A Big Box Store owned sweat shop in Bangladesh collapsed into a twisted pile yesterday, 90 known dead and hundreds still missing. When I say the Walmarts of the world own these sweat shops, I mean it in an economic sense, not in the paper fiction consisting of layers of corporate ownership that they hide behind to evade criminal responsibility. If you or I did the things the Walton family have done behind the bureaucracy of their corporate holdings we would never see the light of day again. That's not to say they are the only ones doing this, the decriminalization of mergers & acquisitions by the Reagan Adm has put most of the world's corporate holdings in the hands of sociopaths.
The fiction promoted by the corporate media is that these garment factories are locally owned, but the margin they operate on is so small that they have no choice but to do exactly what they are told by their corporate masters. It's true that they aren't explicitly told to lock the fire exits and ignore the giant cracks in the concrete, but they'll be joining the ranks of the starving poor if they don't, and they will simply be replaced by someone who will. The thing is, it really doesn't make the poorly made shirt that you buy cheaper, labor is not a big portion of the cost, it just deprives people a living wage, and that is the goal of the Neo-Cons.
Tweet Fall: on Tuesday an internet hacker inserted a message into the official twitter feed of the Associated Press saying that multiple explosions had occurred inside the White House and the POTUS had been injured. This triggered Wall Street computers monitoring the news feed to create an algorithmic response that generated millions of trades on Wall Street exchanges in a nano-second, and this dropped the value of the Dow 30 by 200 billion USD. [Be sure to download the 007 movie track 'Tweet Fall' by Adele on Fox Music].
Tweet Fall is however an insignificant blip compared to the day to day skimming operations of these computers. Their primary function is to monitor 'buy' orders for stock and if the algorithm detects a buying trend the computer will corner the market on that stock because it can act a nano-second faster than the buy orders. This forces the buyer to pay a few cents more for the shares then they would have paid a fraction of a second earlier. It doesn't sound like much but with as much as 80% of Wall Street trades done this way it captures billions for traders that hold stock for no more than two seconds. The trends that they are able to create by doing this also encourages more buying and selling by the retirement funds that hold a huge portion of the stock (and are desperate to show 'value'), this serves to create still more nano-second profit capture opportunities. And as shocking as this is, it is only one of the many scams Wall Street traders are running, more on this in future posts.
The Right Wing is outraged over airport delays because of the Sequester cut driven furloughs of air traffic controllers, but the FAA cuts were specifically mandated by the Republicans in amendments to the Sequester law. These cuts were designed to embarrass Obama, period. The rightwing talking point it is that dictator Obama could simply stop paying for Food Stamps and keep the planes flying on time. After all we know that welfare, the nanny state bureaucrats and foreign aid account for 99% of the Federal budget.
With every embarrassment of rigged research, rigged trading, rigged voting, rigged no-bid contracts, rigged legislation, and on and on and on, the right sinks closer to irrelevance. The problem is that this evil was so powerful to begin with that no matter how many time Buffy kicks them in the face they just keep getting up. It will take the realization by a far bigger portion of the population that there is evil among us to make it stop. It starts with you, sharpen your wooden stake. www.prairie2.com twitter @BruceEnberg and on Facebook
The Revolution won't be televised, but you can follow 'the collapse of civilization' on social media in real time. See you on the other side, we will share a can of beans; P2.
prairie2.com and Twitter @BruceEnberg
