Today I looked at my employee Health Insurance update for 2011.
I should be grateful that I get a fairly good insurance benefit through my employer but somehow feel that the whole thing is a big scheme to get large amount of money out of my pocket and not give me much in return.
I will note here that my benefit costs the equivalent of $5-6 an hour if broken down as a rate of pay in a full time equivalent of 2080 hours per year. I note that for a family of four the rate goes up to about $7-8 per hour for a full time equivalent.
My thinking here is that how stupid are we in this society? Minimum wage is now set at about what? I know the Federal level is not even $7 per hour, in Washington state it is up about $9 per hour. Wow, and now all you need is for the corporate fascist state to say hey buddy, you must buy health insurance by law!? Yeah, sure RIGHT. How can anyone buy a reasonable health insurance for their family if the policy costs more than they make? Yeah I know for the lawyers and bankers and corporate executives such things are petty cash but for the majority of us out here $7 bucks an hour levy for health insurance is pretty damn hefty.
I think if we will not do universal health and tax all income to pay for it then we need to get that minimum wage up. Up a lot. Like to 28 dollars an hour. Think about it. If you have to pay $7 bucks an hour for insurance, and then 8% to Social Security or and 15-25% for income tax, you would only have about $10 an hour left over, then if a cheap dive 2 bedroom apartment is going for like $1000 a month, then your left with $600 a month to buy food, pay utilities and keep the car going.
I spend about $500 a month on food and I am just a single guy trying to get by shopping at Costco.
Really even $28 an hour is an absurdly low minimum wage. How could anyone make it on even that?
With my benefits I make about $29 an hour right now. SO whoop dee doo I should thank the capitalist world that I am so rich and so blessed because most of my fellow travelers are making far less. Hooray. Or actually, I am stuck in a bind and now in this great exceptional nation $29 bucks an hour is just about enough crumbs to scrape by and if I loose my job or get sick or my employer cuts my wages and benefits I am basically screwed and will be selling my home and car and moving in with relatives.
So how about it folks how ya doing out there in the richest most exceptionalist nation on earth?
And how the hell does this have anything to do with green economics???
Green Phoenix Points:
If the global minimum wage were $30 per hour, then the consequences are very green.
People with money don't have to destroy their local environment to get by.
People who have money can get educated and education leads to less child birth.
People who have money can buy stuff that you make or services that you provide.
If workers globally had a high base then corporations would be forced to innovate not exploit.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
WikiLeaks
I would like to post my 100% support of WikiLeaks
I don't think most people have any idea what is going on around the world or in the United States at all.
When the facts are brought up about how many secret service agencies there are connected to the US government (22?), the money spent on such activities (80 Billion?), the number of foreign bases (700-800?), and what exactly is going on with the military and related activities (1 trillion plus annually?) most US citizens shut down and assume the person speaking of such things is a lunatic as they CANNOT BELIEVE THE TRUTH.
How can anyone know what is going on if there are 20 plus secret service agencies doing things under the covers with new agendas every time some top level power change happens? How can a democracy function with such operations? How can we know who or what our government is really supporting and what is or is not the truth? With a know 80 Billion estimate on secret service budgets in 2010 it is at the point of total surreal insanity. Think about it 80 billion of taxpayer money to spend on screwing around with other peoples governments. A corporation in the US can buy a congressman or a Senator for a paltry few million. With 80 Billion at it's disposal the US government can easily secretly take care of most governments on the planet quite handily especially considering the possibility of leverage. It is sort of like a company with revenue of 800 billion dollars having 80 billion left over to play havoc with as the government just dips in to taxpayer funds and keeps on refunding these activities with impunity regardless of the consequences or the blowback.
How can anyone know what is going on or make any rational choices about anything if there is this huge underlying culture of international behind the scenes rackateering and fixing and corruption of all things in order to meet some unknown political and economic agenda of those running these operations? And in fact how can we even know that these operations are being run for our benfit? Maybe these operations have been comandeered by foreign Internatinal corporations at this point and the main mission is to run the USA into the ground for the better profit of the global capitalist structure?
You might think I am paranoid or have conspiracy theory problems but really think about it, do some research, look at the results of US actions..... I might support US global empire if I saw good results, if I saw a booming US economy, an emergent destructive creation of a new green economy, a blossoming of human rights, and a rapidly improving environment for life on earth, but to date I see a spiral down for the US of the type that I would think wow our worst enemies could not have engineered a better path toward demise if they could be right there in the halls of power designing the strategy themselves.
The best defense of true power is 100% open information democracy. We are not at war with Iraq, or with Iran, or with Afghanistan, or some international terrorist organization, we are occupiers and oppressors of much of the world and our bases and secret services scattered far and wide doing mayhem and mischief everywhere, we are the offensive, offending, occupying, force everywhere. But no one knows this because no one pays any attention to what is really going on.
So I say thank you Wiki Leaks and Julian Asange. Please get the facts out there and keep on getting them out.
I don't think most people have any idea what is going on around the world or in the United States at all.
When the facts are brought up about how many secret service agencies there are connected to the US government (22?), the money spent on such activities (80 Billion?), the number of foreign bases (700-800?), and what exactly is going on with the military and related activities (1 trillion plus annually?) most US citizens shut down and assume the person speaking of such things is a lunatic as they CANNOT BELIEVE THE TRUTH.
How can anyone know what is going on if there are 20 plus secret service agencies doing things under the covers with new agendas every time some top level power change happens? How can a democracy function with such operations? How can we know who or what our government is really supporting and what is or is not the truth? With a know 80 Billion estimate on secret service budgets in 2010 it is at the point of total surreal insanity. Think about it 80 billion of taxpayer money to spend on screwing around with other peoples governments. A corporation in the US can buy a congressman or a Senator for a paltry few million. With 80 Billion at it's disposal the US government can easily secretly take care of most governments on the planet quite handily especially considering the possibility of leverage. It is sort of like a company with revenue of 800 billion dollars having 80 billion left over to play havoc with as the government just dips in to taxpayer funds and keeps on refunding these activities with impunity regardless of the consequences or the blowback.
How can anyone know what is going on or make any rational choices about anything if there is this huge underlying culture of international behind the scenes rackateering and fixing and corruption of all things in order to meet some unknown political and economic agenda of those running these operations? And in fact how can we even know that these operations are being run for our benfit? Maybe these operations have been comandeered by foreign Internatinal corporations at this point and the main mission is to run the USA into the ground for the better profit of the global capitalist structure?
You might think I am paranoid or have conspiracy theory problems but really think about it, do some research, look at the results of US actions..... I might support US global empire if I saw good results, if I saw a booming US economy, an emergent destructive creation of a new green economy, a blossoming of human rights, and a rapidly improving environment for life on earth, but to date I see a spiral down for the US of the type that I would think wow our worst enemies could not have engineered a better path toward demise if they could be right there in the halls of power designing the strategy themselves.
The best defense of true power is 100% open information democracy. We are not at war with Iraq, or with Iran, or with Afghanistan, or some international terrorist organization, we are occupiers and oppressors of much of the world and our bases and secret services scattered far and wide doing mayhem and mischief everywhere, we are the offensive, offending, occupying, force everywhere. But no one knows this because no one pays any attention to what is really going on.
So I say thank you Wiki Leaks and Julian Asange. Please get the facts out there and keep on getting them out.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
derivatives and Currency
Supose I sell you 10 dollars for 11 dollars, and charge you a fee for the service, and you charge me a fee for taking the risk on buying 10 dollars for 11 dollars because 10 dollars might only be worth 9 dollars tomorrow, then You sell me 10 dollars for 11 dollars and we both get the fees and then we ramp this up really really big and trade back and forth millions of times a day and now we are making millions of dollars a day right???
And then one day we get everyone on the planet to buy in to this scheme and they all dump large sums of money into the scheme. Yeah! Good times.
A recent article in the New York Times estimated that the trade in Derivatives last year was on the order of 600 Trillion dollars. Ho Hum. Boring. Global Domestic Product depending on the source was something like 60 Trillion Dollars. Currency Trading was on the order of 3.98 Trillion per day, or over 1,000 trillion per year.
So rationally every dollar of product or service produced gets traded by the bankers more than 25 times. Is that not a comforting thought?
This stuff is not capitalism it is anti-capitalism.
The same holds true for the stock markets of today. It is absurd that a large percentage of any companies stock changes hands daily and the so called value of companies goes up and down by a large amount daily while at the same time nothing has changed at all.
Allowing absurd trading schemes and rapid trading back and forth by computers and mathematical formula is not capitalism, it is a parasitic plague of anti capitalism.
The process of which leads to the destruction of the real wealth that has been produced.
A. Siphon off huge percentages of all the wealth produced into the marketplace.
B. Trade stuff back and forth in a frenzy of insanity producing huge rises in values of stuff on paper
C. Get the population to keep pouring capital into the ponzi scheme instead of investing in real things.
D. Since nothing is being produced but a lot of BS. eventually everthing caves in and the artifificial wealth is evaporated along with a whole lot of what could have been real wealth invested in real initiatives.
E. Announce huge crises and make more rules to funnel more wealth to the process next time around.
F. Have the media clowns announce how free markets will surely be a success but that we must buck up now and suck it in and get through these bad times.
G. Find a new angle and get the process rolling again.
The process destroys real wealth and forces the economy into ever more and more convoluted ways of creating artificial wealth and ever less efficient use of resources and into a system where destruction of and waste of all things is the highest and best use and any good and sustainable practice is shunned as non productive and stupid.
And then one day we get everyone on the planet to buy in to this scheme and they all dump large sums of money into the scheme. Yeah! Good times.
A recent article in the New York Times estimated that the trade in Derivatives last year was on the order of 600 Trillion dollars. Ho Hum. Boring. Global Domestic Product depending on the source was something like 60 Trillion Dollars. Currency Trading was on the order of 3.98 Trillion per day, or over 1,000 trillion per year.
So rationally every dollar of product or service produced gets traded by the bankers more than 25 times. Is that not a comforting thought?
This stuff is not capitalism it is anti-capitalism.
The same holds true for the stock markets of today. It is absurd that a large percentage of any companies stock changes hands daily and the so called value of companies goes up and down by a large amount daily while at the same time nothing has changed at all.
Allowing absurd trading schemes and rapid trading back and forth by computers and mathematical formula is not capitalism, it is a parasitic plague of anti capitalism.
The process of which leads to the destruction of the real wealth that has been produced.
A. Siphon off huge percentages of all the wealth produced into the marketplace.
B. Trade stuff back and forth in a frenzy of insanity producing huge rises in values of stuff on paper
C. Get the population to keep pouring capital into the ponzi scheme instead of investing in real things.
D. Since nothing is being produced but a lot of BS. eventually everthing caves in and the artifificial wealth is evaporated along with a whole lot of what could have been real wealth invested in real initiatives.
E. Announce huge crises and make more rules to funnel more wealth to the process next time around.
F. Have the media clowns announce how free markets will surely be a success but that we must buck up now and suck it in and get through these bad times.
G. Find a new angle and get the process rolling again.
The process destroys real wealth and forces the economy into ever more and more convoluted ways of creating artificial wealth and ever less efficient use of resources and into a system where destruction of and waste of all things is the highest and best use and any good and sustainable practice is shunned as non productive and stupid.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The 10% Rant. It really is free
This is the simple thought experiment where we can see that 90% of the bean counters cost is not the cost of the item or service but is what I call usery-tax-excess and liesure class siphon off of value.
Bean Counters = The IRS, Accountants, Bankers of all Stripes, Wall Street, Insurance, Corporations of Any type, Any jurisdiction that taxes you.
Basically you work and produce something for example a widget, and you produce widgets enough to supply many uses for widgets to many others. The cost per widget to you is 1 unit of exchange and you need to get perhaps 2 units to cover all your inputs and pay yourself so you charge 2, but in the process of our world the input costs are mostly tax, interest, and the profit of all those in the supply chains of everything you need to make widgets. We could easily surmise that any product or service has a supply chain at least five or ten steps long, for example resource extraction, transportation, resale of commosities, refining, manufacture, resale and shipping and final retail sale, and going back to any step each step had its own supply chain round and round and back to the original chipping of a stone arrow millenia ago, Each step has to pay taxes and usery fees and each step has a more or less fair profit extracted in many forms. If on average we pay a total of 25% tax and 5% usery then in step one the price is inflated by 30%, but everyone at every step has to inflate the price of everything in order to cover the tax and usery so at the bottom essentially the cost of things is very low and the taxes and fees we impose are the majority of the price of everything.
I shall make the preposterous suggestion that all things are in fact free and the system of taxation and usery is merely an invention, a hoax perpetrated on all of us to allow those in power to reign over us and claim a shortage of needed necessities at all times and the fiction that there is not enough to go around.
Without tax and without usery no one would have to work beyond supplying there own needs if they so wished and the class of persons that produce nothing could not extract the surplus value from others.
The current model causes a block of useful sustainable production and forces a huge production of not useful things like global war machines, huge oppressive financial institutions, large taxation and regulation structures and gigantic amounts of work on every ones life complying with meaningless non productive tax, regulatory rules at every level of society, and burdensome financial rules.
Bean Counters = The IRS, Accountants, Bankers of all Stripes, Wall Street, Insurance, Corporations of Any type, Any jurisdiction that taxes you.
Basically you work and produce something for example a widget, and you produce widgets enough to supply many uses for widgets to many others. The cost per widget to you is 1 unit of exchange and you need to get perhaps 2 units to cover all your inputs and pay yourself so you charge 2, but in the process of our world the input costs are mostly tax, interest, and the profit of all those in the supply chains of everything you need to make widgets. We could easily surmise that any product or service has a supply chain at least five or ten steps long, for example resource extraction, transportation, resale of commosities, refining, manufacture, resale and shipping and final retail sale, and going back to any step each step had its own supply chain round and round and back to the original chipping of a stone arrow millenia ago, Each step has to pay taxes and usery fees and each step has a more or less fair profit extracted in many forms. If on average we pay a total of 25% tax and 5% usery then in step one the price is inflated by 30%, but everyone at every step has to inflate the price of everything in order to cover the tax and usery so at the bottom essentially the cost of things is very low and the taxes and fees we impose are the majority of the price of everything.
I shall make the preposterous suggestion that all things are in fact free and the system of taxation and usery is merely an invention, a hoax perpetrated on all of us to allow those in power to reign over us and claim a shortage of needed necessities at all times and the fiction that there is not enough to go around.
Without tax and without usery no one would have to work beyond supplying there own needs if they so wished and the class of persons that produce nothing could not extract the surplus value from others.
The current model causes a block of useful sustainable production and forces a huge production of not useful things like global war machines, huge oppressive financial institutions, large taxation and regulation structures and gigantic amounts of work on every ones life complying with meaningless non productive tax, regulatory rules at every level of society, and burdensome financial rules.
From A Master
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
One definition of insanity: Repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different
results.
Any Intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex...it takes a touch of genius
and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
One definition of insanity: Repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different
results.
Any Intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex...it takes a touch of genius
and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
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