When Regulators are In Bed with Business

When Regulators are In Bed with Business

The Principle of Imminent Collapse invariably shows up when the people who are supposed to inspect and report deficiencies and non-compliance to laws fail in the performance of that public trust. It would be one thing if the failure was due to inexperience and not knowing what the outcomes would be, but all too often the failure is due to a tacit agreement that the regulation is only for show and that no actual interference will be manifest.

Rampant Capitalist Buying and Selling leads to the Principle of Imminent Collapse. When one allows free-market forces to run amuck free from oversight, regulation and rationality, a crash is unavoidable. The fallacy of Laissez-faire is that it assumes that corporations are peopled with only honest and earnest directors, managers and staff. It would be true if emotions did not interfere. The role of government oversight is to reign in the adrenaline and testosterone fueled frenzy that emerges as a corporate personality trait when the wild ride begins.

These un-watched enterprises are responsible for all the Boom and Bust cycles of the economy. In recent years, the hydraulic fracturing/drilling speculators are riding high on the adrenalin of big money from holes in the ground. They will drill, drill, drill irrespective of the production outcomes of their operations. When the price of gas falls far enough the gas from their wells will be too costly to sell and the speculators will cease operations and walk away from the toxic waste water basins they built to hold the wastes until they were ready to leave. Government action has always been required in order to remediate the damage done in the Bust phase after every Boom.

There are two levels within each regulatory organization: The workers who see the everyday activities that they monitor; and there is the management level to which they report. While the front line workers usually want to do their job, it is the unstated position of the management that government needs to stay out of the process and let business prosper. Nobody wants to hold up the rollout of the latest jet aircraft. It will cost millions if there is a delay. We can’t have big businesses incur losses due to safety concerns that are only alleged anyway. No one has proven that three rivets instead of four really would make the wing fall off.

In the Soviet-era manufacturing environment, performance criteria were commanded. Without respect to capabilities of the factory to perform, they were told they will ship 1000 refrigerators per month. They had an inspector counting the units shipped. It always was 1000 units. The problem arose when the plant had only 900 compressors to install in the 1000 units. In that case 900 functional units were shipped along with 100 non-functional ones. The inspectors were satisfied and the economic planners vindicated that they were meeting the needs of the people.

So what happens when a mortgage finance institution needs to produce 10,000 new mortgages per month to package and sell to investors and they can only find 9,000 good qualified house buyers to sign on the dotted line? Well 90% of the mortgages were good and at cursory glance, all the T’s were crossed and the I’s dotted. Everything looked good until you dig deeper and discovered that many of the mortgagees did not have adequate income to assure confident repayment. Without actually visiting the dwelling, how would the reviewer know that the $400,000 price tag was $100,000 too high? They don’t. But someone certified that the dwelling was fit and suitably priced. Somebody fudged the numbers and the report. And no one was reviewing the performance of the appraisers. Everyone was making money and the economy was flush with discretionary funds to pay for all the stuff we Americans love to buy and consume.

Older people were able to retire to upscale communities like the Charlestown Village in Catonsville, MD or other Erickson communities or hundreds of other “active adult communities” and assisted-living communities. Children could go to college and private Christian high schools.

At the top management level of the finance banks, they were seeing dollar signs floating in their dreams, too. Multi-million dollar salaries, bonuses and stock options abounded. The measure of performance was not solid quality manufacturing and delivery, but it was how many units they could ship and put the price on their Accounts Receivable ledgers. This is were the Principle of Imminent Collapse meets the metaphorical Tuna. The two concepts are so intertwined that they are almost one Principle. There were no independent regulators or auditors to call out the business practices as being damaging.  In many cases the government relied of the companies themselves to self report and self-regulate. How smart is THAT?

Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it

Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

Let's put Global climate Change in its proper perspective. What ever the causes, whatever the magnitude, we humans need to figure out how we will live in the New Equilibrium.

Humans are only one of the direct causes of atmospheric greenhouse gas buildup. We are also the indirect cause of a lot more than by the mere burning of fossil fuels. In some of the cases listed below, one event creates another and the other feeds back and increases the cause.

We used to learn that there was a "food chain". This was a linear progression from plankton in the sea and ended with humans triumphantly standing at the top. Each animal ate a smaller one and up the chain to us. But then we realized that it wasn't a line but a web, a network of predators and prey. One predator was keeping another predator in check by eating the food the other predator wanted to eat. We kill off the one predator so we can have the salmon or the cod but the other predator takes over and eats even more of the fish we want. This is to say: nothing happens in isolation.

This description won't make sense at first but keep reading. A figure skater starts a slow spin to impress the audience. He or she suddenly accelerates to a very rapid spin, then slows down again and stops with a flourish and wave of the arms held high. We are impressed. It is physics that allowed the skater to accomplish that very rapid spin. The skater starts with arms outstretched and he/she accelerates when the arms are quickly pulled in close. The spinning mass out far has the same energy as the mass close in, so the speed must be faster to compensate. The opposite applies for slowing down again.

This applies to the Earth as well. When the atmosphere gets warmer it expands and the rotation of the Earth slows down a tiny amount. When the water that is at the poles as ice melts it flows to the equator and the Earth gets wider in the middle. This slows the rotation a tiny bit too. This may only be a few microseconds but over time it adds up to longer days.

Now for a list:

• Heat doesn't ever really go away. It radiates off the planet into space otherwise the sun's heat would melt it. Nuclear reactors liberate a lot of heat into the air. Burning coal, oil and gas also directly heat the air as well as add greenhouse gases.
• One degree of temperature rise from 60 to 61 or 90 to 91 is a small change. On the other hand a rise from 31 to 32 causes glaciers and snow pack to melt.
• Tundra and permafrost lands are peat bogs with a lot of dead vegetation that is inactive because they are frozen. When they thaw out, they become biologically active and produce copious amounts of methane. Methane buildup traps more solar heat and further thaws the permafrost areas releasing more methane.
• There are dozens of deep ocean volcanoes and fissures that are off-gassing carbon dioxide into the water. The depths are so deep that we do not see and bubbles. The gas is there nonetheless. It gets into the atmosphere too.
• Methane that seeps into deep cold ocean water "freezes" into a solid form called hydrate. Methane hydrate keeps billions of tons of methane out of the air where it would trap solar heat.
• Hydrates are unstable and can erupt when sufficiently shaken. A deep water earthquake, even a small one, or a volcano can cause the eruption of the methane from the hydrate.
• People breed livestock in great numbers. Cows, pigs and chickens being the most prevalent are also manure creators and have copious amounts of methane flatulence. We eat the livestock and create our own manure and produce out own methane flatulence. Seven billion people produce those gases, too.
• People and livestock all breathe. Their respiration includes higher levels of carbon dioxide on the exhale than on the inhale.
• The sun shines on a field of grain. The grain grows and removes CO2 from the air. Livestock and people eat the grain and we eat the livestock. The carbon is returned to the environment. A lot of the carbon is held in the humans' bodies for many decades. Incidentally, obese people sequester more carbon in their lifetimes than do thin people.
• Cows are fed grains, pass gas and respire for about 2 years before slaughter. Pigs do it for 4 months to 1 year. And chickens live 30 days to 6 months. While they contribute to GHG loadings they also cycle carbon into the food web and into our bodies where it stays the longest.
• A field of grain growing takes carbon out of the air during its growing period. If you just burned it, it would immediately return all the carbon to the air. If you eat it some of the carbon will still immediately return to the air while the remaining carbon that stays in our bodies will return when each of us dies.
• If you grow a field of corn it takes carbon out of the air during the growing cycle. If you distill it into ethanol and burn it in your automobile engine, all that carbon is returned to the air in the same year for a net zero carbon gain. This is the same no matter how efficient or inefficient the distillation process is.
• If you cut down a twenty year old tree and let it rot on its own or you burn it in your furnace, the same amount of carbon is released as was removed during the twenty year growth of the tree. So on a carbon cycle, 20 year, it is a net zero.
• Growing grass in your yard removes carbon from the air, but when you mow it, the clipping rot and release the carbon right back into the air for a Net Zero 14 day cycle.
• Deciduous trees remove carbon from the air during the spring and summer only to release all of it in the fall and winter minus the amount turned into wood. Nearly Carbon Zero – 1 year, definitely carbon zero when the tree dies.
• Making trees into paper cycles carbon very fast. Making trees into lumber for houses keeps a lot of the carbon out of the air until the house burns down..

There are so many cycles that carbon makes as it is moved around for both the benefit and the detriment of people and the other species on the Earth. Some of these cycles are insignificant while others are disastrously potent. It is up to wise thinkers and planners, and not the people and businesses which prosper by not doing what is right, to make sure we are following a sustainable path.

Four messages to keep in mind:

1. That which we relied upon to bring us through the last century will not see us through the next.
2. "Men go and men come. But the Earth abides" ~ Ecclesiastes.
3. The Earth doesn't care how high or how low sea level is… We do.
4. Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it.

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The Truth About Chemtrails

Any conspiracy theorist worth his salt can tell you that governments are poisoning the human race with the dispersal of airborne chemicals, heavy metals and even viruses. They point to the white trails that aircraft make as the criss-cross the skies. Somehow they see a difference between the contrails that high altitude jets make as they disturb the stratosphere with their wings. Some of the condensations ultimately comes from the burnt aviation fuel but mostly the moisture was already there but invisible until the jets stir up the air and the water condenses. Usually the condensation just re-vaporizes and disappears from our sight.

The theorists claim that the trails that remain for hours are the results of a covert plan to do something sinister to the planet and to mankind. Such claims range from manipulation of the weather so as to control food production and thereby maximize profits for agri-businesses to population control by lowering sperm counts and virility of men. Other claims are to induce cancers and viral diseases that will cull earth's human population to about 1 billion people. Another claim is that they are poisoning the human race as collateral damage to an attempt to stem global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight that heats the oceans.

There seems to be little consensus among the many Internet-based purveyors of theory. What each person has in common is the notoriety he or she receives from a cadre of followers who believe the conspiracy because it was couched in terms of a conspiracy which the listener want to be true.

The facts are that cloud seeding has been going on for decades in order to provide microscopic particles in the atmosphere onto which water molecules can attach and make rain droplets that will precipitate. If the shadowy presence wanted to decrease solar heat accumulation through the atmosphere they certainly would not do it over land. It would be far more effective in equatorial ocean areas where no one would be seeing it done.

What is most interesting as a characteristic of the conspiracy theorists is that they put forth sinister governmental/corporate actions while ignoring the obvious vectors of doom that mankind is doing to himself without a master plan to do so.

The theorists are silent on the billions of tons of carbon-dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere each year that is causing the warming that "someone is trying to counter". Why not just stop the cause rather than seek a remedy?

Agri-business and pharmaceutical companies have been producing toxins and body/mind altering chemicals for decades. These substances leak into our water and air in huge quantities. The EPA even has a permitting process by which corporations can dispose of chemical byproducts by injecting them into old oil and gas wells. These substances pollute the ground water that is either withdrawn by domestic wells or leaches back to the surface through other old well casings that they did not consider.

Agri-businesses regularly create and distribute genetically modified organisms without proving their safety in the environment at large. One single field of GMO corn or wheat is capable of polluting the entire crop of every field across the nation. Millions of square miles of crops can be permanently contaminated with seeds that carry the mutant genes. We have little knowledge of what this altered gnome will produce as it mutates itself outside the laboratory that created the initial changes. Where is the conspiracy theorist to warn us of the dangers there?

Coal burning electric plants emit millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Among the substances are sulfur, mercury, antimony, lead and other trace heavy metals. All the chemtrail aircraft cannot hope to keep pace with the coal industry in disbursing the same quantity of pollutants in the air.

There are 104 nuclear reactors licensed at 65 sites in the United States. Additionally there are decommissioned reactors and military reactors in various places. None of these reactors has any plan for the ultimate disposal of their nuclear wastes. They all archive that toxic waste on-site in cooling pools that must be maintained lest they over heat and release massive amounts of radiation. While under normal circumstances the wastes are well protected and pose little danger, the kinds of abnormal events such as the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi plane in Japan do happen and all safeguards that were imagined fail to protect us from that danger. Planet Earth has been polluted with radiation from that plant for 10,000 years at least.

Even though the prior explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine added to the radiation loose on the planet, the 100's of air, ground and underwater nuclear detonations have added more toxic isotopes than either of the two "accidents." Such levels of radiation far surpasses anything that a fleet of jets could disperse in a chemtrail. Ultimately the governments of the world did something about the problem with first the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That stopped the contamination of the planet with stupid insistence on detonating nuclear bombs. The biggest peril that humans face is not war. It is not hurricanes. It's not a pandemic disease. It's not even sea level rise due to Arctic ice melt. What it is is the change in weather patterns that impact the availability of fresh water and the growing of food crops. The summer of 2012 brought with it a US Heartland drought that decimated the crop yields. The East Coast received more than its share of precipitation as the weather patterns had shifted a thousand miles eastward. So far the world has only been inconvenienced by Supply and Demand price increases. Two or three years of this shifted weather pattern could make the total amount of food produced be too little to feed everyone.

Climate change driven by a warmer atmosphere will do several things. Changes in crop yield is but one. Warmer oceans will cause algae blooms and smaller fish and crustaceans. Much of the world depends of protein from the sea. The third item is the snow fall in high elevations that remain through the Summer to feed the rivers in otherwise arid regions. When the water stops flowing, that region may be doomed.

The Mighty Mississippi River was humbled this year by the drought in the Midwest. If that persists, we could be in for some terrible times ahead. So chemtrails or not, our bigger concerns are just what nature has in store for us from our neglectful treatment in most everything we do.

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The End of an Era

The world is facing the end of the era of massive corporate production of goods and services. It is not really the fault of the corporations because they too are victims of the progress they made possible in the first place. There is a cyclic dependency of businesses needing to contain costs that feed into the reduction of the need for labor and therefore making it difficult for people to afford what the businesses provide. Unfortunately this reduction of the need for labor creates a cyclic dependency that results in much larger profits for the businesses. So while people are displaced from the means of personal wealth creation, the capital providers (Those Evil Capitalists) do better as the result.

There is a natural process of system aging that is referred to in environmental circles as eutrophication. While there is a precise chemical process associated with the aging process where excess nutrients are loaded into an aquatic environment causing algal blooms and degradation, there is an observational component too. A pond that starts out with clear clean water will ultimately fill in on its own with plant and animal detritus and slowly become a swamp or bog, then a meadow and finally a forest. Humans have accelerated the process in many places but it remains a natural system aging process.

Social, political and economic systems experience their own characteristic eutrophication process. Take for example the soft ice cream stand that was a ubiquitous part of the highway and byway landscape from the early days of inter-city automobile travel. Mr. Yost and his wife bought the manufacturing equipment, bought a cheap parcel of land out beyond the City Limits and built his little store. Motorists stopped by on hot summer afternoons with the kids fussing in the back seat. A cool cone and a hotdog settled them down. The Yosts made a good living off that place for 32 years. In that time he mostly only needed food supplies and electricity. The milk came from a local farmer and he could slice his own potato fries. His costs were low and all the profits were his annual income.

Then along came the Coca Cola regional sales representative. He convinced Mr. Yost to put in a red and white fountain and sell Cokes in cups with ice. He saw the benefits of this action posted on every billboard from City Limits to City Limits. He needed an ice machine now and some more space. All of these items were gladly provided by that Atlanta, Georgia corporation for a price. A bit of the Yost business revenue left the community. He took out a business loan from his local Savings and Loan, or Farmers and Mechanics Bank and expanded to include other menu items and accommodate the larger volume of weekend traffic that he came to rely upon. Business was good and he made more gross revenues even as the cost of doing business continued to rise and his net annual earnings remained flat.

Then along came the state highway department with a plan to build a town bypass to alleviate the traffic volumes in the town. The townies supported the plan but Mr. Yost was going to get bypassed too. With the inevitability of the construction, Yost used his savings to relocate out beyond the bypass. He now had to sell 60% more product at higher prices just to equal the money he used to make in his old location of 32 years. The land price was far higher than the first place along the old highway. The cost of construction was higher and there were new requirements for safe and hygienic operations. The now old Mr. Yost decided that he had had enough of the soft ice cream/burger and fries business. He put the business up for sale.

Mr. Yost needed to get enough money from the sale to retire on. After all he had sunk his saving into the relocation. The new buyer figured that he would buy the place, hire local kids to run it and have a pretty good investment on which to live. He borrowed the purchase capital from the Big Bank, NA and hired the kids. Now a huge interest principle was paid to a distant bank and that money left the community each month. The "kids" were from a town 20 miles away, because all the local kids were now too old to work for such low wages as this new Entrepreneur was willing to pay. All his supplies were shipped in from distant locations and that purchase money left the community.

Because everyone else was making their annual revenues off of Yost's Ice Cream Stand, the location had to sell 300% more product each year at higher prices than old Mr. Yost had to do in all his years of business. The new owner could not make a living on the location because all those other people and businesses were getting their share of the revenues. This business underwent the natural aging process that is akin to eutrophication.

Towns die when they age in this manner. The wealth creation that used to be present is removed to a distant place and the remaining people send all their income, pensions and savings to those places instead of keeping it local and sustaining their community. When the town was young, the corn came from a field the children walked past to get to school. Their peas and beans did not come in a can. The chicken parts did not arrive frozen from Alabama.

More people worked providing labor to produce things, and supportive occupations like accountant, lawyer, storekeeper, doctor, barber, service station attendant. Many of those people have aged and retired allowing someone else to take the reins. They did not go away. Mostly, they are still in the community collecting Social Security, pensions and annuities. Those funds increase the collective wealth of the community, but all their money leaves the community not to return.

The doctor is part of the health plan in an urban center, miles away, when he used to be the neighbor. Pharmaceuticals come from billion dollar multi-national corporations. Phone service is global with not one person employed to operate the system in any town. The money paid for telecom, internet and television content all leaves the community and ends up in the accounts of huge telecommunication corporations. Hint: TV used to be free.

While this aging process is a natural one, humans are accelerating it. Too many companies are depending on getting a percentage of every dollar of commerce, instead of their people doing something physical to increase the value of what they do. There are too few opportunities for an individual person to provide his labors for compensation that will allow him (her) and family to buy the necessary things of life that are priced by the companies who are getting their share of the dollar. Too much of business and commerce is funded with borrowed capital. This borrowing level makes everything more expensive. Mr. Yost originally could make a good living in half a year at his original location just outside the City Limits, doing much of the work himself. But when the investors and the banking system got involved the whole business when out of balance and ultimately failed. It's not really anyone fault, it's a natural aging process. The problem it we don't have a way to stop it or reverse it, yet.

The Undiscovered Lie (another one)

The Principle of Imminent Collapse includes the ramifications of the Undiscovered Lie when it is ultimately discovered. Great men and women have fallen from positions of power and influence because of the dishonesty of their actions. They may have righteously gained that position of power and influence only to lose it. Others would never have amounted to anything unless they employed the Lie in the first place. The men and women of this nation's police departments are no less likely to fall to their Undiscovered Lies.

Nazi Germany employed the Lie to dramatic and tragic affect by convincing the world, or at least enough of it, that they were being beneficial to the greater good by persecuting the Jewish population, Roma, Hungarians, persons with disabilities and all sorts of other classifications of people. They were mechanical and efficient in their exterminations of large numbers of people so much so that many people in the world could not grasp the reality of it. Even today there are those people who refuse to believe the magnitude of the killing.

The Catholic Church has been reeling from the Undiscovered Lie since the first revelations of child abuse, pedophilia, and homosexuality hit the headlines revealing the size and scope of the transgressions of present priests and the men who later became bishops and cardinals. The church hierarchy actively engaged to cover up and dismiss the allegations while transferring the offenders from one location to another in a pious shell game. Men who were looked up to with high admiration for their godliness and piety were exposed for the sins they committed with worldly impunity for decades.

If you look at the reports that police officers file relating to their shift work and the people they arrest, one would see that every beaten suspect was resisting a righteous arrest, every suspect who was gunned down by one or more officers were responding to "threatening gestures", the appearance that the person had a weapon, he lunged at the officer, the suspect actually did have a weapon that mysteriously disappeared or was produced even though the dead suspect had no previous history of crime, carrying a weapon, etc.

Every bruised or bashed face was the suspects' own doing to try to gain sympathy or cast the Police in a bad light. This is what the reports all say.

Witnesses who contradict the official version of events are suspected of siding with the suspect for racial reasons, or mere hatred of the police. Prosecutors and juries like to side with the police just to be sure that a violent criminal doesn't escape justice.

With the advent of the ubiquitous cell phone video cameras tangible evidence is surfacing that demonstrates what previously would have been an Undiscovered Lie. Police officers arrest people, take them in for processing and write an arrest report that fits all the facts that they need in order to justify the arrest. In the past there would not be any way to contest the veracity of the accuser. Now, however, after the report is filed and in the computerized system, it is less vulnerable to being adulterated. Then the video evidence shows up and proves the officer lied.

With the Lie now discovered, it becomes the officers' and co-conspirators task to spin a plausible timeline and story out of that is now presented before them. Each frame of the video is perused for any indications that the interpretation made by the accused is somehow wrong. The Police Department seeks to obfuscate on the basis that "we don't see what lead up to this altercation or what happens after the recording stops. A case in point is a recent arrest by two DC Transit officers who yank a black man out of his powered wheelchair and throw him on the sidewalk ventilation grating of one of the subway lines. They handcuff him and leave him laying on the pavement with profusely bleeding facial lacerations. All the while a bystander videos the events until he is forced to retreat. Amazingly a district judge refused to indict the officers for any sort of mistreatment of this man.

The #Occupy protests all over the nation and indeed the world has relied heavily on these video recordings to expose the Undiscovered Lies that police are using to justify their mistreatment of citizens. Video clips first show up on the Internet. After that they become of interest to prosecution and defense attorneys alike in the courtroom.

The actions of prosecutors and judges seem incongruous in light of the tangible persistent imagery that proved that a police officer lied. He may also have perjured himself if he spoke his lies in the court. The courts are not interested in maligning the "other good works" of officers who have gotten caught lying.

If a prosecutor pursues a case against officers, he will not be later able to rely on them or their fellow officers when they are needed. Just keep in mind that the job of a prosecutor is to convict the accused whether he is guilty or not. He or she only has the evidence provided by the police to go by. If officers fabricate a case, the prosecutor doesn't want to know about that.

The Undiscovered Lie has farther reaching ramifications too. If an officer lies to get a conviction in one case, he might have done it before. He might do it again. This is just the same as the justification of overturning a guilty verdict when there is a preponderance of evidence that the convicted party is innocent of the crimes convicted of. After all, he must have been guilty of "Something." Maintaining the conviction does two things. It keeps the allegedly guilty person out of circulation and it keeps the prosecutors from having to review every case than might be tainted by an Undiscovered Lie. Nonetheless, the police officers are liars and impugn the integrity of every man and woman who wears the badge. When officers act by and for the powerful elite, they lose their honor as protectors of the citizens they are sworn to Protect and Serve.

It is possible that they always only served the powerful elite and service to the people may always have been a myth. The discovery of the Undiscovered Lies will alter the perceptions of even the most skeptical people among us.

Standard And Poor

The outrage that has been expressed at the very idea that S&P lowered the financial rating of the United States down a notch to AA+ is completely understandable.  We have never been so insulted by a private business like that before.  And they did this dastardly deed to us at a time we were vulnerable.  S&P kicked us while we were down.

What were they trying to prove?  We didn't default on our debt.  We have the resources to pay all our investors.  No body who even bought a T-Bill lost even a cent by buying those bonds.  So how does S&P figure that the US of A should be downgraded and removed from the coveted AAA club of the world?  Look at what they did by doing it.  The DOW dropped over 630 points the next trading session.  The NASDAQ dropped 174 points and the S&P 500 by 79 points.  Stocks and mutual funds lost billions in value on the very word that the downgrade meant something.

Was this action one that caused the selloff in the markets or merely preceded it?  Did they make the conditions or just report them?  Were they accurate in the assessment or did they lie or just get it wrong?  The Principle of Imminent Collapse has a connection via the Undiscovered Lie wherein a seemingly upstanding person or company is suddenly shown to be a fraud or not the pillar of society that he, she or it was supposed to be.  Our politics are filled with men who were great men one day and lying cheating misogynists the next.  The history of the financial sector is filled with companies who were riding high and making wealth for its investors until the CEO and/or a cadre of managers were shown to have been cooking the books.  The one day difference is the discovery of the Undiscovered Lie.  Jim Bakker fell from grace, as did Jimmy Swaggart.  Enron died an early death and likes of Michael Milkin saw the world from the inside of a Federal prison cell.  John Kerry became a bum over night over marital infidelity.  Bernie Maddoff made off with billions of dollars in his fraud scheme.  He was a great fund manager one day and an arch criminal the next.  The only way for him to operate was because of the Undiscovered Lie.

A variation of the Undiscovered Lie is the intentional misrepresentation.  Some portion of the mortgage meltdown that destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth came from intentional misrepresentations.  Real estate appraisers reverse engineered house appraised values by starting with the loan amount and backing into saying the value was high enough to cover the loan.  Mortgage loan agents started with what the old mortgage was and added all the cash out and fees to arrive at the new loan figure.  Everybody was making money with mortgages at inflated balances.  S&P rated the USA as AAA rating and left it there without much re-evaluation for decades.  Nobody wanted it to be anything else.  Nobody was arguing about massive budget cuts, no revenue increases, debt ceilings of any of the deadlocked issues now plaguing the American political scene.

Either S&P is now misrepresenting the health of US finances or it was misrepresenting it before.  The rating of AA+ as opposed to AAA is more a indicator of our financial health from this day forward not this day backward.  The rating we have is an indicator of our ability to manage the debt we have, the revenue streams and the expenses of our company.  Any company with a CEO who is being defied openly by the Board of Directors would not have a AAA rating.  Any company with a Board of Directors who is ideologically divided as is the US Congress would not get a AAA rating.  Any company that is failing to manufacture goods and provide services to generate wealth and value would not have a S&P AAA rating.  The United States of American cannot claim to be on the good side of any of those rating factors.  I am surprised that S&P still rates us AA+ and not far lower.

Loose Lips and The Principle of Imminent Collapse

Nature doesn't support the conditions that result in a domino effect because individual events over a long period of time serve to eliminate the interior dominoes that propagate the big collapse. 

Man creates domino sets and waits for one to be knocked over then proclaims surprise and outrage when they fall. He may also deny that he ever knew that the dominoes were all setup to fall and that his words or actions were complicit in initiating the collapse.

When there is a multitude of people making statements against a subject, it is very difficult to isolate which one or ones were instrumental in initiating actions against that subject.  Now if the subject is an idea or a law, it is appropriate to speak enthusiastically for and against the inanimate entity. But when the subject is the people who support and defend the law or idea, or those people who resist it, care must be taken to not incite action against the persons.  Indeed, it may only be the combination of causation that leads to the emergence of negative outcomes.

When a person has the ear of millions of people, that person has the responsibility to be judicious in their use of words.  The speaker of antagonistic and resentful rhetoric may not be able to be held responsible (in a legal sense) for the actions of their listeners, they are nonetheless responsible.

One can claim that it was not the intent to incite murder with such rhetoric as "reload" and "take aim" at the opposition, but those words were explicitly aimed at human beings who were running for public office.  They were not aimed at legislation that was being proposed for passage or repeal.  The national map that was published with reticules (gun sight symbols) pointed to the legislative districts where opposition candidates were running for office.  One can similarly deny that calling for the removal of opposition legislators and pointing them out on a map leads an unstable person to murder 6 people at a public legislative meeting.  The idea that a political candidate would invite constituents to come and shoot an M16 assault weapon as part of a highly contentious campaign, is appalling. However, the perpetrator of such virulent motivations cannot deny that she/he knows that somewhere out there in this nation of 307 million people that there is a significant number of loose cannons who will act upon that accumulation of rhetoric and commit violence as the result.

People who originate and propagate such language may not be convict-able of inciting murder, but they are nonetheless culpable in part for creating the conditions under which the murders were committed.  Very specific persons words are picked up and carelessly spread across the nation's airwaves.  Other less literate bloggers pick up on the words and construct a landscape of distrust, resentment and anger against individuals, some of whom now lay murdered or critically wounded.  U.S. District Judge John Roll is dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is critically wounded by the man who put his and her thoughts into action.

Prominent people have acted to incite actions by members of the American public.  Whether or not one can draw a direct line between them and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, but as nothing happens in isolation, the seeds they have sown grew out into the mayhem at that Arizona Safeway market.