The Go To Jail Truth

My worldview during the last five years has been based on the following premises:

1. That the universe which we all inhabit is a moral universe ruled by the moral standard of a righteous Creator;
2. That an essential pillar of that moral standard is the duty of each human being to treat his or her fellow human beings with dignity and charity;
3. That the Creator of the universe stands ready to enforce His righteous moral standard by imposing consequences on those who break that standard;
4. And that since the most privileged members of the United States have broken that moral standard in making themselves great by murdering and oppressing their fellow human beings, the consequences of this moral breach have begun to spread throughout American society.  I have called these consequences the outworkings of damnation. 

The theoretical basis and starting point for my worldview (and especially of point #4 of that worldview) is found in passages such as Proverbs 22:22-23; Jeremiah 7:9-10; Ezekiel 18:4; Ezekiel 22; and James 5:1-6.  Now when a worldview first comes into being, it is nothing more than a hypothesis.  In order for the worldview to become mature, it must be tested by observation.  Therefore, in order for me to be able to confidently assert the worldview I have laid out above, I must be able to point to destructive or damaging consequences which threaten the privileged and which are the direct result of the dirty tricks used by the privileged to gain and keep their privilege.

But what is interesting is that in searching for the evidences of the outworkings of damnation among the privileged, the searcher encounters various flavors and levels of "truth".  The particular flavor of truth which the searcher encounters will depend on whom he asks for that "truth".  If he or she asks the holders of power and privilege, the answer contained in their words will be very different from the answer which might be obtained by planting hidden cameras, listening devices and skillful spies to observe the affairs of the holders of privilege and power.   This is not surprising, since the wealth of the privileged consists not only in the actual physical assets which they have, but in the image of wealth and power which they are able to project to the world.  In fact, if a person's image is strong enough, he can get a lot of what he needs or wants based on image alone - whether it's obtaining a huge line of credit because he looks like he is rich enough to repay his loan, or whether it's successfully intimidating someone else because the bully has made himself look too powerful to resist.  We might call this projection of an idealized image "managed truth."  (Kind of like "managed democracy", isn't it?)

Last week, the United States was treated to an example of this "managed truth" in the latest employment report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Trump administration celebrated this report by shouting that the American economy is "coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible" in the face of the coronavirus pandemic because 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy between mid-May and mid-June.  However, as a number of sources have reported (see this, this, and this for instance), this supposed recovery does not reflect the state of the economy as it is today.  For these jobs were added during the hasty and ill-conceived rush by many states to reopen their economies, and those states are being forced now to backtrack their reopenings due to an explosion of COVID-19 cases.  Moreover, the vast majority of jobs that were added are in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors - sectors which are most likely to be shut down again due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some actual figures from the BLS are given below:

• Hospitality and Leisure - 2.1 million jobs added
• Food Service and Drinking Places (bars) - 1.5 million jobs added
• Amusements, Gambling and Recreation - 353,000 jobs added
• Retail Trade - 740,000 jobs added.

That adds up to a total of 4.69 million out of the 4.8 million jobs that were added.  It should be noted that the resurgence of the pandemic threatens all of the job gains in these classes which I have listed.  Not only this, but the last two BLS jobs reports have contained a "misclassification error" which falsely lowered the reported unemployment rate.

So if seekers for the truth of things - especially those who wish to accurately track the outworkings of damnation - cannot rely on official statements from those who are experiencing that damnation, where can they turn?  One possible source of truth is the official reports and communications which the most privileged members of society share with each other, for it is these reports which are most frequently used as the basis for the decisions made by these privileged members.  Petroleum geologist Arthur E. Berman once referred to these reports as "the go to jail truth".  Why refer to these as the "go to jail truth"?  Because if the captains of certain industries lie to each other (or to government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the actual state of their industries and market sectors, a whole lot of people stand to lose great big money - thus (hopefully) obliging the liars to go to jail.  The threat of jail time is usually enough to keep most people honest in their official reporting.

But what if the most privileged members of society have corrupted themselves to such a point that they will stop at nothing in order to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense?  For evil is progressive.  The first step is to disregard moral restraints against taking advantage of one's fellow human beings.  The last step is to disregard even the physical or financial realities of one's situation in the desire to be godlike.  Along the way, people who have thus given themselves to evil stop telling even the "go to jail truth", and the organizations, businesses and polities headed by them enter the realm of willful blindness.  Last week the State of Texas entered this realm, as a state which rushed the reopening of its economy and which is now facing the overwhelming of its medical system due to COVID-19 cases that have spiraled out of control.  But if you want to find out how much the Texas medical system has become overwhelmed, good luck asking the State government.  They won't tell you.

According to Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, organizations and polities operating under willful blindness have certain characteristics.  First, most of the lower level inhabitants or employees know that something smells rotten.  Second, many of them can actually see some of the skeletons in closets and/or dead bodies under beds.  Third, the higher-ups in these organizations and polities will have created an environment that is hostile to truth-tellers.  Fourth, such organizations and polities tend to break down rather suddenly and dramatically in a way that surprises the outside world even though the lower level people on the inside could see the breakdown a long time in coming.  The collapse of Enron is a good case in point.

How can seekers of truth track the outworkings of damnation through organizations or polities which have entered the phase of willful blindness?  Ms. Heffernan gives us some suggestions on pages 237 and 238 of her book.  First, we need to have a sense of history - especially the history of the collapse of dysfunctional organizations.  By studying the collapse of a multitude of types of organizations along with a multitude of types of organizational dysfunction, we can get a sense of the general trends along which the outworkings of damnation are likely to propagate.  Once we recognize these trends, we watch the dysfunctional organization to see if we can spot the "weak signals" which indicate a trend.  Where the weak signals accumulate, a trend is likely emerging.  It was attention to these weak signals that enabled a CIA analyst named Herb Meyer to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union several years before it happened.

And this bears thinking about a bit more deeply.  For I'd like to suggest that Putin's Russia may be headed for a second collapse.  As someone living in America, I have focused largely on trying to track the outworkings of damnation in American society - yet the United States is by no means the only nation which is worthy of damnation.  Russia has proven itself over the years to be at least the equal of the U.S. when it comes to national narcissism and the desire to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  (See this, this, this, this, and this for instance.)  Putin's use of dirty tricks (such as election-tampering, promotion of far-Right/racist/skinhead organizations, assassinations, and now bounties) to make Russia great by tearing down the West have also been well-documented over the years.  Indeed, when one reads M. Scott Peck's description of malignant narcissism in his book People of the Lie, one can't help but think of Russia under Putin.  To quote Peck, "As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness."  When observing Russia, therefore, some weak signals to watch out for include watching what happens to truth tellers in Russia who reveal Russia's imperfections.  Another (not-so-weak) signal is the Russian attempt to meddle in other people's lives in order to destroy them. (He who spends all his time minding other people's business doesn't have time to mind his own!)  A third weak signal is seeing how frantic the Russians (and their mouthpieces in the West) become when the fig leaves sewn by Russia to cover its shame slip in the least bit to expose some raw flesh.  Watch the weak signals.

Repeat Post: The Ontogenic Battle

My schedule for the next several days is full of things I need to do in order to take care of business (including the earning of daily bread).  So I won't have time to do the research needed to put together a fresh blog post.  However, I hope you will find that the things in the fridge, in the freezer and in the cupboards are just as tasty.  Here is a link to a post I wrote back in 2017.  It is just as appropriate today for all those of us both in the United States and throughout the world who are under threat from a dominant culture that wants to make itself great at everyone else's expense.  Enjoy.

Whadja Do With The Money?!

Two Filthy Men, Two Filthy Regimes

Image captured in late 2016, retrieved from phorum.vietbao.com 

on 21 June 2020.  Similar images from 2016 and early 2017

can be seen here, here, and here.

*Note: I noticed this weekend that this blog had several dozen visits from people who live outside of the United States.  Thanks very much for reading my posts!  If English is not your first language, please let me explain the title of today's post more clearly.  The word "whadja" is not actually proper English.  It is instead an American slang contraction of the words, "what did you...", or of "what do you..."  So my title in standard English would read, "What did you do with the money?!"  And now, on to today's post.

From the time I was six years old to the time I turned eight years old, my parents sent me to Catholic school.   The schools I attended provided lunch for their students, but this was contingent on the families of each of the students paying a weekly lunch allowance.  It's been a long while since those days, but I vaguely remember that the usual procedure for families was to put each week's "lunch money" into an envelope, and attach the envelope to each child's clothes with a safety pin on each Monday morning before the kid went to school.  I think my parents used to admonish me to give the envelope to the nuns the moment I got to school.  

But one morning I became curious to know what was in the envelope, and so I opened it before my arrival.  When I found out what was inside, I became full of ambitious ideas of how I would like to spend the money.  The result was that when I got to school, I handed the nuns an empty envelope.  Little did I know that the school was not going to feed me just because of my good looks.  Little did I also know that they would place an urgent call to my parents.  But what I did know was that my parents were firm believers in the laying on of hands in order to cure their children from foolishness.  When I got home that day, hands were therefore laid on me.

These events should have served as a valuable lesson, namely that money is a means of transmitting the benefits of honest labors between two people.  My dad had worked hard in order to earn the money which was given to me to give to the nuns in exchange for the hard work that other adults had done in making a nutritious lunch for a bunch of kids.  Money therefore could be seen as a reliable transmitter of value only as long as it symbolized an exchange of the value of one kind of necessary work for the value of other kinds of necessary work.  Empty lunch money envelopes, on the other hand, were not a symbol of exchange of one kind of value for another.  I wish I could say that the events of that day had taught me right then this valuable lesson, but at the age of six, I was still just a goofy, gel-brained boy out "raising Cain", to put it euphemistically.  

I do understand the lesson now.  But as I look at the uses to which American money have been put lately, I am not sure that very many of the people at the top of the American economic pyramid understand this lesson.  Nor am I quite sure that some of these people are not still gel-brained six-year-old Cain-raisers trapped in adult bodies.  For it increasingly appears that the exchange of money between the most powerful players no longer represents an exchange of differing kinds of necessary, valuable labor.  American money is therefore increasingly not a reliable transmitter of value between two parties who both do various kinds of necessary work.  

I am thinking of the American stock exchanges (NYSE, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, to name a few) in the aftermath of Donald Trump's seizure of the White House in 2016.  What is interesting to note is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) shot up over 2,000 points from November 2016 to February 2017.  (Source: Statista.  See this also from MarketWatch.)  Since January 2017, the DJIA has closed below 20,000 only once.  The DJIA has instead flown on a somewhat phugoid trajectory within a range from 22,000 to 28,000 points for most of Trump's presidency.  During the upswings in the DJIA and other exchanges, Trump has boasted of these upswings as proof that he is indeed "Making America Great Again!"  But what has really been going on behind the scenes?  (Aside from the exploding numbers of tent cities and homeless encampments throughout the United States!)

First, it is no secret that much of the increase in corporate asset prices has been driven by stock buybacks, as noted in the following stories:

• "Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous For The Economy," Harvard Business Review, January 2020.  (Note: this essay was published before the coronavirus pandemic became a major economic issue.)
• "Companies Have Been Buying Back Massive Amounts Of Stock This Year," CNBC, July 2019.
• "S&P 500 Q4 2018 Buybacks Set 4th Consecutive Quarterly Record at $223 Billion; 2018 Sets Record $806 Billion," S&P Global, March 2019

According to various sources, corporate buybacks of publicly traded stocks in U.S. stock exchanges have totaled over $2 trillion from 2017 until now.  This is troubling because it used to be that the price of a share of a company's stock was a reflection of the value of the amount and quality of the work done by the owners and employees of the company.  But due to the tax cuts passed by a Republican-controlled Congress under Donald Trump, the money that should have gone into corporate taxes or into investment in increasing the value of meaningful labor has instead gone to boosting shareholder dividends, stock prices, and CEO bonuses.  The prices of shares of corporate stock therefore no longer reflect the genuine value of the things produced by the corporations whose stock is publicly traded. 

This is even clearer when we consider what has happened to U.S. productivity during Trump's presidency.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported widespread declines in American manufacturing productivity in 2018.  This is a reflection of a decline in global worker productivity during 2018 and 2019.  American worker productivity also declined during the last half of 2019.  The decline in productivity extends also to the construction industry, according to this source.  And Servaas Storm of the Institute for New Economic Thinking states his view that the reasons for falling American productivity are "‘under-consumption’ driven by stagnating real wages, rising inequality and greater job insecurity and polarization."  In other words, falling American productivity is being caused by the very factors which Donald Trump has maximized.

But as I said in a previous post tracing the outworkings of damnation on American society, I am not here to editorialize or to moralize.  I write this post only to hypothesize how this situation might end.  For "the wages of sin is death", and the regime of Donald Trump is based on the premise of America's most privileged holders of wealth and power sinning against the rest of humanity by making themselves great at everyone else's expense.  I am therefore wondering how this one special group of parasites is about to die.  For the most powerful economic players in the United States have made it clear in 2020 that one of their main objectives is to prop up the value of the financial assets of their cronies at all costs.  Therefore, the Fed has this year made itself a purchaser of corporate bonds.  This includes buying the debt of corporations which should have crashed and burned because the value of the things they produced declined to the level of junk.  This is also why the DJIA for instance has consistently closed above 23,000 over the last two months even as the coronavirus pandemic deals a shattering blow to the actual productive capacity of the U.S. economy.  (Note: it is not only the U.S. central bank which is propping up asset prices.  See this also.)

Now, if the financial "bodily organ" which creates U.S. dollars uses them to prop up stock prices of corporations which produce no real value, what does that do to the U.S. dollar as a reliable transmitter of value?  (To put it another way, what would happen to your body if your bone marrow suddenly began producing red blood cells that could not carry oxygen to your vital organs?)  Consider also that the Fed's ability to prop up asset prices depends on the Fed's ability to sell U.S. debt to foreign governments.  And consider that the U.S. government is already hopelessly in debt (especially due to huge deficits under Trump), with the likelihood of repayment growing more distant by the day.  What happens when foreign governments begin to refuse to buy any more U.S. debt and start asking, "Whadja do with the money?!"