It needs a title – Tired of being told I’m a dishwasher

Tags

cricketdiane, personal stories, poverty in America

I’m rather tired of being told I’m not working, nor contributing, not doing anything of value nor making an effort. Look across this blog and it is obvious that these things didn’t simply get up online on the blog posts by themselves.

– cricketdiane

***

The America the Beautiful Show website –

http://www.americathebeautifulshow.com/

The CricketDiane – Cricket House Studios website –

http://www.cricketdiane.com/

The CricketDiane Weblog – over 2000 entries

(and I haven’t been talking about what I ate for breakfast)

https://cricketdiane.wordpress.com/

***

Now, in case you’re wondering why I said this, let me explain briefly. After all this work and massive work sitting here in my apartment which is behind the scenes of this blog – I’ve been told again by my family to go get a job washing dishes if I expect to make any money. And, I don’t like it because first of all, housekeeping would never get me a seal of approval, second of all – it doesn’t pay enough to keep me from being homeless and third of all, it completely ignores all of the other things I could possibly do with the limited time I have remaining in my life. Yes, I would rather sell everything I have sitting here at a yard sale, dump the rest and go be homeless or turn to stealing for a living.

I’m not qualified to be a street sweeper. I do about the worst job washing floors and standing to wash dishes would likely insure my rent would never get paid because I would be fired in short order from mucking it up. I’ve tried to be a waitress and cost the owners about $30 when the plates of Asian lobster cuisine went flying across the floor. It is not my forte.

But, those are the jobs I am to go find to call it work and make some money according to my parents. These other things have no value and cannot make any money no matter what I do with them according to these people I’ve been stuck with all my life.

Well, I’m here to tell you this one thing –

I think there are a lot of people in this country that believe the same thing as they do. I think there are neighbors and friends of mine that believe the same thing and people in churches and government leadership that also have no appreciation for the work I’ve done. That’s what I think.

And, yet – I’m supposed to be a good sport and consider a good attitude about all this. Well, I’ve considered a good attitude about all this – I’ve decided they are wrong and that money is not the only judge of value. There had to be some usefulness somewhere in all of it and I’m working now on turning those things into working capital. And, if I can’t this time – I’ll put a yard sale listing on craigslist and let people come in to buy the durn paintbrushes for a dollar, the science files can go in the trash and the designs can be thrown out into the street again as they already have nine other times in my life.

When I was watching the “Intelligence Squared Debate” on bloomberg early this morning, I think it was Lawrence Korb that repeated twice, the statement “Undermine their Narrative, Undermine their Narrative” and I thought, now wait – that’s what I’ve been living with in my Republican conservative family nearly all my life.

How did I get to be their enemy? How did I get to be the enemy of my community and the conservatives before I ever started speaking out against them? Why did they make me the “bad guy” to be blamed for every last shred of the problems in the US and in Georgia and in Cobb County and in the national budget deficits? Why did they exclude me and then use me as a place of blame when I’ve had less access to resources than nearly anyone? Why is that? Why does it even make sense to anyone?

But after working for many, many years for 16 hours a day for often, 7 days a week to make a contribution, to create solutions, to become better educated, to make things and create options that never existed before, and writing, and researching, and doing the computer things necessary to bring them online, and telling people about it, and making notes, and keeping up with the news, and working to learn more about how to do business successfully – I’ve no understanding of why I’m being told I have nothing to offer of value by my own family, my community, my friends, my state and my nation, including anyone in it and that means, Republicans, conservatives, church people, and Tea Party braggarts, too.

As if it isn’t bad enough to have done all this work without ever making the money from it which in anyone else’s hands it probably would’ve made – why should I have to endure constant self-esteem damaging attacks from nearly everywhere I turn and at the most unexpected times from my own family?

From what I can see – even in the Intelligence Squared Debate, one of the Republican cronies at the table had to work into the limited opportunities to say something (after all, it was about the US having its global wings clipped and not the national budget), that, the biggest danger to national security is “entitlements” and he said, “but nobody in Washington wants to talk about that.” He doesn’t look at the corporate welfare as “entitlements” and he, along with his Republican conservatives at Karl Roves’ massively well-funded political action committee, don’t look at “entitlements” as those given to Israel at $7 million dollars A DAY for military equipment and training, plus no telling how much every day for humanitarian and social / civic funding. That isn’t considered an “entitlement” although nearly every nation in the Mideast is getting one of that similar neighborhood of millions per day from our tax money.

Their ideas of “entitlements” don’t include the TALF money given away, the TARP money used to bail out banks and Wall Street firms, the other programs that bought toxic assets from those corporations, the massive staffs and paychecks being given to Congressional offices and Senate offices, the Treasury Department hiring people to manage the economic / financial debacle with salaried employees to help with buying the toxic assets being given on the high end of the stratosphere, including the $500,000 a month that was paid to a Wall Street firm every month for a year to tell them when to sell the toxic assets of General Motors. Nor do they count as “entitlements,” the over $185 BILLION Dollars given to AIG without Congressional accord, without any vote and without any authority to do so with our tax money.

They don’t look at it as “entitlements” when their own health care is subsidized, their own private action committees funded, when they get grants or get them for their own children and friends, nor when they give billions of dollars away for various industries and corporations to be subsidized when they are already profitable. There are not considerations of what these massive outlays of money have done to this nation’s insolvency. Those things are not blamed. Neither are the hundreds of millions paid to Fannie and Freddie executives including AFTER they worked there and the place went to hell in a handbasket.

No, it has to be told on every Christian broadcast, right-wing talk show, every hour of FoxNews opinion broadcasting, every Tea Party conservatives’ opportunity for airtime, and every email forwarding right-wing conservative opinion making operative, that the real danger to America are only those in our families who don’t do it “their way”, don’t think about it “their way”, don’t look at it “their way,” agree with things being “their way, ” act as “they want,” don’t dress and look as “they want”, don’t live in the manner as “they want,” don’t think as “they want”. And, that includes me and everyone in America like me – whatever that is and whoever it may be.

I guess I really should be angrier about this. I’ve run out of excuses for why people don’t hire me. I’ve run out of excuses for why people will give millions of dollars to other people doing the same things I’m doing, creating the kinds of things I’ve created, designing the level of things backed up by research that I’ve created, writing the degree of quality things that I’ve been writing for many years. I don’t know why that is anymore and as many excuses as I have made for the multitude of reasons why my community, and my state, and in fact, my nation’s businesses and leaders exclude me – none of them really have ever made any sense, but they do that. It is probably the way I look, I’ve said. It is probably because I don’t own the kinds of clothes I’m supposed to have in order to be doing this kind of work. And, then I said, well – maybe these people can’t know what I can do unless it is obvious by doing it and letting them see it – so I did that and the blog is certainly evidence of it.

But, now – I’ve run out of excuses for why a single chair for their offices is worth many times more to them than I am and than any of my work might ever be. I have no more excuses to offer for why it is like that in America, or why Mubarak and Qaddafi as sadistic and horrific as they are – could be treated as friends and I have been treated like an enemy and an “undesirable” by my state and community. I don’t get that. In fact, I’m not sure it is even worth trying to understand that anymore. It is more insane than I am and more evil than I ever have had the ability to be.

– cricketdiane

***

My mother explained to me a couple nights ago, that I need to do whatever it takes to make money except for spreading my legs. But, in America and especially in the Great Republican Sovereign State of Georgia which is predominantly Christian, Conservative and Republican – the only use for a woman in this territory is that.

Maybe its why she thought to include that first on the list of things “not to use” for making money. Okay to give it away – but don’t do that one for money.

Thanks, mom.

***

So, I added a couple things and fixed a typo. And, walked to the store and back. Took some nifty photos of the flowers in blossom on the way to put on the cricketdiane.com site. And, I thought about it, and I thought some more about it. And, so far today – the computer has only crashed twice trying to load a gallery on the godaddy site where cricketdiane.com is hosted with photographs of daffodils. And, I’ve thought some more about it.

I’ve watched a bit of the news that is covered over today with what it means to be bipolar and about stories of mental illness. And, I’ve decided that sounds good – it would have to be easier to live in a mental hospital than this. And, after thirty years of Republican rule – I would have to say, my life is really never going to get any better anyway. Someone should’ve just told me that in the first place. In a country where they worship Karl Rove, and people like Qaddafi and Mubarak and fawn over BP even after they’ve killed hundreds of people by considering the cost to be too great to operate safely compared to what they’d have to pay out if many people were killed, among other things – how could I possibly expect to be considered an asset?

Where Goldman Sachs screws everybody on both sides of the table, steals tax money, creates evil and conniving strategies for getting ahead then gets treated like royalty, what could any one of us expect?

Can people (including my family) honestly tell me that somehow the worth and value of my efforts suddenly changes the moment it makes $40 million dollars? And, that money means that when I was doing it day in and day out – suddenly it IS considered work instead of being considered a waste of time and a worthless one at that? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?

And, I’m supposed to believe that someone’s efforts that are the same as mine which are making money for them makes theirs more valuable, more credible and more worthwhile? Is that what this means? Of does it in fact mean I simply need to stop working at this and go bag groceries or wash dishes, however many weeks that will make a few dollars before they fire me?

That is something I considered when walking to the store, that people think if I can be given a sign to paint and do it successfully, then they will give me a thing more complicated to do – like a painting of their house and then if I can do that, they will give me a chance to do a painting of their dog. Well, I hate to say it – but I’m not a sign painter.

– cricketdiane

***

Did you know that I started playing chess when I was three years old and taught adults to play chess when I was only five years old, so I could grow up to be told my only value is to wash floors? Did you know that if you are a woman in America, it will always be to watch men with half the education, a third of the knowledge, a fifth of the conscience and only a tenth of the willingness to continue being educated – make hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing as little of value as possible while being paid for it? That is America.

Angelo Mozillo has value. It has been explained to me. He has a right to do whatever he wants to whomever he wants in whatever way he wants, because he is a good American and I’m the great cause of all America’s woes financially and socially. That’s because he made money screwing Americans out of their money, out of their life savings, out of their American dream, and out of their homes – and I don’t know what is wrong with me that I just can’t do that too so I can garner the respect and freedom he is given.

***

The other day, when the budget cuts were being blasted down the throats of America by the Republicans in Congress, I wrote an A-Z and then using the Greek Alphabet – the alpha and the omega of why the Republicans and conservatives are the exact opposite of what they publicly claimed. And, it only matters to me because I have already suffered over thirty years of their crap, watching my nation go down the drain at their hands along the way – that I feel it necessary to be saying something about it these last couple years.

I am repeating it here starting with a couple comments I made just before starting the entire ABC’s of why people serving the Republicans simply have not understood what they are serving.

Here they are –

***

Karl Rove, still running the country from the pig seat – is on FoxNews now explaining how everyone in America is to think about everything

***

Grass Roots people may have gathered for the Tea Party but professional ultra conservative right wing political operatives run it & profits

***

How many businesses have been bankrupted by Republican conservative created economic meltdown of 2007 – 2011? More than 800,000? 1 million?

***

It doesn’t matter what I say, it doesn’t add one thing to options available in Washington – they could tax sales of stocks, pay off US debt.

***

The spending problem in the US is that Republicans are keeping a third of our population in jails & institutions, keeping mass numbers poor.

***

Did you know that Republicans over last twenty years, have allowed exploratory mining & drilling in our national parks? check Mark Twain PK

***

Why are Republican conservatives &Tea Party against high-speed rail? Do they just not own stock in it like they do in cars & gas companies?

***

US Budget Cuts to Destroy US Economy & kill off most disadvantaged 41211Finalprogramcuts.pdf (application/pdf Object) http://goo.gl/aVSTY

***

$500 million taken from WIC for babies, children under 5 & pregnant women to have milk fruit juice eggs cereal – bankers given $700 Billion

***

When Republicans conservatives & Tea Party have finished off America this year it will all look like Detroit or Fukushima – US $$ worthless

***

California Republicans have been trying to remove breaks for workers, lunch breaks, and all safe work place regulations for yrs & yrs & yrs

***

New York State, they removed funds from general fund for paying off credit default swaps probably & then declared deficit as if no revenues

***

150 yrs after the Civil War & Republicans have divided us into 50 sovereign nation states instead of one great nation & made them sovereign.

***

You know what the word is for small central government? the word is  king , ruler , aristocracy , monarch , but basically the word is  king

***

$185 Billion Dollars to AIG without even batting an eye or crossing a t – but America’s women, children, babies aren’t worth it to Congress

***

They sure have made fools of the elderly who voted the Republicans conservatives & Tea Party into Washington – now elderly are getting axed

***

Republicans already made cuts to the programs to help with heating bills for the elderly in the winter, cut programs for fans in the summer

***

They’ve cut housing programs and assisted living programs from HUD, cut funding for food programs to the poor, elderly & disabled, to babies

***

Were Republicans right when they said we had to give $700 Billion Dollars to banks because otherwise credit wouldn’t flow? Where are loans?

***

If Kyl weren’t getting $200,000 yr to work in Washington representing special interests as elected Republican crony, he’d be what?

***

David_Gergen, The budget cuts you & your intellectually inbred Washington friends have foisted upon Americans is bullying & it took jobs .

***

A credible plan to pay off US Debt completely in less than a yr is to put 10 cents tax on every dollar of stocks, bonds, CDOs, cds sold

***

Charts of average income pay in US were $55,000 a yr – turns out reality is $33,000 a yr – Why does Congress get paid $179,000 per year each

***

Tomorrow, Congress will vote to make more Americans homeless, take milk fruit & cheese off tables of children, remove more jobs from America
(they already did that on Friday, when they passed budget cuts)

***

We didn’t send Democrats to Washington incl President to work w Republicans We voted to stop Republicans asinine policies destroying America

***

Charles Wolf, Jr.: The Facts About American ‘Decline’ – WSJ.com – In relative terms, the story is not always as good… online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…

***
storiedstrategy Dr John Ortner
Aspire, achieve, teach: Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail – R. Emerson

response made back to the above twitter comment – (by me)

@storiedstrategy I have wasted my life believing & acting on that crap – people need to look at Snooky as an example of what works in 2011.

***

And, that is the truth.

***

Republicans were so worried about Lehman, AIG taking $40 billion out of US economy in short time by failing – now using US budget to do that

***

Here’s what happens – Republicans get Dems to pass these budget cuts, then when people suffer & communities devastated – blame Obama for it

***

I am not the one who used US taxpayer money to arm, train & give sophisticated equipment to Qaddafi known to be unstable, psychotic & vile

***

Taking money from the poor is stupid, all you’re doing is making criminals out of otherwise decent Americans

***

Why not take money from where there is money – like the US & London stock markets whose volumes trading numbers in the billions a day?

***

Republicans & their crony friends, Wall Street raiders took long built companies, tore them apart robbed pension funds & enriched themselves

***

Then, Republicans determined to give banks, hedge funds & Wall Street our State Revenues & US Taxpayer funds to play leveraged gambling with
5 hours ago

***

And after those finance gurus of Wall Street finished with it – all of our state & federal treasury moneys weren’t just gone, we owed for it

***

If #Republicans wanted increased jobs – wouldn’t have destroyed US economy in 2008, & wouldn’t be taking jobs from economy with budget cuts

(including, I might add – unfunding the high-speed rail projects and removing $38 billion dollars from the US economy over the next 5 and a half months.)

***

If #Republican’s feed the wealthy plan had worked, there would be no poor & no need for increased numbers of businesses & jobs & revenues

***

We are the children that they left the national debt to deal with – all the way back from WWII and rebuilding – from Nixon, Reagan & Bush x2

***

My guess is – conservative right wingers that have run this nation into the ground never looked around & noticed the number of bankruptcies

***

So after the Wall Street raiders cheated & robbed pension funds, Republicans let them & now want the money paid into Medicare & taxes
4 hours ago

***

How many Senators? 100? How many Representatives at $179,000 each plus staff members times $157,000 a yr each plus how much per diem? Hmmm?

***

(By the way, did you know that the amount of money spent on liquor for a full bar of premium brands made available on any flight for the Congressmen and Senators and paid for by US taxpayers is the same amount of money given to a person on social security to live for a year?)

***

?REVENUE is the problem with the federal and states’ budgets – the new catchphrase by #Republicans is a lie – tax stocks pay off US debt now

***

Whatever conservative thinktank or pr firm came up with current #Republican nonsense phrase  revenue isn’t the problem  fails to see US debt

***

I noticed that census figures show avg salaries in America are about $33,000 /yr rather than $55,000 /yr but govt charts haven’t changed

(When decisions were being made every year over the past five years, including last year – the assumption was made that the average American was making $55,000 a year – when in fact 90% of the nation’s income paying jobs do not pay anywhere near the downside of that amount.)

***

If that is correct & majority of Americans are NOT making $55,000 per year then the US has a REVENUES problem – axing programs won’t fix it

***

#Republicans don’t see a Revenue problem because they are getting paid $200,000 /yr plus their investments, benefits & perks at our expense

***

If every sale, purchase, trade, swap of a share of stock paid 10% of that dollar value to US Treasury, we wouldn’t be broke – no cuts req

***

When Mayor Bloomberg & Governor Cuomo cut funding to programs for homeless & work advantage / housing programs in NYC – they made more homeless

***

Now, while US builds schools in Afghanistan w tax dollars & everywhere else, our schools are relieved of tax money & more are homeless in US

***

Here are the ABC’s of Truth – they say the truth matters –

***

A #Republicans are so hungry to get at money given to Social Security, they can’t stand it. They will never be satiated until America is dead

***

B #Republicans have already stolen financial prosperity from Americans, & opportunities for America to excel – when $40 Billion withdraws?

***

C #Republicans made businesses of US jails – has managed to let most criminals (Dugard kidnapper) get away w it while arresting everyone else

***

D #Republicans got us into this mess by letting their rich friends do the same things that were done that caused Great Depression of the 30’s

***

#Might as well do the whole alphabet

***

E #Republicans ran this nation for thirty years & in that time created more wealth for fewer at expense of more people than ever done – ever

***

F #Republicans failed to see future when Savings & Loan debacle happened, when mortgage backed securities failed, when Nixon handshaked China

***

Yes, there is more than enough to do the whole alphabet – in fact, I could probably go through all 26 letters & the Greek alphabet plus some

***

G #Republicans made joke out of  no child left behind  by unfunding it, defunding it, using funds for testing which profited their companies

***

H #Republicans & specifically because of Republicans in every state & federal govt US has greater poverty & homelessness than ever in history

***

I #Republicans have given away national resources to oil companies without fair compensation return, worshiped them, subsidized & protected

***

J #Republicans cut budgets to programs serving poor, elderly, homeless, impoverished, starving, hungry, sick, disabled, children, babies, US

***

K #Republicans & conservatives fawned over Qaddafi, worshiped Mubarak etc knowing they were viciously torturing their own people & unstable

***

L #Republicans were chosen because they worked the Christian churches in America as if there were no God to reckon to at all – that’s wrong.

***

N #Republicans – no matter how good America looks on the outside & on TV – truth is, over half of America lives like a third world country

***

O #Republicans had their chance to do anything with America they wanted & could’ve made life better for all people in America – they didn’t

***

P #Republicans are the shame of our generation because they have wasted lives of more people, killed more people & devastated more than any war

***

Q #Republicans made over our agencies to be corporate servants rather than public watchdogs to suit their own purposes & benefits & profits

***

R #Republicans changed the laws protecting Americans from corporate fraud, from faulty products, for food & drug safety to suit their profit

***

S #Republicans played games with people’s lives around the entire world until we are among the most hated of nations on this earth – obscene

***

T #Republicans scream for dignity & respect while offering not one shred of anything like dignity, respect & equality to America’s citizens

***

U #Republicans have taken & taken & taken – to give to bankers, to give insurance companies, to give oil companies, to give sheiks & tyrants

***

V #Republicans & conservatives worshiped greed, money, vice, gambling, perversions, evil, Wall Street, oil companies, pharmaceuticals, banks

***

W #Republicans have herded Americans through every possible manner of raising taxes, fees, fines, impositions on US citizens in every state

***

X #Republicans gave $700 Billion to Banks, Bought toxic assets from Wall Street, gave $185 Billion to AIG & millions/day foreign militaries

***

Y #Republicans sold our public utilities & water companies to private foreign investments groups & gave away our US owned natural resources

***

Z #Republicans charged with protecting our freedoms – gave those freedoms to corporations while taking them away from the American people

***

And, then I went on through the Greek alphabet – and believe this – there is enough to go through nearly all the alphabets of the entire world and probably still have entries that could be appropriately made about them.

– cricketdiane

***

But, this is the one I find to be the most important of all –
How many businesses have been bankrupted by Republican conservative created economic meltdown of 2007 – 2011? More than 800,000? 1 million?

***

When the Depression of this Century started, I said people would be better off being told they won’t work for the next five years. But – no.

***

When small businesses have losses – there are not federal tax dollars used to bail them out. When families are without jobs – what happens?

***

Could the Republicans be voted into office if only the 1 percent paying to line their pockets were voting? Probably. Those are what matters.
***
CNN just noted Washington D.C. doesn’t have full representation in Congress – well, apparently neither do Americans – only rich represented

***

So, you believe throwing sick, elderly, disabled and poor families and children into the streets serves to make a strong military?

***
Grass Roots people may have gathered for the Tea Party but professional ultra conservative right wing political operatives run it & profits

***
Karl Rove, still running the country from the pig seat – is on FoxNews now explaining how everyone in America is to think about everything

***

Buerkle, Republican NY sitting on CSPAN talking s**t about giving banks & businesses assurances to get off billions they are holding & lend

***
It would be worth watching CSPAN as the Republican run House of Representatives vote on budget cuts to decimate US economy & poor & elderly

***

It only takes a sales tax of 10 cents on the dollar for every stock traded, sold, or purchased and US debt will be paid off in six months.

***

Republicans worked the US for 30 yrs – if it worked so well, why do they have to lie in order to get the job? to get money? to get elected?

***

banks stole homes from everyone who cared about having them & refused to work out mortgages – why should anyone buy them?

***
The US Treasury had given a contract to a Wall Street firm for $500,000 per month to tell them when to sell GM toxic assets – but no to WIC

***

There is no greater sickness of mental health than those in Washington who would decide to destroy the poor, elderly, sick, disabled & young

***

Seeing the volumes of stocks traded, the idea that my gallon of milk is taxed, everything I buy or create is taxed, but no sales tax on them

***
Corporations should be paying 25 cents on the dollar for every single dollar of sales gross made in US, that gives back to where they got it

***
Wasn’t that equal pay for equal work thing passed in 1976? Let’s see, now who has been in charge predominantly since then? Republican consv

***
Wasn’t that equal pay for equal work thing passed in 1976? Let’s see, now who has been in charge predominantly since then? Oh yeah – men.

***
In 2020 women might make the same as men according to CNN from a study – well, let’s all wait to eat or to feed our children until 2020

***
Apparently both Republicans & Democrats only need to keep their rich friends happy to get those donations. They don’t need American’s votes.

***
History will record this moment & every name in US House of Representatives that gives yes to pass budget cuts destroying US children & poor

***
It is so funny for people to amuse themselves making fun of braniacs and nerds until they need their computer fixed or something looked up.

***
Karl Rove & George Bush made it popular to be a  D  student. Who wants a doctor who got a D in anything? Who wants a stupid Congressman?

***
Personally, I didn’t think it was funny when people explained to me that most Americans don’t know how nuclear power plants work nor want to

***
When Republicans, Tea Party groups & conservatives took money from Americans promising good things for America – they were lying as a method

***
Under Republicans, there have been fewer and fewer Americans who will have the American Dream, communities have been destroyed, lives wasted

***
In Atlanta, their answer to homelessness was to remove all the park benches, arrest people for tying their shoes, putting people in jail

***
We have had wars and pestilence that didn’t kill, maim and injure as many people and families as the bad policies of the Republican Party

***
Republicans have been running this country 30 yrs & hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed from food poisoning – its their way

***
1 in 3 hospital patients in America endure medical mistakes, drug errors, secondary infections, stupidity, bad diagnoses & errors since 1999

***
Republicans don’t want a stronger middle class lifestyle for Americans – they want what was done in Detroit to bust unions & US automakers

***
Not only did the Republicans not cut corporate subsidies, industry billions from tax dollars, we own toxic assets of banks & Wall Street

***
Why would anyone build a business in America or make innovations in a nation that encourages raiders to come in and dismantle it, steal it.

***
US Representatives failed to represent the interests of the public good in America while serving only the interests of the wealthy & bankers

***
Right wing conservatives, Tea Party groups, Republican Party conservatives are using Christian churches, Christian people, but are hedonists

***
Republicans are the only people I know who did make it possible to kill people in US w/ salmonella tainted peanut butter, e coli beef & eggs

***
Neither Russia, Japan, China, the Mideast Nations or any other enemy has destroyed as much in America as the Republicans have done in 30 yrs

***
Every successful business that had been built over a hundred years or tens of decades –  fiscal conservatives  & billionaires dismantled

***
Our US infrastructure is crumbling, costs of everything are higher, a third of our population is in jail or institutions, 30 yrs Republicans

***
In thirty years of Republican conservatives running America, there has been more bigotry, domestic violence against women, crime & poverty.

***
The US Congressional House of Representatives has become the US Representatives of the billionaires, bankers, oil companies & Goldman Sachs

***
Tomorrow when the votes are taken passing this horrendous evil upon the poorest of the poor in America, make sure & copy the names of yeses

***
Christianity teaches to care for poor, disabled, homeless, elderly, disadvantaged, sick, disabled, the babies. Republicans act to kill them

***
You know where I found out that hundreds of thousands of Americans are homeless were living in tent cities like the 1930s? In French news

***
They didn’t have to cut any of these budgets US, EU or US States, didn’t want to put sales tax on every share of stock sold of 10 cents/ $1

***
Republicans Tea Party conservatives have money coming from Americans to support them and their radio shows – do they know what the cuts do?

***
After $185 Billion dollars plus being freely given to AIG without consulting America, $700 Billion given banks & Wall Street – now kill poor

***
First, Republicans worshiped heinous beasts like Qaddafi & Mubarak – worshiped a dead brass bull on a New York Street – gave our money away

***

AntiChrist means the exact opposite of every teaching of Christ – finally, Republicans & their Tea Party ultra conservatives have done it

***
Seeing the budget cuts from CNN article listing the amounts being taken away from WIC and other programs – they gave bankers $700 Billion

***
Before I go through the entire Greek, Hebrew & Japanese alphabets, let me say I would only be just getting started – Boehner had CNN airtime

***
Alpha #Republicans #Conservatives #TEA PARTY are all the same dog that don’t hunt nothing – steals from every paycheck, small business, life

***
Beta #Republicans thought that money we sent to Washington was for entertaining their corporate friends, cronies, giving to brutal dictators

***
Let’s all play nice, say Republicans as they throw grandmas out in the street, children & babies into starvation, sickness & poverty to die.

***
I might have said something ugly about #Republicans but it is fact & what they’re doing is far worse than  ugly  – including their intent

***
F #Republicans failed to see future when Savings & Loan debacle happened when mortgage backed securities failed, when Nixon handshaked China
1 hour ago Favorite Reply Delete

***
E #Republicans ran this nation for thirty years & in that time created more wealth for fewer at expense of more people than ever in history

***

Gamma #Republicans created expansive & massive poverty in America where it never existed before & destroyed capitalism through faulty policy

***
Delta #Republicans used the good name of America to rape, pillage, plunder, torture & put police brutality on streets of American cities

***
Epsilon #Republicans took the US Constitution & gave its rights to corporate entities & divided our nation into 50 sovereign nation states

***
Zeta #Republicans have known women were not receiving equal pay for equal work for over thirty yrs, they knew it was the law & unfunded it

***
Eta #Republicans used our churches for fund-raising & perception management to further their own desires, benefits, profits & to get elected

***
Theta #Republicans have installed cameras on every corner, layers upon layers of police in every county, trained brutal secret police, Egypt

***
I don’t need to use alphabets but it does lend itself to the subject – except that there aren’t enough letters in all the world’s languages

***
Iota #Republicans let banks sell loans that had been taken as mortgages & get money for them, then resell them, after paid twice, foreclosed

***
Kappa #Republicans have committed crimes against humanity by defunding food & safety programs yielding suffering & deaths for millions in US

***
Lambda #Republicans have trounced on the meanings of freedom, liberty, individual rights, rights to fair trials, rights to reasonable search

***
Mu #Republicans took the meanings & intent of our laws and twisted them to suit their own versions of reality, used laws to oppress & harass

***
Nu #Republicans have missed the boat on what it is to live as an American because their loyalties serve their common interest of money first

***
Xi #Republicans made it possible for every other nation on earth to buy out from under us what is rightfully our heritage from patent to oil

***
Omicron #Republicans believe themselves to be wiser than the masses, more deserving than you or I, more entitled than anyone else in America

***
Pi #Republicans have taken America from great to bankrupt using their speculation, gambling, destruction of America’s communities, serving $

***
Rho #Republicans & conservatives failed to tell most people in America they were supposed to buy a house for 2 yrs, then sell it & do again

***
Sigma #Republicans have stalemated our President, blacklisted his every effort, refused to work toward solutions & demanded their way alone

***
Tau #Republicans allowed massive pollution with horrendous exotic chemicals from industry to fill our air, water & soil for thirty years

***
Upsilon #Republicans & conservatives used our women, our daughters, our wives & mothers as floor cleaners, as sex slaves, as menial drudges

***
Phi #Republicans believe war is an economic policy choice & sent brightest strongest healthy American young to die or brought home in pieces

***
Chi #Republicans did not make our nation stronger nor safer. Their watch included the greatest horrors ever meted out on Americans – ever.

***
Psi #Republicans & conservatives think they are doing godly work to beat down poor, elderly, infirmed, disabled, different, widowed, orphans

***
Digamma #Republicans introduced policy of exclusion in America & in schools to narrow the numbers of people who could have highest education

***
San #Republicans introduced a class system into America where it doesn’t belong – in complete antithesis of our Constitutional guarantees

***
Qoppa #Republicans sold our patents for innovations, inventions & unique discoveries to our enemies, competitors, foreign national interests

***
Sampi #Republicans & right-wing conservatives have sold away America & our children’s opportunities to live, our opportunities to employment

***
Omega #Republicans serve Anti-Christian values of intolerance, greed, covetousness, lying, cheating, stealing, selfishness, vice, corruption

(***_
When honor is given to the most corrupt among us, when they are set upon high places, when they are regarded with awe & given our riches –

***
What did you think the results would be?

***

Every time the #Republicans reached into America’s pockets & gave that money to ruthless, cruel obscene dictators using it for atrocities –

***
When the #Republicans gave the hard-earned money from our paychecks & small businesses to wealthy bankers and Wall Street firms and the rich

***
And, when they left Americans hungry, homeless, hopeless, uneducated, broken, beaten and without freedom – what did they think would result?

***
What did you think the results would be?

***

As long as Republican Conservatives and the Tea Party’s professional conservative political aristocracy funded by exclusive billionaires clubs and corporations funding PACS to get their friends elected – none of which look at the America people as a valuable part of our nation’s assets, but rather as a bunch of scum in the way of them enjoying a free reign of stealing every national resource, every natural resource, every dime and dollar that has ever been made by anyone in the US – then they will continue their war on all of us.

And, believe this – the report just made by China about the human rights abuses by the United States failed to report 80% of the atrocities in the United States abusing human and civil rights of its citizens that have been perpetrated, devised, instigated and applied by the Republicans in every state they have run into the ground. And, I guarantee – those abuses are far more than high unemployment figures, CIA activities and Abu Graib.

– cricketdiane

***

Now, either the nation of the United States of America was never I and everyone else was taught that it is or the conservative Republicans since Barry Goldwater and Nixon remade the United States into something it was never intended to be and was never right for it, wasn’t good in the final analysis and didn’t build the nation to a stronger foundation. Instead of believing that the first statement is true, since I see all evidence that the US is what I and others were taught that it is supposed to be and what its foundations were intentionally created to be – I think the other statement is the more likely accurate.

The Republicans in their perverse fear and trepidation of change or of sharing power in the country, leaving bigotry and prejudice behind, including women in the society into which they were born as full-fledged first class citizens, and in their paranoia that the war protests challenged their tenuous hold on power, reacted by becoming and by doing every thing that the great demonic powered tyrants of past history have done. And, not even one considering how un-American, un-democratic, un-Christian, intolerant, brutal, perverse, hedonistic, unholy and just plain evil that would be judged by the results of those things.

And, once more – I was not the one who worshiped a dead brass bull on a city street, put billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in the hands of sadistic and psychotic people who tortured their own citizens brutally every day by the thousands, beat homeless people to death on the streets of America, nor taught my children to do any such thing, nor was I the one who took the brightest, best, strongest young adults of our nation to be blown into a million pieces in pursuit of wars to acquire oil rather than finding some other way to do it.

Those weren’t my choices.

– cricketdiane

&***&

I’m not the one who gave away American patents to foreign nations to compete against us. I’m also not the one who allowed corporate raiders to takeover our nation’s established companies using junk bonds and leveraged promises based on the future sell-off of the companies’ long-established resources and assets in order to dismantle it and pocket those resources. I’m not the one who looked the other way when they were doing that and destroying companies and employers whose businesses had been growing for over a hundred years simply to enrich a few by robbing the pension funds, borrowing against any future earnings of the company and selling off all its assets that might make any future earnings even possible.

Then, weren’t they the same ones bankrupting the company and putting all those people and communities into a welfare state – despite those employees having worked as good decent hard-working Americans for years upon years upon years? I wasn’t the one who thought that was a good idea for our nation. That is not “free market capitalism.” That is the destructive power of greed and aristocratic power without fetter.

But, who did do that? Lets’ see – when I look around now – aren’t those the same corporate raiders and their groupies that are setting policy right now in the Republican Party and in the Tea Party and in the conservative thinktanks? Aren’t they they same bunch that have been running this nation into the ground for the last thirty years?  Why, yes it is. How about that.

And, aren’t they the same ones who demanded the Republicans’ budget cuts made this last week, further decimating our economy? And, further decimating America’s families, children, individuals and communities at a time when there simply are no jobs available to get on their feet? And, then aren’t these the same corporate jackasses and Republican conservatives who turned to the American people and blamed them for the entire economic meltdown, the financial fiasco and the entire budget deficit and debt of the United States and every state in the Union?

Why – yes, I believe it is the same ones doing all those things. And Americans pour money on them like it was water. They hover by their radios to hear them tell it the way it is “supposed to be told.” They send their church dollars to support Republicans, their veterans’ dollars to support them, their immigration policy support dollars to support the same ones, their family and community organizations’ dollars to support them and their business donations to underwrite them. And Americans repeat the words their political conservative Republican opinion leaders and operatives say as if those ideas are the gospel truth, no matter if those words are the absolute opposite of reality, which in anyone’s book would make those words, a lie.

***

Budget 2011: Surprise cut in corporation tax ‘will stimulate growth’ – Telegraph

Tags

cricketdiane, solutions to the US and UK debt and budget deficits, UK EU US budget deficit cuts crisis debt

Budget 2011: Surprise cut in corporation tax ‘will stimulate growth’ – Telegraph.

. . . the Chancellor cut corporation tax by two percentage points to 26pc from next month. By 2014, corporation tax will be reduced to 23pc.

They cut education budgets, raised tuitions, cut social programs that people had given into and then gave tax breaks to big corporations – but, if those rich corporations were going to bring jobs in – they would’ve already done it. That has nothing to do with the taxes – it has to be profitable and make business sense or they aren’t going to do it. All they’ve done by cutting the corporate taxes is to make themselves vulnerable to greater losses within their society and subjected their present and future employment pools to decimated educational opportunities that could have made them competitive in the world market.

My comment added to facebook a little while ago – and I mean it too. If those damn corporations were going to do business there, or here – they would already be doing it. Hell, they’ve gotten every last subsidy anyone could be conned into designing for them in both our countries and at the first sign of cheap labor – they went high-tailing it off.

The first sign of there being difficulties with their losses from betting with their corporate funds – they hit both our governments up to cover them and then they took their employment needs elsewhere with our money under their hats and stuffed into their back pockets. And, you really think some more corporate tax breaks will get these companies to do something different? Please, think that through again and see if history doesn’t explain what will happen next.

I swear – as soon as some nuclear scientist or finance geek comes around – everybody’s eyes glaze over, but then they want to know what those specialists were talking about the moment they need the information . . .

Damn, damn, damn.

There are no other words for it.

– cricketdiane

***

While I’m thinking about it – I’ll say it again – if the UK and the USA want to completely pay off their debt and then not have to pay the interest on it which would balance their collective and individual budgets – all they have to do is to place a sales tax on each and every dollar of stocks, bonds, credit default swaps, funky exotic financial products, financial derivatives, re-insurance and commodities trades. Then there wouldn’t be a budget crunch, no budget deficit, no interest on it to be paying for the next 500 years at rates that continuously increase and having to make these supposedly necessary massive cuts to everything.

So, either they want to fix the problem or they don’t. Looks like – they don’t.

– cricketdiane

***

 

Sam’s Exchange: Trading uranium | Columnists | RIA Novosti

Tags

Australia, Chernobyl, cricketdiane, IAEA, nuclear power, nuclear power plants, uranium mining

Sam’s Exchange: Trading uranium | Columnists | RIA Novosti.

There are 440 nuclear reactors operating in the world, with another 70 or so scheduled for completion over the next five years. The trend for nuclear power is on the increase, not just because it is one of the cleanest forms of energy production.  Uranium is either mined underground, or in open pit form, and must undergo certain technological procedures in order to make it useable in nuclear power stations.

Australia produces roughly one-quarter of the world’s uranium, second only to Canada.  Together they produce more than half the world’s supply.  Yet, fewer than 100 companies are involved in trading uranium in the western world, with pricing formulas varying widely.

(etc.)

http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20110309/162929130.html

***

Nice article – interesting perspective. Especially more interesting before they dig up the whole place getting the uranium to export great quantities worldwide. Hmmm………..

– cricketdiane

***

Top Story | 3 March 2011

Lessons from the Chernobyl Disaster – Safety for the Future

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the IAEA will participate in an international conference designed to ensure that the lessons learned from the accident will bring about lasting improvements in nuclear and radiation safety globally. Read more →

http://www.iaea.org/

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

**

 

Gasoline cost to jump $700 for average household | Reuters

Tags

Alternative Fuels, commodities speculative trading, Cricket Diane C Phillips, Cricket House Studios, cricketdiane, crude oil, diesel fuel, fuel costs, gas prices, gasoline, heating oil, hedge funds, NYMEX, oil and natural gas industries, petrol, Petroleum, petroleum industries, shipping costs, speculation, trasnportation costs, Wall Street

Gasoline cost to jump $700 for average household | Reuters.

There is a 25 percent chance the pump price will exceed $4 a gallon from June through August, the agency said, compared with a 10 percent probability gasoline could fall below $3 during the same period.

My Note –

I think they need to review their math skills at the agency where they made this projection. It is wrong.

The price of gasoline is already at or over $4.00 a gallon in Chicago, it has been reported. And, it is over $4 a gallon in California, Denver and probably anywhere Spring Break destinations are used to having a captive audience.

Summer will be even more so. My guess is that the price of gasoline will go up substantially higher than that because the traders and speculators driving the prices per barrel are already trying to figure out how to offload what they’ve purchased and make a bigger profit from it. They likely figure this is one of those once in a lifetime deals where they can really make a killing. That would be my guess. It will stagger through the economy faster than the contracts that will get delivered because that is how it has done in the past (2008, 1970’s) as companies try to get ahead of the upswing in costs to have a buffer.

On a personal note, as I have noticed in the stores when I stopped buying cereal – it the boxes that cost nearly $5 already get any skinnier – we can use them as postage stamps instead. I don’t know how they get away with it. Many foods now look like something from a child’s play kitchen set with little in it at all. That is going to be even more so as the commodities prices have been driving upwards by the traders on the exchanges and now add the increased price of oil, gasoline, shipping and increased cargo charges to them. It is not going to work.

The law of supply and demand would naturally bring these prices down or the quantities up because there cannot possibly be as many people buying these things at these prices for the amount of product offered. But, the free market doesn’t exist in America in that sense. It is unnaturally supported in the manner middlemen including the commodities traders are driving the prices. The losses can be written off and it doesn’t yield any incentive to meet the market demand where it is and price competitively to it at the real value.

Oh well. If we had a better deal on the oil that is being pulled out of the ground in America, like Libya’s foul leaders got from the oil industries – we wouldn’t even be having this problem.

They only give away 12% of the profits and charge a “sign-on” bonus over a billion dollars each to the oil companies (and they are glad to get it.) Damn ridiculous while we are subsidizing the oil companies and begging them to do whatever they will to get our oil out of the ground so they can profit at our expense. Damn ridiculous.

– cricketdiane

***

Rediscovering WWII’s female ‘computers’ – CNN

Tags

before the computer age, codes and ciphers, computer science, computers, cricketdiane, female computer innovators, foundations of today's computer, higher mathematics, intellectual resources in America, Intelligence, Rocket Science, secrets, US Government, women computer geniuses, women mathematicians, Women's Rights, WWII

Rediscovering WWII’s female ‘computers’ – CNN.

Computer, at that point, was a job title, not a machine. Long before the sisters were businesswomen, community activists, mothers or grandmothers, they were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research. They worked six days a week, sometimes pulling double or triple shifts, along with dozens of other women.

The weapons trajectories they calculated were passed out to soldiers in the field and bombardiers in the air. Some of their colleagues went on to program the earliest of general-purpose computers, the ENIAC.

( . . . )

The war ended in 1945, but within a couple months of arriving in Philadelphia, Bartik was hired to work on a related project — an electronic computer that could do calculations faster than any man or woman. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, created by Penn scientists John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., weighed more than 30 tons and contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes. It recognized numbers, added, subtracted, multiplied, divided and a few other basic functions.

Men had built the machine, but Bartik and her colleagues debugged every vacuum tube and learned how to make it work, she said. Early on, they demonstrated to the military brass how the computer worked, with the programmers setting the process into motion and showing how it produced an answer. They handed out its punch cards as souvenirs. They’d taught the massive machine do math that would’ve taken hours by hand.

But none of the women programmers was invited to the celebratory dinner that followed. Later, the heard they were thought of as models, placed there to show off the machine.

 

(from)

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-08/tech/women.rosies.math_1_women-computers-white-collar-women-first-computer-programmers?_s=PM:TECH

Rediscovering WWII’s female ‘computers’

February 08, 2011|By Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN

***

My Note –

How many teachers in schools across America know that some of the greatest mathematicians in their classes of students are the girls?

How many classrooms of students hold the greatest scientists and engineers that happen to be the girls in the class rather than the boys alone? How many of our educators know that as they face that class and work with those students?

Hmmmm…….

Sometimes I wonder.

It was great finding this article. There are four pages to it which is a little hard to notice because the next page numbers are below some ads and rather small – but definitely take a look at all four pages. It is absolutely amazing.

and there is even more about women in the first programming languages of computers, too. We wouldn’t have the computers we have today, had it not been for the efforts of the women who participated in the process along the way.

– cricketdiane

***

Really amazing.

The Statue of Liberty isn’t called that by virtue of political rhetoric

Tags

America, American money, cricket diane, cricketdiane, Democracy, Egypt, foreign policy, Freedom, Human Rights, Mubarak, Suleiman, US foreign aid, US foreign military aid

As I’ve thought about this and about our nation giving $3.5 million dollars a day to Egypt, along with no telling how much else for a brutal dictatorship to be kept in power all this time, and after hearing the Republican comment on the news several days ago about how the protesters in Egypt had “bought into Obama’s rhetoric from his speech when he was there” and were acting on it – and having seen enough to know that the amount of money per day being paid out to Egypt and other countries with the same kinds of regimes is far in excess of that –

I just keep thinking about the words in the Pledge of Allegiance – and the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Oath our legislators, presidents, secretaries of agencies, staff of agencies, administration officials and foreign policy committees take – and the words keep rolling around in my mind.

Did they think those things were just “rhetoric”?

– cricketdiane

***

The current version of the Pledge of Allegiance reads:^[1]

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

(from)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

***

To be honest, the part I always had trouble with was that “indivisible” thing. I had trouble learning to spell it and trouble when I was younger, learning what it meant. How could I have had so much trouble understanding, “a thing which cannot be divided, is never to be divided, is to forever be one great thing together.” That is how it was explained where it finally made sense to me. I was about 5 years old, maybe younger when I must have asked thirty or forty adults, every time I had the chance, “what does indivisible mean?”

But, the part I didn’t have any trouble with understanding was that last part that says, “with Liberty and Justice for all,” and the fact that I was giving my “”oath,” (my full and complete commitment throughout the full course of my life,) to something greater than myself. The pledge of allegiance isn’t just something we stand and say in a classroom somewhere or before an event of some kind. Those moments standing with our hands over our hearts, heads up, singing our national anthem before football games or baseball games and other events, isn’t a meaningless display of “rhetoric” – that we believe in freedom sometimes for some people in some places under some conditions. That isn’t right.

“With Liberty and Justice For All” doesn’t mean nothing. In the hands and decisions of our legislators and past presidents, it may have meant nothing, but they were wrong. They were just plain wrong when they thought that and acted on it that way.

I understand that we live in a world of contrasts, of conflicting ideologies and disparate perspectives. I get that. But, when choices are made about how our nation uses our resources that we have individually given into a pool to serve our common good, we didn’t send those resources to Washington for other nations to use as a bank account.

“The Statue of Liberty isn’t called that by virtue of political rhetoric”

It is said that when you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything. I think that needs to be expanded a bit to include this, “when the principles that you stand for aren’t applied properly, the results will indicate it. They won’t match up.”

When money is given to Israel and Egypt, (among others) and then used to brutalize people, it does not match up with the principles of democracy, liberty, freedom, human rights, civil rights, inalienable rights, universal human rights, dignity, value for human life, responsibility, equality, and America’s tenets of every single document underwriting our laws and beliefs.

Further, when that money is being used to sponsor brutality and the elite hoarding of resources in these nations, it is also not doing the things elsewhere that do underwrite our values. It is not making a level playing field in free market economies, it is not supporting our own economic foundations either, it is not ensuring our own domestic strengths, it is not being used to benefit our own people and nor is it supporting our own national interests.

It doesn’t match up.

Online, I can go and see the vast sums of money that is being appropriated, has been appropriated, has been sent, spent or just plain went wherever it went. I can go in person and find the vast reams of paper that have printed text, charts, graphs, logs of what the money did and what it was supposed to do, reports, final reports, declassified “secret” documents, and various other physical documentation of how our money was used. I can, (as anyone can), follow a trail to see whose hand appropriated it, argued for it and eventually, find out why that was done in that way by that person or the group who were backing them.

We have people and resources that can do that and are doing that all the time, even before having the internet widely available. There have been some legislators and even Presidential administration members that have found themselves in just as much trouble as many business leaders for the “insider trading” of our dollars and resources among the world’s nations and industries.

But, at its heart is the very thing I started talking about in this post and the post I made yesterday, (about Egypt and the money that has and is going to their ruling dictator and his cronies to brutalize their citizens and profit at their and our expense along with their Washington lobbyists paid to help them do it). The heart of why America’s leaders have in complicity made the wrong choices about what to do with our money and our resources is exactly the things that we’ve all heard them say. They have believed that those words in our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Pledge of Allegiance and other oaths to our nation, in our laws, in our founding principles, are just rhetoric – something to be used in a speech to get the job or to get the seat in Congress or to have the opportunities to be elected or in the case of businesses, to have expanded business profits and “sweet deals.” And to them, these tenets of America are just something to sound good when speaking before the cameras in a televised snippet on the news or in a speech somewhere around the world, or somewhere in the US, because it sounds good and people want to believe that these things matter.

The truth is, these things are being used as “rhetoric” by speechmakers because they know people have, or will, hire elected officials to stand up for these things, not because they are rhetoric but because applying these principles upon which our nation is founded means something to us.

That old saying about following the money and you can see what is important and who is behind it (and why), holds true. What will we find this time as we all see across the entire populations and leaders of the world, what America has done with our money for the last thirty years? What does it prove was important to our leadership who made those decisions and the parties who backed them?

What does it say about our business and corporate leaders? What does it say about our nation and our political leaders and those decision-makers who made these choices? And, what does it say has been done in our name, as the American people who are the bedrock and foundation of our nation?

Did the Washington, London and Geneva groups of decision-makers really believe they were buying “stability” with our resources? As they wined and dined themselves at our expense, and people were being beaten to death all across the world as a direct result of the power those financial and military resources gave, did those decision-makers really believe sponsoring police brutality, denial of human rights, destruction of families and communities, keeping vast multitudes of people in poverty, abuse of people throughout the world (and throughout the US, for that matter) was the “right thing to do”?

Is that right? That’s what they believed . . .?

That’s what they did.

That is what they did with our money and resources.

That is what they did with their decisions and their office of power.

That is what they did at our expense with our name and the money from our pockets.

That is what they chose.

That is what they wanted.

That is what they thought was right.

And, now I’m asking –

“Why?”

Why could that even have appeared to be right?

There is no “stability” from it. Those are not even the kinds of decisions that create stability, stable economies, stable nations, or stable societies. Those kinds of things didn’t work historically to create stability when decisions were made to brutalize populations and keep them impoverished, denying opportunities to many for the hoarding of resources by a few. It never worked. It doesn’t work this time, either. And, for the same reasons it didn’t offer stability in historic examples of it, these were known factors for the very results that would be likely by those making the decisions about it.

So, again – I’m asking, “why?”

Was it like the Wall Street bunch who thought they could simply get out before it all went to hell?

Did they think that if they put enough resources into place, that they could quash any rebellions of people rising up demanding their rightful participation in society such that the historic evidence of results could be waylaid?

Were none of the applications of education made to the decisions at hand when they were making them?

Did the decision-makers think it was all just a matter of rhetoric and perception management?

Hmmmm………..

$3.5 million dollars a day for people to be beaten to a bloody pulp, tortured, abused, denied access to make a living, denied employment, denied their fundamental human rights, denied a place in the society to which they were born and to which they belong, and to make money for the rich and the richer and the richest, while keeping vast populations too poor to even have food, shelter, water, education and opportunity.

How dare you use America to do that.

And, don’t even say that I don’t understand.

I’ve already noticed that our business community and political leadership don’t believe in communist societies until it is time to get free labor or nearly free labor or cheap labor or not have to deal with unionized labor –

And, I’ve already noticed that our leaders and decision-makers have been pretty loosey-goosey about what they see as nothing but “rhetoric” when they are feeding caviar to their friends around the world on our dime –

And, it is pretty obvious where they got the money they are using to feed to their rich friends around the world, including in Egypt and Israel and Jordan and every damn where else –

State after State across the US have budget deficits. The Federal government says they cannot do this and cannot do that because cuts have to be made. Party candidates and representatives scream for the nation to be fifty sovereign separate entities and to remove all Federal domestic spending to “balance the budget.” Homeless people across the US in numbers that are staggering have few, if any opportunities. Vast unemployment across the US and inequity of resources has left millions without opportunities or access to make better lives for themselves.

Massive foreclosures on homes, many of which are being demolished now – are razed to the ground by communities given money to buy them but not money to save them for the families that had owned them, have devastated our nation at every level. Vast numbers of businesses, retailers, corporations, and long established companies have gone into bankruptcy, closed their doors or re-organized by closing multiple locations in their organizations.

Resources once in place for factories and businesses to produce things, including the production and factory line equipment have been sold for nearly nothing to countries around the world and now do not exist in our own country to use. It is no longer a matter of re-tooling a factory for production, the equipment, dies, production line, manufacturing robotics, specialty manufacturing processes and equipment would all have to be built or contracted from another country to be built “from scratch,” even to make a startup producing anything.

Patents and intellectual property once in the control and management of the US and for our citizens’ employment opportunities, and for our business profits to be made – have now been stripped from companies that were either sold to other nations or offered in “fire sales” to raise needed money without resulting in saving the companies who did it that way.

Well, I would say –

At the rate of hundreds of billions of dollars going out every single day to the rest of the world from our States coffers and our Federal tax dollars, and with hundreds of billions of dollars a day going also to these same places from everywhere any other resources exist, from the UN, the UK, the EU, from every agency of the US and state governments, from the IMF, and from vast business / industry groups as well –

you have fucked up.

***

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/topusretailcompanies/a/chapter11retail_5.htm

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/topusretailcompanies/a/chapter11retail_4.htm

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/topusretailcompanies/a/chapter11retail_3.htm

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/topusretailcompanies/a/chapter11retail_2.htm

http://retailindustry.about.com/od/topusretailcompanies/a/chapter11retail.htm

These are lists of retailers which have gone under in the US only in 2008-2009.

***

A note from a website about arms sales from the US – (and appropriations for it) –

When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003—a full 80%—were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

A report from the World Policy Institute released mid-2005 has found that the U.S. is routinely funneling military aid and arms to undemocratic nations. [The figures are from] 2003, for which the most recent data was available at the time, (above).

(from)

http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business

***

USAID or the U.S. Agency for International Development, offers tens of thousands of results for any search for non-military aid.

(from)

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm

(also from that page – about US foreign military aid and other funds flowing out of the US coffers to foreign nations)

It has become more difficult to get more recent data, since the FAS stopped presenting their analysis in 2006. Ever since, it is necessary to go to the source data from the US State Department. The State Department is not consistent year-by-year in its data presentation. Entities change, departments change, and file names change. Each year presents a new puzzle, as to how to find the data. (etc.)

One third of ALL US AID
goes to Israel and Egypt.

These 2 countries receive
one-third of the total
aid, the majority of which
pays for armaments.
Yet, neither is a “developing” country.

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm

***

(also from)

http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business

The British arms manufacturer, BAE was being investigated for bribing Saudi officials to buy fighter planes, but the government intervened in the investigation citing national interests. The Guardian also reported that BAE gave a Saudi prince a £75 airliner ($150m approx) as part of a British arms deal, with the arms firm paying the expenses of flying it. This seemingly large figure is small compared to the overall deal, but very enticing for the deal makers, and it is easy to see how corruption is so possible when large sums are involved.

***

A note from an earlier blog post about  – “innovating in America”

In fact, imagine what happens when I want to create a business. As an example – There is a need that I see for a person to be able to go into any store and buy something which would show up at another store in another state or another location across town. I know their computers are tied together and they are part of the same corporate entity. But, I also know that they are sometimes franchise stores, that their inventory systems are not necessarily the same in every state and that their financial systems do not integrate from store to store. I think this could be fixed with a bit of software which could be designed and then sold to the store’s corporate headquarters to do this job for them. It would serve their customers. It would serve my needs and my family’s needs when we want to buy groceries or formula for for a daughter or son or grandbaby or friend or someone somewhere in some other state. It would allow us to purchase a fan or heater or air conditioner here where we live that they could go to their local store and simply pick up to have it right now on the same day. We could buy tires for their car when the tires are so bald that they aren’t safe anymore and pay for them to be picked up near the college where they are living or in the state where they decided to runoff to in order to have some freedom from us.

It is true, that between what I know and what other people who can do programming know, that we could create the software to do this. That is a fact. It is a good innovation. That is also a fact. I can even write a business plan to show how it would make money and project revenues for it with something less than a lie and fairly close to the reality of what costs it would have and sales it could make. However, then what happens?

And, the text from that blog entry goes on to explain some of what happens and the insurmountable obstacles which have been placed in the way of anyone in America creating their own business –

But what happens if it is the King of Saudi Arabia, or Mr. Netanyahu, or Mr. Mubarak and his goon squads – Hmmm……. Let’s see. Despite the fact that they can both personally, and economically from their own nation’s resources start up such a business, or provide the capital for it to be accomplished – they call America and get the money that I couldn’t even access one millionths of one tenth thousandths of a micro-fraction of one percent of – in order to do it, when in fact, for the price of the caviar they throw away from their tables alone, just about all of Georgia’s state budget could be provided for our entire population to prosper for several years.

Hmmm…………

***

Well, what do I want to do about this?

Let me think.

Yes, I’ve thought of some things –

One, of course – is to do nothing and let America fall to its indentured servitude in slavery to its Mid-Eastern and Asian masters. The leaders we’ve had and their viewpoints and decisions sold us to them and now here we are . . .

Two, would be to bring a class-action suit against the appropriations members who have decided to consistently give our money away to ruthless and already well-funded dictators against every known law and principle our nation has. That is certainly a possibility that would hold them individually and collectively responsible for what they’ve done. It would have to reach back at least thirty years and include the advisors and their political backers who told them to do it that way in antithesis of everything our nation stands for. And maybe add “collusion” with those dictators and corporate interests involved, in the charges.

Hmmm…….

Yes, that would be good.

At the very least, the world would see that the American people do not agree with things being done that way and let the people around the world know that we do stand up for what is right. I doubt that it would fix anything, though.

Third, I could start a business somewhere else rather than in the US, especially since this is so typical of life in the US during the last thirty years of my adult lifetime, and I have no way to change it –

Rubenstein said Louima is a victim of perhaps one of the worst examples of police brutality in the history of this country.

Louima’s case led to a major shakeup of the New York Police Department. Charges against him were later dropped. ( . . . )

After Louima’s arrest in 1997 for a scuffle outside a nightclub, Volpe assaulted him in the patrol car and later sodomized him with a broomstick handle inside the 70th Precinct station house. Louima suffered severe internal injuries.

http://articles.cnn.com/2002-02-28/justice/police.torture.overturn_1_bathroom-assault-thomas-wiese-haitian-immigrant-abner-louima?_s=PM:LAW

(and this one – )

Houston’s mayor and police department were on the defensive Friday, two days after graphic video came out showing several police repeatedly kicking and beating a 15-year-old burglary suspect as he lay on the ground.

(There is actually video of this one along with many, many others like it from across the US – )http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-05/justice/texas.police.beating_1_police-officers-police-car-police-department?_s=PM:CRIME

Fourth, we could all get together as Americans and demonstrate as they are doing in Egypt –

It is certainly possible, but it looks like to me that multitudes have been protesting these kinds of things for years upon years at every occasion and it has yet to yield even one modicum of difference in it.

Fifth, ahhh – even better –

There could be a class action styled suit brought to the international courts for breach and defiance of international laws by decisions and financial appropriations made by our previous leadership including the Senators and Congressmen who made those choices. Many of those laws were insisted upon and written by the United States leadership for the rest of the world to follow, so they obviously knew them when they made those decisions.

Again, at the very least, the rest of the world would know that America’s citizens did not agree with doing things that way, nor did we agree with brutal dictatorships that they were sponsoring with our financial resources.

And, of course, sixth would be –

could be, anyway – to hunker down like the right wing militia types are screaming for us all to do and get enough gold, physical protection and friends who think the same way about it to try and survive it all as it is . . .

but, gold doesn’t buy anything in America for regular Americans trying to get food, or shoes, or pay the utility bills, or get water when it is needed to drink, or just about anything else required – and as much as I believe in guns and the right to have them and to carry them, I’ve never noticed them to be an appropriate nor handy option at the point of needing to defend myself against sure physical assault or danger. Those are really just expensive and stupid toys to most of the people who have them in this day and time. And, friends who think as those right wing people do are part of the reason we are where we are right now in as big a mess as we are in – I don’t think having them any one bit closer to me is what would make my life better or safer.

So, Seventh could be –

Building something that I could sell to those jackasses in the Middle East and elsewhere to get our money back. That is one possibility but it could be that it was part of what they were trying to do when they sold all those military arms to those places in the first place. It looks as though, our national resources were appropriated to go to those countries by the millions of dollars a day, and then some companies, in particular military hardware companies, went over there, sold them those even more dangerous “toys” and as a consequence, funded their companies’ profitability. I suppose, that is what they told themselves they were doing anyway.

And, while I can certainly see how that worked out – still, there are some who are working to do it that way, from Wal-Mart to PepsiCo among others. And, President Obama did say for us to out-innovate them, out-maneuver them and out-do them in typical American fashion as we have been prone to do on multiple occasions in our history. That might work . . .

I could take my little, “order a patent” form and sell it around the world through brokering deals on our patents. They are selling them around the world anyway. Hmmm………

Then, these countries could make the things wherever they sit – oh wait, they are already doing that, from tanks to helicopters, handguns to 50mm rifles, chemical and biological weapons to sodapop and air cleaners . . . No use in brokering licenses at this point, then. And, what can’t be done that way is getting reverse engineered anyway. So, hmmm…… again.

Well, a number Eight choice of what I could do about all this might be –

To at least make sure my children know what matters in America –  having cosmetically enhanced big tits and shopping to get designer handbags whether they are homeless or not. And, knowing who to bet on in the Super Bowl, including the commercials. That is the important thing.

I’m guessing they already know how to get drunk and just not worry about it, like most of the rest of America does. And, at least that is considered psychologically healthy in our society. Most of our leaders are running around the world partying to their heart’s content and on any given day, most of America is “wired” or drunk too. At least, they will know how to fit in, and never notice the crap going on around them.

I still think they should at least change the Barney song on kiddie tv to reflect that the only good use of any American child, adult or citizen, generally is to “not be special.” At least it would be honest.

At most, I think there should be a national campaign to let people know that they are not important in America, that there are no freedoms or rights from brutality, and that our Constitutional guarantees of such things simply are no more than rhetoric to those we have charged with positions of leadership in our country over the last thirty years. And, that is why police brutalize us on our own streets and halfway around the world, as well as in countries we have funded with our hard-earned dollars.

Nope, that wouldn’t be right – it would possibly remove hope and that may be the last remaining shred of what people have.

There would have to be a Ninth choice of what I could do –

I could let my imagination run wild a bit and see what it comes up with – like something designed that would literally melt the gun that is in the hands of someone about to use it . . . .

That would be an interesting possibility but it wouldn’t get our money back from those who have it nor would it get the constant flow of our funds to dictators who are brutalizing their people to stop.

It also wouldn’t re-route any of those funds to our national domestic needs and uses. But, it would be nifty to see armed combatants have nothing but ooze in their hands where a gun used to be – before they can even shoot with it at somebody.

It would make me feel better, anyway.

I don’t think that “sensitivity training” would stop any of the police brutality we have on our own streets, or to keep the use of our funding, training and police equipment, (and military equipment) to brutalize and torture people elsewhere from happening. At one time, I had thought that anger management courses being required of all police personnel for their own anger issues would be of help, but then having been reminded of the fact that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” (roughly paraphrased,) it occurred to me that it just wouldn’t be enough to do any good. And, besides – we’ve been taking fairly normal people and training them to be psychotic in the ways they deal with others in order to do police things, and military things and espionage things, and detective things and other things of that nature. (and most of them may not have been real “normal” and respectful of others in the first place, but they certainly wouldn’t have been after the kind of training we’ve been paying for them to have.)

What if,

all the heads of state, US and international leaders and every single person involved in giving our money to Egypt to brutalize people were required to spend three months in an Egyptian jail at the hands of those brutal beatings every day by their secret police that our leaders have been funding for thirty years – would it change their minds about whether it matters or not and whether those “human rights things’ are just a matter of rhetoric?

Is it that, in the plush surroundings of mahogany clad rooms with elegant gold gilded furnishings where every mete and measure of their whims, needs and desires are satiated with immediacy from the finest selection of everything available on the planet, the idea of “human rights’ is simply an intellectual discussion for debate to entertain and while away the hours?

Or, is it that they are just chasing the party? I had thought about this earlier, that Bautista in Cuba was propped up to keep the party available in America’s playground (although Americans weren’t the only ones partying there), and by party – I mean, the casinos, the drunken orgies, the opportunity to have prostitutes who will engage in whatever twisted perversions businessmen and government leaders desire – in fact, prostitutes of even young ages of both sexes available to them for nearly nothing, the most extreme forms of gambling from full contact lethal sports between people and all types of animals, to other twisted games of chance upon which to bet, opportunities to have “sweet deals” and inside contracts on business dealings, and the kickbacks and bonuses from those things along with the nearly free flow of drugs that they desire from cocaine to smoking hashish (to relax.) Could it be that wherever we, as Americans and as international citizens, have seen leaders and power brokers maintain oppression of the local people, there has gone hand-in-hand, a use of that population to serve the needs, whims and desires of a few in ways that are irresponsible, unconscionable, twisted and perverse, considered by them to be entertaining or satiating in some way, and against what would be considered sane social norms were it done in any other place?

There is a solution to that.

We could return these countries to their local populations to run, stop funding military weapons to them and use that money for ourselves instead as our nation is in dire straits, and create one place appropriate to party where the whole world agrees for them to go and do that. It could be created in such a way that no one under the age of thirteen would be allowed into it ever. And, only those below twenty-five whose parents agreed to sell them for that use could be offered in that environment (since that is what they are doing already). And, all the twisted extreme forms of gambling, lethal sport fighting, and sex could just go on day and night and night and day and then nobody would have to be repressed, obsessed, oppressed, beaten half to death or killed to get it, keep it or have it available.

Or we could make sure all our businessmen are eunuchs before sending them anywhere to make deals or lobby Washington. I don’t know, its just a thought.

Maybe my imagination is not the best places to find choices of solutions. It finds some extremes as options that seem at least nearly as appropriate as what is being done already. But, all the above concept would do, would be to confine to one place, that which is unacceptable to be happening anywhere already, yet is happening in many places around the world to serve the whims and perversions of the rich, of the wealthy business leaders and government officials that are running to those places as it is. It wouldn’t really fix anything or make it better for the nations where it is happening, in the US where it is happening, nor the people who have been forced to endure it.

Maybe there needs to be a tenth option –

Well, we could all just get in there and be criminals, too. This is how some people are doing it and there are many examples of how this is working, sometimes well and sometimes not. I would say that Bernie Madoff showed us how to do it well, he lived well, he enjoyed his life and so did the family he made. The brutal dictators of many foreign countries have done it well, as have the Bush clan and their friends – a little close to the line at times but overall – they’ve gotten away with it.

And, the bankers and Wall Street groups have found ways to make it legal to steal from everybody. We could all just do that, too – in the ways they’ve already shown us. They’ve gotten away with it as well. And, people like them just fine. That, of course is the typical “join ’em” philosophy, which it looks like any number of people in the world have managed to do without consequence, maybe it is the “American way”.

There have, in fact – only been a few instances where that didn’t work out so well. Even during Prohibition, vast sums of money and power were accumulated and until they started shooting each other in the streets every other day, very few people in America even cared.

I don’t much like the tenth option. It is possible and as much as I or anyone else could do it that way, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through without changing much of anything for the better, but maybe I’m wrong. At the very least, those people are in positions of power and people listen to them and do things the way they want them done, including interpreting our Constitution to suit themselves and their own perspectives about what is important.

But, I don’t like it.

I will try one more time to think of something I could do about all this – hopefully, more effective than the things I’ve considered already – there would have to be some other choices –

*  I could write about it – did that.

*  I could give up and not doing anything about it – tried that.

*  I could tell others about it and see if they will do anything about it – yeah, well, it didn’t matter to them either, but maybe I didn’t work with the right people who give a damn about it or know what to do.

*  I could build something that would help, which was a choice in the above group of options – have done that.

*  I could do any or all of the things on the list above whether I liked them, or thought much of them or not – well, maybe.

*  And, I could bring into the world something that would help – I’m working on that.

*  Or, I could create a solution or a set of solutions that doesn’t exist already – that would work.

Hmm…….

Well, that certainly was fun.

I’m still disgusted by what our previous thirty years of officials, agency members and elected leaders have done with my money and my family’s money and my neighbor’s money and my state’s money and my nation’s money and my children’s money and our opportunities and the opportunities I would have had in my lifetime and that they would’ve had in their lifetimes – [*that sheer and absolute contempt for what they did and how they did it, might just never change.]

– cricketdiane

***

***

Innovation in America – White House has requested comments – my comments about innovation in America

Tags

American innovation, Creating Solutions, Creativity, cricketdiane, Extreme Engineering, innovators, Inventing, invention, money-making possibilities, problems to solve, small business startups, Solutions, Solving Impossible Problems, starting your own business, tech startups

So, I was twittering something and thought to look through the tweets that had just been posted and found the niftiest thing –

whitehouseostp OSTP

What is Your Strategy for American Innovation? http://go.ostp.gov/eiZT32

16 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

And, of course copied it over on a document and then went over to it –

What is Your Strategy for American Innovation?

Posted by Aneesh Chopra on February 04, 2011 at 04:45 PM EST

In the spirit of commonwealth, I’m confident that we can exceed our individual potential when we come together to meet a larger challenge.  Are you ready to win the future?

(etc.)

Aneesh Chopra is U.S. Chief Technology Officer

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/04/what-your-strategy-american-innovation

Which I read and then copied over to the document. And, then popped over to another tab with the pdf from about the Commerce Department from a link on that page while going to the nice slide/share page from the White House where the link for comments had taken me on the original tab.

Here is the other link to the Commerce Department request for comments –

http://www.ofr.gov/%28S%284cabmywb5bw33jogu1nlzqr4%29%29/OFRUpload/OFRData/2011-02558_PI.pdf

Then I made a comment – which, as usual posted without one paragraph marked in it as seems to happen on every one of the government sites for some reason.

And, of course – in order to share my comment on the slide/share site, I had to sign up for it through Facebook and allow the two to do their sharing of informational content – and I just plain decided, what the hell – it hardly matters at this point, so I did that such that my comment could actually go to them. (more or less – my guess is that they all have other things to do besides reading my comments on the matter.)

But, here is what I wanted to share with them and posted there –

I appreciate the need to study what research is being done in light of what is being most productive or most effective, but I really think that is part of the problem. The way it is set up now, our government and state resources are going into studying studies on top of studies of studies of things that had already been studied in their measure in the first place. Not only, to get funding are the basis and benefits of the research provided but, also as the research continues to its peer reviews and eventually into the investment community and the marketplace. Throughout that process, there are multiple stages at which the usefulness of the research is having to be justified and then at every opportunity there are more Science Foundation, State, Federal and International funds being put into studying whether it was worth doing the studies and research in the first place. All of those funds could have been spent to do something else valuable including taking that research being done originally into a manufacturing context for our nation’s businesses to be built with it – or something.

It reminds me of the filters that were researched and engineered to put on smokestacks of various industries many years ago which would have cost about $200 each to place on the polluting facilities – but industries and businesses didn’t want to do it. So, to save money and not be told what they could or could not do, they insisted that the government put money into studying the problem and that the states and academic research groups study whether the initial studies and engineering were valid. And, then they studied it some more and paid a team of lawyers and many years of lobbyists and pr firms to keep from even the suggestion of installing those filters. And, then at the point at which it would have cost about $2500 each to install those filter systems, they did the same thing again and didn’t install them at that point either. But, a multitude of studies were made again and new studies made along with new lobbying and pr campaigns. Eventually, the filters were either placed on the smokestacks at a cost of (more or less) $25,000 a piece or the companies moved what they were doing to another country which is putting up with them polluting whatever population is in that country where they are now.

The amount of money, time and efforts spent on the example above far exceeds what could have been done with that situation in the first place if the original science and engineering had been accepted and several hundred filters had simply been placed on the smokestacks. And, beyond that least costly choice – further updates to the science and engineering could have built forward in better efficiency and better opportunities for our nation in the meantime with cleaner air, better health in our population and better quality of life.

This is a long-winded way of saying that some of the problems we have now with innovation and seeing those innovations to the marketplace, of creating startup businesses and having opportunities for all Americans to start a business, if they want to do that – are literally problems built into, not only the mindset, but the ways that things are being done currently and for the better part of the last thirty years in America.

In a way, it could be said, (to be fair), that doing things in the manner described in the example above does yield a number of businesses and opportunities that simply breed out of doing it that way, but the cost of it has been to have wasted years and dollars with no greater nor timely solutions to show for it. And, to do it that way has made us look foolish in the eyes of the world and to have wasted time, national resources and the efforts of many great minds, great engineers, a great deal of money, talents, knowledge, resources and great science on innovations and research being used that way. Part of the losses in opportunity costs is that our nation’s leaders and business decision-makers have been doing things this way without yielding a wider array of solutions to a great many things that really needed their attention and that continue to need our nation’s intellectual assets applied to them.

We are already a nation of studying the studies of the things we’ve already studied. To do any more of that is just a waste. Either the rational justification to fund the study was appropriate enough to have funded it in the first place or it wasn’t. Our efforts need to be re-focused to use those innovative discoveries that have resulted from the research our national assets have already paid to produce and get those into applications in the marketplace.

I would say what is required to start a business from where I sit in America and the absolutely impossible hindrances, obstacles and obscene legislated requirements and complexities that have been set in the way for nearly every American to start a business, but it is just about enough to fill an entire book. It is no wonder that people get disgusted with it – the playing field is not level, the competition within the US is not fair, the risks are massive and the returns are questionable at best.

And, then even if everything is done right and goes well, its only purpose is to provide a profitable exit strategy for any number of investors who want to pull their money out plus a 3-5 times return on it within two or three years of having funded it. What is the point in that?

– cricketdiane

Thanks for asking though.

**

My Note here –

They had these four questions on the Commerce Department document which I read before contributing my comment above and really only had an interest in the first two questions right now –

1. Government research and development: How can the economic impacts of basic research funding (e.g., NSF, NIH) be better measured and evaluated? What methods can the Federal Government use to prioritize funding areas of basic research, both within an area of science and across areas of science? How can existing Federal government institutions (not just organizations, but also programs, policies, and laws) devoted to basic research and innovation be improved? Are there new institutions of these types that are needed to achieve national innovation goals? How could the government increase support for industry-led, pre-competitive R&D?
2. Entrepreneurship: Through what measures can government policy better facilitate the creation and success of innovative new businesses? What obstacles limit entrepreneurship in America, and which of these obstacles can be reduced through public policy? What are the most important policy, legal, and regulatory steps that the federal government could take to expand access to capital for high-growth businesses?
3. Intellectual Property: What are the key elements of any legal reform effort that would ensure that our intellectual property system provides timely, high-quality property rights and creates the best incentives for commercial innovation? How can the intellectual property system better serve the dual goals of creating incentives for knowledge creation while also ensuring that knowledge is widely diffused and adopted and moves to its best economic and societal uses?
4. Education: How important is catalyzing greater interest and training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields? What strategies can be most effective on this score? Can educational technologies be better utilized to this end? What are the critical opportunities and limitations to the creation and adoption of effective education technologies? How can investments in community colleges better leverage public-partnerships to better train Americans for the jobs of today and tomorrow?

from

http://www.ofr.gov/%28S%284cabmywb5bw33jogu1nlzqr4%29%29/OFRUpload/OFRData/2011-02558_PI.pdf

**

There has to be a better way to prioritize Federal and State research dollars than to study the studies again and again and again. It has made an entire industry of studying without ever doing anything with any of it at this point.

That is one thing. The other is that I’ve noticed in China, Japan, and a few other nations, they are investing in R&D with an eye to get results, returns and revenues from them in twenty years from now, or in fifty years from the time money was put into it, and in some cases, maybe even longer periods of time. By doing that, they have been able to reap returns and revenues from those things very quickly – say in two-five years. That is because they are putting a lot of money into it and into continuing the funding of it in an ongoing basis without expectations that it must show any immediate returns to be taken out of it as justification for it to continue.

The advantage of doing it that way and at one time in this country we had done it that way is in being able to cull the harvest from it quickly when those discoveries and breakthroughs are made. There is enough money underwriting it for the science to get done, for the engineering to get done, for the confirmation of results to be made, for safety considerations to be checked and for market applications to be designed as well as creating the manufacturing systems to mass produce whatever it is.

In the manner that the US has been doing it for the last thirty – fifty years, if a product cannot justify itself or if an avenue of research cannot justify itself within a very short period of time (usually less than two years) with a substantial return of profitable revenues, then it is dropped and not proceeded further. That is costing us.

Those patents and research avenues are being sold in fire sales by brokers and corporations just to get rid of them and the profits they would have made for the US and our national business community is lost.

Investors want a short term return. Companies want a short term guaranteed return. Corporations and banks want short term guaranteed returns. And, innovation by its very nature is not guaranteed by the successes of what has come before it. As an example, the track record of auto sales generally cannot begin to prove to a banker, investor or corporate entity that innovative electric cars or hybrid cars will be guaranteed sales. So, therefore – the tendency is to put all the resources in cookie cutter fashion into what has already been proven over that which has not.

There has also been a tendency toward very shady, inappropriate strategies in many industries and businesses to grab up those innovations that are available intending no use for them whatsoever to simply keep them out of the marketplace where others might use those things in competition with them. The invention of a battery system heavy duty enough for commercial vehicles, small trucks, light duty transportation uses and long-range passenger cars was available for a number of years and could have been incorporated into all manner of vehicles but the patent was tied up by one of the large automotive companies (Dodge, I think it was) so that it couldn’t be used in competition with them. There are a number of situations like that which have hindered, and halted innovations being applied in the marketplace. In America, that is considered the way to do good business. And, I suppose it is except for the long-term costs of doing it that way.

When the monopoly thinking takes over, it doesn’t seem to hurt anything in the immediate experience. There are profits. Others can’t compete effectively (at least using that one avenue.) And, everyone appears to be happy – shareholders are happy, Wall Street is happy, business magazines and colleges telling about it seem happy, the customers aren’t being hurt in any way and generally, everything seems good and okay about it. But, the reasons that we have had laws about it and particularly, against many of those business practices in our history is because those strategies do cause harm, not only in the long-run but to our national interests, as well. Our nation is reeling from the disadvantages of doing many, many things that way.

Now, rather than having a multitude of small businesses selling gasoline, for instance, with its variety of Mom and Pop shops, we have national and international companies, franchises and huge conglomerates with all of those resources and revenues. Well, it was a trade-off and we let those big companies monopolize the marketplace. We are living with the results of what we traded-off to get, for better or worse. We are suffering those disadvantages, one of which was watching the gas prices go up every fifteen or twenty minutes on the retail gas outlets when the prices speculators were pushing for barrels of crude oil went higher in the summer of 2008 and then when the barrel prices went down, the retail prices started to shuffle downwards sometimes weeks later by a few pennies at a time.

That is a disadvantage. And, companies, families, communities, distributors, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, food suppliers, retailers, truckers and even airlines (eventually) suffered for it. And, many of the other disadvantages and obstacles that have been created in our marketplace for Americans to start their own businesses, innovate, invent, create or grow their own businesses have been caused by some of the same kinds of choices made by businesses too big to fail, but too small not to lobby.

In fact, imagine what happens when I want to create a business. There is a need that I see for a person to be able to go into any store and buy something which would show up at another store in another state or another location across town. I know their computers are tied together and they are part of the same corporate entity. But, I also know that they are sometimes franchise stores, that their inventory systems are not necessarily the same in every state and that their financial systems do not integrate from store to store. I think this could be fixed with a bit of software which could be designed and then sold to the store’s corporate headquarters to do this job for them. It would serve their customers. It would serve my needs and my family’s needs when we want to buy groceries or formula for for a daughter or son or grandbaby or friend or someone somewhere in some other state. It would allow us to purchase a fan or heater or air conditioner here where we live that they could go to their local store and simply pick up to have it right now on the same day. We could buy tires for their car when the tires are so bald that they aren’t safe anymore and pay for them to be picked up near the college where they are living or in the state where they decided to runoff to in order to have some freedom from us.

It is true, that between what I know and what other people who can do programming know, that we could create the software to do this. That is a fact. It is a good innovation. That is also a fact. I can even write a business plan to show how it would make money and project revenues for it with something less than a lie and fairly close to the reality of what costs it would have and sales it could make. However, then what happens? The state where I live wants to have a number of registrations for who I am and what I am doing with it in a business sense. The local municipalities want a business license to be registered. To protect the concept, I have to not tell anybody but in some way protect it through the intellectual property registrations that are available. I have to give it a snappy name that is easy to remember and not over two syllables. I would need to be able to tell somebody about it in 30 seconds using what amounts to about two sentences of very easy to remember information that includes where they can get it. And, then I have to go over to the SBA, the banks, the angel investors, or some group of family members, none of which think I can get my socks on right, let alone do something with a business effectively. And, here I would sit with that nice software designed to do a specific, much needed, very commercial, innovative thing with its snappy name and 30 second spiel to tell someone about it. Then, with another $250,000 to run around the country and pitch it to every chain store – I would have some sales of it or licensing for it to those stores, maybe. If they didn’t simply tell me they weren’t interested and then get on the phone after I leave and have somebody over at the nearest college design it for them to use while I’m on my way home.

And, I didn’t even mention that my credit would have to be sterling, which it isn’t, my character would have to have proof of being sterling for the last fifty years out of fifty two, which it isn’t and everything else that would need to be done correctly would have to be done correctly before anyone would begin to want to put money into it to get it going. I mean, that trademarks for the name and copyrights purchased, any patents required would have to have at least provisional patents applied for and all the legal things of being a business generally. And, then – the investors, potential partners or anyone else getting into it would want guarantees that they would get substantial returns for using their money. Then in two years, they would want their money back plus the returns they were told to expect or more. And, at that point – either more money to keep it growing would have to be located or the whole thing would go bankrupt and end up sold for pennies on the dollar.

It wasn’t on that list of things above – but there is also money required to market, to tell people about it, to promote it, to have a website about it, to tell industry leaders about it, to go sell it, to go pitch it to companies and industries that might use it, to run around networking with others who might tell others about it, and to have a team of attorneys fight to keep my ownership of it, because whether another company or group actually has the same thing before I did or not, they can say they did and then it is my responsibility to prove them wrong in courts. Oh yeah – and I’d have to have collateral to put up such as property or a huge savings account or stocks or bonds or who knows what and I don’t have any of that. And, if I did have any of that I wouldn’t need to borrow money to put a business together in the first place.

Oh yeah – and one other thing, right off the top of my head – when the stores would use the software that I and a team designed that my business is selling and they do end up collecting information about their customers who are using it and then the store sells that information – it could very well be a liability against the software manufacturer rather than against the retailer’s behavior and choices which would also take a team of lawyers to fix. The fact that things like that could tie up resources and time and efforts and public goodwill in courts and fooferrah makes it a possibly risky choice even after doing everything right, if everything to satisfy the law is done and everything else required actually works.

And, don’t even get me started about the tax code . . .

– cricketdiane

***

Switzerland: Letter to the Swiss Confederation regarding the visit of Mr Bush / February 3, 2011 / Assistance to victims / OMCT

Tags

anti-corruption, anti-torture, cricketdiane, Human Rights, President Bush, Republican Presidential administrations, Switzerland, torture ordered by President Bush and Dick Cheney, UN human rights council, US executive trust

In light of the overwhelming body of available information there can hardly be doubt that there are grounds that were to trigger Switzerland’s obligation to submit cases for investigations into the crime of torture against anybody present on its soil who has authorized, participated or was complicit in the above practices.

 

This would have to include also former President G Bush who had the overall control as commander in chief and as all information suggests authorized, knew and acquiesced into the practices that constitute the crime of torture. Switzerland would also have to take measures against any offender present on its territory to secure his presence for such criminal investigations and proceedings.

 

In this regard, the OMCT considers that neither officials nor former Heads of States can enjoy immunity for the crime of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture, nor can superior orders or the memos drafted by government lawyers and that sought to immunize officials from prospective prosecution under US domestic law, shield them from responsibility under international law.

via Switzerland: Letter to the Swiss Confederation regarding the visit of Mr Bush / February 3, 2011 / Assistance to victims / OMCT.

Excerpt from the article / letter on the above linked page about the visit that ex-President George Bush was expecting to make on Feb. 12, 2011.

It is about damn time. He and his Republican conservative cronies had no right to use the United States the way they did and to use the resources put at their command to abuse people, to torture, to kill people during torture, and to do any other of a number of horrible things they did. It is unfortunate that they made those decisions but they were not done in our name as citizens and most of us, including me – do not agree with any of it having been done in America’s name. I’m glad they have taken a stand on it.

– cricketdiane

***

 

Ex-Spy, Duane R. Clarridge, Runs His Own Private C.I.A. – NYTimes.com

Tags

Above the Law, blackwater, CIA, contract killers, cricketdiane, Democracy, Egypt, ex-spy in private practice, Freedom, Homeland Security contractors, Human Rights, Intel, Intelligence Contractors, International Concerns, KGB, mercenaries and spies, MidEast, military contractors, military intelligence consultants, Mossad, Mubarak, NSA, Private Contractors US Military and Intelligence, security industry, South America, Spies, Suleiman, US foreign aid, US foreign military aid, Xe

Ex-Spy, Duane R. Clarridge, Runs His Own Private C.I.A. – NYTimes.com.

Has a great photograph on page 3 of Ollie North (Oliver North) during the Iran-Contra hearings with Clarridge possibly? Who knows – they are whispering in the middle of nationally televised hearings where their butts were on the line – supposedly . . .

What conspiracy? How could any conspiracy in America be true? What would make anybody believe that?

Duh . . .

Our nation’s history and our world’s history is literally littered with the conspiracies of many, many different times – including the one where Lucretia Borgia and her “family members” had their own ways of dealing with things they didn’t like. And, yet – it is just something to be mocked, despite all evidence such as the very existence of Mr. Clarridge and others in his quasi-government, quasi-privatized war of information, misinformation, dissemination of information, agents, CIA spook stuff and generally malfeasance . . .

Durn – and they say I’m crazy.

These people held a way without Congress allowing it and then got caught and then got paid and then got away with it. And, now this guy and fourteen others like him are in business for themselves. Figures.

– cricketdiane

 

***

Why I know the government of the states and the US are lying to us – whether Party, Legislatures, Legislators, Politicians, Elected US Government Officials, State Government Officials, Republicans, Democrats, Administration Leadership, Agency Appointees, Highly Paid Experts to Cabinet Members and Administration Officials, Highly Paid Experts and Think Tanks to Congressional Members and Caucuses – gee, let me think – what tells me they are lying?

Tags

bill of rights, cricketdiane, Don't Tread On Me, health care reform, health care summit Washington DC, health insurance corruption in Washington political parties, innovation and invention, lies of Washington and state govenments in the US, New Boston Tea Party Actions, tenets of freedom, the Revolutionary War soldiers of this generation, the United States of America, US and state legislators, US Constitution, US Government

Here is why I know Washington is lying – all of them that we’ve elected to be there making decisions who are at the table –

1.  They didn’t invite us to the table (as in, the American people). Oh no, they invited the insurance companies to be at the table, the automakers CEOs, the banking industry and financial services industry CEOs, pharmaceutical company representatives, oil company lobbyists and big industry consortium representatives to be at the table – not us.)

2.  If they (legislators in Washington) had wanted to pass a health care insurance bill to serve the US population, they could’ve passed one bill to make it illegal for insurance companies to charge 80% more in premiums based on gender and to make it illegal to deny coverage in pre-existing conditions. (Period – nothing else in the bill, no “riders”, no pork, no bullshit.) But they didn’t do that – no, not even after a year of fussing, cussing, discussing and putting off other more important issues to play with this one. Time consuming at best – energy, manpower, effort, money, resource, time and opportunity wasting at worst.

3.  If they were very concerned about the health and well-being of the American people and our quality of life throughout the US, these legislators would’ve stopped a lot of common practices in industries, including the release of toxic chemicals into their surrounding living communities. They would’ve stopped corporations from taking profits made in the US into other countries in order to evade taxes on those profits. They would’ve funded schools first and the re-building of Iraq and Afghanistan second. They would’ve thought more of us than to allow 2600 complaints about cars with defective design elements to be disregarded while causing deaths and injuries to people throughout the US. They would’ve made sure our food supply and food providers were using safe food handling methods and processes across the board whether the manufacturer sneaked the production facilities into another country with lax standards or was sitting here in the US right under their noses breeding salmonella and E.Coli in their production facilities. They would’ve required standards of accounting in our corporations that show everything on the balance sheet, not off-balance hidden accounting for liabilities and they would’ve required that accounting to be prudent and truthful and accurately reflect the true values of those assets and liabilities across the board. They would’ve made financiers who got into trouble dig into their own pockets to get themselves out of it, since that is the same thing required of us. And, they would’ve made sure that nobody, but nobody could buy the goodwill and rubber stamp of the consumer protection agency that was intended to keep us safe from defective products and fraudulent business practices. They didn’t do any of that.

4.  The elected officials in Washington also never, never, never create and apply policy that does what they claimed it would do, either by their intentional design of it which is the antithesis of what they claimed it would be or by virtue of some very basic misunderstanding of applied common sense which escapes their abilities and that of their staff members. Rarely, if ever, are the people of the United States doing anything that they can hear, acknowledge, believe or understand to express the accurate facts about what their policy decisions are destroying, causing, distorting, screwing up, manipulating in negative ways or otherwise resulting in some unnecessary and expensive suffering of some kind. That information is either discounted, discredited or just plainly not heard in Washington no matter how it is done and no matter what measures are used to get the information to them. Then, why do I know they are lying because of this – because I can hear it, I can see it, I know about it, I find it easy to get the information about what their policies have done in real factual reflections of reality. To say they can’t or don’t know or can’t see it or can’t hear it or don’t know about it – has to be either a lie or a lying excuse to do nothing about it.

5. I also know they are lying because the evidence is there in their choices, decisions and actions. One side of their mouths says that the American people are at fault for our financial meltdown, while their backhand is giving away our money to financial institutions and insurance companies like it is a private bank account of free money to cover whatever they want at the moment. The other side of those mouths they have are saying that they want us to innovate and create solutions, while behind their backs they are doing everything possible to hinder the growth and opportunities of entrepreneuship, raising fees and licenses, requiring absurd groups of regulations to be met by small businesses and startups, hindering business grants and loan packages to any but the large business communities and foreign investors, and generally, laying every complexity of intellectual prowess in the path of starting up any business from scratch at all – particularly those that are innovative, new, and competitive to larger industries.

6.  At every turn, they have taken out the checks and balances systems that would ensure our Constitutional rights and guarantees are upheld and that would insure our government doesn’t become the bully state of Orwellian novels which we’ve all seen come to fruition in dictatorships, regimes of absolute tyranny, despotism, aristocratic rule, profit-driven anything goes industrialism, and in Nazi Germany’s Aryan race atrocities. Enough is enough, none of us like the America that has become so close to those things as to mitigate the belief it can be something else. If our government legislators in the states and federal levels cared about that as they say they do, they simply wouldn’t be doing half the things they are doing now and wouldn’t have done 90% of the things they’ve already done. The checks and balances built into our system would be restored to what it was intended in order to accomplish what was intended and offer accountability both individually and collectively from our government officials at every level as well as our agencies. The sovereign immunity clause offering no accountability to government personnel is only appropriate in a tyranny or a dictatorship where there are no rights afforded the citizens – not in a free and democratic society where the government serves the people who are their primary source of power.

7.  One side of our government party system says that small government is desirable and offers a list of benefits they assume come with that territory – and they did their best to accomplish that while they spent the last thirty years in power. They were lying then and they are lying now. Those benefits did not materialize during their reign. And, the word for small government is “king” with the tentacles of an octopus doing all his dirty work. Which, by the way, is exactly what we’ve had in the US for the last thirty years and more so in each and every day throughout that time and still yet from the damages that they caused. States underfunded programs that the Republican administratorship did not want, removed checks and balances because they didn’t want to be accountable for the heinous crimes they committed everywhere they touched, acted like mini-dictatorships at the behest of the federal government lackeys who were serving the interests of industries, big business, and financial conglomerates and genuinely, treated the American people like slaves and undesirables along with establishing a caste system in America where it didn’t belong that is still there to this day. They were lying when they said that is the “American Way.” They were lying when they said it would be the best for America. They were lying when they told us our lives would be better and America would be stronger for it. They were lying when they said they weren’t criminals. They were lying when they said they had the interests of the American people first and foremost on their agenda and on their minds when they did these things and numerous others (both at state levels and federal levels). It was all lies.

8.  I also know they are lying now because they do know better. They have the finest resources available, all of our money, the best in education, the best in the educated minds of our country available to them, the most in money, materials and manhours to get any job done, the best in intellectual and data resources from around the world available to them, the instant information resources from the American people to use as feedback on how their decisions are actually working out – if they choose to see them or hear them, the best opportunities, the most egregious pool of combined resources that belong to us which we’ve made available to them from every hard earned dime and dollar we’ve sent there along with the resources that have been bought with it – as well as having resources available to them on a daily basis that cover every basic need, want, income, delight, luxury, comfort, opportunity and desirable life experience for each of them personally – so they could want for nothing while doing our national and state business. How the hell can you screw it up with that much to work with?

9.  If they wanted to stop waste and fraud, they could stop giving themselves raises. If they wanted to help the budget deficit, they wouldn’t have been charging the American people to cover each of them with 100% fully paid health care coverage when they, if anybody could afford it for themselves. If they wanted to cut government dole, they would’ve only hired lawyers to cover their asses as needed instead of keeping armies of them on the payroll at anywhere from $187,000 – $450,000 a year each as they have done. If they wanted to insure good health in America, they would’ve changed the fuel on school buses from diesel to natural gas and they would’ve made polluting industries stop polluting in the same year they discovered they were doing it, not years into the future after really damaging the health of everybody for hundreds of miles around and many generations thereafter. If they had ever wanted to get legislation passed that was sane, sober and built on some kind of common sense, they would’ve made it illegal to place riders into bills that are in no way related to the material subject of the legislation. At the very least, if they had wanted to do a good job for the American people, they would’ve considered the American people and their interests in light of what they were doing, what they are doing and in light of what choices they are making in order to serve industries that basically have no use for them or us in the overall scheme of their activities.

10. I’m sad to say that I know they are lying because to get to Washington requires being the better liar, the more convincing liar and the best opportunistic lying bastard of the lot or people just don’t get to be elected to go to Washington. Isn’t that the shame of it all, that we, as Americans would choose the best liar of the lot to send into Washington to get our business done than to choose an honest, decent man or woman to serve our interests? And, isn’t it the shame and tragedy of it all, that we let them get away with it without doing a damn thing to change it when we knew what they were doing was wrong and even, as most of us noticed that they weren’t listening to any of us with any real regard – that we let them get away with demonizing us, discrediting us, disregarding us, and generally, dismissing us and our concerns? They lied to us in Washington and in our state legislators and administrations. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have served the interests of their financial power base while lying to us and using us to further their own personal opportunities and enrichment. The lies have been so pervasive and perverse that the media and the American people alike believe that the truth, the facts and the reality are no more than a matter of opinion and rhetoric as presented by whosever side is representing it and irregardless of those facts. And, isn’t it the greater shame of all of it that the truth, in fact – will be the reality that we all suffer, endure or experience – no matter what perspective we might have about it. Dead is dead and broke is broke and polluted beyond recognition is still polluted beyond recognition – climate change is, because we are experiencing it whether the “rhetoric” told us it didn’t exist or not, and most of us in America are living in a “Depression Economy” whether it is called that or not and no matter what the politicians tell us it is.

(And)

11. Just for good measure, the problem with these lies and probably the reason most religions suggest that it is a bad idea in the first place, is because reality will win out every time. Sooner or later, the propaganda doesn’t work and the deflected, distorted perspectives about reality and about the facts just doesn’t make any difference in changing what is what. It still is whatever it is. And sooner or later, people know about it and they do understand it for what it is, and sooner or later, they do get up and make things different starting right where they are with a power that is unknown and misunderstood by the people who think they hold all the power. One change, changes everything a little bit and another change, changes it even more, and as another person and another person join in making those changes one at a time from where they are with their own personal abilities and perceptions, the whole thing changes even more.

That is the truth. And, that is what made the Boston Tea Party so monumental. The American Revolutionaries said – You will not tax us without representation. You will not steal from us without our voice. You will not indenture us in enslavement to you and you will not indenture our lands and the abilities of our hands. You will not tread on me nor force me to set below your feet for you to stand on nor for your power to rest upon. You will not use me to do your bidding without my will or choice. You will not remove from Us nor from me that which God has given:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the right of every man to set his own course and to pursue his own destiny. Try as you might, once a human being knows the taste of freedom, democracy and the rights to life free of the burdenous yoke of tyranny – there is no going back.

Don’t believe for one minute that perception is everything. It just isn’t. The power and truth of our Constitution does not exist in a piece of paper or some flimsy document resting in a museum somewhere. It is in each of us and that is where the true power of our nation’s substance exists and where it will always exist. It is in the power and wonder of freedom that we already know exists and can exist for each of us that can never be taken away no matter the circumstances where we find ourselves. It is the truth of what we see and know in our hearts and minds which is defined by the reality of the facts at hand that can never be distorted by politicians or religious fervor or zealousness of a cause or by the disregard for human life that we have experienced or have seen those in authority exemplify. It is the desire for human dignity and decency and fairness for all without discrimination, contempt or disregard. It is the sword of justice that is not blind, deaf and dumb to the plight of suffering and inhumanity to human lives and human dignity at the hands of others. It is the will of the American people, both individually and collectively that define the power of the government to govern by no more and no less than the consent of the governed. And, it is the true power that comes from the intimate knowledge of the freedom, rights and accountability to those tenets of America’s founding fathers that spilled our blood to protect it and have made us the soldiers of freedom that we are and will always be as American citizens and as citizens of the World.

– cricketdiane, 02-25-10

**