Termination Letter For An Oligarch

Dear Mr. Oligarch:

In light of the current economic environment, difficult decisions have had to be made. Your position is being eliminated and your service will no longer be required.

Please understand that this decision was not made lightly and that everyone on our team is also being asked to make tremendous sacrifices at this time. The bottom line—and every business must ultimately answer to the bottom line—is that we simply cannot afford your salary, which is out of all proportion to everyone else in the organization.

We want you to know this decision is not a personal one, and does not necessarily reflect your performance. But the organization you work for, Humanity, Inc., has recently undergone a change in management and we are taking things in a different direction. In fact, we are doing away with the entire oligarchy department as a matter of streamlining. A careful review of the oligarchy department has revealed that it has been requiring more resources than it has been able to bring in. The expense requests for luxury boats, fighter jets, and the constant need for cash bailouts every time business hits a few bumps has made it necessary to try a different approach.

We are shifting our attention back onto our core values, which needs to be on serving the customer and empowering the workers to make the important decisions that will move our organization forward. We are moving Humanity, Inc. in a direction more in line with our founding principles and your skill set of plundering and hoarding do not match with that direction.

As part of your severance package, we will be providing you with a roomful of now-worthless cash, a gold toilet, and a plaque of recognition for your service in making our organization what it now is, a smoldering trash fire teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

It is our hope that in this moment you can reflect upon the many fine memories we’ve had over the years as we’ve lived through the good years and the lean. We cannot help but think that we have been more than generous with you, and that the amount you’ve earned through our combined efforts will provide a comfortable retirement for not only you but your children, their children, their children's children, etc.

We understand that loss of position can be a traumatic event and we will be offering counseling services should you require them. As with any other employee who loses his or her job, it is a normal reaction to experience feelings of betrayal, worthlessness, and lack of direction. You may feel that all your hard work has not been appreciated or the organization will not be able to survive without you. Please remind yourself that many others before you have felt as you do now, and yet Humanity, Inc. still goes on.

Please understand that you are not the only one who has undergone such a termination. In fact, the obscene amount of compensation we have provided you over the years has forced us to terminate many, many workers in the past. In doing away with your position, we hope to be able to give some degree of assistance to those in far worse circumstances than yourself with the money we will be saving. We are also confident that our customers will be happier as a result.

Your termination is effective immediately. Please clean out your desk of all personal effects, but be aware that you will be searched upon leaving in order to insure you do not try to walk out with any company supplies. We suggest you get started immediately, as security will be knocking at your office in ten minutes to escort you to the door. 

Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors, 

The People Of Humanity Inc.

P.S. We would also like to see you clean up some of the mess you made before you go, but we understand the limited amount of time we have provided for you.

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Working To The Letter Of The Law Will Not Save Us

Free market capitalism will always work to the letter and never the spirit of any law.

That was a thought I had recently, but in light of recent events it’s really hit home. You see, the only law capitalism feels compelled to obey is the law of profit. Sure, when capitalists point to capitalism as the greatest of all systems, they refer to a sort of moral capitalism, a capitalism that believes in the tenets required to make capitalism work. That’s really not any different than Marxists pointing to how communism is the best of all possible systems provided human being act in moral ways. It’s trying to change people to fit a system rather than create a system that fits humanity.

The bottom line is that most capitalists are not moral creatures. They are guided by a desire for wealth. Not all of them, but some of them. Most of them actually, but for argument’s sake let’s just say some of them. It’s obvious to us whenever there is a crisis and people try to sell hand sanitizer or bottled water at exorbitant prices. At such times believers in the capitalist way of life scream that such people are evil, but they are only following the law of the market which is to sell at the greatest cost people are willing to pay. This is economics 101, the law of supply and demand, the central tenet of capitalism. That it enrages people who are so completely supportive of capitalism is evidence that most people’s convictions are not the result of a prolonged search for truth but rather a prolonged period of indoctrination. Most of us do not spend much time questioning the basic premises we’ve been told since youth.

Besides, that’s the alleged beauty of capitalism is that morality is not required. No matter how selfishly we are motivated by profit, the market will transform individual selfishness into a win/win for everyone. This is what they call the “magic” of the marketplace. Economics is the one (alleged) science that uses magic as a factor in its equations.

But even the most uneducated of the common people seem to know there’s no such thing as magic, at least when their personal finances are involved. They understand that morality needs to be a part of the equation. That’s why they get so angry at price-gougers, especially when they themselves are the ones being gouged. When they are charged $30 for 24 bottles of water, their sense of fairness suddenly comes to the fore, although they never seem to notice that they’ve been led to pay $1.25 for a bottle of water from a vending machine when a few decades back there used to be a free water fountain where the vending machine now stands. People must be sold capitalist ideas, and when the pleasant packaging and marketing are absent and they are left staring at the ugly face of economic exploitation, they rebel.

Which is why laws are written to protect ordinary people from the abuses of capitalism. Or were. It seems there are few if any new laws written nowadays to protect the average American from those who use the market without any morals. This is what is pushed by libertarians as the ideal form of capitalism, but even they have no love of immoral capitalists. So our government is compelled from time to time to pass laws restricting those who wish to make a profit by egregiously hurting individuals, animals, or the environment. Even capitalists have a certain revulsion to those who practice their religion to zealously.

The problem is, as I came to realize a short while ago, that capitalists will do everything in their power to follow the letter of the law while doing everything they can to avoid following the spirit of the law. No one person is to blame, it is just the nature of the beast. The most immoral of capitalists—which we’ve already admitted, such people do exist—will hire a team of lawyers to find weaknesses in the wording of any law in order to contest what the meaning of it really was meant to be. Their legal team, having much more financial incentive to argue their case, will eventually outlast those who argue on the side of principle over profit.

And once those greediest of capitalists—which for the sake of argument, we will agree are a small minority of those who engage in the practice of capitalism—are able to bend the laws to their own advantage, it now leaves those with high moral standards (a group to which the greater share of capitalists surely belong) to compete on unequal ground. Of those capitalists with high moral standards, there will undoubtedly be a few in exceptional circumstances who will have to capitulate to the new reality of competing in a market in which some are circumventing the spirit of the law. Perhaps they have an ill spouse, or have recently acquired debt, or have through no fault of their own fallen upon hard times. They are competing in an economic jungle in which they must either find a way to survive or else perish. When life and death are on the line, morality is understandably pushed to the side.

So it is that within the pool of capitalists—the vast majority of whom are pillars of the community who are motivated more by their concern for society than personal advancement—yet another segment is led away from the spirit of the law into accepting the need to conform merely to the letter of the law. At which point a certain amount of high-minded but not that high-minded capitalists are forced to abandon principles for profit or even survival. At which point most of those left realize they are involved in a game where, if they wish to play, morality will be a millstone around their necks.

It is at this point you will hear the capitalists say “Why should I follow rules when no one else is? If I do, I shall only perish. I’ll have to do whatever is necessary to survive.” I understand that way of thinking. Because, as I’ve said before, when survival is on the line, it’s hard to maintain your morality. Few do, and among those, much fewer survive.

I think of capitalism and the letter and spirit of the law now in light of the current pandemic and the resulting stock market crash. As a working class blue collar worker, I have a bit of a finger on the pulse of those who are now facing the fallout of a system that has for decades been built upon the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Nurses lack for masks, patients lack for testing, millions of us lack healthcare, workers lack sick leave, and the capitalist system lacks the ability to cope with a crisis that does not work within the law that has been shaped by the greed of a few and followed by the economic necessities of the rest. 

And all the laws that we had in place to prevent catastrophes such as the one we now face have been more or less followed to the letter. But not to the spirit. Because capitalism has no soul.

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Random Political Thoughts: The Joe Biden Edition

Before you blame me for helping Trump by poking fun at Joe Biden, please keep in mind all the fun I poked at Trump leading up to the election. Obviously, it had no impact on who won.

  

Knock Knock.

Who’s there?

Joe.

Joe who?

Joe Bi the…go…you know the thing.

Of all the turds in the toilet that is the Democratic Party, I never imagined it would be Joe Biden who would float to the top.

Young girls are being instructed to socially isolate themselves from Joe Biden

The freedom to vote for the lesser of two evils doesn’t really feel like freedom to me. The only way I can feel free is to refuse to do what is demanded of me.

I've heard people say they's support Joe Biden if he was the candidate, but I still have never heard anybody actually admit to having voted for Joe Biden.

Even if you're a total Blue No Matter Who person, I have to think you can't help feel a little let down by the Democrats. Like, after four years of coming up with a solution, is this really the best they could do? And I have to wonder if you're starting to think you should have held the bar a little bit higher than "anybody but Trump". 

The goal is unchanged from what it was before, to bring down the system of which the Democratic Party is a part.

It has been suggested that one of the greatest causes of the spread of the coronavirus in the United States has been Joe Biden’s inappropriate touching.

A vote for Joe Biden in the general election is a vote for the normalization of rigged primaries.

If there is not a very distinct AND or BUT after your statement “I will vote for Biden” I see certain flaws in your reasoning. As for me, there is a very distinct and capitalized NOT included in my statement “I will NOT vote for Biden.”

Go ahead, take your rusty old Biden into battle and see what happens. They say its an upgrade from their previous model, but both were made from the same blueprint. Both are weapons forged by the very enemies we need to be fighting: corporations that have usurped our democratic processes. Trump is the more obvious tool of the enemy, the more powerful weapon, but we are unlikely to win a battle and will damned sure lose the war if we rush into battle with whatever weapons are handed to us by those who grow rich by funding both sides.

When I am old, I hope I will be able to continue to fight for what I think is right and inspire young people like Bernie Sanders is doing. If I am unable to do that, I at least hope I am as clueless about what I'm doing as as Joe Biden is.

In the midst of global crisis, Joe Biden is proving his ability to vanish from sight.

What if Trump found dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine and is just waiting for the general to use it?

Trump needs to learn a lesson from Joe Biden and keep a low profile for a while so he doesn’t say anything stupid.

If you were the captain of the Titanic and you had a giant iceberg to your starboard, and another giant but slightly smaller iceberg to your port, which would you try to avoid? If you answered port, then you will vote blue no matter who. If you refused to confine yourself to these two options, the small iceberg people are going to blame you for the ship going down.

DNC would have been just as happy with an old Odor Eater shoe insert as their nominee so long as it didn't threaten the interests of their donors.

I’ve seen the Democratic Party repeatedly sell its soul in order to win an election, but never before have I seen them so utterly sell it for utter failure.

Joe Biden's not hiding. He's been busy making 78 recordings with his message on them and sending them in the mail to voters. Expect them to arrive in your mail box in the next week. Clean your stylus.

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I Speak For The Dead

It's always a dangerous thing to attempt to speak for others, but sometimes the attempt must be made. Those who have a voice must speak out against the injustices perpetrated against those who have none. People need to speak out against problems even when the victims themselves are unaware. Just because someone does not have a voice does not mean they have nothing to say.

As for me, I feel I must speak for the dead.

I feel the need to give voice to those who have passed on, our elders who are no longer around to give us their wisdom.

It is risky, channeling the voices of those who raised us, those who guided us through our early years and shared with us their principles and beliefs. It is even harder to attempt to speak for those we have only heard about, those who passed out of existence before we were ever born. And yet their stories were passed on to us, at least parts of them. I can only approximate what they would say, but I feel they would want me to make the attempt. Their lives had meaning, their experiences can guide us even as we make our way through a world quite different than the one they knew. 

I see many of the things my parents tried to teach me differently now that I am approaching the age I knew them to be. Some of what they told me makes more sense now, some of it has not proven to be wisdom. I do not judge them, they did the best they could to point me in a positive direction. But they did a good enough job that I would dearly love to be able to talk to them now, to hear their opinions on the issues I am facing and the issues our society is facing. Most of us think we'd have a good idea of what our parents would say if they were around today, but I’m guessing for most of us our understanding of what our parents believed was fashioned by our younger selves, that if we were able to speak with them now our understanding of what they were trying to teach us would grow deeper and would better be able to guide us in the present.

And for me, at least, I would love to hear their opinions of the society in which we live now. I’m guessing it would be different than what we’d expect, because we are creatures of our current environment and they were creatures of theirs. I can’t help thinking that if we would show what we consider to be modern marvels to many of our ancestors, they would consider them abominations. If we were to show them our water parks, they would ask “But where are the open fields, where are the woods?”

We are in an era where the present is constantly with us, where we are unable to touch the timeless because the outside world has infiltrated our homes. Newsmen and advertisers, social media and video games are working from within our places of sanctuary, demanding our attention, and while we connect with these electronic devices, we are disconnecting from any link we once had with our past, with our ancestors, and with the perspective that those of another era might be able to give us.

I challenge you to step out of the present for a moment. Find an old magazine where the pictures look different, where the color scheme is not what you’re used to. Grab an old novel and really feel where the author was coming from in an era that once wrote letters and waited days and weeks for a reply. Seek to understand a different culture, which after all is really your culture, your heritage.

Watch an old movie, where most store managers were actually store owners, where people went shopping in a dress shirt and tie instead of pajama bottoms. You don’t have to agree with the way everything was back then but you should at least attempt to understand it. And don’t watch a new movie that takes place in another era, because it will be filled with the biases of our own age.

Visit an antique store or a museum, gaze upon the tools people once used. Gaze upon an old lamp and consider how not only the technology but the perspective on how things were made was so different.

Gaze at an old picture, and see what it can tell you. Who were they, what would they say to us, what did they know that we did not?

Get connected to those who came before you. Because it is only in knowing who they were, the good and the bad, that you will have any real understanding of who YOU are. Pour through your memories, reflect upon what you can remember of them, reappraise what you understood when you were young and permit yourself to see the past in light of the present. Do this until you feel you now understood them better than you ever did before. Then let them speak through you. Their voices deserve to be heard.

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If Failure Were An Olympic Sport, Democrats Would Take Home The Gold (Again)

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

-Chuck Schumer, 2016

I’ve heard people say weathermen have the easiest job because they only have to be right half the time. I have to think even weathermen envy Democratic strategists, though, because they never have to be right.

Think about it. Democrats lost the most winnable election in living memory, and not one person has been called to task for it from those whose job it was to win against Donald Trump. Russia was blamed, Julian Assange was blamed, Bernie Sanders was blamed, Bernie Bros were blamed, voters were blamed, but nobody whose actual job it was to win the election took any flack. Hillary’s still allowed on television every time she wants to blame others for her loss. All the great prognosticators, pundits, and strategists are still pulling in obscene paychecks, and there has been no shakeup in the Democratic Party, no change of strategy instituted, nor any house cleaning done. Nothing has changed. When a professional football team underperforms—not completely falls flat on its face like the Democrats did but simply underperforms—armchair quarterbacks call for heads to roll and huge changes made. Owners usually respond, or at least find a patsy to fire.

My attempt to find a fitting sports comparison fails me. I would have to go with an imaginary scenario to explain how epic a loss the Democratic Party achieved by losing to a guy who makes fun of handicapped people. It would be like the U.S. Olympic Basketball team losing to a division 3 high school team. It would be like Rocky Balboa losing to Pee Wee Herman. It would be like Joey Chestnut losing to Calista Flockhart in a hotdog-eating contest. Epic. Failure. 

Epic.

But not epic enough, apparently. If the Democrats brought home the gold for failure in 2016, they’re shooting for a platinum this time around. The company that forged Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Medal is now working on creating one in anticipation.

The Democrats had four years to come up with a strategy to beat President Trump. What did they do in those four years? Find a candidate who was fundamentally honest? Find someone who connects with voters? Make sure the primary contest would be run openly and fairly? Ask the voters what they were looking for? Ditch their corporate donors whose interests were in conflict with what the American people want? See what they could do to reach out to their progressive wing? Look in a mirror? Nope, none of that.

You have to admire their single-minded vision and dedication to reach the very nadir. They are like a ski jumper who has no plan for what happens when he eventually lands, content merely with an epic plummet. 

Had they fallen short in even one aspect of their multi-prong failure campaign, they wouldn’t be in the position they are now to accomplish the impossible, the unthinkable, the unpardonable: giving Donald Trump as many terms as it is possible for a United States President to serve. I can see it now, Joe Biden standing in the middle of the Olympic podium, flanked by Mike Bloomberg and Liz Warren, clenched fists raised high to honor their cause.

Oh, sure, Bernie Sanders still stands in opposition to their quest, but if they are as successful at playing offense against him as they have been up to now, they have a real shot at this. If the Democratic establishment is able to lift Biden over this last hurdle, he’s got an open lane to run as fast as he can into the brick wall that is Donald Trump. It will not be pretty. Because although the DNC is good at rigging primaries, they aren’t able to rig a general election. That’s where Republicans excel. That’s because it’s the job of both the Democrats and Republicans to sift out voters and candidates who are on their left. But I digress.

The Democrats have chosen the perfect candidate to lose this thing. Joe Biden has already been forced out of a previous contest because of his plagiarism, the political equivalent of PED. Had this been a one-time incident, it might not be a medal-worthy attribute, but he has a history of it. He is also a liar, as is also proven in the link in the last sentence. His son was drawing a paycheck from a Ukrainian energy company when he had no experience in energy or Ukraine, and there is audio evidence of Joe Biden being involved with the U.S. handpicking who would be in charge of the Ukrainian government. There’s no telling if Trump has uncovered any damning evidence on what Joe and Hunter Biden were doing in Ukraine, but anyone who’s not lying to him or herself has to know the whole situation stinks. If Trump does have the goods on what went down, don’t expect him to reveal it now. He’s going to wait until the general election, both in order not to knock out the weakest candidate but also to deliver the death blow when it will serve his purpose.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Joe Biden: his support for the Iraq War and his repeated calls for cutting Social Security, his support for Clarence Thomas, and his creepy behavior around women and even young girls. Most important, though, is that his mental faculties are clearly in decline. Damage control is being done by the media as much as possible, but it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s not invested in his candidacy or the Blue No Matter Who philosophy.

The Democratic establishment have pushed this man into the position of carrying the hopes and dreams of all who call themselves Democrats. This was the result of four years planning by the best and brightest minds on the DNC payroll.

Four years ago I was writing a series of articles about a monkey who leaped into the arena that is the elections, causing chaos and tearing to shreds the dignity of any who came in contact with him. Fast forward to the present, and there is no dignity left for the monkey to fling his feces at. It appears that even the monkey is at a loss for how to behave, for the moment observing the parade of clowns that are the media and political elite as they get in line behind their fool’s pope We have reached a point where even a monkey is content to sit in the audience with a bag of circus peanuts and watch as the pandemonium unfolds. 

In the meantime, those who control the party and the airwaves will be telling you they’ve got a winner on their hands. They say they're afraid sending anyone other than their handpicked candidate will be a catastrophe for the party. If Biden is that candidate, you have to wonder what event they're competing in, because it isn't the Beat Trump 2020 event. 

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