Imperator Pontifex-Maximus Julius Caesar was vested with dictatorial authority by the Senate of the Republic of Rome; as dictator, he became virtual emperor and the Republic of Rome an imperial oligarchy until its fall more than four hundred years later. Parliament of the Weimar Republic of Germany vested Chancellor Adolph Hitler with dictatorial authority; Hitler became fuhrer and Germany became an imperial oligarchy until the military defeat of Hitler and his Nazi regime years later.  Congressional oligarchs (party makes no difference) pass legislation (the National Defense Authorization bill/act) vesting the unitary executive (President and commander in chief) with dictatorial authority, no doubt in preparation and anticipation of regime change in the U.S.

No doubt this action by the overwhelmingly wealth-class Congress (both houses), representing foremost wealth-class interests, is an hysterical, paranoid defensive overreaction to Occupy’s denunciations of rogue Wall Street; its demands for tax increases on those with incomes of $1,000,000 or more, taxes on the commodities markets’ derivatives transactions, restrictions on lobbying of Congress by “Beware of men dressed in fine raiment bearing gifts (campaign contributions, wining and dining, mercenary lovers, entertainment, recreation, etc. — legal bribes),” or Congressional lobbyists for big corporate and wealth-class interests; and its calls for an amendment to the Constitution redefining a corporation as a non-human (so corporations cannot spend unlimited human free-speech money to influence politics) as well as the prosecution of Wall Street and banking system crooks that caused the mortgage meltdown and world economic recession, in addition to the damage it did to the big banks by asking depositors to take their money out of the big banks responsible for the mortgage meltdown and to redeposit it in trustworthy community banks and credit unions and the pressure (by bad publicity) it is putting on meltdown banks to renegotiate mortgage balances and monthly payments with home purchaser victims in trouble in making their mortgage payments.  Such highly publicized demands and general public support for them likely have scared and distressed Congress, Wall Street and the majority of the big corporations and wealth class beyond their tolerance. Congress appears to be doing nothing other with this legislation than using “The War on Terror” as a smokescreen to authorize the U.S. military to apprehend and lock up indefinitely or permanently, in override the Post Civil War Era Posse Comitatus Act, of any undesirable individual or group of people, citizens and non-citizens alike, on a mass scale if necessary, in the U.S., without the right of legal due process or challenge, under an unproven or unevidenced charge of “terrorism” by an official of a security office of the President’s executive office cabinet (such as Homeland Security, the FBI, Secret Service, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, etc.). Thus, the National Defense Authorization Act institutes a permanent de-facto state of martial law in the U.S.

However, Occupy needs to give up those nasty, nuisance tent cities as well as side-show gestural, symbolic political action, and meaningfully and directly face off on the rogue financial elitist, right-wing power structure (Wall Street, the banking system, the fossil fuels industry, the nuclear power plant industry, the weapons and war industries, near monopoly and big communications media, and on-government lobbyist profession), as opposed to the compassionate, communitarian wealthy and not menace, disrupt or provoke ordinary business and commerce, citizens, public and private property and particularly local civil authorities, including the police, and such government operations.

Has Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2 (energy equals mass multiplied by the velocity of light squared) been invalidated?  Will it have to be rewritten replacing  ”velocity of light squared,” the velocity of the photon squared, with “the velocity of the neutrino squared” or something else?

A second team of scientists has clocked, for the second time within the late-summer through mid-fall months of this year of 2011, the subatomic-processes-byproduct the neutrino particle in another solo run to have impossibly broken the cosmic speed limit of the speed of light, a speed limit postulated by the great physicist Albert Einstein.  Skeptical scientists are musing that perhaps a subtle error is repetitively being made in clocking the speed of the neutrino, if nature has not changed or if Einstein’s experimentally long reliable postulation is not wrong.  Probably a major reason these solo clockings of the speed of the neutrino exceeding the speed of light are questionable to much of the physics community, despite two separate clockings showing the same superior speed for the neutrino, is because the light particle or unit, the photon, has no mass, whereas the neutrino has a small mass, and, so, on the basis of this fact they would reasonably expect the photon, the basic unit of light, to travel faster than a neutrino, somehow, nevertheless. Scientists, one of which I am not, may intuit such an “Elementary, Watson! Elementary!” consideration and leave it out of the questioning conversation, taking for granted that this is presumed by their peers.  The other glaringly obvious and important but rectifiable issue, as well as a repeated flaw, with the two recent experiments clocking the speed of the neutrino and determining its superior speed or racetrack performance over the photon is that they involved solo, one-critter runs of the neutrino, alone in a scientific reality vacuum, rather than two-critter races including its competitor the photon in both fully scientific and fully reality-based, truth-showing scientific test events.

I share the skepticism that the speedy massless photon could normally be out raced by the speedy neutrino particle with a mass as well as am critical of the result coming from the procedure of doing a solo clocking of the neutrino particle where a track meet between the two different particle species could have been held and produced a different and clear, real-time comparative result.  To quell this skepticism, I propose such a track meet between the two particle types for all interested to witness live, in process.  A little quantum or cosmic science sports-theater would be a lot of fun and educational.

The photon versus the neutrino for the title of speed champion of the universe at The Quantum-Physics Cosmic Olympics

For determining the quantum particle gold-medal speed champion with finality:

Conduct a quantum physics Olympics racetrack experiment simultaneously pairing and clocking the defending champion photon quantum particle (unit of light) with the challenger neutrino quantum particle, and repeat the experiment 100 times.

In the event there are parameter differences, or measurable, often variable, shared characteristics (e.g., the size of the widths, lengths, perimeter and area of a given rectangle; or the size of the circumference, diameter and volume as well as each the weight and age gradient of a given roughly or nearly perfectly round orange), among individuals within each the photon and neutrino populations, it seems it would be prudent to not only conduct individual photon versus neutrino clocked races but also team (group) photon versus neutrino clocked races. If there are significant individual differences in the shared characteristics of and within these distinct quantum particle species, and if they are not controlled for as much as possible by random selection of same type individuals composing each of the species particle teams, then coincidental individual rather than species characteristics might influence which is the victor particle in a match up between the photon versus the neutrino particle species in the clocked races.  However, all of this may have been considered in the performed solo clockings of the neutrino, which actually may have been the solo trackings and clockings of a beam or stream of neutrinos misunderstood and misreported in lay news media articles as repeated solo trackings and clockings of a single neutrino.

This simultaniety experiment matching up and jointly testing the test objects (different types of quantum particles, being the photon and the neutrion) of examination and their performance under the same conditions, including possible systematic and unidentified experimenter error, would also subject both test objects to the same possible hidden experimenter error and/or the same undetected, confounding influence in the experiment itself, independent of the experimenter, that may have biased the outcome of the previous solo clocked runs of the neutrino in favor of the neutrino. In short, this kind of experiment would evenly distribute any error or bias in the experimental procedure and conditions across the test objects and negate a biased outcome for either in the experiment. It would make for a clean experiment and a definitive result from the experiment.

If by some definitive perplexing chance the neutrino is the consistent winner of the races, science spectators and citizen scientists will want to know mechanistically, why?  For instance, they may be asking “Do neutrinos have a special relationship to dark energy and/or dark matter or the nature of these?” and, if they have such a relationship, “Do the laws of nature governing dark energy and dark matter deviate or significantly differ from the different or differently-charged energy and matter of our visible universe?” or “Can quantum particles hybridize or synergize (i.e., the photon with the neutrino), sort of like but more efficiently than atoms that can combine into molecules?” and “Can quantum particles mutate and variegate or, so to speak, speciate?” If the answer is yes to either or both of the last two broad questions, the corresponding fact or facts would mean that elemental quantum nature is not static but does change, as do atomic and macro-nature phenomena, and that not only do neutrinos move faster than the speed of light but that perhaps light, photons, can move faster than the former speed of light (photons) and still move faster than the speed of the neutrino quantum particle species, but at a changed, accelerated speed of light, or of photons.  Also, what if, as the strangest of all possibilities relating to the speed relationship between the neutrino and light (photons), as indicated by recent speed test findings on the neutrino alone (in isolation from the photon) and astronomical observations of the behavior of neutrinos and photons in a deep outer-space explosion of a star (observations reported to have found neutrinos in the presence of photons approximating or moving at the speed of photons), that indeed, without experimenter or experimental-conditions error or contamination, neutrinos time faster than photons in solo, separately clocked runs of each of these quantum particle species yet do not shed the required extent of energy nor precipitate the cosmic events mathematically or theoretically projected of any object, however small or large, exceeding the speed of light — with the cosmic events in this post-speed-of-light scenario projected to include a faster-than-the-speed-of-light barrier boom (a trans-photonic speed barrier boom analogous to a sonic boom when its speed barrier is exceeded by an airplane?), the radical warping of space-time and its inverting (cumulatively generating anti-gravity, dark energy and antimatter or dark matter?) or the reversing of the direction of space-time (from a cause-and-effect environment to an effect-and-cause environment?) and/or perhaps even to include the implosion, explosion or annihilati0n or radical (disequilibrium) expansion or contraction of space-time — but nevertheless in a simultaneous racetrack run of both the neutrino and photon together the neutrino’s travel time equals the speed or falls short of the speed of the photon? Who knows — the mysterious observable increasingly rapid expansion of our universe may have something to do with this possible conundrum unbeknownst to us? These far-out but empirically conceivable possibilities cannot be ruled out of or excluded from the realm of serious scientific consideration and are more reasons for holding a simultaneous two-critter quantum physics race between the photon quantum particle and neutrino quantum particle.

Which one would you wager on to win the race/s, the photon or the neutrino?  I’m tempted to bet on the photon and Einstein.

I read several news articles, which I was led to by twitter links on November 18, 2011, reporting that a team of scientists had again, for the second time in the recent few months, clocked the neutrino to have exceeded in its travel speed the speed of light.

Perry’s flat tax plan & Republican candidate former U.S. Congressman & Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s resurrected, newly announced, on 10-25-2011, even lower 15% flat income tax plan (years ago an idea) are monkey-see, monkey-do, follower-the-leader, tax-reform plans intended to compete with Republican retired, rags-to-riches, millionaire-businessman Herman Cain’s predecessor 9-9-9 tax reform plan of this campaign round fabulously popular with Republican voters (the designation 9-9-9 refers to a 9% national [federal] flat income tax on persons, a 9% national sales tax and a 9% national flat income tax on corporations, amounting to an 18% federal overall income-and-spending tax on individuals [inclusive of non-corporate businesses] & corporations).  The substance of the Perry & Gingrich plans is similar, but significantly differs on their tax rates, explaining why odious Gingrich has sprung from nearly the last place Republican presidential candidate to 3rd place, behind former MA governor Mitt Romney, in first place, & Cain, in second place (the latter under a cacophany of sexual-harassment character-assault charges in the mass media).  

Any alternative federal income tax system to a progressive tax system apportioning level of tax to level of income, such as we have, be it a federal national sales tax or flat federal income tax, is a sweetheart dream tax idea from the miserly wealthy for a giant tax-cut benefit for the Scrooge, screw you!, wealth class, at the expense of the common-good government programs & services for everyone else.

All three Republican tax-reform plans constitute class warfare for the wealth class because they benefit the wealth class to the overall & net economic & public services & works sufferance of the middle & under classes, as well as of U.S. society in general, to pay for them, as explicated in the following analysis & commentary. The current highest federal rate of tax on income, on the highest income earners, is 35%, scheduled to increase to 39.6% in 2013, when the extension on the Bush-II Administration tax cuts expire. The lowest tax rate, on the lowest income earners subject to tax, is 10%, with no scheduled increase in 2013. Under any of the Republican proposed federal income tax reform plans the highest-taxed highest income earners would receive a tax cut of 43% (under the Perry plan) or more (under the Cain & Gingrich plans) on their taxable earned income, not counting tax cuts on inheritances worth ten of millions of dollars & above to billions of dollars they may receive, whereas the bottom tax-rate income earners & low-income earners would experience giant federal tax increases (percentage-wise) or taxation they were exempt from because of their poverty-level incomes.  While they campaign to reduce the tax rates on the wealthy by income-tax-reform proposals for a changeover to federal flat & sales taxes, the Republicans are also unified in hectoring & attempting to negotiate the Democratic Congress members & President into making permanent the extended Bush-II-Administration giant tax cuts for the wealthy. 

No tax reform system will be able to do away with a tax investigation & collection force for enforcement of tax-paying compliance as, like under the current miscellaneous tax systems (business & consumer sales taxes, & excise, property & income taxes) at municipal, state & the federal levels, there are & will be tax evaders, tax noncompliers (including businesses that collect but keep the taxes & black market & informal businesses that disregard taxes & the tax systems, antitax-system believers & tax dissidents or protesters objecting to taxes being used to fund wars of aggression and so forth) & tax delinquents (those who default in paying over or paying taxes because of financial management problems, negligence & procrastination).

A national sales tax system or a significant reliance on such a system as the primary source of tax revenue by the federal or a state government would most likely give rise to, in many or most venues, a difficult-to-control, tax-free black market economy for every kind of good & service in advantaged competition with licensed & tax compliant mainstream businesses, undermining these & subjecting them massively to failure. It would likely take a large totalitarian-size undercover tax collection force to fight a no-win, very expensive (possibly unprofitable) war against this rival black market economy that would be a temptation to consumers generally & highly popular with them for its low prices & easy-to-escape taxes.

Taxes are the cost & fare we pay for a high-quality-of-life, advanced civilization. What has made the U.S. socially highly stable, great & able to respond to & compete with continuous economic, technological & military challenges from other nations heretofore has been the U.S. system of public schools & mass education (that has worked $ works for many while not for many others — a school system that has become an example for mass education adopted by many nations, including nations that are our economic & technological competitors), public & private trade & technical schools, elite science & engineering higher education & such public institutions, the universality of libraries, (altogether respectively continuously supplying highly-developed brainpower & valuable fresh knowledge & skills to industry, government & society generally); commitment to & requirement & support for infrastructure (schools, the armed forces & Coast Guard and their installations & schools, the transcontinental & southern railroad systems for the comparatively rapid & efficient transportation of commercial, consumer freight on a mass scale, compared to transport-obsolete horses & wagons, & often ships & trucks; national electrification for powering artificial lighting & plug-in electrical appliances as well as telecommunications; roads & state & federal interstate highway systems, dams, shipping ports & airports, & aircraft & road-vehicle traffic control; universal residential & commercial plumbing & sewage systems; regulated openness to immigration here of particularly healthy, entrepreneurial & educated and skilled people from all parts of the world contributing to our society’s unique nature as an oasis of cultural & intellectual eclecticism & revolutionary creative & innovative fusion & synergy; bureaucracy & laws protecting common people, real & personal property, communities & health & safety, public order, the currency & banking system, business, & intellectual property with patents & copyrights in reward of talent & creativity; public employment development & skills centers; aid to the unemployed & disabled; guaranteed pensions & health care for the elderly; & more).  Amusingly, it should come as no surprise to us that with the succession of giant tax cuts on the affluent & rich starting with the Reagan Administration in the 1980s the cost of once free & cheap public higher education has soared, along with oppressive college-student indebtedness, resulting in a domestic shortage of hard-sciences & engineering Ph.D.s & in SciTech industries resorting to importing from & outsourcing abroad employment of available & needed sci-tech educated talent to fill the domestic SciTech educated talent shortage, often conveniently far less expensive educated talent from technically & industrially developing nations in mainly south Asia & the Far East of Asia. If & when any of these underpinnings of our civilization, inclusive of the social safety net, is sacrificed or critically weakened by tax defunding in the giving of giant or cumulatively giant tax cuts to the rich, our nation will eventually, in the near term, cease to be sufficiently competitive with the best competitor nations & our civilization will deteriorate & degrade socially and economically for a critical mass of the population, & possibly implode. 

Always at the top of the heap of the trash talkers against the government social safety net, particularly Social Security retirement & Medicare-Medicaid health care, are the lifetime financially over-secure millionaires & billionaires — supported by their think-tank, lobbyist, politician, publication & broadcast media propaganda power structure — who don’t need it, &, resenting it, don’t want to pay taxes for masses of others in society who need it. Broadcast media conservatives Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, & their ilk, are corporate-made millionaire trash-talking, class-warfare broadcasters for unfettered U.S.-corporate & wealth-class investor monopoly & militarily-protected & advanced imperial worldwide free-for-all marketplace capitalism; they are hireling, mercenary mouth guns & cannons. Similar propagandistic, articulate trash- & vitriol-talking former politicians (like nutty & miscreant professor, glib Newt Gingrich) may be given crony jobs  making them millionaires, too, as may be some occasional, rare such minority group individual (like inarticulate news-media-buffoon Herman Cain) who verbally flagellates his or her low-status & socially widely demeaned and marginalized minority group with members, disproportionately in percentage relative to the size of their minority group as opposed to head-count numbers relative to other racial & ethnic groups, receiving housing support, aid to families with dependent children & food stamps from government — how dare Herman Cain endorse the Republican presidential candidacy of repetitive big-time moral & ethics hypocrite & U.S. House leadership ethical outcast & pathological omnibus bigot & demagogue Newt Gingrich, who, when he was speaker of the House, attempted circa 1994 to whip up a national lynch mob frenzy against black people per se, by implication, based on the alleged but false charge that “a” black man had carjack-kidnapped the children of Susan Smith, until the car was found crashed in a river with the children drowned in it & Susan Smith confessed to the drowning of her children when her story of the carjacking and kidnapping fell apart under police questioning of her!. The financially elite snob class & their think-tank, publication, broadcast, lobbyist, politician & political officeholder, & public-speaker propaganda power structure (network) continuously trash talk & campaign against government, & needy financially low- & non-achievers receiving government assistance, & their faults but downplay, disregard & focus no attention on the deficiencies & misdeed of most & major mainstream industries & business (fossil-oil CO2 pollution, spills & contamination, wild-life kill offs, scenic coastal & water-body light & fishery & coastal recreational & tourist business disruption & destruction; NG [natural gas] -fracking contamination of agricultural & community water tables & land; nuclear power plant leaks, environmental susceptibility, malfunctions & contamination, & long-life nuclear-waste indisposability & radioactive threat to the environment, wild life & humans; coal mining & plant pollution, coal-mine explosions & cave ins & environmental contamination; unsafe & injurious products & unsafe & injurious, irresponsible & unscrupulous business & medical practices; & rampant business & investment services & stock-market failure, disasters, predation & debacles, to the detriment of public entity & employee, educational-institution, company & industry worker 401(k) pensions, modest-cash private individual & such elder-citizen investors). At the same time they call for stock-market investment of Social Security pensions (after repeated credit-union & banking system corruptions & scandals of respectively the 1980s & late first decade of the 2000s & junk-bond & stock-market scandals & busts of respectively the 1980s & Y2K & 2008 that greatly permanently diminished & destroyed, massively, public & private-industry employee pension as well as small individual stock-market investors’ investments in the stock market), privatization of Medicare into investment in insurance companies that profit by minimizing & avoiding major expenses & major liability or expense clients (or prospective or likely such clients), privatization of government services by business, translating really into income producing corporations for major financial institutional investors & the parasitical investor wealth class, including privatization of, or services of, to the extent possible, public schools, prisons, NASA-JPL & the military. Also while calling for the gutting of the government-provided social safety net & social spending on & for the America’s citizens and children, they cheer lead & advocate for a worldwide U.S. military presence & unlimited war on terrorism abroad & benevolent development (nation building or rebuilding) of Afghanistan & Iraq by corporations of the U.S. & coalition member nations at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.  Given their discretion, one day soon their corporate executives, investment strategists & staff lawyers may be the oversight escort & desk minders & advisers of generals & admirals in the Pentagon, at the headquarters of military bases, in the field & on ships & of ambassadors & military chiefs in U.S. embassies, as well as of all intelligence agency bosses & top science staff of federal regulatory agencies – bigger than the big brother  imagined with foreboding by political-nightmare writer & visionary George Orwell & something that was under way in its beginning stage during the Bush-II/Cheney Administration.

What the financially elite snob class calls class envy & class warfare on the part of the middle & under classes is reciprocally viewed by the middle & under classes as socially privileged & specially entitled snob class contempt & spite for & class warfare callousness by the arrogant snob wealth class toward the middle & under classes & their economic & socially upward mobility (like low- cost & free SciTech education & employment-skills training) needs & aspirations. If our society wants an abundance of affordable, financially satisfied & happy world-class competitive, hard-sciences outstanding doctors, dentists, nurses, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, computer and information science techs, etc., to overcome the native-born shortage of SciTech college & university graduates & Ph.D.s to pioneer new, novel, unforeseeable SciTech innovation & industries & supply  industry sufficiently with these permanently, SciTech-tracked college/university student education by official policy should be very low cost in general & free for those scoring 85% in the average of each separately objective tests & regurgitative, applied knowledge & concepts written tests, with no score for the ended school semester or quarter of less than 75%, without regard to letter grades & not based on statistical classroom, department or student body grading curves. Students carrying a full-load course of study, with a majority of courses in SciTech & maintaining numeral scores in all classes of 95% & above, should by official policy earn tax-free free books & school supplies & such stipends for free housing & meals on (set-asides) or off campus. When the cost of higher education is too high, oppressive & debt enslaving, many cognitively exceptionally- & well-endowed &  functional middle-class & under-class people, particularly young people, well educated at the high-school level, otherwise potentially highly beneficial to society by virtue of their natural high-level cognitive capability or brainpower, may be financially shut out of higher education, or being financially desperate or in financial despair, may forego, straggle through or long delay for a goodly number of years or for several or more decades a higher education. Many of the smart & technically or administratively achieved educated people of middle and under class origin one might know, including doctors, dentists, elite surgeons, physicists, scientists of all kinds, engineers, science & technology company CEOs, etc., might not have their education, credentials & valuable & lucrative knowledge & skills if they had not been educated in the era of low to moderate cost public higher education during the 1960s into the 1990s (most of the achievers who were college or university educated during the public-higher-education very-cheap 1950s & before are retired or deceased).

Inexpensive public education open to all comers in large part acts as a sieve for sorting out high efficiency information-processor & conceptualizer people; fast, capacious &/or durable learners & such intellectual-performance adapters; & disciplined, deep & creative thinkers, developing these academically to the best of their capability, particularly in SciTech disciplines to the ongoing technological progress & industrial & economic champion-class competitiveness of our nation internationally, in addition to our nation’s like academic international competitiveness inasmuch as the graduates from this system would continuously produce the educationally most highly developed teachers & college/university professors possible from generation to generation. Many comers who may not be top SciTech learners & performers or who may not succeed in higher education initially, may have a unique or special cognitive gift or multiple gifts (manifested as a striking level of capability, independent of the speed of its development or expression, or such facility for its acquisition in a high quality state) & succeed at their own pace or on a later try when they are functionally or circumstantially ready, or may be latent learners who leave higher education early with latently evidenced valuable learned know-how or skill roots that may serve them & others well, nevertheless. In recent decades, when public higher education was inexpensive & open to all comers at the junior or community college level & to most academically qualifying for public universities (qualifying with respect to high-school or junior-college grade-point-average & SAT-score criteria), take-all-comers junior colleges and universities for the academically prepared & qualified for matriculation to a university served as very important pillars of what is termed the American meritocracy (not uncontaminated by organizational & partisan party politics as well as religious, gender and race/ethnicity bias), in which university professor selection & job tenure, government-civil-service & corporate-career achievement were overwhelmingly based (with some bias) on job application testing, educational background & credentials, on-the-job performance & accomplishments, performance ratings by superiors and sometimes, where appropriate, internal-entity job change or advancement tests.  When the collective quality & integrity of the U.S. SciTech intelligencia & technocracy of the U.S. meritocracy are sacrificed & undermined for the sake of tax cuts for the wealth class & the minimization of expenses & maximization of U.S.-based corporate & other business profits from global operations, at significant cost to fellow Americans & our society, in the furtherance of  maximized wealth for the wealthy, at a minimum oligarchical capitalism will have, or has, trumped democratic capitalism for our nation & our nation will have, or has, ceased to produce  human performance as well as products & services on the champion competitive world-class level & will cease to harness & realize its own greatest potential in collective brainpower & the highest realizable quality of its products & services, rendering our nation’s work force technologically, industrially and commercially uncompetitive in net effect with the SciTech-industrial best educated & trained work forces among the work forces of other nations of the world.

Noblesse Oblige:  Much is required of those who have much.  In an absolute sense, personal or private wealth owes itself to and is derived from the overall natural and social sources and girding providing for its acquisition and preservation.  Private wealth is maintained, preserved and protected by social institutions, relationships, innovations (including weapons) that draw from the communal legacy of innovations & body of knowledge & skills that preceded them as well as from natural resources & the laws of nature, & by law & law enforcement (judicial, police and military) & thereby has a permanent indebtedness & obligation to society, substantially in the form of taxes commensurate with level of wealth or income, or benefit from inherently communal natural resources (grant deeds or land grants, licenses, patents, copyrights, contracts & other claims on nature & the derivations of nature & human nature are conferred, or acknowledged & honored, & enforced by government, be it the pack, gang, tribe, militia, warlordship, community, ruler, crown, head of state, legislature, hegemon or other).  Bill Gates Sr. (a Washington State attorney & the father of famous Bill Gates) has written & lectured on this as well as has a number of prominent public intellectuals & economists, including U.C.B. economics professor Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, & Harvard professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, an expert on bankruptcy & consumer law, formerly with the Obama Administration, campaigning in a U.S. senatorial contest to replace incumbent Tea-Party Republican Senator Scott Brown as U.S. senator for MA. If a victorious domestic revolutionary government or invasion military government confiscates &/or abolishes (nullifies or does not recognize, honor or uphold title to or in, etc.) the wealth of denizens holding it & changes the money (like the U.S. did significantly in Iraq & NATO just did significantly in Libya), poof, like magic, it’s gone for those folks or the affected (sometimes selectively liquidated or uncirculated, or annihilated en masse, in the wealth confiscation &/or abolishment process for its new control & ownership in whole or part). This is the template of wealth in human history. Wealth is not autonomous & unalienable, nor God or Allah, etc., given; rather, its very basis & existence comes from & depends on society, nature & the wide-ranging pool of human labor, talent & skills, the product of cumulative ancestral communitarian or communal (dare I say “collective”) genetics, biology, culture (including, most valuably, language & mundane, practical & technical knowledge) & formal & informal education & training, & ingenuity & creativity, over the ages from the beginning of our species & evolution — read past & observe & read current history for confirmation.

Incidentally, Perry’s proposal of a flat-tax simple postcard tax return goes back to a proposal circulated in the Treasury Department during either late in the second term of the Clinton Administration or early in the first term of the Bush-II Administration; it is not Perry’s nor his campaign organization’s idea & went nowhere way back because it had no legs, nor a wheelchair. 

More of “False face doth hide what false heart doth know,” the timeless relevance of William Shakespeare

Republican Governor Rick Perry’s federal-income-tax-reform plan, announced on 10-24-2011, of an individually-optable 20% flat tax system, proposed to run parallel with and as an alternative to the traditional progressive tax-bracket federal income tax system, with individual discretion also to opt out of the federal Social Security retirement system and invest one’s otherwise Social Security contribution, or a part of it, in the stock market or suggestively an insurance-company, or other financial-services, offered annuity plan, would result in a drastically reduced revenue stream to the federal government for funding and supporting the capacity and viability of the federal Social Security retirement system as well as all other federal government services, that are often disaster and crisis aid and services, in addition to other important federal support, to states and municipalities. Inevitably and of course, the wealthy who, for the most part, do not, will not and are unlikely to need a Social Security pension or to retire under the Social Security retirement system, and many misled, irrational and stupid others (the financially-gifted, functional mentally ill, survivalists, anti-all-government anarchists), and, some, despite their college education, truly educated fools and intellectual idiots, who resent paying taxes for indispensable public infrastructure and services provided by government, on which they and all of society rely all day and night daily, without exception, will rush and lead the herd-instinct charge to conveniently and shortsightedly opt for the tax-cut, lower, 20% flat income tax system, superficially benefiting themselves tremendously. They nevertheless feel, or pretend, that they have no need for government (until they are victims of an overwhelming natural disaster or arson, their daughter is kidnapped or has disappeared, they’ve been blackmailed, extorted or fleeced, they are under threat by violent social unrest, their plane crashes in a forest or on a snow-covered mountain, or they’re stranded at sea, etc., ad infinitum) and so have no interest in and feel they have no legitimate obligation in financially contributing toward the common good (for which our federal [national] constitution prescribes as a mission of government that it provide for this, the common good), being the at-large community, for which they have no concern beyond their own dwellings or enclaves – obligation and shared support for such they, in large part, regard as socialism. They cannot sincerely claim to be patriotic yet not be concerned citizens, concerned about the good of the nation on the whole and its people collectively — that is, be concerned for the common good and community as a nation and demonstrate shared love of and support for our country commensurate with one’s benefit in and from society and one’s means — as opposed to very often and in large numbers posturing as patriots for supporting endless war and exhorting “Support the troops” (a euphemism for “Support the war”), for whom they do not care as persons, but only as obedient fighting bio-automatons and sport-of-war gladiators in the arena of demolition, blood-and-guts and slaughter combat for their desirably victorious troops, with victory by the troops to bolster their nationalist ego pride (sense of triumphant esteem, or superiority over others) and imperial financial power. Many other people needing money in the here and now, and financially seduced or conned into investing their otherwise Social Security retirement money in the stock market and in insurance-company annuities, almost the worst of all investments, aside from losing one’s money to a swindler or in the stock market, as is common, will elect for the 20% flat tax and withdraw from the federal Social Security insurance retirement system, to the detriment, also, and fatality of the Social Security retirement system, the federal social-safety-net programs and other valuable, critical government services.

The point of Social Security insurance retirement is that no matter what befalls an individual (including stay-at-home homemaker spouses of income earners) and one’s assets during one’s working, pre-retirement years that when one reaches retirement age, a time when for a large percentage of working people the body is noticeably deteriorated and debilitated regardless of an increase in lifespans, one will have a Social Security pension (a permanent, guaranteed income) with which to still financially fend for oneself, and such health care insurance for medical services, until one dies, however infirm one is or becomes in the interim. Antigovernment, anti-tax, deregulated free-market, primacy-of-profits, financial libertarian assertions that charity will take care of the indigent dying and disabled, have nots and homeless, and dependent-age orphans and brutalized and abandoned children, and that charity will not allow anyone to go hungry, medically uncared for and die homeless and without help, are facetious, crazy talk and writing, and are outrageous, if not arrogant and malicious, falsehood. Greed has no top. Greed has no bottom. Greed has no perimeter. Greed is gluttonous and insatiable. Greed and avarice have no limits,  are unreasonable and have no conscience.

From the beginning of the Republican presidential candidates pre-primaries debate campaign this year for the 2012 presidential election, Governor Rick Perry of Texas has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme (a long-term financial fraud) and proposed scrapping it, to the objection of a majority of staunch Republican voters, which resulted in his plunge from first place Republican presidential candidate to petty-percentages third place candidate since, despite his dominant campaign funds chest and fundraising position. His flat tax proposal is intended to politically salvage his candidacy and make him competitive in popularity with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, whose precedent, equally destructive, 9-9-9 federal income tax reform plan that, along with his exclamation, in close paraphrase, in retort to Perry’s putdown of Social Security, was that “People need Social Security!; they depend on it!,” has catapulted Cain (a heavily-accented black man in a political party that right-wing, xenophic media commentator Pat Buchanan is alleged to have said, in effect, is or should be the white people’s party), shockingly, from the last place Republican presidential candidate to the fluctuating first and second place candidate consistently in the consensus of the major independent political polls. Rick Perry’s proposal is structured to give another giant tax cut to the rich (his mainstay and major campaign contributors and long-time general backers) while fiscally starving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to functional collapse and death, with the volitional flight of taxpayers into the 20% flat-tax income tax system and with enough of them withdrawing and redirecting their money permanently from Social Security and Medicare insurances. His position on Social Security reflects that he is of the same political-economic philosophy as that expressed by unconscionable, psycho-minded Grover Norquist (a Harvard MBA and head of the Americans for Tax Reform and a hero to primacy-of-profits, antigovernment, anti-tax financial libertarians), infamous for having said, according to Wikipedia, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Doesn’t he really need to be in the rubber-walled room of a psychiatric ward for the criminally insane?! And what about his worhippers and supporters too?

With exception, Republicans, conservative Democrats (who founded the bi-partisan American Liberty League opposing the New Deal social-safety-net programs of the Great Depression era) and financial libertarians  – all largely of a miser ideology and mentality — have opposed and called for the abolishment of, as they refer to it, the public entitlement system (the social safety net, which even Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and ultra conservative Ronald Reagan defended from their meat cleavers), since its inception in the administration of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. Where the core tenent and mantra enunciated by the wealth-class-turned Republican Party of late and financial libertarians, an extremist wing of the Republican Party that includes the Tea Party, is that tax cuts for the wealthy or rich create jobs, contrarily, empirical economics 101 documents that foremost and overwhelmingly mass consumer demand, financial means and ability to purchase (purchasing power and its deployment) drive business production, sales, income, profit, hiring, upgrade, growth, research and development, implemented development, investment and attraction of outside investment. When domestic common consumers do not have their jobs outsourced to low-wage foreign nations and their service, retail, factory and building and other construction trades jobs outplaced to an nonstop flood of uninsured, low-wage and no-fringe-benefits illegal immigrants and are not burdened with onerous education debts and exorbitant (usury) interest rates on debt itself and credit cards (really ‘debt cards’), they have more money for financially fueling and supporting a sustained, strong retail and wholesale goods and services production and sales economy. Job outsourcing to lowest and low-wage nations and outplaced to minimal expense, lowest and low-wage illegal immigrants and tax-underfunded public infrastructure, schools and institutions of higher education burdening students with staggering debt and debtors with exorbitant credit interest rates (interest rates that squander the money and severely diminish the purchasing power of consumers indefinitely, as well as drive up, along with the debt burden itself, the cost of professional services of eventual doctors, dentists, nurses, attorneys, architects, engineers, accountants, commercial artists, etc., who graduate from college with huge debts) only enriches unscrupulous entrepreneurs, company and bank executives and investors by use of the inflexible, hard-nosed maximization-of-profit and minimization-of-expense strategy, with investor wealth further maximized with tax cuts, all at the expense, and often impoverishment, of maximal domestic employment, public infrastructure, essential government services, the citizenry, the common good and the nation. It is another right-wing, wealth-class Republican Party, financial libertarian and Tea Party myth and falsehood that Americans don’t want these jobs, which they use to cover up their true agenda, identified in the aforementioned. It is a further canard of theirs that the Republican Party is the party of small business, a categoration they dangle before the public as a tax-cut sympathy-drawing decoy to garner gaint tax cuts for the rich (like the tax-free inherited estate tax, for the 8 years of the Bush-II presidency, that went to the entitlement and privileged class of indulged, wealthfare-raised, -cultured, -educated, -gilted and financially lifetime-endowed freeloader children of mega millionaires and billionaires) behind the pretense and guise of protecting the family farm or business from the ravages of inheritance, scary “death taxes” (officially and in emotionally neutral language termed decedent-estate inheritance taxes), with these and all inheritances before the zero tax of the Bush-II administration on decedent estates having had a $3,500,000.00 exemption from taxation (before taxation was applicable).

The reason the U.S. is in a state of a protracted economic crash and sluggishness, or protracted economic slump, denied any longer to be technically a recession, is due to profligate war spending, the massive banking liar-loan debacle (related to shaky subprime mortgages), huge financial losses from greed-driven high-risk and competitive investment gambling by commercial and retail banks, the fleecing of employee retirement investment money by employing corporations and unscrupulous players in the stock market, the plundering of corporations by CEOs and top level executives, the strategy of hard-nosed minimization of expenses and maximization of profits via exporting manufacturing and jobs abroad and the outplacing of wanted domestic low-skill (like food service, food processing and cannery, janitorial, street and environmental clean up and maintenance, waste management, fabric, garment, hotel service, valet, automotive servicing such as oil changes, lubes, tire repair and change, window change, body repair and painting) and building-trades and construction jobs to a continuous massive influx of illegal immigrants by a great many businesses large and small, as applicable, and giant tax cuts for the wealthy.

As it is the case that there are many Americans who are low and modestly skilled and educated and are not high-skills or higher-level education achievers and are glad to have even a secure and adequate-paying humble or simple job on which to make a living and support a family and have a family life, they want these jobs regardless of what out-of-touch, insensitive and pugnacious, financially well compensated mass-media talk-show hosts and their partisan, ideologue guests, as well as columnists, high-profile social figures and politicians, representing the profit and wealth class or exercising social diplomacy, say. Many drop out of high school and college. To many of these people, to have a steady job with a livable income and health insurance, friends and a family, or romantic life, is the top priority in life. Wake up! There are individual differences in ability, aspiration and motivation among people of any kind, anywhere, including in families. The ranks of the unemployed, imprisoned and homeless are bloated with frustrated, simple, ordinary folks, young and old, who may in big numbers be unskilled or modestly skilled, and lowly to modestly educated, in want of a steady living-wage job, almost of any kind, with health insurance, so long as they are treated with respect on the job (by superiors, co-workers and customers).

The exportation and domestic outsourcing of jobs to low-wage, no-benefits foreign workers and unlawful-entry immigrant labor are just another means of domestic labor union busting and the busting of union scale pay compensation packages for all workers as well as often of employers circumventing government imposed minimum wages domestically. Union workers who vote for the union-busting Republican Party and its candidates for political office in response to the constant Republican call for and lure of tax cuts are also voting for the export and outsourcing of their jobs and the reduction of their wages, job fringe benefits and job security.  Nevertheless, plenty of them can be depended on to vote for shortsighted tax cuts and whine in bewilderment when their financial world collapses around and on them.

Granted, there is a reluctant domestic labor pool for stoop agricultural work, which should be available to immigrants to the U.S. from our neighboring nations, with a path to U.S. citizenship to them after 25 years or so of such labor, since this is physically highly stressful work people cannot do into late-age career or working years. However, whatever the government policy is regarding illegal immigrants in general, particularly should they be given stay amnesty, whether conduct-contingent permanent non-citizen residency without citizen rights or outright citizenship, they, except for their children born in the U.S. and those accepted into military service and completing it with an honorable discharge, should be barred by predetermined failproof law from Social Security retirement pensions, Medicare and Medicaid, so as not to have these programs be a magnet and incentive for illegal immigration and for them not to threaten further the solvency of these programs. In addition, they and their hosts, employers and landlords should, by failproof law (which will be challenged by unlawful immigrant defenders and attorneys), be charged registered unlawful-entry amnesty residency taxes and they (the unlawful-entry immigrants) should be required to register their unlawful entry presence in the U.S. by a deadline in order to qualify for unlawful-entrant or entry amnesty residency status. The registration process should include a small fee, finger printing and a DNA sample, among other identification and domicile information collection. Post-deadline, unregistered undocumented, or illegal, immigrants and their hosts, employers and landlords should be levied unregistered unlawful-entry immigrant taxes and charges to in part pay the cost of their apprehension, detainment and deportation. Sheriff, police and ICE departments and offices should be legally authorized to administratively seize and sell the assets of undocumented or unlawful immigrants, and retain all monies therefrom, in their names and possession and in the name/s and possession of others, whether persons or entities, again, post-deadline for registration of unlawful-entry immigration status and qualification for conduct-contingent amnesty for permanent residency without citizenship rights and with permanent disqualification for citizenship. Disqualification for citizenship for even those qualifying for and granted conduct-contingent permanent residency gives resolute notice that in no instance whatsoever, retroactively, now or henceforth, will citizenship be granted for any unlawful-entry immigration or immigrant — stay amnesty in the form of conduct-contingent permanent residency ought to be offered given the impracticality and imprudence of deporting 12,000,000-plus unlawful-entry persons complexly integrated into our society and economy. They should also have to pay into a health insurance, disability insurance and retirement insurance system for stay-amnesty unlawful entry residents, perhaps co-funded by Congressional statute by hosts of the illegal immigrants, including host churches and religious and other host organizations and sanctuary municipalities and states, and sanctuary-granting elected authorities — material supporters, incentivizors and settlement facilitators of unlawful entry immigrants and immigration — as well as the central governments of their native nations (for the latter, by law suits in international court).  This will go a long way toward solving the illegal immigration problem. Illegal immigration is an additional economic problem in that, according to the most recent official government report on this matter, the taxes paid by illegal immigrants in toto are far less than the value of what they consume in public services (having cost $26,000,000,000 to the federal government alone while having paid $16,000,000,000 in federal taxes, per Center of Immigration Studies), Immigration’s Impact on Public Coffers – Center for Immigration …… burden (taxespaid minus services … year versus 800,000 would increase the dollar value of … Illegal Immigrants and the Federal Budget A good deal of research) …www.cis.org/articles/2006/sactestimony072606.html, and much of the money they earn in the U.S. is not re-circulated and reinvested in the U.S. but is sent abroad, Economic costs of mass immigration (legal and illegal immigration …) … 2004 study by Bendixen & Associates 6 found that legal and illegal immigrants send a … this report… The results of this study … the U.S. send $30 billion a year in remittances …www.cairco.org/econ/econ.html, whereas the great majority of the money earned by their counterpart blue-collar U.S.-citizen workers in the U.S. is retained here.

Children of unlawful-entry (illegal) immigrants or migrants born in the U.S., and thereby Constitutionally made U.S. citizens by birth, should be conferred with compulsory dual citizenship (that of their illegal immigrant or migrant parents or parent and that of the U.S.) by statute legislated by Congress and remanded to the custody of their parents (in deference to and observance of generally the sovereignty and intactness of the family concerning children) until they reach the age of emancipation, 18 years old, at which time they would be able return to the U.S. as age-emancipated, adult U.S. citizens. Only such alleged children officially documented (such as by a recorded official birth certificate) and confirmed to have been born in the U.S. should qualify for automatic return to the U.S. to exercise their U.S. citizenship as age-emancipated adults. If such a child is the offspring of a U.S. citizen and an unlawful entry immigrant or migrant, that child should remain by law in the custody of the parent agreed by the parents, where both are available, or with the parent in possession of the child, where only one of the parents is available. If the parents have married, or are unable to agree on which parent should have custody of the child, both parents may consider departure together from the U.S. to remain together.

In further comment on securing the solvency of the Social Security retirement system, perhaps a way to fiscally fortify this system while securing state and municipal government budgets and treasuries against busts from runaway and unsustainable pension and health-benefit obligations for their government-worker retirees would be for all federal, state and municipal governments to pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems for their employees’ primary retirement pensions and retirement health care, rather than for each division of government to have its own pension plan and retirement-system funding arrangement, per and within each state and for the federal government. This would permit all government employees to get defined pensions, not subject to the vicissitudes and whims of investment in the stock market and it would put a damper on pressures for special parcel (real estate) and licensing taxes and fees to sufficiently fund local government budgets and treasuries and correct problems or shortfalls with them.  It also would derail efforts by self-contradictory patriotic fiscal conservatives, calling for the elimination, other than a replacement 401(k)-style stock-market-invested pension system, of 20-service retirement pensions for career soldiers and sailors.

Just like the Republican demanded and negotiated freezes on Social Security pension COLAs (cost of living adjustments: increases) and federal employee wages in part subsidy-financed the extension of the Bush-II-era giant tax cuts for the rich, still in place, under the Obama Administration, so too any flat tax would provide a big tax cut for the rich subsidy-financed by a loss of federal tax revenues from major reductions in tax on the high income earners under a flat tax, resulting in an underfunding or defunding of the federal social safety net and valuable and critical other federal government services provided directly to the public by the federal government as well as indirectly through the state and municipal governments by federal funds to them, federal funds in danger of being lost or significantly reduced under a flat federal income tax system.  Herman Cain’s and New Gingrich’s tax reform plans, with even lower net tax rates than Perry’s plan, would result in even larger federal income tax cuts for the higher and highest income earners.

The current highest tax rate is 35%, scheduled to increase to 39.6% in 2013, for the highest income earners. The lowest is 10%, not scheduled to increase, for income earners with the lowest income subject to tax. Four of the 6 current tax brackets are from 25% to 35%. The lower two are 15% and 10%. In light of this tax bracket information, Governor Perry’s flat tax would result in a 43% federal income tax reduction on the currently top tax bracket of 35%, and, unless he excludes from the proposed flat tax the bottom taxable income earners currently taxed at 10%, they will incur a 100% increase in their federal income taxes under the flat tax system to help finance the 43% tax cut for the top bracket of taxpayers and tax cuts for the other three brackets of taxpayers currently taxed at above a 20% flat tax rate. This federal income tax bracket information was obtained from http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm.

On the morning of 10-29-2011 I heard a radio talk show guest who had attended an Occupy event say that he saw one particularly memorable sign, being carried by an activist, with the striking words “Capitalism is Socialism for The One Percent.”  Incidentally, the Occupy movement is a populist rallying outcry in protest of gross and growing intolerable national economic injustice and in demand of economic justice — gross economic injustice and devastation resulting from the pathological and rabid financial misconduct of financial plundering and reckless investment gambling of the public’s money by major banks, corporations and high-wealth-controlling individuals subscribing to and/or practicing the financial Libertarian shortsighted economic philosophy of an unfettered free market and the primacy of profits and profits before people, the habitat, wildlife, planetary health and our planet itself.

Unfortunately, however, Occupy’s big-tent ideal is indeed attracting all kinds, including irresponsible and dangerous rogues, idiots and pariah hurting Occupy’s intended image of peaceful expression of its legitimate concerns about our political, economic and financial systems gone awry to the severe harm of our society overall, but to the financial benefit of the ultimately controlling relatively few rich and most powerful people and corporations, domestically and abroad. These problematical people and their misconduct adulterate the Occupy movement and distract and divert attention away from Occupy’s incisive and popular message. Also, a movement without a leadership structure, an agenda and explicit goals, which Occupy is said to eschew, is inclined to incoherence, chaos, aimlessness, pointlessness (apart from unpurposeful speechifying and emotional venting), ineptitude, discredit and disintegration or withering. In addition, Occupy activists should gather and disperse daily and not undemocratically squat, erect dwellings and domicile on and seize self ownership or possession of the public commons or private property or let itself be used as a roost, stalking ground, camouflage or hiding place for uncontrollable violent revolutionaries, anarchist, criminals, troublemakers, crazies and the such stupid to carry on and wreck havoc, otherwise Occupy will alienate from itself the sympathy and morale support of the majority of the citizenry, most of whom are employed, welcome and enjoy the amenities of a civilized society and enjoy shopping, indulging themselves and having a good time — they are not against small or ordinary businesses that supply their apartments, homes, plumbing, toilets, appliances, utilities, heat, furniture, public transportation, cars, fuel (but they may be ambivalent and uncomfortable about this and its sources and suppliers), clothes, jewelry, deli and restaurant food and beverages, groceries, electronics and gadgets, entertainment, infrastructure, etc., nor are they against public order, safety, cleanliness and aesthetics, nor against professional police protection and service and firefighter and emergency-medical-technician services.

The claim by some Occupy activists that pitching tents on and taking control over or taking over public or private property is an expression of their right of free speech is fallacious and a legally losing argument, in the same way that no one can claim hi-jacking police cars or taxis is the exercise of the right of free speech that is immune from legal repercussions.  To further illustrate, legally, no one has the right to erect a dwelling or significant fixed structure of any kind on any real property, public or private, or use that property for any purpose in disregard of real property building and use zoning laws and ordinances by government regulating real property development and use.  Not even can a big-money corporation legally set up shop and engage in any activity it wants on land it has purchased in disregard of land development and use zoning laws and ordinances instituted by government.  Nor can one strip off one’s clothes and masturbate in public with immunity from legal repercussions based on an argument that such conduct is the exercise of one’s Constitutional first amendment right of symbolic free speech.  Government has the right to control and punish potentially hazardous, damaging and blight conditions and behavior, which legally unpermitted and unregulated tent cities are inclined respectively to constitute and give rise.

Read Governor Perry’s income tax plan at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204777904576651330270547222.html.

There will be capitalism with a conscience or there will be no capitalism. Capitalism with a conscience but not with a dunce cap.

Folks, check out this tweet feed of 12-17-2011 titled ‘Rwanda’s Poo-Powered Prisons’ by BBC news, with a news video link at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16203507, something I added to my blog promoting a similar but bigger idea, The Fast Lane to Clean Fuel Energy Independence: the lead & bridge fuel to total clean renewable fuel-energy dominance http://powerticspowerpolitics.blog.com/2011/04/21/fast-lane-to-clean-energy-independence/. We can get off of dirty & environmentally dangerous & disruptive traditional fossil fuels abruptly if only we decided to do so & did so, at lesser energy bills expense at home, work & on the roads.

Wall St., behind the face of S&P Exchange’s downrating of the federal credit rating (debtworthiness and repayment dependability), wants minimal taxes, protection of special-interest and corporate tax rates (capital-gain and hedge-fund management and breaks, permanence of the 2-year-extended Bush-era tax cuts rescheduled to expire on 12-31-2013 and ending of the social-safety-net tax burden: Social Security Retirement, Medicare, Medicaid, now; Food Stamps, W.I.C., Unemployment Compensation, disability insurance & assistance, later.

More military-industrial-complex resource and political kickback wars for corporations (especially financial patron corporations to successful election bids of politicians),  plutocrat families & financial-titan individuals and endlessly more privatized, corporate prisons — taxpayer & government-funded — bursting at the seams, further financially feeding the callous and unconscionable, parasitical financially elite, lazy sponge-class professional investors and heirs to fortunes parking their money in all steady and high-return, growth-opportunity investments.  The Tea Party being their spearhead, intellectual-idiot goons.

pauperization of the middle class & economic suffocation, desperation-criminalization and imprisonment  of the underclass

How will a labor population without job security and secure employer or government sponsored retirement and health plans realistically secure these stably or lifelong afford these for themselves and their children and families on insecure, unstable, intermittent income, as well as stably pay for proposed privatized unemployment insurance

better life

export of manufacturing jobs

influx and illegal employment of low wage-no benefits undocumented immigrants in replacement of high-overhead native-born employees, disparagement of native-born as lacking drive and a hard-work ethic

What percentage and raw number of jobs in the economy do ui hold?

What is the objective evidence native born don’t want them, other than agricultural jobs?

Agreed there should be a special path to legalization and naturalization of immigrant agricultural workers once an established qualifying years of service without criminal conduct has been met.

Strict restriction on public assistance, SSR, Mcr, Mdcd to others than to native born and immigrants who substantially pay into them, including immigrant wealthy who subsidize them.

A permanent federal bar, without exception, of illegal immigration ammesty of qualification for legal or naturalized immigration, will disincentive in major part illegal immigration (firmly extinguishing the hope for either)

where will growth areas for permanent new jobs by the millions be in the economy?

elderly, disable, unemployed men and women, families and children residing homeless on the streets, beach, underbrush and parks, slum tent towns, American favellas

For making the best of a bad situation in the states experiencing extreme heat this summer, where affordable, buildings should be solarized and air conditioners should be operated off of and electric vehicles should be charged on on-site solar generated electricity during the daylight hours to lower the potential and avoid the occasion for electrical-utility-company grid-demand overloads and failure (blackouts and brownouts), associated with exceptional mass air-conditioner usage for coping with such lethargizing and health- and life-threatening heat and to have a daytime unlimited supply of electricity for unlimited daytime air-conditioner usage. Religious entities might start extending the public righteous equity for the tithes, donations and exemption from taxation they receive by also solarizing and air conditioning their churches or houses of worship and other buildings and opening them up as cooling centers for those oppressed by the extreme heat who do not have air conditioning or cannot afford high utility bills for running air conditioning.  The expectation should be that this heat situation will be the new normal, or norm, in spring and summer in the concerned states and that climate change is in place.  In the near future, nighttime and localized 24-hour solar electricity may be available for these uses as the problem of clean, chemical-free solar-capture energy storage has been solved by a process of storage in and later extraction from molten salt, Arizona uses molten salt for storage : Solar Power Engineering, www.solarpowerengineering.com/…/arizona-uses-molten-salt-for-st… - www.solarpowerengineering.com results, Feb 7, 2011 – 150-MW solar project planned for Arizona will use molten salt for energy storage. Utility-scale developer SolarReserve has received its …; Gemasolar Finishes Building Molten Salt – Backed Solar Power Plant …, www.greenoptimistic.com › Solar Power, Jul 7, 2011 – SolarReserve Receives Funding for CSP & Molten Salt Energy Storage in Nevada … Solar Power Plant That Uses Molten Salts as Energy Storage …; Solar Power for Vampires: MIT Team Invents 24-Hour Solar System, CleanTechnica - 1 day ago … a concentrated solar power system with a molten salt heat storagesystem. … the idea is to heat the salt with solar energy, then transfer theenergy …

Like it or not, believe it or not, the new seasonally extreme heat norm, that is a circumstance of in-place and enduring climate change in many U.S. states, will compel offices and businesses in the affected states, as well as households that can afford them, to adopt on-site solar electric power systems and on-site chargeable plug-in all-electric vehicles (that are tune-up and oil-change free, low-cost for maintenance and insurance, and for which one does not have to wait in a petro-station gas-pump line when one recharges at home, especially with a high-speed charger, or at one’s driveway solar charging station, for those able to afford either of the latter) and plug-in hybrid vehicles, as economically practical beneficiary side products of their solar electric power systems, for workers and people generally therein to function comfortably and financially efficiently and have affordable and undisrupted electric power during the extreme heat season.

Investment in Solar Electric Power Goes Mainstream:  Chevron Oil, Bank of America, Total Oil (France’s largest oil company), General Electric Corp., Pacific Gas & Electric Company (P.G.&E.), Google, IKEA.

Interestingly, toward the bottom of the right margin on an online news article on the new plug-in electric Ford Focus, coming to market in 2011, with an option to also buy 2 rooftop solar panels to recharge the car’s battery for up to a 1,000 miles monthly, a natural gas ad was posted picturing a bus accompanied by words in gist saying “cleaner and all American,” whereas natural gas vehicles have been found to emit 30% more greenhouse-gas pollutants into the atmosphere than even plug-in electric-gasoline hybrid vehicles, determined to be more polluting than these and all-electric vehicles even were they to be charged by electricity generated by 100% coal, whereas, in fact, coal-fired power plants account for a plunging 44.5% of all electricity generation in the U.S., followed by an increasing number of relatively environmentally friendly natural gas power plants (where the NG is isolated from contact with the atmosphere and natural environment), 23.3% (NG & all other renewable sources of fuel energy account for 33.9% of electricity production).  Natural gas is most clean burning when sequestered in power plants for generating electricity but not in vehicles (although it is less dirty, or cleaner, than gasoline itself).  Also the maximum speed and range of natural gas vehicles is drastically less than those of the current crop of plug-in all-electric and hybrid vehicles and they require tuneups, oil changes and  expensive, normal internal-combustion-engine maintenance.

Employees of their newspaper News of the World caught hacking into the mobile phones of British citizens from the bottom to the top of the social ladder, with such hacking being equivelant to breaking and entering and burglary, and unlawful search and seizure of privileged and legally protected private communications and communications information, as well as discovered bribing police and/or police authorities for eavesdropping help and silence relating to these activities — click on and read the news links below

Rupert Murdoch and media ownership | The Casual Truth

www.thecasualtruth.com/story/rupert-murdoch-and-media-ownership

Sean Hoare, the ex-reporter of News of the World who revealed this news tabloid’s illegal mobile-phone hacking practice, was reported suddenly deceased (conveniently) on 07-18-2011 due to an unexplained but not homicidal cause. However, in a controversy such as that associated with News of the World, News International, the Murdochs and News Corp. and their enormous wealth and power — with the careers of very powerful persons and major business and considerable wealth at risk — theoretically death can be engineered to technically come across as a non-homicide that is really a homicide. For instance, carcinogens can be enhanced to kill rapidly, there are medications that can be misused to cause heart attacks that appear to have occurred naturally (simulation) and psychotronic weapons such as taser guns, which can unintentionally kill some people from minimal use, can illegally be calibrated at the pre-production stage to intentionally kill. A simulated-natural-causes homicide planner (such as an unscrupulous, mercenary biochemist, pharmacist or doctor or a bio-warfare or bio-medical tactical operation of a private or government intelligence agency) can also exploit knowledge of individual and family medical histories and conditions on which to focus kill strategies. In addition, specialized bio-agents can be administered to attack and damage or disease specific body organs, systems, structures or parts or deliver intolerable, undefeatable suicide-driving pain. Read below news reports on actual, apparently biological warfare, poisonings of some political figures in recent years and times and the history of biological warfare and on biological and psychotonic weapons programs.

Phone-hacking whistleblower found dead - World - CBC News

www.cbc.ca/news/world/…/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-scandal.html

5 days ago – The reporter who first came clean in Britain’s phone hacking … hacking at the News of the World, has been found dead. … Sean Hoare, the first person to linkformer News of the World … (News International/Associated Press) … But, therevelation that journalists accessed the phone of Milly …

On Wednesday, 07-20-2011, in a hearing before Parliament, British PM David Cameron declined to summarily apologize for hiring his former director of communications Andy Coulson, the previous editor of News of the World, a taploid held by News International, the U.K. umbrella news company of media baron Murdoch’s News Corp. He also dodged answering directly the question as to whether he participated in talks with News Corp. principals about News Corp.’s interest in purchasing British broadcast-network giant BSkyB with the surreal response, in effect, that he had not done anything inappropriate, to the raucous reaction of Parliament.

News of the World phone-hacking scandal – Friday … - guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/…/news-of-the-world-phone-hacking-scandal

When the absurd voices for privatization of the public sphere and for regulation-free, unaccountable private enterprise sovereignty exercise undue control of the news and political mass media, and when these trespass upon the lawful, intimate and private lives of the citizenry, without legal or just cause, and tyrannize over and psychologically terrorize the citizenry, they have become a sociopathic Gestapo tyrannical fascist mass media, incompatible with democratic or democratic-republic society, that must be overthrown and mercilessly destroyed by the public and government with public-interest, class-action lawsuits, the stripping of and denying of, by special legislation and court order, their owners and controlling top executives, for their lifetimes, direct and indirect ownership or control of or in news, political and entertainment media, and deterrence-example social and psychological damage reparations to victims (gravely emotionally traumatizing and inducing or heightening neurosis and a sense of paranoia in victims), socially from the low to the high, and fines as well as irrevocable full-serve long-term jail sentences. Politeness and mannerliness in the aftermath of and apologies for transgressions for which they or their “employees,” plural, were responsible must be corroborated as sincere by the corporate bosses (Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch) and employing or parent corporations of the rogue employees with immediate, voluntary bundles and bundles of tearful high-denominated cash to all victims, throughout the world, or their closest survivors, well in advance of and separate from financial and jail sanctions to be imposed by legislatures and courts. Allegedly, hacked-mobile-phone victims also included Prince Charles, former British PM Gordon Brown and returned soldiers from the Middle East wars or their families, among others. The extent of this illegal intrusion and surveillance has not yet been determined, according to general news reports.  However, it is estimated that approximately 3,700 Britons have been affected.

Britain, do not bow down to the Murdoch mass media barons!

Concentrated mass media ownership or control is a means of political, social and mass-mind (thought, belief, attitude, ideology, behavior and action shaping) control.

Missing Milly Dowler’s voicemail was hacked by News of the World …

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/…/milly-dowler-voicemail-hacked-news-of…

News of the World phone hacking: Police review … - guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/…/phone-hacking-police-review-child-murder… - Cached

Jul 5, 2011 – Police officers investigating phone hacking by the News of …

Murdoch papers paid out £1m to gag phone-hacking … - guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/…/murdoch-papers-phone-hackingJul 8, 2009

Guardian exclusive: News of the World phone-hacking … who illegallyhacked into themobile phone messages of numerous public …

BBC News - Timeline: News of the World phone-hacking row

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12253968 - Cached

Jul 11, 2011 – The latest developments in the News of the World phone-hackingscandal that has … Reports suggest mobile phones owned by relatives of UK soldiers killed in …shortly after she went missing, according to the Guardian newspaper. … who covers royalstories for the Press Association news agency. …

Politically-Related Assassination Plots/Conspiracies & Official Biological & Psychotronic Warfare Weapons Programs

Ex-KGB spy ‘poisoned by alpha radiation’ – Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/…/Ex-KGB-spy-poisoned-by-alpha-radiation.ht…

Nov 24, 2006 – The former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was probably poisonedby a …that a former KGB colonel who died in London had been poisoned with a rare… thedeath of Mr Litvinenko, whose body was ravaged by polonium 210, …

BBC NEWS | Health | Yushchenko and the poison theory

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4041321.stm - Cached

Dec 11, 2004 – Austrian doctors say Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenkowaspoisoned, apparently confirming claims his supporters made all along.

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Arafat Dies at …

www.nytimes.com › International › Middle East

Nov 11, 2004 – Yasir Arafat will be buried in Ramallah, at the fortress where he spent the last … 11 – Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, died early Thursday morning in a …from an unknown disease after lingering in a coma for days, … and a lingering intifadaagainst Israel that has seen the deaths of …

Israel poisoned Arafat with thallium – Australians for Palestine

australiansforpalestine.com/36268 - Cached

Jan 11, 2011 – Former special advisor to Arafat, Bassam Abu Shareef, … revealed that the late Palestinian leader was poisoned by thallium, IRNA reported on Tuesday.… Arafatdied of a mysterious disease in a French hospital on November 11, 2004. …from Israel to Turkey over flotilla deaths in 2010 22Jul11 …

638 ways to kill Castro | World news | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/03/cuba.duncancampbell2 - Cached

Aug 3, 2006 – Attempts to kill Castro began almost immediately after the 1959 revolution,…. Fidel Castro TV series charts 638 assassination attempts …

Assassination plots and schemes: Castro in the crosshairs – CNN

articles.cnn.com/…/castro.top10_1_assassination-plots-fidel-castro-ci… - Cached

Feb 19, 2008 – Cuban President Fidel Castro poses for a photograph last …

Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons:

www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html - Cached

Aug 6, 2004 – Psychotronic weapons belong, at least for a layman uninformed of secret military research, in the sphere of science fiction, …

“The Mind Has No Firewall” Army article on psychotronic weapons …

dprogram.net/…/the-mind-has-no-firewall-army-article-on-psychotr… - Cached

Jul 1, 2009 – This article examines energy-based weapons, psychotronic weapons, and other developments designed to alter the ability of the human body to …

Psychotronic weapons : Brain Manipulation From a Distance …

istina.rin.ru/eng/ufo/text/360.html - Cached

That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal, either sound or visual, messages is now generally known. This is why in most of …

Biological Warfare

www.emedicinehealth.com › home › topics az list - Cached

Biological weapons include any organism (such as bacteria, viruses, or fungi) or toxin found in nature that can be used to kill or injure people.

Potential Biological Weapons Threats

www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no4/kortepeter.htm - Cached

The use of biological weapons has occurred sporadically for centuries, culminating in sophisticated research and testing programs run by several countries. …

A History of Biological Warfare from 300 B.C.E. to the Present

www.aarc.org/resources/biological/history.asp - Cached

What is biological or bio-warfare? It is the use of biological pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi, and toxins derived from living organisms to kill or …

Emerging Disease : Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism …

www.zkea.com/categories/category1.html - Cached

Provides a history of bio-warfare throughout history. With links.

CBRNE - Biological Warfare Agents

emedicine.medscape.com/article/829613-overview - Cached

Jul 31, 2008 – Biological weapons include any organism or toxin found in nature that can be used to incapacitate, kill, or otherwise impede an adversary.

BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: Malignant Biology

www.slic2.wsu.edu:82/hurlbert/…/pages/101biologicalweapons.html - Cached

Mar 1, 2000 – Biological weapons may target living organisms or an environment seen as affecting the outcome of a struggle for control. …

Insight at noontime on a dark and rainy summer’s day in late June in California. How the great physicist Albert Einstein got his cosmological theoretical physics demonstrably correct. Famously, Einstein once remarked “God does not play dice with the cosmos.” In reply, his contemporary, the equally renown physicist Niels Bohr famously quipped “Stop telling God what to do!” But Einstein’s remark was a disciplined deduction based on his extensive knowledge and observations of physics and astronomy and by it he was not telling God what to do. Rather, Einstein’s remark was the expression of an evidentiary insight that order proceeds from the vast chaotic and happenstance spew of the universe and that the stuff, processes and objects of the cosmos, from the microcosmic to macrocosmic levels, are lawfully constituted and behave in lawful ways. From this insight, he deduced that God (a metaphor for the lawfulness of the cosmos) has an MO — that is, a modus operandi — that is substantive, lawful, structural and mechanistic, as expressed in nature (the metaphorical Mind and Essence of God), and was able, in light of his recognition of it, to extrapolate and calculate fact, to become scientifically established fact, where there were voids in knowledge of such fact.

To possibly derive the theory of everything and thereby know the once-postulated Mind of God, as entertained by present-day celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking, theoretical scientists ought to be cognizant of a cosmological MO, applicable to every level and every niche of cosmological nature, and attempt to decode and synthesize it, and to extrapolate-test and refine their knowledge of it from what is known to what should be, in voids of established natural or scientific fact, where factual knowledge is wanting. Hawking has adeptly explained this MO in significant part in regard to the phenomenon of order in the cosmos as proceeding from the shaping force or natural law of gravity of the cosmos. A continuous compilation and updating of a computerized, comprehensive book of the laws of physics, and all of nature, and their manifold interactions and application or applicability, is a starting point for deriving a “scientific” theory (factual explanation and evidentiary basis for making accurate or sure-outcome predictions) of everything and knowing the Mind of God, in a metaphorical scientific sense and context.

The God of Galileo, Darwin & Einstein,

In the Temple of Truth

Aka

God Came to Me

God came to me,

Not in my dreams

Nor in the vision,

Nor in a voice

Or apparition

But in the sobriety

And labor

Of my

Wakeful thought.

Copyright Lord Prophet

In a minimum of words, learning is the functionally retrievable long-term-memory end product of memory work

A few words of caution about the currently fired-up minimal or no school homework movement catching on in some parts of California and inspired by the book (titled ‘Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students’), speeches and radio guest spots of Denise Clark Pope, director of the Stanford University School of Education Stressed Out Students (S.O.S.) Project, on this subject. Simplistically and overly briefly, in net effect, learning is memory consolidation from stimulus-response repetition and reinforcement (with reinforcement meaning the fortification of the stimulus-response connection and the reward and punishment contingencies for optimization of the response, relative to a response standard, as in fine tuning and stabilizing the quality of the response). We learn how to listen and talk, how to draw, how to assemble puzzles quickly, the alphabet and numerals, and to read, spell and write, and literate foreign languages as well as learn grammar, math, science, public-speaking, acting, dance, music and sports knowledge and skills, and everything else, in this manner — by modeling, imitation, practice, rehearsal, role play, drill, review, analysis, testing, instructor feedback, and eventually by critical self observation and internalized self-feedback judgments of our satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance. Even spectator, observational, vicarious, indoctrinational and discursive learning entail respectively the perception of beneficial and adverse examples and reinforcement as well as negative and positive feedback contingencies in the viewed, examined, read or debated, etc., scenarios or issues — reinforcers that may be multiple or overlapping and concurrent, as in bearing or conveying strikingly or dramatically powerful and memorable action, intellect and emotional content simultaneously or in close proximity in time and place and that may induce rapid or near-instantaneous memory consolidation and learning.  Note-taking on, reflection on and contemplation of the characters, situations, descriptions, arguments, ideas, concepts, etc., in novels and other casual reading and learning writings and oral presentations, whether read or heard, is envisioning (mental-sensory) stimulus-response repetition and memory-learning work, too.  Respectively, the extent and potency of stimulus-response repetition and its reforcement figure largely into the durability of one’s summonable memory or learning — whether it will be or is short-term, intermediate-term or long-term memory and learning.  Also, some stimuli in stimulus-response learning situations are intrinsically reinforcing, apart from the need for repetition in conjunction with the response and a further reinforcer of the response, as in the virtually immediate learning of a brief poetically and melodically catchy musical phrase.

Information and homework overload is bad in that it can be intolerably stressful, a cause of emotional explosiveness or explosion, and academic burnout and learning turnoff, rebellion or shutdown. This is the case when a student’s every teacher or professor assigns extensive amounts of homework to a student as though that student has no other homework to do, thereby overburdening and overwhelming the student’s attention span, mental work or exertion (like muscle work) tolerance and often scarce available time impossibly. When such excessive or extreme homework assignments are chronic, they can lead to outright homework shirking and disregard by students or worse. Moderate homework assignments should be the rule, with teachers and professors who make the assignments taking into consideration time for a job and/or humanly stress-relieving diversion, recreation or play for students. Nevertheless, high-achiever knowledge and skills require extraordinary mental labor, practice and training — that is, extra effort, extra homework.

Don’t ever give up on doing homework if you are a student and don’t let your children go without doing homework. However, the legitimate issue of excessive homework needs to be brought to the attention of the local PTAs, boards of education and college or university presidents and academic senates. Teachers also need to bear in mind that there are individual differences in learning-load capacity and learning speed among students, that may vary with subject matter, with individual differences for improvement on these learning parameters among students (adaptability).

A partial solution to the homework problem might be for class time for every class to be divided into an instructional period, followed by an in-class homework period of diagnostic quizzes, short assignments and roving instructor consultations with and tutoring of students calling upon the instructor for help with writing comments and essays, grammar, math, etc. Routinely concluding the instructional period should be some time for students to ask subject-matter relevant questions. Students should also be permitted to write questions for the instructor and write brief critiques of instructional material during the in-class homework period. Questioning and critiquing should be a standard feature of classroom education and student critical-thinking development.

Redefined slightly differently than previously defined, learning is memory consolidation from stimulus-response (S-R) repetition and reinforcement (with reinforcement being memory and performance fortification respectively by each mere repetition itself, performance feedback and reward and punishment contingencies (being the positive, negative and neutral or spectrum of pleasure versus pain consequences). Less mechanically, the learning process may also be understood as the sensory-motor (neuromuscular) cognitive acquisition and retention of information, knowledge, skills and behavior. Another casual definition of learning, more applicable to social adaptation or acculturation, is “the assimilation and adoption or incorporation of knowledge, skills, behavior and culture, etc.” Secular industrial education (teaching and training) focuses on inducing and facilitating learners’ acquisition of knowledge and skills and developing their ability to conceptualize, think, reason, newly conceive and create. Learning is underlain by neuronal connections, bonding and networking, primarily in the brain, resulting from cognitive stimulation and is overtly expressed by sensory-motor reflexes or voluntary responses.  The complete memory process consists of stimulus or stimuli perception (internal, external or mental), perception-memory storage (short term, intermediate term and long term), memory consolidation (long-term memory storage) and memory retrieval, in which memory storage and consolidation are a conjoined subprocess in long-term memory formation (retrievable memory) and learning.

In a discrepancy between demonstrated and demonstrable empirical mechanical science and statistical correlation, factual empirical science incontestably prevails and the statistical correlation is wrong, as empirical science determines and expresses cause-effect relationships and correct statisical correlation determines degree-of-association relationships, which may or may not be cause-effect connected — the relevant empirical sciences here being stimulus-response repetition and feedback-reinforcement (informational and reward-discipline contingencies) cognitive and behavioral psychology and neurobiology. If a competent math teacher instructs a student newly on a mathematical operation also new to the student (other than perhaps addition and the addition of 1 plus 1 for even the least learning capable generally age-appropriate school child) and does no permit the student to ponder, question, study and practice that operation, the overwhelming odds are that the student will not remember substantially or commit to memory a retrievable accurate understanding of that operation when tested.  Likewise, if a music student does not review and practice practice his or her music nomenclature and performance licks, he or she will undoubtedly not or little remember them and will score poorly in related music nomenclature and performance tests of his or her music instructional learning (related cognitive achievement).

In this land of money grubbing and get-rich-quick schemes and scams, I would not rule out that this book and movement are a money-making gimmick in the self service of the author and the author’s publisher latching onto and exploiting a controversial real concern, where parents, teachers, school administrators and political authorities are all pointing their fingers every which way for causes and solutions for mass-scale student failure and underperformance. However, it may incredibly constitute another cookoo, counterintuitive strategy to solve the intractable problem of large-scale educational failure in the schools by, as the departed 20th-Century singer and songwriter Curtis Mayfield remarked in his song ‘Don’t Worry,’ “educated fools from uneducated schools.”  Perhaps so much academic failure and underperformance are substantially caused by something politicians, the chambers of commerce, the junk and fast food industry and many parents and children don’t want to talk about, in our primacy-of-profits era of libertarian-feudalist-capitalism sway,  such as junk food like sodas, hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, potato, corn and other chips of all kinds, pastries, donuts, ice cream, candy, and so forth ad nauseam — bad nutrition, that is also bad for athletic performance, a physically fit, aesthetic appearance and a source of serious child and adult medical problems.