frankilin roosevelt

It's not about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.


Check out my old  Voice of the People page.


Gino Napoli
San Francisco, California
High School Math Teacher

jonsdarc@mindspring.com




Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.

a middle-aged
George Washington



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Friday, 16 December 2011 at 1h 29m 33s

Reminder: the rich don't create jobs, the economic environment does

Click here for another in a growing list of reasons about why the notion that "the rich and the entrepreneurs" are job creators is bunk.

Okay, I'll supplement this topic.

The general availability of purchasing power makes anything beyond the subsistence needs of a society even possible. Once people are clothed, sheltered, and fed, the surplus income purchases the products and services of what it is that entrepreneurs provide. A middle class is necessary for a vibrant capitalist society to functionally exist, or else it will devolve into plutocracy or dictatorship. The last 4,000 years of human history provides many examples of societies with two classes, or three, if you include the slaves amongst the rich and the poor.

When the middle class drifts towards impoverishment, or diminishing future returns (an economic term used by the neo-conservatives) this will have an aggregate effect on the overall demand return entrepreneurial potential engine. In any economic environment, there is always potential for reward. Either by connivance or cunning, or sheer luck, there will always be those who can rise above their original social status. However, these individual efforts do not affect the overall distribution of the members of the population. Hundreds of success stories do not dispel the reality that 90% of the population earns less than $50,000 a year, and 98% earns less than $100,000.

Now consider what happens when demand evaporates underneath the malignant priorities of the profit extraction system, and nothing changes in 4 years, 8 years, 10 years.

I'll leave it at that. Read the link above. Despite the misplaced sarcasm, there is some insight.

[SOURCE: Henry Blodget | businessinsider.com | 15 December 2011]


Friday, 16 December 2011 at 1h 0m 56s

My rebuttal to a recent blog commentariati

I love the blithe attempt to massage Libertarianism as the new truth, now that the Neo-conservative economic belief system has completely fallen apart. The idea that human beings can exist as hermetically sealed economic units is ridiculous. But I've made that point many times before, and any additional fodder I'll save for another day.

I thought it might be entertaining to share this "dialogue" (if that's what you call the comment board of the internet).

Here is what the guy said

I’ve gotten interested in Austrian School economics. I’m reading the Ludwig Von Mises book entitled Liberalism. He has a quite different account of what’s best for all — he claims free enterprise is good because it allows for the maximum of exchange which allows a kind of Darwinian fittest to emerge in terms of products and distribution. One of the problems I have with Marxism is that it puts kindness first, when of course all of nature is about selfishness. Marxism is unnatural and usually kills nature (though not usually with kindness). It’s interesting to hear about this author (I generally like anarchists). There is an anarchistic side in libertarianism of the kind that Ron Paul espouses (he is also an aficionado of Austrian School economics). I suppose if we’re going to turn to economics as the set of paradigms that clarifies what else we’re doing in the humanities we might as well look at all the different schools. I personally like Smith, but he wouldn’t have accepted slavery as is here said to be the case. I’m certain that Hayek and Von Mises wouldn’t have accepted slavery. Not so sure about Marxism systems. They seem to accept slavery and even to promote it as they seek to deny democracy, and to impose the will of a minority on that of the majority. Do you think that OWS is Marxist? I haven’t been able to determine what they want or what they are saying.

Here is my response :

@Darcy: Yea the elite and their wall street cronies certainly allocated the investment funds in an efficient manner. Outsourcing all of the production potential of the nation to skim more money off the top and pay workers less, forcing the middle class to take on more debt when government stops funding education and starting spending more on war and military contractors. When bankers and various members of the political elite can break the wall and walk away, where is the moral rectitude of the economic system? Is this type of corrupt, mismanagement allowing the maximum production based on the survival of the fittest?

No. It’s about people with power and money being greedy and doing whatever they want — and getting away with it.

Your knowledge of the names in Economics means nothing. The substance of what they have written is more important then quoting a few names. Especially given the many different names you don’t include. I on the other hand, are well versed in the various historic literature — so when you say that “Smith” is a school of thought, you reveal your ignorance.

Capitalism is amoral. Neither good nor bad. Economics and the hierarchical relations of the society itself ARE THE SAME THING. All of the economists you stated agree. So please stop saying that an economic system is “good”. The economic system does not create the social rungs by itself. That is what community and government do. All of the economists you stated agree.

There are other choices than Marxism. So why are you so fixated with that ancient, defunct product of an impoverished 19th century writer? What value is it to what the citizens are facing today? People who are upset with the corruption of our government and our financial system are not anti-capitalist at all. They do not read Marx for guidance.

This is easy to understand. However, someone like Darcy is a troll who probably works for a company hired to spew these contrived opinions. They act like they are confused about why people are protesting and make innuendos that they are socialists, communists, or marxists.

Get real. The OWS movement is an American movement, just like the Farmers movements of the 1880s and the progressive movements in the early 1900s, the labor movements of the 1930s, and the civil rights movements of the 1950s-60s.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE: Admittedly I added the labor movement of the 1930s, in the above quotation of my "original" rebuttal.

Ah, but there's the rub. Everything is evolutionary. Given half a chance, all of us will make some change to what was once a misconception or oversight. Details take time. Nothing is instantaneously achieved. Only time can percolate the best ideas and the best practices.


Friday, 16 December 2011 at 0h 43m 23s

Questionable purposes

I don't know if anyone out there in the ether realizes this, but ...

The recent arrests of the occupy movement have focused on the legal and journalistic constituents of the movement. 100% of those who are arrested are legal counsel, video streamers, known bloggers, or avid twitters, despite their being less than 5% of protest population. The police are singling them out.

And as they are held for 2 or 3 days, some of them have $50,000 bails for a misdemeanor offense. Or they are threatened to have their retina's scanned (which is what happened in New York City). Why do they want to scan retinas? Makes you wonder if the drones used in the middle might actually be used for some purpose in the United States?

Am I paranoid?


Tuesday, 13 December 2011 at 2h 35m 50s

The history of debt

Click here for the source blog where this awesome summary of how Money is really government debt that is used as a medium of exchange and facilitate the purchase of goods, payment of wages, and payment for services.

David Graeber’s Debt The First Five Thousand Years is a brilliant and powerful book; and even, I would say, a crucial one. Graeber does several things. He shows how the notion of “debt” has been integral to any notion of an “economy.” He traces the history of debt, both as an economic concept and as a metaphor for other forms of social engagement, back to the Mesopotamian civilizations of thousands of years ago. He traces the changes in how debt is conceived, and how economic exchange is organized, in various Eurasian civilizations and societies since then. And he contrasts these relations of economy and debt to those that existed (and still exist to some extent) in non-state societies (the ones that anthropologists tend to study)

[SOURCE: Shapiro blog |  | 19 November 2011]


Tuesday, 6 December 2011 at 2h 14m 52s

A timeline of the financial crisis

From February 2007 to April 2011

Click on the picture to go to an interactive timeline.

[SOURCE: St. Louis Fed


Saturday, 3 December 2011 at 4h 36m 11s

The Rich Don't Create Jobs

Click here for the Wall Street Journal blog entry by Robert Frank.

“I’ve never been a ‘job creator,’ ” writes Nick Hanauer, who helped start several start-ups, including aQuantive, which was sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. “I can start a business based on a great idea and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.”

It’s this “feedback loop” between mass consumers and businesses that creates jobs.

“When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution,” he writes. “In fact, it’s the other way around.”

The spending of the rich can’t make up the difference for a gutted middle class. Hanauer said his biggest expense is his jet, which doesn’t support many American jobs since it was made in France and fueled with oil from the Middle East.

The answer, he says, is to tax the rich so their money can be used to improve the purchasing power of the middle class.


[SOURCE: Robert Frank | Wall Street Journal | 1 December 2011]


Friday, 2 December 2011 at 2h 8m 23s

Another Super committee


Wednesday, 30 November 2011 at 1h 43m 37s

The recent NBA events

Charles A. Pierce writes his take on the recent NBA events.

Here's my favorite snippet:

Another way you know that it wasn't really about economics is that the league's economic public case for its position became more and more preposterous as the weeks went by, and even the public began to notice that it was being taken for a fool. The hilarity hit high tide for me when David Stern started going around explaining that 22 of his 30 franchises were losing money.

Tell me, do you suppose that when Stern sat down and chatted with the Nike corporation, or with the People's Republic of China, to name only two of the wildly successful authoritarian operations with which the league does its business, the first thing he explained while pitching the NBA to them was that 73 percent of his league was in the red? Did you, at any time, expect to see Herb Simon, the shopping-mall billionaire who owns the "small-market" Indiana Pacers — a team that he bought for $11 million and which is now estimated to be worth $269 million — swiping the leftover bourbon chicken off abandoned plates in his various food courts unless the players surrendered to him a chunk of their dough?

Of course you didn't, because your mother didn't raise a fool when she raised you.

(Can the NBA produce financial documents testifying that Simon and his fellow plutocrats were perilously close to selling apples on Fifth Avenue? Yes, because almost anyone could, if they hired Philip K. Dick to do their accounting.)

And the third and most important reason why you know that the lockout was not really about economics is that there was a lockout at all. Because 30 years of propaganda — thanks, Ronnie! — have convinced most people under 50 that unions are for losers, it eluded many of the people covering these events that lockouts are, and will always be, things willed into being exclusively by management. They are not natural phenomena. They are never truly unavoidable. They don't "just happen," and they certainly do not occur because "both sides" are at fault. Lockouts occur when management believes that unions are too strong, and they occur when management believes that unions are too weak, and they occur when management doesn't want a union to exist at all.

Lockouts are not devices of economic correction. That's just a byproduct. Lockouts are attempts by management to exercise control over their workers. Period.


[SOURCE: Grantland.com | Charles A. Pierce | 28 November 2011]


Sunday, 27 November 2011 at 18h 50m 22s

Emotional Transference

The idea of transference means "the action of transferring something or the process of being transferred" . The branch of psychology called transference neurosis is "the redirection to a substitute of emotions that were originally felt in childhood" . I got this idea from the television series Law & Order that I will watch sporadically throughout the year, when I have time.

The show deals with human psychology and the devolution of unresolved social and personal issues becoming transformed into monstrous consequences. The particular show involved an older gentleman who transfered his traumatized notions of his mother having an affair with a jew into a hatred for jews in general. The man thought his secretary mother was raped by the jewish owner rather than becoming a willing accomplice, unable to admit that life is more complicated, irrational, and hypocritical then what he might have wanted. The man devolved when his mother died and he carried out a series of 7 deaths against hebrews -- which is a rather extreme end to this set of events, but then what do you expect from a tv show that needs to attract eyeballs. To be fair, the show did a good job evincing the characters involved in the script.

But it got me thinking about transference. This might be an innate human mechanism of dealing with very painful events. We redirect the challenging emotions towards a substitute, for whatever reason, and there are many different reasons. The mind makes its own connections and hypotheses of events; therefore, the mind finds and accepts its own substitutes.



Emotions are like water. Some persons control their flow of water at a regular constant drip. Others spray all over the place at different irregular intervals, or rush out, and some even turn off the spigot for most of their entire life. But when emotions fill an underground reservoir of pain, the deposits accumulate and grow. Soon the enormous amount of water has to go somewhere, and where it goes may or may not be the choice of the water carrier. Drainage systems have to be installed, and they are usually installed without any plan, on an as needed basis. So after a while, the drainage system becomes dysfunctional and has to be rebuilt or re-routed. This involves having to make decisions and choices that are difficult because of historical associations and various other personal attachments. However, whatever decision that is made, dictates the drainage construction and infrastructure (or lack thereof) that proceeds afterwards.

Ignoring the inevitable is the most frequent strategy. Lacking any absolutely necessary reason to change or reassess, the human species will merely drift, carrying on the current traditions and practices with which we have become imbued.


Wednesday, 23 November 2011 at 2h 7m 12s

Reality sets in




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