The election is over, but I want to talk about another type of democracy. After reading Al Gore's recent article "The Climate of Change", I started thinking about energy and how we use it. Today we get expensive gasoline from private conglomerates some who buy oil from state owned oil fields such as those in Venezuela. It's strange, to say the least, the way the profit is distributed among the populace in these "free markets", but that's not what I want to talk about. It's the coal fields buried under federal lands which are mined by private interests and this coal is then burned to produce electricity for a couple of hundred million Americans. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of providing electricity, but it's intended purpose is first and foremost to provide a profit for the private interests, remember ENRON. Now, some people may not understand this, and at the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this electricity, which is produced in large part by coal, is brought to our homes over a grid system. Think of it as a web in which every home is connected to every other home. The electricity doesn't flow into each home to simply dissipate upon providing work through appliances, but is maintained at a relatively constant level over the entire grid 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The meter doesn't measure the amount of electricity a home uses. It instead measures the resistance to electric "flow". You might ask, "What does this have to do with anything?" Well for one thing, it's a shared resource. The other is that the many are at the mercy of the few, and it's a dependency based on finite production resources. To top in all off, much of that grid system was built with tax money or tax incentives. The bright side is we are all connected together, and that's a good thing.

What I want to remind you of, is that there is another way to live, while maintaining a similar if not better lifestyle. Forget depending on someone else to produce power. Imagine every home in America with a roof made of solar cells. Imagine all those homes connected to the national grid system. During the day while the populace are away at work, storage devices can be storing the energy being gathered by all the rooftop solar panels for use during the peak hours of the evening, when the workers come home. This would reduce the stress of the current power plants. Most importantly, it would also democratize the grid by turning end users into co-producers. Plus, adding energy storage devices would allow power plants to cut over all energy production. I estimate that if every roof in America were made of solar panels, 30 to 50 percent less energy would be needed from traditional means. The initial cost would be high but the long term saving would be huge. Not to mention, the solar maintenance and replacement industry would create millions of jobs locally. Distributive power production would be a revolutionary change in so many ways I can't begin to count them.  

This bailout that has been rammed down the publics throat by the elite, congress, and the media, is really just a tax increase on the working class. Think about it. When congress takes tax money and loans it at a low rate to rich people, so they can make more money, joe middle and lower class gets hit twice. First, you do your part for society by paying taxes, then you get hit a second time by the rich who use your tax money to make a profit by selling a service to you, with money you just gave to society through taxes. In my book that's called double dipping, and it amounts to a tax increase of what ever percentage profit the rich make off the bailout money.

And what if you were like me you didn't buy a house in the last 30 years, so where's our help? If you were financially prudent, this bailout just gives your money to the wealthiest Americans.  Also, if home values decline further, and banks don't get current market values for mortgages, how does this affect the bank's ability to return tax payer's money to the government? Will the congress later forgive banks who can't pay back bailout loans? Its possible.  

I think we are looking at a situation where the rich are happy either way. If we don't give the rich money, then housing prices collapse along with the world economy. That would lead to the end of any stability or democracy government could provide. In that scenario, the rich would have total hegemony. If we give them the money, the rich continue the long extraction of wealth from the lower classes anyway, which, you guessed it, leads to total hegemony.    

The only way out of this is to raise taxes on the rich, which so far have managed to have everything their way. Just look at the wealth disparity that exist in the world today. The last time it was this bad, heads eventually rolled, literally.  Technically speaking, the heads of the poor have been rolling for quite a while in the middle east and other impoverished locations throughout the world.

I realized after watching video of the debate and looking at early photos of Palin, that she's cross eyed. I'm being serious no joke she's cross eyed and the winking was a result of her self correcting her  left eye. She held it strait through most of the debate somehow but winked as it tried to return to its usual position. Someone must have decided it would be a negative to appear cross eyed. It's important because many people misread her winks as some sort of message. Her winks were involuntary. I'm not voting for McCain but I think the truth about this still matters.

Billionaire Warren Buffet just worked a deal with Goldman Sachs for 5 billion worth of preferred stock that p[ays a 10% dividend. Now the big question is, if Goldman is a part of this government payola  plan of Paulson's, does that mean we're paying Buffets tax free dividend? Remember congress made dividends tax free a few years ago, or have you forgotten already. Another question, if Buffet can get that deal why can't Congress? It seem a very revealing event to me. 

It began sometime ago, but the climax started eight years ago with the election George W Bush.  With republicans calling themselves the government opposition party, they railed against taxes and wasteful spending. They promised to remove government from our lives by getting rid of regulation. George W. Bush took care of the things they cared about most, taxes and regulations. 
But that's just mechanism. What we are dealing with are thieves. When Alan Greenspan lowered rates to about 1% and left them there, housing prices skyrocketed and banks reaped hugh profits for their preferred share holders and executives. Oh, did I mention Phil Gram deregulated the banking industry, allowing them to trade securities for the first in over seventy years. Then they played musical chairs with pieces of paper called mortgage backed  derivatives. When the music stopped, they demanded the tax payer to give them more money. That's using other people's money going up and going down. The property itself is merely incidental as the guys have no interest in holding such assets. These guys rigged the outcome. Just as Enron falsified their accounting to make themselves look profitable. The banks manipulated and cheated in the mortgage industry. Keep in mind when a person's home is foreclosed they have lost all the money that went into interest payments and also in a declining housing market they may lose equity too. The banks get the asset to resell. The government steps in to make up the difference between the current equity value and the future equity value. The bank makes out like the bandit it is, never losing.
This heist will cost citizens of the US, nearly over two trillion dollars. The perpetrators have so far gotten away with vast amounts of wealth. When you combine that with the privatizing of war. The heist swells to nearly five trillion. There is no incentive to win a war when you profits count on the war continuing.