JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,756
- 2,220
I know a lot of people are going to read the title and say, 'Of course, that is how it has always been Jim.'
But that is a lie.
This nation would not exist if the government had always been corrupt as it is now, or if our markets had been rigged solely for the Market Makers benefit. We have always had some corruption, and in different forms, but today we have a 'Rigged Casino' model that is the system used in our politics, markets, educational system, clergy, etc. That is definitely new.
In any system of human activity, we have the worker bees, the monitors, the Big Players and the Rules Makers or Market Makers. Each has their roll and if it were not for the Big Players and the Rules Makers we would not have a game/system to play in, so them taking 'a little off the top' is not a problem for most of us.
We go into a casino and we expect the odds to be little bit on the side of the House and that the House will charge us a small percentage for the chips. But we expect honest dealers, straight rules that apply equally to everyone and equipment that is not 'fixed' in a bad way. Thus the huge contrast between an Honest Casino and the Rigged Casino; at least in the Honest Casino we stand a chance of winning on occasion. A lot of people like the Honest Casinos even if they lose all their money, but the Rigged Casino is fraud and illegal... and yet they exist. Gaming Commission inspectors can be bought or scared into non-enforcement behavior. Pros can be cajoled and socially engineered to look away. The government can be bought off with new tax revenue streams, etc.
But the Rigged Casino is like a Ponzi Scheme in that it can only last for a short time. Eventually so many stories of people being ripped off get around that the casinos have to beg people to come in again. as an example, Faro was an easy to learn game that had the best odds for a player in any gambling establishment and was wildly popular int he 1800s, but it was too easy for the house to cheat and it got so bad that Hoyles in its rules for Faro warned players that not one single honest gambling casino existed in the United States. Eventually people would not play Faro and it became the equivalent of a fools game. So Casinos started offering Black Jack as a replacement and it is just as easily vulnerable to cheating. The Casino realizing that it is best for them to offer an honest game would be enough motivation to keep them honest, one might think, but it is simply not true. Unregulated casinos would defraud and abuse their customers without moral bounds of any sort, wrecking families, ruining businesses and exploiting entire communities of workers and the gullible.
Like casinos in the 1800s, each major area of our nations culture is infested with the moral rot of fraud and deceit and all we do is ignore it, or make some half-assed 'reforms' that do nothing about the underlying fraud, but give it a fresh style and appearance, like replacing Faro with Black Jack. From our sports to our schools to our clergy to our political system, the entire structure is rotted and on the verge of collapse.
Lets look at our financial system, the biggest bedrock of what makes America Great. Our last Real Estate crash saw open fraud as ratings companies rated Mortgage Backed Securities to be AAA in reliability despite knowing that the underlying mortgages put into these MBSes were all crap. They say 'subprime' but they really mean that the borrower had no income, that they would not be able to pay the adjustment to their mortgage when the ARM started going up. Borrowers were assured by smiling salesmen lying through their teeth that they 'could always' refinance. The SEC did not do its duty and its job to regulate the rating agencies, the banks or anyone, and the millions who trusted them to perform their duty lost $5 trillion when the market collapsed. The Rigged Casino owners never meant for this to happen, but they did intend to use their ties to the Political Establishment to get a fully taxpayer funded bail out when the dust settled. And they got it without a single person ever going to jail for their grotesque dishonesty and incompetence. And the rest of us would rather watch football. No wonder our nations financial leaders are so corrupt; we make it too easy for them to steal from us.
So the political system is another 'strength' to our nations culture, many say. The Freedom we have to chose our leadership....wait, oh yeah, Sanders won New Hampshire with 70% of the vote and Hillary got the most delegates anyway. Trump won Louisiana but the GOP is giving Ted Cruz the majority of those delegates too. Like the markets when they have a Rigged Casino going, the political Establishment is going all in with stupid corruption, disregarding the consequences of a huge section of the public becoming outraged and determined to do away with the Establishments control of the entire system. But since Trump supporters think all Sanders supporters are Communists and all Sanders supporters think Trump supporters are stupid and/or evil, the Establishment is likely going to win it all this election too again. But maybe before we dont have any elections any more, Working Class people will stop fighting each other and letting the Casino Rules Makers continue to control the game? Bigger surprises have happened in the worlds history. But usually the solution is an 'honest dictator' who makes a public display of punishing the corporations and bankers all the while he depends on them to stay in power.
This is why our colleges dont teach history any more except from a bullshit Marxist perspective. The purpose of putting these ideologues in charge is to destroy any trust the public has in historical references and analogies, and this tactic works. One sure way to end any discussion of politics is to point out that our elections have been worse in every way and that even Obama is to the right of the British Conservative Party's David Cameron or make a comparison to some culture or period that makes the listener go to sleep with boredom..
The clergy are the ones tasked to watch our nations morals and culture and to advise and rebuke us, but they are part of the system of corruption too. So many are pedophiles, cheating on their priestly vows, or just plain old greedy and worse that they protect each other from outside observers and close ranks to defend each other, even if the priest is fucking little kids. And it is not just the Catholic church here, dont kid yourselves. Almost every other branch of religion has the same rates of pedophilia that the Catholic church has. Catholic priests no guiltier of sex abuse than other clergy
Wisconsin-based Church Mutual Insurance Co. has 100,000 client churches and has seen a steady filing of about five sexual molestation cases a week for more than a decade, even though its client base has grown.
“It would be incorrect to call it a Catholic problem,” said Church Mutual’s risk control manager, Rick Schaber. “We do not see one denomination above another. It’s equal. It’s also equal among large metropolitan churches and small rural churches.”
Iowa-based Guide One Center for Risk Management, which insures more than 40,000 congregations, also said Catholic churches are not considered a greater risk or charged higher premiums.
“Our claims experience shows this happens evenly across denominations,” said spokeswoman Melanie Stonewall.
Of course everyone knows that our sports heroes all cheat, the ones regarded as more honest are only a shade from 'just not caught yet' in the public mind, but we dont think about these things. All our kids say they are not going out and getting high/drunk and having sex, and we parents believe them, forgetting our own behavior at their age, until Sally gets pregnant, then we often kill the unborn baby and pretend it wasnt really human or couldnt feel the knife as its limbs were ripped off and its skull crushed without any pain killer.
The character in the movie 'The Big Short' known as Mark Baum was based on a guy named Eisner, and I doubt Eisner said this, but maybe he did. In the movie Mark Baum said it and it is a classic line, that people should realize is the true modern horror tale:
"We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food. Even baseball…
For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south.
When the hell did we forget all that?"
Maybe we forgot all that when we decided that markets are more efficient if left unregulated. That we could trust greedy amoral men with our nations Treasury and savings and decided to watch baseball's cheaters rather than our own nest eggs? Maybe it was when we decided we had entered an unending Golden Age that was fated to last a specific length of time and how we conducted ourselves was of no concern any more?
All I know is that, we have had a good thing going with this country now for over two centuries, and when it came to our generation, we are the first to totally fuck it all up for our kids.
We deserve a special place in Hell for that.
But that is a lie.
This nation would not exist if the government had always been corrupt as it is now, or if our markets had been rigged solely for the Market Makers benefit. We have always had some corruption, and in different forms, but today we have a 'Rigged Casino' model that is the system used in our politics, markets, educational system, clergy, etc. That is definitely new.
In any system of human activity, we have the worker bees, the monitors, the Big Players and the Rules Makers or Market Makers. Each has their roll and if it were not for the Big Players and the Rules Makers we would not have a game/system to play in, so them taking 'a little off the top' is not a problem for most of us.
We go into a casino and we expect the odds to be little bit on the side of the House and that the House will charge us a small percentage for the chips. But we expect honest dealers, straight rules that apply equally to everyone and equipment that is not 'fixed' in a bad way. Thus the huge contrast between an Honest Casino and the Rigged Casino; at least in the Honest Casino we stand a chance of winning on occasion. A lot of people like the Honest Casinos even if they lose all their money, but the Rigged Casino is fraud and illegal... and yet they exist. Gaming Commission inspectors can be bought or scared into non-enforcement behavior. Pros can be cajoled and socially engineered to look away. The government can be bought off with new tax revenue streams, etc.
But the Rigged Casino is like a Ponzi Scheme in that it can only last for a short time. Eventually so many stories of people being ripped off get around that the casinos have to beg people to come in again. as an example, Faro was an easy to learn game that had the best odds for a player in any gambling establishment and was wildly popular int he 1800s, but it was too easy for the house to cheat and it got so bad that Hoyles in its rules for Faro warned players that not one single honest gambling casino existed in the United States. Eventually people would not play Faro and it became the equivalent of a fools game. So Casinos started offering Black Jack as a replacement and it is just as easily vulnerable to cheating. The Casino realizing that it is best for them to offer an honest game would be enough motivation to keep them honest, one might think, but it is simply not true. Unregulated casinos would defraud and abuse their customers without moral bounds of any sort, wrecking families, ruining businesses and exploiting entire communities of workers and the gullible.
Like casinos in the 1800s, each major area of our nations culture is infested with the moral rot of fraud and deceit and all we do is ignore it, or make some half-assed 'reforms' that do nothing about the underlying fraud, but give it a fresh style and appearance, like replacing Faro with Black Jack. From our sports to our schools to our clergy to our political system, the entire structure is rotted and on the verge of collapse.
Lets look at our financial system, the biggest bedrock of what makes America Great. Our last Real Estate crash saw open fraud as ratings companies rated Mortgage Backed Securities to be AAA in reliability despite knowing that the underlying mortgages put into these MBSes were all crap. They say 'subprime' but they really mean that the borrower had no income, that they would not be able to pay the adjustment to their mortgage when the ARM started going up. Borrowers were assured by smiling salesmen lying through their teeth that they 'could always' refinance. The SEC did not do its duty and its job to regulate the rating agencies, the banks or anyone, and the millions who trusted them to perform their duty lost $5 trillion when the market collapsed. The Rigged Casino owners never meant for this to happen, but they did intend to use their ties to the Political Establishment to get a fully taxpayer funded bail out when the dust settled. And they got it without a single person ever going to jail for their grotesque dishonesty and incompetence. And the rest of us would rather watch football. No wonder our nations financial leaders are so corrupt; we make it too easy for them to steal from us.
So the political system is another 'strength' to our nations culture, many say. The Freedom we have to chose our leadership....wait, oh yeah, Sanders won New Hampshire with 70% of the vote and Hillary got the most delegates anyway. Trump won Louisiana but the GOP is giving Ted Cruz the majority of those delegates too. Like the markets when they have a Rigged Casino going, the political Establishment is going all in with stupid corruption, disregarding the consequences of a huge section of the public becoming outraged and determined to do away with the Establishments control of the entire system. But since Trump supporters think all Sanders supporters are Communists and all Sanders supporters think Trump supporters are stupid and/or evil, the Establishment is likely going to win it all this election too again. But maybe before we dont have any elections any more, Working Class people will stop fighting each other and letting the Casino Rules Makers continue to control the game? Bigger surprises have happened in the worlds history. But usually the solution is an 'honest dictator' who makes a public display of punishing the corporations and bankers all the while he depends on them to stay in power.
This is why our colleges dont teach history any more except from a bullshit Marxist perspective. The purpose of putting these ideologues in charge is to destroy any trust the public has in historical references and analogies, and this tactic works. One sure way to end any discussion of politics is to point out that our elections have been worse in every way and that even Obama is to the right of the British Conservative Party's David Cameron or make a comparison to some culture or period that makes the listener go to sleep with boredom..
The clergy are the ones tasked to watch our nations morals and culture and to advise and rebuke us, but they are part of the system of corruption too. So many are pedophiles, cheating on their priestly vows, or just plain old greedy and worse that they protect each other from outside observers and close ranks to defend each other, even if the priest is fucking little kids. And it is not just the Catholic church here, dont kid yourselves. Almost every other branch of religion has the same rates of pedophilia that the Catholic church has. Catholic priests no guiltier of sex abuse than other clergy
Wisconsin-based Church Mutual Insurance Co. has 100,000 client churches and has seen a steady filing of about five sexual molestation cases a week for more than a decade, even though its client base has grown.
“It would be incorrect to call it a Catholic problem,” said Church Mutual’s risk control manager, Rick Schaber. “We do not see one denomination above another. It’s equal. It’s also equal among large metropolitan churches and small rural churches.”
Iowa-based Guide One Center for Risk Management, which insures more than 40,000 congregations, also said Catholic churches are not considered a greater risk or charged higher premiums.
“Our claims experience shows this happens evenly across denominations,” said spokeswoman Melanie Stonewall.
Of course everyone knows that our sports heroes all cheat, the ones regarded as more honest are only a shade from 'just not caught yet' in the public mind, but we dont think about these things. All our kids say they are not going out and getting high/drunk and having sex, and we parents believe them, forgetting our own behavior at their age, until Sally gets pregnant, then we often kill the unborn baby and pretend it wasnt really human or couldnt feel the knife as its limbs were ripped off and its skull crushed without any pain killer.
The character in the movie 'The Big Short' known as Mark Baum was based on a guy named Eisner, and I doubt Eisner said this, but maybe he did. In the movie Mark Baum said it and it is a classic line, that people should realize is the true modern horror tale:
"We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food. Even baseball…
For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south.
When the hell did we forget all that?"
Maybe we forgot all that when we decided that markets are more efficient if left unregulated. That we could trust greedy amoral men with our nations Treasury and savings and decided to watch baseball's cheaters rather than our own nest eggs? Maybe it was when we decided we had entered an unending Golden Age that was fated to last a specific length of time and how we conducted ourselves was of no concern any more?
All I know is that, we have had a good thing going with this country now for over two centuries, and when it came to our generation, we are the first to totally fuck it all up for our kids.
We deserve a special place in Hell for that.
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