The Meme works inside the Left in organizations like Move On.org and campaign funding leashes.  Democrats push alternate pro-Meme-biased agendas including not admitting the truth that abortion is killing, yet America kills.  Instead we get irrational debates about trimesters and when a human is a human.  A human is human post fertilization and we still allow termination.  We get welfare assistance based on how many kids a uterus produces, rather than saying kill the baby or pay for him yourself. 

We have welfare food-assistance to purchase almost anything in Walmart rather than a national sku-code linked database for retailers based on maximizing nutrition per pound per dollar based in part on hemispheric seasonality to limit purchase options to the Poor through a healthy nutritional filter paired with cost-efficiency for the public.  (E.g. No soda, chips, or candy, but beans, broccoli, and chicken the store’s inventory system shows as near surplus is getting bought by the taxpayers to feed the Poor.  Big data talking could be a win-win for taxpayers and the Poor, but not the Meme.)  The idea of increased sales taxes based on a lack of nutritional value and decreased sales taxes on presence of nutritional value is also anti-Meme.  The Navajo nation is attempting this in 2015. 

The Meme and the corporations who pilot the Meme: Walmart, Nabisco, Coca Cola etc. would never allow such taxpayer subsidy of stock-price to be risked.  The Poor must have taxpayer funded Dr. Pepper, Doritos, Hershey’s, and Oscar Meyer.  Walmart and its 4 family members in the top 17 on the planet demand it.  The Koch Brothers, 2 in the top 7, agree.

We get environmentalists not acknowledging a rational balance between fossil fuels and renewable energies for our reasonable consumption.  Humans will not admit the planet will be fine it is humans that will go extinct.  Over ninety-percent of species go extinct and so will we.  The idea that humans are special implies that after human extinction somehow god’s plan inside the atomic is over or that the atomic universe will pause or stop in some grand conclusion roll of the credits. 

We get pushes for a double standard of continued defined-benefit retirement plans in all levels of government despite private sector America showing how delinking market risk from retirement plans causes massive inequities.  The American auto industry almost collapsed due to this issue and the American government awaits a similar fiscal Armageddon. 

So many of its state and federal defined-benefit plans are substantially over-promised and under-funded with taxpayers’ money in standards private sector taxpayers would rarely if ever enjoy outside executives.  Rather than admit the excess generosity taxpayers are expected to fund, government employees are made to be heroes: policemen, firefighters, soldiers and teachers. 

The life of a retail employee is as valuable as a doctor as a teacher as a copy.  We are all animals, all human, all interconnected.  We make choices of vocation and should not expect special compensation beyond market pay rates.  We should not rig markets to externalize costs from profit formulas to assist fraudulent compensation models based on patriotism. 

Promising government employees excessive retirement and healthcare benefits at much lower than private sector retirement ages (30 years of service or 55 years of age) and defined compensation at a percentage of the highest three years of pay is excessive fraud.  This is especially insipid when the plans go unfunded, present governments effectively push the bill to future generations and governments and critical services go unperformed because the police force, the school board, and the fire department are paying for one retired employee for what they could get two or three active working employees.  The spots go unfulfilled and budgets go negative.  Crimes increase.  Under-education expands.  Frustration with the inherent dysfunction spoils the fruit of the present for the indulgence of yesterday.

The Meme is fed by the duplicity of the double standard insulating the very group of people who could actually do something about issues like retirement, social security, Medicare, and healthcare in America.  Because government employees have better than average special retirement and healthcare arrangements the problems never get functionally addressed.  The Democrats are more culpable than Republicans in this regard. 

We get an inability to recognize the frauds of affirmative action despite racism and white-privilege still being present and necessitating affirmative action in modern America to counteract the generational cascade of slavery.  (See Commandment Ten on prejudice.)  We get race-baiting and race-consciousness as a constant.  We get feel-good do-nothing gun control legislation that is an un-passable piece of prohibition legislation, rather than admitting humans chose to kill.

We get unions and labor movements that got fat like communist leaders rather than understand that the only labor movements ever worth making were national minimum-wage inflation updates, workplace safety standards, and national employee benefits standards, not individual corporate fiefdoms with disparate tiers for policemen, firemen, autoworkers and stand-alone fast-food cashiers.  If Labor organized nationally for health and minimum wage standards for all employees in all industries collective empathy would be pursued rather than the ego-focus of segregated employee pools.  Maybe there could be regional variances for places like San Francisco and New York, but state and city laws could adapt for that as well as they do now.

One can understand the deflationary wage growth in the United States as a function of relative constant wages in the bottom ninety percent and a non-increased minimum wage having to afford the increased costs of the four basic living necessities: housing, food, healthcare, and education.  Standard of livings have increased but the floor of the costs to sustain these basic necessities is significantly higher than the minimum or average wage floor of the lower and lower middle earners in 2013 compared to 1953. 

Labor got fat and lazy and ate the cheese of the Meme in times of prosperity.  The inability of the national labor movement to focus on national employee benefits rather than segregated wages made national labor divisible and subject to collapse based on economic globalization.  The influence of the Meme inside the Democratic Party through political donations through corporate interests focused on the rhetoric of the business world: pride in the American worker, the exceptionalism of American products, and ultimately the support of rampant commercialism over the inflation-adjusted buying power of the Middle-Class led to Labor’s collapse.  This is this one of the Meme’s grandest victories in modern America.  The devaluation of the human bicep for a robot, mind for a microchip, and hand for a GPS-mapped harvester delink collective productivity with collective prosperity.

We have a One-Party system, under the Meme.  Neither party will touch the drug war, congressional term limits, campaign finance reform or go after Wall Street in a manner to demand white-collar crime be held to more rather than less stringent standards than blue-collar crime.  Two hundred dollars taken with a gun is still more maligned than two million taken with a profit gouge from an illegal quality standard violated to manipulate a profit equation.  As long as this is the case, the Meme is winning.  The Meme wants the complex, tiered connective thinking to be ignored.  Disassociation of interconnection on all levels is pro-Meme.  Understanding interrelationships is anti-Meme. 

If we look at the list of things the two-parties tend to agree on using the military, not disappointing big-business, and never really fixing healthcare, education, the environment, or energy, we will see the Meme.  The Meme is in firm control through prioritizing the fifth commandment fixating on physical vices rather than the exceptions to the seventh commandment allowing systemic economic exploitation.

One should not confuse free-market capitalism as an evil.  A healthy balance and awareness of where capitalism and socialism excel due to the nature of the goods and services being facilitated is key.  The same can be said for terms such as conservative and liberal.  Although conservatism is generally more pro-Meme and liberalism is more anti-Meme.  The hypocrisies and strengths in each are not absolute. 

The most crucial variable is focusing on ideas not who speaks them.  The Meme wishes us to see characters spouting scripts so that the Meme has already implanted our reaction either for or against the potential idea based on our preconceived connotation of the speaker.  In this way the Meme has hijacked: our thought, our volition, our mind.  This is the crafty masterwork of the Meme.

The Meme wants politicians to be celebrities where we think we identify with the indispensable enigma of who the celebrity-politician appears to be.  This idea-of-a-person substitutes as a friend for our ego to quell the loneliness we feel from not having a human in front of us who hears us and feels, who is empathetic to our needs.  Politicians become characters as if only certain well-known’s can run, i.e. are allowed to have ideas infused into culture.  Regular people should not think, should not have ideas because they do not have celebrity status.  We see the obsession with reality-television as a manner of heavenly ascension to be heard or witnessed in such ways.

We begin to function in an abstract universe where our idea of self distances from reality.  We become our music, television shows, movies, grocery cart, restaurants, fashion tags, and the political rhetoric of our politicians.  Our ego expands, carried as if traces of us are represented in objects.  We synthetically participate in the global community as we express our self through conduits.  We inhibit our questioning of the Meme.  We seek emulation of imaginary arbitrary social standards as ideals for a false communion for the collective empathy we ignore, but hunger. 

Politics inhabits religiosity in the absolutism of the Meme for the ego capitulating to the sense of belonging provided by a party-line dogmatic troop.  Cult-like opinions become pre-made, like a store-shelf product shortening deliberation.  The opposing party becomes demonized preventing the participant from seeing the common Meme present in each side of an aisle in a single store.  We ride an animal with no heads and two sphincters.  We live in a congress of shouting from the only orifices available. 

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States bicker with one another rather than prioritizing a national agenda.  States compete to be the lowest common denominator to shed taxes applicability to steal private business activity from the whole.  Nations do the same with the globe.  Look at what Ireland does to the rest of the E.U. with corporate tax laws.  Due to the power of incumbency rather than strategic budgeting and planning America acts like fifty fiefdoms (corporations) when it comes to national assets that can benefit a region or the entire country.  This makes the governmental process of major expenditures often game shows of politicking between states picking winners and losers.  This creates over capacity with national assets that could support the entire country or region rather than being limited to state borders.  We see this with electricity, ports, and petrochemical plants, etc.  The flipside of this is scarcities and a deteriorating infrastructure after the games are played.  Waste ensues.  

The Meme won’t do things like raise the national gas tax to repair bridges because of Norquist pledges and the Meme yearning for desperation (if you see endless potholes the average citizen feels helpless to change the system.)  Despite a gas tax being mainly regressive, it doesn’t matter.  To raise any tax is to be kicked out the Republican herd in America.  To make gasoline ‘cost’ more without the profit going to the Upper might be misconstrued as pro-environmentalism which is to seek empathy and the anti-Meme.  The gas tax goes to mostly giant construction companies, which often employ union labor. 

Individual vehicles and taxis are favored over buses and trains by the Meme.  This puts assets in control of firms rather than the public.  Public transportation also requires trust in the collective or others to operate the vehicle and maintain the infrastructure.  Trust in relying on others for one’s personal safety is anti-Meme.  Look at the Meme media obsession in the event of a transport train, plain, or ship wreck.  The Meme wants to scare people from cooperating and trusting public transportation.  Look at the type of trains Japan or Germany use compared to the United States.  The Meme rants are about our fear of death, the risk of trust and interdependence. 

Roads, bridges, and public transportation systems are encouraged to decay under the Meme.  The life cycles of individual vehicles sold are collectively shorter with poorer roads.  This forces humans to buy more cars and gas.  Public systems are a last resort due to physical logistics inside the Meme and most likely operated by private control maximizing route-profit over service.  Public systems are sabotaged by firms wherever possible through marketing and lobbyist-driven legislation.  The Meme would say if the people want a road a private toll-road is preferable and the people who want to use it are better paying tolls in perpetuity than taxes. 

Ayn Rand is the ultimate Meme railroad engineer.  One can look at the conservative magnum opus to free market capitalism in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a blueprint for Rupert Murdock and Roger Aisles inside Fox News to spread the Meme.  The Meme is not economic conservatism.  Red and blue both bear Meme and anti-Meme.  However the absolutism of Rand settling scores for her familial history with the Bolsheviks is the Meme.  Rand’s idea that government regulation serves economic decline in the costume of altruism for the public good fails to recognize the interconnectedness of humanity and ultimately the universe.  We have previously discussed how industries linked to public safety, healthcare, big-agriculture, national defense, education, and transportation infrastructure do not present direct for-profit capitalist markets and are therefore the most easily exploitable without public regulation. 

Rand’s absolutism shows a tyrannical over reach, which is the flawed grip of the Meme to control inside a Soviet era, just as the firm hoarding and exploiting the Earth and population’s resources through the monopolies Rand canonizes is also the Meme.  Understanding this balance between motivation and reward for work is the fulcrum of all economic systems.  Currently the world is over-tilted towards firms as firms have purchased government crafting the very industry regulations they decry.

Gerrymandered partisan congressional districting allows legislators to ignore compromise and prioritize ideology to appear to their skewed district over America’s macro-reality.  This explains much of the House of Representatives and the 2013 government shutdown by the Meme.  State legislative bodies operate in a similar manner, particularly as zip codes become deeper reds and blues as the ideology spills like religious ties to inculcate voters in blame-focused dysfunction rather than solution-based proposals inside a Meme-led one-party system. 

The Supreme Court is no longer independent from the executive and legislative branches because it is fundamentally constructed to sway by partisanship for the Meme.  Every judicial appointee or elected judge is vetted through partisan muster or voting constipation.  The independent body intended to uphold the constitution has cast off the blindfold for dilated irises inculcated to bias for facets of the Meme.  Neither party can risk an open-minded magistrate.

Justices may default to Republican or Democrat decisions, but the true casualty to the Meme is a public assumption that most trials have been decided prior to the first submission of evidence.  Rights are no longer inalienable, but subject to the under-currents of political tides of presidents, legislators, and P.A.C’s obliging the Meme. 

Ronald Regan raised taxes on social security, borrowed from social security and tripled the national debt, while cutting taxes on the wealthy and facilitated some of the pro-Meme military operations described earlier.  One of the biggest lies of the Meme on the Republican side is that politicians are anti-deficit.  The Fox News crew is anti-social spending and anti-tax revenue, but pro-bonds.  The rich would prefer a government raise debt than taxes.  Bonds are often purchased by the rich and increase their private wealth.  This is one reason this side of the aisle wants to avoid inflation, because inflation devalues the bond holder’s debt, by paying it back in an inflated currency.  (e.g. $50,000 in debt meant a whole lot more in 1950 than 1990.) 

George Bush capitalized on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and his son finished the job to reignite Reganomics while Cheney’s Halliburton and other companies like it profited.  W’s compassionate conservatism masked the idea of helping in a Christian overcoat for the Meme with the absence of actually helping.  Also see Bush’s speech in Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina and the follow up.

Bill Clinton and his penis rode the false economy of the dot.com boom, which coincided with the dismantling of the defined-benefit pension plans of most of corporate America to flood Wall Street with 401k investments to salivate over the potential of the internet.  Despite discussions of single-payer healthcare, even in this temporary prosperity universal healthcare could not get passed.  

Meme-candidate Clinton also reorganized the national welfare system in 1996 to shift a higher percentage of the burden for a state’s welfare roll to a state-level.  Welfare declined and federal disability rose.  In 1995 approximately 4.75 million American families were on welfare and 4.9 million were on low-income disability for a total of 9.65 million.  In 2011 this was about 1.8 million American families on welfare and 6.8 million on low-income disability totaling 8.6 million according to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration.

This has resulted in state after state assisting citizens without a living-wage (self-sufficiency) to qualify for federal disability.  This often leads to a permanent taxpayer umbilical cord to replace or supplement the lowered or disqualified welfare, which the state-level has to bear a greater burden.  Rather than focus on what living-wages are in America’s month-to-month living room reality, the Meme imposed blame-the-Poor. 

Private companies and lawyers, which are often paid by the state, have created a disability-industrial complex which states encourage to transfer welfare candidates to disability.  Every transfer represents profit for the state at the detriment of the nation.  Judges are forced into the role of federal decision maker.  Disability is set to go unfunded by 2016, Social Security by around 2035.

The medical community understands the underlying economics.  Reasons for disability according to the Social Security Administration include: back pain 34 percent, mental illness 19 percent, and neurological disorders eight percent.  Injuries are only four percent.  Disability functions in part to fill the gap in mental healthcare coverage in America.

Disability correlates with the unemployment rate and poverty.  Lowly educated people cannot find many sit-down jobs.  Manufacturing-America is also now in the Third-World.  Disability Americans do not count in unemployment statistics.  Disability plus Medicaid for $13,000 a year with medical is better than minimum wage of $15,000, work, and no medical.  Disability is like the mob; once in the only way out is death.  This is a byproduct of the Meme and using the Poor as disposable superfluous humans.

Kids can garner a check to assist in supporting a family with learning disabilities.  Better grades or a part-time work teenager equals less money for the family.  This is seven times larger than thirty years ago.  The Meme wants the Poor to stay dependent.  This systematic strategy borrows from religions like Catholicism to distort progeny and self-sufficiency economic calculations.

Barak Obama accelerated the drug war rather than ending it.  He continued wars in Afghanistan and an escalation of the surveillance state.  The Affordable Health Care Act would appear to be a compromise with the Right, as previously discussed it is basically Newt Gingrich’s idea from the Clinton administration and Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts state plan, but Obama never had the gumption to demand single-payer healthcare because Obama is the Meme’s Manchurian Candidate cow tailing to special interest groups.

The debt has been building and underneath the monster causing it has always been greed, which translates to the worship of the ego.  Rather than address the fundamental systemic influences of the Meme, we have the thou-shall-not-steal exceptions.  The global economy sits like the Titanic already struck through the hull and waiting to see the effects cascade into the fallout of the WWII Baby-Boomers mass-retirement.  The wealth gap is greater than ever and widening as the hole in the ship daily.

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The hypocrisy of Jesus and the Robin Hood myth setting aside possessions and giving to the Poor is intended to convey the church to a large degree to reinforce the third commandment, despite the church rarely qualifying as Poor throughout history.  The Meme teaches consumers to value investment so much more than labor.  This can equate to class welfare.  This is veiled inside the Jesus and Robin Hood myths which teach the Poor that they do not really want money anyway.

The Meme diminishes people for using food stamps or healthcare.  This is never considered class warfare, but corporations and wealthy-individuals criticized for profiting from government expenditures and tax breaks is.  The Meme likes to tell the Robin Hood myth in the form of the Church, but does not like to talk about the Nottingham reality that the Church is generally on the same side as the sheriff.  The Church is on the side of the Meme.  There is no Robin Hood.  There is no theist-god.  There is merely gold in King John’s store-houses.

The divergent illusion is spread about caring about the Poor, prioritizing the Poor, yet the Church disserves the Poor.  The Church spreads debilitating masochistic hunger propagated by the likes of the misguided Mother Theresa in India teaching women to be birthing-cattle to ensure their dependency under a physical kindness that although real is soaked in patriarchal poison.  Pastors spread the Meme by how great and wonderful and favored the Poor will be for remaining so. 

The exploitation and order are best served in such ways as the Poor believing the Poor possess a moral trump in heaven, a moral superiority over the living wealthy who will have a harder time getting into heaven or paradise than the camel through the eye of the needle. 

This keeps the Poor from rioting.  The final European draft of Jesus was the ultimate riot control.  Riot cops are crucial to teetering empires like Rome or the United States.  Jesus’ messages of service, subordination, welcoming his execution, and absolute forgiveness are the good-cop in contrast to the old testament Father bad-cop.  The tag-team works in conjunction with a spirit.  The Holy Spirit is like a ghostly possession swirling in the “soul” of humans joining humans as party to the equation of willing repentance, self-criticism, slavery, and submission to authority.

Churches enrich themselves in an economy of explicit and implicit indulgences in such false promises.  The Poor are promised heaven.  “Sinners” are promised an exclusive elixir of forgiveness.  Neither is ever provided or real other than the psychological illusion of self-satisfaction for masochistic glee for the Poor and guilt-release for the “sinners.”  Tithes enter the church’s coffers in exchange for this drama.  Heaven and reconciliation are the ultimate forms of feel-good legislation.

Feel-good legislation is pro-Meme.  Events, actions, and investments in political rhetoric which may make people feel better about themselves or for the recipient, but do not address the root cause to a fundamental threshold of alteration coincide with the Meme’s desire to appear to be creating movement.  The result is an idle motor, juggling balls, or a hamster wheel.  In other words, the result is sentiment. 

We feel better, but are not better.  We are not different in position of progress of our capability or space-time.  We merely feel like we moved.  The concept of god and karma operate through such economies. 

People pray, tithe, and practice ritual.  The sick are not healed.  The poor are not raised to self-sufficiency.  The salvation the god claims to have exclusivity over does not exist.  Actions and volition affect biological life. 

One’s self-image may be improved by the dopamine release of knowing others are concerned while lying in a hospital bed.  Others may do worse fearing disappointing the masses’ intentions.  One’s recovery may become a validation or indictment of a common faith.  God’s will may be bartered for through some manner of spiritual sycophancy or like a lottery ticket.  One recognizes the unlikelihood of a winning ticket, yet wishes to purchase a ticket through prayer in the off chance that Pascal’s wager is found true in a derivation pertinent to the attempt at compliance.

These systems of betting are entwined with men who claim to “at least we did something.  We know something greater is required, but at least we tried knowing that the effort shown meant something to someone, somewhere.”  Such rationale is fraudulent.  One presumes rational action on Earth and in an imagined heaven, which is specious.  One can show military strength and still be counterattacked.  One can threaten perdition and still be subjected to anarchy.

The Meme plays god with such unenforceable feel-good laws.  Prohibition laws and tax exemptions are the prime examples.  Human behavior will manipulate activity for individual advantage to craft surrogate profits including criminalized activity to circumvent the prohibition because the profit potential has been increased because demand under prohibition is not significantly diminished.  This is the Meme attempting to communicate we are doing something rather than nothing. 

When governments create unenforceable laws like drug prohibition, industries like public-safety craft profit-niches that would not be possible without the feel-good legislation.  Puritanical drug laws link back to the Meme.  Fear from herd-mentalities that threaten to crash markets after events like 9/11/01 link back to the Meme. 

We decide whether or not to own death and life by conserving resources by uttering harsh realities to those who wish to hear a hero’s valedictory and instead speak as a human.  We choose to speak or not of the weaknesses, both inherent and chosen, which have created the economic, biological, sociological, and environmental states.  

Only through frank examination that spurs humans to self-examination and shedding the cheap and inefficient luxury of blame can we see each person’s role either through action or apathy to produce the world we each are charged with inhabiting by our second by second decisions to not elect suicide. 

The Meme does not wish us to choose.  The Meme wishes us to blame.  We are to blame the external system.  We are to blame the injustice, the greedy, the selfish, the evil, and the wrongdoers.  We are to see heroes, saints, champions, role-models, answers in the eyes of others, but not an expectation that we have to sponsor similar responses or manifest similar roles.  We are the world, not a bystander in it.  The Meme prefers our apathy, lethargy, and ambivalence.  Only with these can the Meme continue to prosper. 

To Commandment Eight: Knowledge