Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/ ... t-off.html

The archdruid puts some larger context on the water shutoffs in Detroit and Baltimore.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... valve.html

Most of the remaining residents are poor, and the ongoing redistribution of wealth in America toward the very rich and away from everyone else has driven down the income of the urban poor to the point that many of them can no longer afford to pay their water and power bills.

You won't see Gates or Buffett paying anyone's water bill in neo-Africa with their multi-trillion dollar foundation because they won't want to draw attention to the fact that they helped create neo-Africa. Or draw attention to the fact that everything is not okie dokie in Buffett's beloved America.

Then there's the fact of what I've seen "on the ground" where people used to having the government foot the bill will not make themselves responsible for usage. I've seen people turn the water on to the bathroom sink in the morning and leave it on until everyone is up and finished. Why make the effort to turn a knob if there's no consequence to not turning it, right?

Which is part of the reason why my mindset developed that total collapse is the only solution. Neither side is correct, neither side has a solution and total collapse is the only solution. It's not a human right for some pig to have water that is too lazy to turn a knob. It's not humane or sustainable to leave people trapped in hellholes to breed like rats where their only legitimate income is based on how many humans they pop out to count as a welfare dependent.

[Higgenbotham]

I was in Detroit very recently with fellow churchgoers. We met with some people from the Boggs Center and got a tour of the east side of Detroit. To my surprise, one of the things we learned was that the water issues in Detroit go much deeper than simply poor people not being able to afford their water bills (although that is, without a doubt, no small part of it). Here are some of the things we learned:

* Detroit has the highest water rates of any major city in the Great Lakes region.
* Suburbs buy water from the City of Detroit at state-mandated discount rates.
* Because Detroit has de-populated and there is so much infrastructure necessary just to get the water to the suburban borders, and because water has to be sold to the suburbs at discounted rates, it is Detroiters who have to bear the brunt of all of that infrastructure cost.
* Water is being shut off to entire neighborhoods, not just house by house, even though there are people in those neighborhoods who are not behind on their water bills and never have been.
* Land in poor neighborhoods like those on the east side is being snapped up by real-estate speculators. Even the famed GM Packard plant in Hamtramck that closed in 1955 has been purchased by a South American billionaire.
* If you look at Detroit’s Master Plan, there is an obvious correlation between the neighborhoods where water shut-offs are occurring and the development ambitions of the City.
* The City has taken to attaching water bills to people’s property tax bills, so when the water bills can’t be paid, they can foreclose on the homes.
* Long story short, what’s going is an attempt by the City and the wealthy people in the shadows of the City government to deliberately push poor people out of the neighborhoods they want to re-develop. They don’t care where they go or even if they have the means to go, they just want them gone.

A comparison can be made to this activity and the kind of activity that occurred prior to the 14th Century collapse. Also, just because the wealthy vultures think they have found a way to make some money off of this, it doesn't mean they will not get swallowed up in the collapse also to include payback in some form equivalent to a guillotine type of fate.

[John]

> A comparison can be made to this activity and the kind of activity
> that occurred prior to the 14th Century collapse.

What would be a list of similar activities prior to the 14th century
collapse?

[Higgenbotham]

> A comparison can be made to this activity and the kind of activity
> that occurred prior to the 14th Century collapse.

What would be a list of similar activities prior to the 14th century
collapse?

At that time the European bankers were in trouble and about to go under. To keep afloat, they conspired with the Mongols to lay siege to multiple European cities and received pre-payment prior to the Mongols laying siege to the target city and/or split up the booty. In other words human populations were sacrificed in order to provide the loot to stave off bankruptcy.

[aedens]

The local indications still are that People will not vote "no trust" Republican and can barely stand the red diapers brigades and the watermellons here. Point rings true the green masks are the new blue dogs as we noted earlier. As we posted from the rehabilitated Democrat who forwarded what is coming, and is already here. I can check my off line notes to what the focus group seen. This was from the protestants, catholics, and non alighed participants of the specific problem when the city was told this or else from the group. Basically our money will go in this direction. The latest insult was prop one and it got its ass kicked by the voters. I will be in Detroit in early June to see whats up other than ignoring the usual suspects wasting the tax payers time. As we provided Rosa Koire over in Leftardia reported facts to what was actually going on.

http://nord.twu.net/acl/research/

[Higgenbotham]

Reading the particulars about Detroit (and that over time may apply to many large cities) and its water situation, it is apparent that water being treated in Detroit is being pumped a large distance to the outer edges of the suburbs. Yesterday I was reading a description of the situation for a city where the water is pumped 20 miles from the lake to the treatment plant. It doesn't seem that this is uncommon at all. There are pumps in the pipeline between intake and the plant to keep the water moving. That's a lot of infrastructure to keep intact in an age of decline and also to keep safe from potential vandals who have been deprived of the water service.

[aedens]

http://www.dailyimpact.net/2011/08/01/a ... ter-banks/ JULY 26, 2011

Soon after the Union, the Act 6 Anne c.40 (later infelicitously named the Union with Scotland (Amendment) Act 1707) united the English and Scottish Privy Councils and decentralised Scottish administration by appointing justices of the peace in each shire to carry out administration. In effect it took the day-to-day government of Scotland out of the hands of politicians and into those of the College of Justice.

This point then "inflicted" upon labour was never forgotten. Parliament of Scotland had been unicameral while that of England had been bicameral.

As for myself, forecasted trends allow objective room as was used chiefly in medieval philosophy. Adaptive measures are not neglected here either.

DICK MORRIS: Obama Sneaking in 'Unrestricted Immigration' in Trade Deal

Dick Morris said the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPA) fast track being supported by many Republicans has a provision that allows for the “free flow of workers” between countries, essentially creating a backdoor to “unrestricted immigration.”
“This is huge. I hope everybody listening takes action call your senator about it. If he is a Republican he is voting wrong. “I dont think that people understand that in this deal which is a trade agreement among Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Chile, there’s a provision for free flow of workers, just like in the European Union. What It means is unrestricted immigration. It means literally that congress would not have the authority to restrict immigration because a treaty supersedes a statute under our constitution.”

Obama’s Republican Collaborators
By Patrick J. Buchanan April 21, 2015

When we look back to NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, MFN and PNTR for China, the Korean-U.S. free trade deal, CAFTA with Central America — almost all have led to soaring trade deficits and jobs lost to the nations with whom we signed the agreements.

As for the bureaucrats and politicians who promised us big new markets for exports, rising trade surpluses, better jobs — were they simply ignorant, or were they knowingly lying to us?
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/why-obam ... 12596.html

No one can be that wrong for that long. The law of averages is against it.

As forwarded this guy is a smooth op http://thesaker.is/todays-victory-day-c ... n-history/

I find these conversations insane today on so many levels it simply defies any logic.

They do not in service: http://littlesistersofthepoor.org/ Sorry but they do now better and the swamp people.
Its that simple, locally we still do not point blank trust the jagged pills.

As I was told point blank from a national who legally came here when you see this, start to happen its already to late.
He was referring to cartel hits on street level peddlers.

[John]

Higgie -

You've given lots of examples of failing systems in today's world.

There's a paper that I've referred to for years on "How Complex
Systems Fail." I've passed it on to a number of people in discussing
large software systems, and what can go wrong.

But I think it also applies to the entire world as a complex system.
Everything in the world is so interlocked these days, that the failure
of any large component, or even some small components, could
disastrously affect the entire world.

This paper is only a couple of pages long, and is well worth reading:

** How Complex Systems Fail, Richard I. Cook, MD
** Cognitive technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago
** http://GenerationalDynamics.com/gdgraph ... msFail.pdf

[aedens]

An insurance group is warning consumers of a widespread scam in which fraudsters are buying cars on Craigslist with bogus checks.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau has identified nearly 100 instances throughout the Midwest of Craigslist car sales in which the buyers used fake bank checks.
“These scams are well organized and have all the appearances of being legitimate,” NCIB President and CEO Joe Wehrle said in a statement. “But in the end, the criminal gets the car and the sellers or their financial institutions are left on the hook for thousands of dollars still owed on the car.”

Drug cartels have set up shop in el paso texas areas also as car sales shops was warned. mex drug cartel money launders.

[Higgenbotham]

Higgie -

You've given lots of examples of failing systems in today's world.

There's a paper that I've referred to for years on "How Complex
Systems Fail." I've passed it on to a number of people in discussing
large software systems, and what can go wrong.

But I think it also applies to the entire world as a complex system.
Everything in the world is so interlocked these days, that the failure
of any large component, or even some small components, could
disastrously affect the entire world.

This paper is only a couple of pages long, and is well worth reading:

** How Complex Systems Fail, Richard I. Cook, MD
** Cognitive technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago
** http://GenerationalDynamics.com/gdgraph ... msFail.pdf

I would agree that this paper is applicable to other complex systems. The system cited earlier today by which water gets delivered to a customer at the far reaches of the Detroit water distribution system would be an example. There is a dependency whereby the fact that government welfare programs and recipients whose water usage was subsidized for a long period of time may have kept that system stable. Yet that created an instability whereby the users who were subsidized may not have controlled and limited their usage such that the subsidy could be afforded over the long term. All of these various factors that are not well understood and their interactions that are not well understood can contribute to the catastrophic collapse of the system. Now obviously some people do understand that if the "white flight" out of the center of Detroit that helped cause the current instability can be reversed by using the water system as a tool for removing the dependency from the core area of the system, then perhaps the water system can be stabilized. According to the paper, there is no guarantee that can work. As I had pointed out, there are reasons why that may not be successful such as the fact that persons deprived of water may behave differently. The human experts who would be tasked with the responsibility of preventing the system from being vandalized (for example, there are regulations that require fences around pumping stations, etc.) would not be able to anticipate a situation such as went down in Baltimore prior to a mob having been cut off from the water system whereby a mob deprived of access to infrastructure may redirect their attention in ways mobs have not done so previously. There would be other factors also unanticipated where a mob deprived of water may be a breeding ground for Ebola, for example, the fears of which could precipitate a collapse of the financial system. Obviously there is not going to be anybody on Wall Street saying, "Hey, we need to get some barbed wire fences around the pumping stations of the Detroit water system because if we don't the stock market is going to collapse." But that is in fact a potentially true statement and there are dozens more that are similar. As the author points out, the proximate cause will never be identified in advance and some combination of factors seems obvious in retrospect. Identifying that in retrospect will not be helpful. In my experience there is not an abundance of experts similar to the abundance of experts in the field of software who grasp what pumping millions of gallons of water per day for miles to the far reaches of a water distribution system and maintaining adequate pressure in that system means in terms of its complexity and all the inputs required to make sure that happens. They don't pay people a lot of money to understand that. I think that situation has occurred because water systems, though inherently unstable under conditions that have not been seen until now, were stable for decades.