Part 7 Avarice 71 to 72: The Meme

71

States bicker with one another rather than prioritizing a national agenda.  Nations do the same with the globe.  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.  

Individual vehicles and taxis are favored over buses and trains by the Meme.  This puts assets in control of firms rather than the public.  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. 

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 operated 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.  

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.  George Bush capitalized on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and his son finished the job, while Cheney’s Halliburton and other companies like it profited. 

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 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 continues wars in Afghanistan and an escalation of the surveillance state.  The Affordable Health Care Act would appear to be a compromise with the Right, (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. 

The debt has been building and underneath the monster causing it has always been greed.  Rather than address the fundamental systemic influences of the Meme, we have the thou-shall-not-steal exceptions.  The 2013 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. 

72

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 hungers propagated by the likes of the pernicious Mother Theresa in India teaching women to be birthing-cattle to ensure their dependency.  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.  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 this 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. 

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.  

Substandard macro level adaptations will take place like Americans buying sports utility vehicles with heavy-weight vehicle frames to qualify for a tax depreciation exception that was intended for farm tractors.  When governments create unenforceable laws like these, industries like public-safety and vehicle manufactures 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 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.