Paul Haeder, Author

so-so rotting the entire system that face plants 80 percent of us when we get laid off, fired, face medical crises, get T-boned in traffic , and age out of life.

“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.” – Anonymous

We will not get saved by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Harris or Biden or Trump. This is a wrecking crew project on many levels. All those lies of the Minyan of Wailing Wall White House. FCC, SEC, CDC, DOD, stocks and bonds, mergers, lay offs, robotics, AI-VR-AI-MR. These people, these millions of Eichmann’s, these bullshit politicians, they are led by the nose by YOU KNOW WHO!

Endless predation, stripping of assets, swap schemes, insider trading, fake figures on inflation, the non-genuine progress index, disaster capitalism on steroidsthe lies about poverty, poverty rates, the powerlessness of citizens — we beautiful 80 Percenters — to buy basics, get basic dental care, all of it, lies lies lies. Public transportation? Public ownership of the resources? Never.

But we have to see all those fucking High Tech Motherfuckers, hear about all those fucking rich celebrities, see all those soulless economists and traders and hedge funders and those black hearts of the mortgage and investment variety sucking the blood out of our towns, cities, communities, even just our neighborhoods. Buying up all the housing stock, those investment organizations, AKA Cartels.

Every person I run into lately, they are sucking wind, gaping chest wounds from this fucked up war economy, this fucked up casino capitalism. So many lies lies of the rich, and no oversight or people’s court for these feces producers.

Boeing 737 Max falling from the sky. Fetuses born with diabetes. 130 jabs for baby Jesus by the time that sacrificed fucker reaches 21. Imagine, boy and teen Jesus getting that HPV vax starting at age 12. God’s chosen people. God’s chosen demons.

This fucking piece of shit? “Sanders says US must not be complicit in Gaza, fails to call genocide.”

What would Dickens’ write? Nuke Iran. What a fucking Jon Leibowitz Joke?

Jews? Times of Fucking Dirty Israel: Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, Jewish cryptocurrency CEO, brings echoes of Bernie Madoff — After becoming a billionaire before age 30, the FTX head suffers a reversal of fortune so massive it’s setting records, decimating investors’ savings, and drawing legal questions

Social Fucking Security? Listen to the fascists in the Republican Party circles, and the fuckers in the Demon-Cratic Party circles. Poverty? Ten percent aged 65 are in poverty? Nah, these are all lies. Double or triple those fucking numbers. Again, fail, big fail. Sanders, live in the fucking real world.

And, as Sanders’ report said, about 10% of older Americans live in poverty, an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found. Without Social Security income, about 38% of Americans 65 and older would be living below the poverty line. Even so, America’s Social Security benefits lag programs of many other wealthy (sic) countries; benefits amount to, on average, 51.8% of workers’ earnings across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries. In the US, they fall under 40%.

Yes, the other world, the Third World, the Global South, they are all poor mother fuckers. Really poor. But us all areunder the thumb of these fucking criminals.

Monsters.

Michael Parenti:

The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.

How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.

“The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. So poverty is spreading even as wealth accumulates. It is not enough to bemoan this enormous inequality, we must also explain why it is happening.”

Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes–and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans–are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.

Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops.

The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.

Regarding the poorest portion of the world population–whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”–what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.–can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities, especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc? We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.

Millions of children who number in the lower 50 percent never see the inside of a school. Instead they labor in mills, mines and on farms, under conditions of peonage. Nearly a billion people are unable to read or write. The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. So poverty is spreading even as wealth accumulates. It is not enough to bemoan this enormous inequality, we must also explain why it is happening.

But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs–even taken as a totality–have next to nothing.

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• A new report from Sen. Bernie Sanders signals a looming retirement crisis for Americans.
• Many older folks are financially vulnerable, with over half living on incomes of $30,000 or less a year.
• Solutions might include enhancing Social Security checks and setting up automatic retirement accounts.

Americans’ struggle to comfortably retire could prove costly and devastating for retirees who may find themselves cash-strapped and unable to afford healthcare or housing in their later years. A 2023 Pew Charitable Trusts study suggests that as more households with older Americans become financially vulnerable from 2021 to 2040, state governments will take a $1.3 trillion hit.

And for some, the retirement crisis is already here. Just over half of Americans older than 65 are living on incomes of $30,000 or less a year, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The largest share — just under 23% — has incomes between $10,000 and $19,999.

References:

Chen, Anqi, Wenliang Hou, and Alicia H. Munnell. 2020. “Why Do Late Boomers Have So Little Retirement Wealth?” Issue in Brief 20-4. Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Munnell, Alicia H., Anthony Webb, and Luke Delorme. 2006. “Retirements at Risk: A New National Retirement Risk Index.” Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Munnell, Alicia H., Anqi Chen, and Robert L. Siliciano. 2021. “The National Retirement Risk Index: An Update from the 2019 SCF.” Issue in Brief 21-2. Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Munnell, Alicia H., Wenliang Hou, and Geoffrey T Sanzenbacher. 2018. “National Retirement Risk Index Shows Modest Improvement in 2016.” Issue in Brief 18-1. Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

U.S. Bank of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983-2019. Washington, DC.

Dickens versus Sanders.

Dirty Sanders wants more weapons for UkroNaziLandia. It’s a Jewish thing. Watch those corporations taking too much for their bombs because it costs us so much not much is left for UKRAINE!

The six progressive senators contend major defense contractors, namely Lockheed Martin and RTX Corporation, overcharged the government and used the cash influx to reward shareholders. The senators want Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to revive the Truman Committee as the U.S. hands out military contracts to support the war in Ukraine.

“There’s a name for all this: war profiteering. These companies’ greed is not just fleecing the American taxpayer; it’s killing Ukrainians. A contractor padding its profit margins means that, for the same amount of federal spending, fewer weapons reach Ukrainians on the front lines,” wrote Sanders alongside Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

The goal, they continued, would be “to provide dedicated resources and staff to investigate war profiteering, the effects of consolidation in the defense industry, the lack of sufficient oversight over U.S. military spending, and options for further use of the Defense Production Act or other federal authorities to provide for the national defense in a more cost-effective and transparent manner.”

Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, a panel led during World War II by then-Sen. Harry Truman (D-Mo.). The panel, known as the “Truman Committee,” looked into the defense industry’s profits to ensure they weren’t ripping off the government during an era-defining fight.

This fucker wants price caps on murder weapons, not caps on the weapons’ sales to begin with, or ending this fucking AmeriKKKan proxy perversion.

RTX Corporation—formerly Raytheon—has increased the price of its Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles by 600% to $400,000 since the early 1990s ($25,000 in 1991).

The senator continued:

It’s not just RTX. The stocks of American arms manufacturers have surged: Northrop Grumman’s share price increased 40% by the end of 2022, and Lockheed Martin’s by 37%. In 2022, the federal government awarded Lockheed Martin more than $45 billion in unclassified contracts. The company returned about one-quarter of that amount to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, and paid its CEO $25 million.

Here’s a piece by Dickens written for the weekly journal Household Words that he edited from 1850 to 1859. It’s from the issue of January 26, 1856, with his first-person reporting on “A Nightly Scene in London.” 

Dickens writes: “I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity …” 

A NIGHTLY SCENE IN LONDON

On the fifth of last November, I, the Conductor of this journal, accompanied by a friend well-known to the public, accidentally strayed into Whitechapel. It was a miserable evening; very dark, very muddy, and raining hard.

There are many woful sights in that part of London, and it has been well-known to me in most of its aspects for many years. We had forgotten the mud and rain in slowly walking along and looking about us, when we found ourselves, at eight o’clock, before the Workhouse.

Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rags. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great beehives, covered with rags— five dead bodies taken out of graves, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags— would have looked like those five bundles upon which the rain rained down in the public street.

“What is this! ” said my companion. “What is this!”

“Some miserable people shut out of the Casual Ward, I think,” said I.

We had stopped before the five ragged mounds, and were quite rooted to the spot by their horrible appearance. Five awful Sphinxes by the wayside, crying to every passer-by, ” Stop and guess! What is to be the end of a state of society that leaves us here!”

As we stood looking at them, a decent working-man, having the appearance of a stone-mason, touched me on the shoulder.

“This is an awful sight, sir,” said he, “in a Christian country!”

“GOD knows it is, my friend,” said I.

“I have often seen it much worse than this, as I have been going home from my work. I have counted fifteen, twenty, five-and-twenty, many a time. It’s a shocking thing to see.”

“A shocking thing, indeed,” said I and my companion together. The man lingered near
us a little while, wished us good-night, and went on.

We should have felt it brutal in us who had a better chance of being heard than the working-man, to leave the thing as it was, so we knocked at the Workhouse Gate. I undertook to be spokesman. The moment the gate was opened by an old pauper, I went in, followed close by my companion. I lost no
time in passing the old porter, for I saw in his watery eye a disposition to shut us out.

“Be so good as to give that card to the master of the Workhouse, and say I shall be glad to speak to him for a moment.”

We were in a kind of covered gateway, and the old porter went across it with the card. Before he had got to a door on our left, a man in a cloak and hat bounced out of it very sharply, as if he were in the nightly habit of being bullied and of returning the compliment.

“Now, gentlemen,” said he in a loud voice, “what do you want here?”

“First,” said I, ” will you do me the favor to look at that card in your hand. Perhaps you may know my name.”

“Yes,” says he, looking at it. ” I know this name.”

“Good. I only want to ask you a plain question in a civil manner, and there is not the least occasion for either of us to be angry. It would be very foolish in me to blame you, and I don’t blame you. I may
find fault with the system you administer, but pray understand that I know you are here to do a duty pointed out to you, and that I have no doubt you do it. Now, I hope you won’t object to tell me what I want to know.”

“No,” said he, quite mollified, and very reasonable, ” not at all. What is it?”

“Do you know that there are five wretched creatures outside?”

“I haven’t seen them, but I dare say there are.”

“Do you doubt that there are?”

“No, not at all. There might be many more.”

”Are they men? Or women?”

“Women, I suppose. Very likely one or two of them were there last night, and the night before last.”

“There all night, do you mean?”

“Very likely.”

My companion and I looked at one another, and the master of the Workhouse added quickly, “Why, Lord bless my soul, what am I to do? What can I do ? The place is full. The place is always full—every night. I must give the preference to women with children, mustn’t I? You wouldn’t have me not do that?”

“Surely not,” said I. “It is a very humane principle, and quite right; and I am glad to hear of it. Don’t forget that I don’t blame you.”

“Well!” said he. And subdued himself again. …

“Just so. I wanted to know no more. You have answered my question civilly and readily, and I am much obliged to you. I have nothing to say against you, but quite the contrary. Good night!”

“Good night, gentlemen!” And out we came again.

We went to the ragged bundle nearest to the Workhouse-door, and I touched it. No movement replying, I gently shook it. The rags began to be slowly stirred within, and by little and little a head was unshrouded. The head of a young woman of three or four and twenty, as I should judge; gaunt with want, and foul with dirt; but not naturally ugly.

“Tell us,” said I, stooping down. “Why are you lying here?”

“Because I can’t get into the Workhouse.”

She spoke in a faint dull way, and had no curiosity or interest left. She looked dreamily at the black sky and the falling rain, but never looked at me or my companion.

“Were you here last night?”

“Yes, All last night. And the night afore too.”

“Do you know any of these others?”

“I know her next but one. She was here last night, and she told me she come out of Essex. I don’t know no more of her.”

“You were here all last night, but you have not been here all day?”

“No. Not all day.”

“Where have you been all day?”

“About the streets.”

”What have you had to eat?”

“Nothing.”

“Come!” said I. “Think a little. You are tired and have been asleep, and don’t quite consider what you are saying to us. You have had something to eat to-day. Come! Think of it!”

“No I haven’t. Nothing but such bits as I could pick up about the market. Why, look at me!”

She bared her neck, and I covered it up again.

“If you had a shilling to get some supper and a lodging, should you know where to get it?”

“Yes. I could do that.”

“For GOD’S sake get it then!”

I put the money into her hand, and she feebly rose up and went away. She never thanked me, never looked at me— melted away into the miserable night, in the strangest manner I ever saw. I have seen many strange things, but not one that has left a deeper impression on my memory than the dull impassive way in which that worn-out heap of misery took that piece of money, and was lost.

One by one I spoke to all the five. In every one, interest and curiosity were as extinct as in the first. They were all dull and languid. No one made any sort of profession or complaint; no one cared to look at me; no one thanked me. When I came to the third, I suppose she saw that my companion
and I glanced, with a new horror upon us, at the two last, who had dropped against each other in their sleep, and were lying like broken images. She said, she believed they were young sisters. These were the only words that were originated among the five.

And now let me close this terrible account with a redeeming and beautiful trait of the poorest of the poor. When we came out of the Workhouse, we had gone across the road to a public house, finding ourselves without silver, to get change for a sovereign. I held the money in my hand while I was speaking to the five apparitions. Our being so engaged, attracted the attention of many people of the very poor sort usual to that place; as we leaned over the mounds of rags, they eagerly leaned over us to see and hear; what I had in my hand, and what I said, and what I did, must have been plain to nearly all the concourse. When the last of the five had got up and faded away, the spectators opened to let us pass; and not one of them, by word, or look, or gesture, begged of us.

Many of the observant faces were quick enough to know that it would have been a relief to us to have got rid of the rest of the money with any hope of doing good with it. But, there was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not to be placed by the side of such a spectacle; and they opened a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.

My companion wrote to me, next day, that the five ragged bundles had been upon his bed all night. I debated how to add our testimony to that of many other persons who from time to time are impelled to write to the newspapers, by having come upon some shameful and shocking sight of this description. I resolved to write in these pages an exact account of what we had seen, but to wait until after Christmas, in order that there might be no heat or haste. I know that the unreasonable disciples of a reasonable school, demented disciples who push arithmetic and political economy beyond all bounds of sense (not to speak of such a weakness as humanity), and hold them to be all-sufficient for every case, can easily prove that such things ought to be, and that no man has any business to mind them. Without disparaging those indispensable sciences in their sanity, I utterly renounce and abominate them in their insanity; and I address people with a respect for the spirit of the New Testament, who do mind such things, and who think them infamous in our streets.