POLL: The World's Future Reserve Currency

As distressing as it is, we should prepare for the eventuality that the current occupants of the White House and the Naval Observatory might still be at their current D.C. addresses on January 21, 2021. If that happens, and they continue in their quest to transform the United States of America into the Bankrupt Republic of Gilead, what will replace the formerly-mighty U.S. Dollar as the world's favorite reserve currency.

POLL:
So, if Trump is re-elected, what will replace the American dollar as the world's most important currency?

— True Blue Liberal - #BidenHarris2020 (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 27, 2020

The USA is exceptional (and almost 69 years behind the UK) in at least one area.

The National Health Service began on July 5, 1948.

I'm simply retyping the historic text of the page above in order to make it searchable and readable on all devices:

THE NEW

NATIONAL

HEALTH 

SERVICE

*

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it?

    It will provide you with all medical, dental, and nursing care. Everyone--rich or poor, man, woman or child--can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a " charity ". You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

Oligarchy By The Numbers

With billionaires trying to buy candidates and control election results in both major US political parties with the legal support of a pro-business Supreme Court, the word "oligarchy" is getting thrown around again as we approach the 2016 election. So I found these sentences relevant when I ran across them in my morning reading...

"So the long period in which towns prospered, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was also one in which the sense of urban community was most highly developed. In some respects the notion of a community is specious, however, since the richer townspeople known as 'the better sort' created an oligarchy of power concentrated in a small network of families. In Norwich 60 per cent of the wealth had devolved into the hands of 6 per cent of the population..." --Peter Ackroyd, Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors ["page" 139 of the Kindle edition]

Yeah, you say, but that was the 1100's and 1200's. That was medieval England. Everyone knows that medieval societies were based on hierarchies of extreme inequality, not like today when the top 1% are expected to control more than half of the world's wealth by 2016 and when the top 0.1% of Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 90% and all of these numbers are trending quickly toward even greater inequality.

So if 60% of the wealth being controlled by 6% of the people was defined as 'oligarchy' back in the 12th and 13th centuries, we may actually need a new word for our extreme 21st-century phenomenon.

Today in American Exceptionalism: "We're Number 65! We're Number 65!"

From CNNMoney: "The U.S. is 65th in world on gender pay gap":

Browsing by here because you're having a rough day at work?

Here's your literary quote of the day from my morning's reading on the train.

". . . In the early '60's a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology* that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive's first thoughts were naturally of suicide.  But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee. ..."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
(p.83 of the Bantam mass market paperback) 

Having a better day at work now?

___________

*Despite the look of the word, eschatology has absolutely no relation to the verb romney or the noun santorum.  It is, however, true that Yoyodyne was one of the companies that was eventually bought and destroyed by Bain Capital under Mitt Romney's watch.   

"...banks aren't bad people ..." (says Mr. Willard "Corporations are people, too" Romney)

Here's Mitt Romney in Lehigh Acres, Florida earlier today:

How Rich Is Willard "Mitt" Romney : The Answer(s) to the TBL Math Puzzler of the Day

This morning I posted the following question on Twitter. "Your Math Puzzler of the Day : If Willard "Mitt" Romney drops a twenty on the sidewalk, is it worth his time to bend over and pick it up?"

I didn't know the answer myself when I tweeted the question, but I had the feeling that it would be a close call.

Now I've done the math and I have two answers.

1.  Based on income, the surprising answer is Yes!  He has reported his estimated 2011 income as $20,900,00.00.  If we assume for the sake of argument that he actually "worked" for this investment income at a rate of 40/hrs week and 52/wks year, his hourly pay would be $10,048.07 per hour, or $167.47 per minute, or $2.79 per second. So, if Mitt could pick up that twenty-dollar bill in less than 7.17 seconds, it would be worth his valuable time to bend over!
2. Based on net worth, the answer is No, keep walking and let some pauper pick up your loose portrait of Andrew Jackson.  If we accept a commonly reported net worth of $250,000,000.00 for Mr. Romney, then $20.00 represents 0.000008% of that quarter of a billion dollars.  Let's compare that to a more normal net worth of $250,000.00, which might be closer to yours and mine.  0.000008% of that 250K would be two cents.  I think we might not miss a step for those two loose pennies.

It's a silly question anyway. I'm sure he has someone to carry his money for him. He looks like a germophobe to me, and you don't know where that stuff's been.

Abraham Lincoln Explained the Dangers of Corporate Personhood in 1864

Two years ago today I posted this quotation from South Carolina's least favorite Republican President (at least they don't hate Barack Obama enough to secede from the Union) in honor of the Supreme Court's Citizens United case that had just been decided earlier that week. I followed it at the time with a short rant about the ramifications of this groundbreaking Corporate Personhood case, but now it doesn't need any further elaboration:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

--Abraham Lincoln (letter to William F. Ekins, 21 November 1864)

Black Friday Strike and Shop Local Saturday

I'm not even sure if I should be spreading this word, because it will be no skin off my nose. My office is closed and as a longtime foot soldier in the Liberal War On Christmas, there was no way that I'd be shopping with the hordes on the day after Thanksgiving. But I'm 100% behind these two drives.

1) Don't work, shop, or do anything else next Friday, the 25th. You can click here at Black Friday Blackout (or Adbusters' more traditional Buy Nothing Day) for more information or promotional materials.
2) When the Strike is over on Saturday the 26th (if you must shop), please shop locally, if the chains and online retailers haven't already driven all the local businesses off your Main Street. Do your own search for shop local Saturday in your own area, because there are a lot of local offers out there on the internet.

The Word of the Day is "Slumburbia"

"The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this [San Joaquin] valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums [...] this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live."

--Timothy Egan, "Slumburbia"

on nytimes.com, 10 February 2010

Click the link for his full short blog entry on the ghost towns dotting the Sunbelt that are filled with underwater McMansions and minimalls of cigarette stores and cash advance outlets, but I also love that Timothy Egan quotes another writer of the American West to sum up the religion of economic bubbles and development even more succinctly:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

--Edward Abbey, The Journey Home, 1977

Petroschadenfreude from Ted Rall

Today's cartoon from Ted Rall distills the joyful message of my post from May 2 into one frame.

.

Remember to check Ted's comics and blog posts regularly at gocomics.com/tedrall and at rall.com.

The Headline of the Day

If monkeys are controlling robot arms with their brains, it won't be too long before my job is outsourced to someone living at the Bronx Zoo.

there IS a crisis, but not the one the bushies are pushin' (Part II)

The New York Times >
April 22, 2005 >
Paul Krugman: "Passing the Buck"

". . . decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution."

As promised, PK delivers the goods again today on the nuts and bolts of the American Health Care Crisis. Read him. Forward him to your friends. There's not much I can add here, except a simple Thank You.

True Blue Liberal