COASTAL POST
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april,2000
usa/ponzi.scheme.com
The first part of our multi-million dollar democracy charade is over -
26 million spent on media ads alone -
and now we move , endlessly , into the final phase of the spectacle. It
will waste even more dollars and
energy, but thatís the way it goes in an unworkable situation, if
viewed from the perspective of humanity .
But seen from the narrower standpoint of globalism - the current
euphemism for the rule of capital -
everything is going according to plan.
The gambling casino financial market, with little relation to the
actual production and distribution of goods
and services, continues to reward The House and some of its
crap-shooters with riches. This, as it
bankrupts the source of its wealth; people and other aspects of nature,
which it uses to enrich minorities,
while impoverishing everyone else. Charles Ponzi was years ahead of his
time.
Ponzi, arrested back in the 1920s as a criminal, merely created a small
sample of the idiocy now working
on a global level. He got people to invest in properties that were
nothing more than their own
investments , which he used to pay them at ridiculous interest rates.
Once he ran out of gullible people
who believed the lie, his scam came to an end. Upper class swindlers
resented an immigrant upstart
encroaching on their territory, and dubbed his efforts at imitating them
a ìponzi schemeî.
If Ponzi were alive now, heíd be one of our new millionaires . In an
environment filled with investors who
rush to finance companies that show nothing but losses, the ponz would
be happier than a pig in deep
do-do. Which is the substance market groupies - the smaller ones - are
likely to be buried in, if this
financial balloon bursts.
But the insane spectacle goes on. And while a minority cleans up on the
casinoís glorified ponzi scheme,
society continues to be torn apart by even greater institutional and
social horrors. Among the most
recent:
An innocent, unarmed black man in New York was killed by white
policemen, and in a search for individual
vengeance, people sought their punishment. Disappointment at their
exoneration found little focus given
to the system of racism and poverty that creates ghettos and violence.
Then a six year old child shot and killed a classmate. Again,
vengeful thoughts directed at parents who
could let a child have a gun, with little concern for the miserable
circumstances of the gun-toting childís
life , and the tens of thousands of children who live like him.
The police, like the army, have the jobs of maintaining law and order,
frequently under conditions that defy
law and prevent order. Whether slaughtering foreigners who made the
mistake of being born in the wrong
country, or killing citizens whose mistake was living in the wrong
neighborhood and having the wrong skin
color, they do the dirtiest work that maintains the status quo .
When they act out societyís worst realities , they are often identified
as the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the real villains enjoy lives of leisure class luxury, and
scam the great mass of unarmed
servants into seeking retribution from the terrible armed servants who
would commit such atrocities.
The young black man in New York was among the 25% of workers in the
U.S. who earn less than eight
dollars an hour in this booming economy. He was an African national, a
street peddler, and he lived in a
neighborhood of latins and blacks, described as a ìcombat zoneí by some
authorities. Major urban areas
of this nation look much like the third world these days, though most
white critics of police violence donít
know this. The only white people familiar with these parts of America
are the police.
The young African manís life here was similar to what it would be in the
third world , where people often
sell goods in the street to survive. But his death was all too
distinctly American, even to the conditions
of his murder. Only the number of bullets used made it newsworthy.
Unarmed black men are regularly shot
by the police , but just the most notorious cases reach public
awareness.
The young child who killed his classmate lived in appalling domestic
conditions which are all too common
for children like him, even in this exciting economy of cyber profits .
His father was in jail, where tens of
thousands of young black men languish. These men are not among the
privileged few who receive
upper-class tokens from affirmative action; they are the
under-privileged majority who only get the
lower-class slugs of negative action. The childís mother was living
with another man, labeled a ìcareer
criminalî by authorities who create conditions for evil language more
readily than for decent lives.
What future had that child, and the countless others like him, left
fatherless in a nation that now has more
than 2 million people in its prisons and jails? What are their mothers
to do, without education, without
child care, without welfare , without a father around? Who considers
them? Certainly not the
establishment gas bags who run for president. Nor the citizens who see
a bad police officer, but are blind
to a rotten police state.
If he were alive, Charles Ponzi might not know or care about such
things. Heíd simply become a dot.com
entrepreneur and exploit his share of the greed and immorality that
continues, in part because we seek
individual scapegoats instead of confronting social horror .
This ponzi scheme of an economy is at the root of the injustice
financed by its profits. When citizens
confront this sham and create a real democracy, that economic scheme
may finally come to an end. Until
then, racism, environmental destruction and casino profits will
continue flowing, like so much polluted
water and poisoned air.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
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Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on
other terms, in any medium, requires the
consent of the author .
frank scott
http://www.marin.cc.ca.us/~frank
email: [log in to unmask]
225 laurel place, san rafael ca. 94901
(415)457 2415 fax(415)457 4791
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