Instant Eradification
All of those unshowered, vagrant conspiracy theorists occupying Wall Street—the 99 percent who claimed the system was intrinsically stacked against them, the ones the mainstream and liberal media pigeonholed—more were right than wrong.
The recent Libor Index debacle is what debate-team judges refer to as a knockout punch. It illustrates with certitude just how deeply systematic the fraud actually is. Corporate banks aren’t just colluding with US regulators; they’re doing so on a global scale and in plain sight.
Regulators continue to claim the wrongdoings are the result of a few “bad apples, acting on their own,” when it’s clear and certain that the entire orchard is infested. What’s clearer now than when the Occupiers were pissing in Zuccotti Park is just how deeply the regulators are in on it.
These guys were the final barrier. The last hope. But they were undermanned and overloaded, or so we were told. We were also told that with enough evidence and conviction, they would get at least a few of the bad guys and make an example of them.
Then the facts started trickling in. And they weren’t pretty. Were these regulators really asking us to believe that they missed the “red flags” for six years? Six years?
Said regulators were pretty damn prompt doling out those TARP billions, though. That part wasn’t bungled or delayed in the slightest. Is it crazy to think that instead of working backward to cover their asses after it all blew open and the walls came down, these regulators could have used a tiny sliver of that massive booty to hire a few more people to improve their lame-ass system of pseudo checks and balances?
Yes. Because, as we now know, the regulators stood more to gain in leaving the status quo intact.
Banking scandals are a disgrace of greed. We will look back on them as we do the robber barons, except the robber barons did some civic good, like building railroads and museums and parks. Environmental scandals, on the other hand, are nothing short of catastrophic, and we won’t look back on them because we’ll all be burnt to a toxic crisp before we get the chance for a searing retrospective. Both scandals share one basic truth: soon there won’t be anything left to abuse.
The predictions for Arctic warming are being surpassed by the incoming data. The ice is receding faster than we thought. And we react—unbelievably—by preparing full steam ahead to drill the land once covered by ice! Reminds me of the commercial where the cancer patient is still inhaling through the hole in his neck because his mouth was destroyed by smoking.
Exxon plans to spend $37 billion a year (roughly $100 million every 24 hours) searching for more, more, more, more, more, more, more oil. British Petroleum recently shuttered its solar division. Shell stopped its research and development on wind power in 2009.
Why chase alternative energy when there are trillions in profits to be made in fossil fuels? Extract. Extract. Extract without putting back. Because that makes sense. All our resources are totally limited! The batteries in our phones are never going to die! The gas in our cars will never hit empty! The food from our farms will never stop growing!
Why is it so hard to understand that disaster is looming on a larger-than-imaginable scale in the very near future? Our children will see a different world. We’re just waiting to see to what degree. There have been studies saying the idea of “climate change” is too abstract for people to grasp. If it’s not something they can relate to in their daily life, like a lawn furniture sale at Costco, it won’t have any impact.
It begs the question: how much have we really evolved? What’s so hard to grasp about deferring satisfaction? About conserving for the future? Don’t we read these stories to our children every night in one form or another? Don’t we remember the moral of the three little pigs? How the third one worked real hard while the other fucked off so as not to become back bacon. Don’t we all know how much better it is to plan ahead?