The banker bailouts of the 2008/09 period changed my life forever. I was working on Wall Street at the time, and the way in which the government rallied around the financial institutions that torched the world and left its victims in the dust threw my entire delusional worldview into disarray. Prior to that, I had bought into the absurd assumption that I was financially successful at a young age primarily because I was hard-working and talented. The ensuing bailouts and the government’s emphasis on obsessively rescuing some of the most degenerate people in our society made me realize once and for all how completely rigged and sleazy the U.S. economy really is. As you might expect, it only got worse under Obama’s oligarch-coddling policies and will surely continue to deteriorate under Trump (Goldman Sachs is not your friend).
Ever since I left my cushy financial services job to do the challenging and often draining work of chronicling our ongoing crime scene, I’ve spent the vast majority of my free time trying to further educate myself on exactly how this system works. What I’ve discovered over and over again is that it is far more abusive than even I imagined.
Today’s post highlights two important articles that came to my attention over the past couple of days. Both are extremely disturbing, and both should be seen as completely unacceptable in a remotely ethical civilization (which we are not).
First, here’s a short excerpt from a recent Bloomberg article highlighting GE’s pension shortfall, and how it’s gotten worse as executives focused on share-buybacks as opposed to funding the pension.
It’s a problem that Jeffrey Immelt largely ignored as he tried to appease General Electric Co.’s most vocal shareholders.
But it might end up being one of the costliest for John Flannery, GE’s newly anointed CEO, to fix.
At $31 billion, GE’s pension shortfall is the biggest among S&P 500 companies and 50 percent greater than any other corporation in the U.S. It’s a deficit that has swelled in recent years as Immelt spent more than $45 billion on share buybacks to win over Wall Street and pacify activists like Nelson Peltz.
Part of it has to do with the paltry returns that have plagued pensions across corporate America as ultralow interest rates prevailed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But perhaps more importantly, GE’s dilemma underscores deeper concerns about modern capitalism’s all-consuming focus on immediate results, which some suggest is short-sighted and could ultimately leave everyone — including shareholders themselves — worse off.
Before you think GE is about to reverse course, take a look at the following depraved quote from the new CEO.
During a conference call to discuss the CEO transition and his priorities, Flannery said that “it is important that we’re always mindful of the impact on all of our stakeholders.”
“So, obviously, our customers, our employees,” he explained before adding, “but I’d say, especially our shareholders.”
This is precisely how most corporate executives see their employees. They’re basically an afterthought — and these are the lucky ones who have a job at a major company like GE. Poor workers are even worse off, and in some cases have simply become indentured servants.
What am I talking about you ask? I’m referring to the highly disturbing, yet extremely powerful article published by USA Today describing the Southern California port trucking industry titled, RIGGED: Forced Into Debt. Worked Past Exhaustion. Left with Nothing.
Below are some key excerpts, but you should really read the entire piece and share it.
A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.
If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.
If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.
Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers – essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.
The USA TODAY Network pieced together accounts from more than 300 drivers, listened to hundreds of hours of sworn labor dispute testimony and reviewed contracts that have never been seen by the public.
Using the contracts, submitted as evidence in labor complaints, and shipping manifests, reporters matched the trucking companies with the most labor violations to dozens of retail brands, including Target, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Hasbro, J.Crew, UPS, Goodyear, Costco, Ralph Lauren and more.
Among the findings:
- Trucking companies force drivers to work against their will – up to 20 hours a day – by threatening to take their trucks and keep the money they paid toward buying them. Bosses create a culture of fear by firing drivers, suspending them without pay or reassigning them the lowest-paying routes.
- To keep drivers working, managers at a few companies have physically barred them from going home. More than once, Marvin Figueroa returned from a full day’s work to find the gate to the parking lot locked and a manager ordering drivers back to work. “That was how they forced me to continue working,” he testified in a 2015 labor case. Truckers at two other companies have made similar claims.
- Employers charge not just for truck leases but for a host of other expenses, including hundreds of dollars a month for insurance and diesel fuel. Some charge truckers a parking fee to use the company lot. One company, Fargo Trucking, charged $2 per week for the office toilet paper and other supplies.
- Drivers at many companies say they had no choice but to break federal safety laws that limit truckers to 11 hours on the road each day. Drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation testified that their managers dispatched truckers up to 20 hours a day, then wouldn’t pay them until drivers falsified inspection reports that track hours. Hundreds of California port truckers have gotten into accidents, leading to more than 20 fatalities from 2013 to 2015, according to the USA TODAY Network’s analysis of federal crash and port trade data.
- Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it. Eddy Gonzalez took seven days off to care for his dying mother and then bury her. When he came back, his company fired him and kept the truck. For two years, Ho Lee was charged more than $1,600 a month for a truck lease. When he got ill and missed a week of work, he lost the truck and everything he’d paid.
- Retailers could refuse to allow companies with labor violations to truck their goods. Instead they’ve let shipping and logistics contractors hire the lowest bidder, while lobbying on behalf of trucking companies in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Walmart, Target and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies have paid lobbyists up to $12.6 million to fight bills that would have held companies liable or given drivers a minimum wage and other protections that most U.S. workers already enjoy.
But allegations like those have been made in sworn testimony in hundreds of the cases, virtually all of which ended with trucking companies ordered to repay drivers for truck expenses and lost wages. The USA TODAY Network found that at least 140 trucking companies have been accused by at least one driver of shorting them of fair pay or using threats to squeeze them to work longer hours.
Prominent civil rights leader Julian Bond once called California port truckers the new black tenant farmers of the post-Civil War South. Sharecroppers from that era rented farmland to make their living and regularly fell into debt to their landlords. Widespread predatory practices made it nearly impossible for the farmers to climb out.
Through lease contracts, California’s port truckers face the same kinds of challenges in ways that experts say rarely happen in the U.S. today.
“I don’t know of anything even remotely like this,” said Stanford Law School Professor William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and one of the nation’s top labor experts.
“You’re working to get yourself out of the debt. You just don’t see anything like that.”
Apparently you do.
California’s port truckers make it possible for the Walmarts and Amazons of the world to function. Even so, most of the two dozen retail companies contacted by the USA TODAY Network declined to comment, some saying they had never heard of the rash of labor violations at their primary ports of entry.
Only Goodyear said it took immediate action. Spokesperson Keith Price said in a statement that the tire giant dropped Pacific 9 in 2015, “within two weeks” of California labor commission decisions in favor of dozens of drivers.
The few others that issued statements said it was not their responsibility to police the shipping industry. Retailers don’t directly hire the truckers who move their goods at the pier. They generally hire large shipping or logistics firms that line up trucking companies through a maze of subcontractors.
“We’re not trying to wash our hands of this issue,” said John Taylor, a spokesman for LG Electronics, “but it’s frankly far afield” and “really very disconnected from LG Electronics.”
When asked about labor violations by trucking companies in Target’s supply chain, spokeswoman Erika Winkels wrote: “Target doesn’t have anything to share here.”
Ok then.
The contracts work like sub-leases. Knowing drivers could not qualify for their own loans or leases, trucking companies arranged to finance their fleets. Then they had drivers sign up for individual trucks.
Drivers gave their old trucks – many of which they owned outright – to their company as a down payment. And just like that they were up to $100,000 in debt to their own employer. The same guys would have had a tough time qualifying for a Hyundai days earlier.
As far back as August 2008, a trucking finance firm warned Port of Long Beach board members that 40% of drivers were likely to default on truck leases. But no one stopped the deals, which place almost all of the financial risk onto the workers.
Drivers’ names were not on the truck titles. And many contracts effectively barred drivers from using their truck to work for other companies.
The companies also retained the power to decide how much work to give their drivers. They decide who gets the easiest and most lucrative routes — and who gets to work at all.
That leaves drivers in constant fear of upsetting managers, who can fire them for any reason, or simply stop sending them business, a process some call “starving” them out of the truck.
On a five-year lease, drivers could pay in for four years and 11 months. If they got sick, fell behind on the lease or were fired in the last month, they could lose everything – as if they had never paid a dime.
“There are no rules,” one driver recalled La Rosa saying when he took the trucks. “No law or politicians will help you.”
Understandable, after all, inventing new Russia conspiracy theories every day is a real time suck.
After emigrating from Nicaragua in 1992, Samuel Talavera Jr. drove a truck at the Los Angeles harbor and made an honest living. Since 9/11, all truckers working at ports of entry must be legal residents.
Talavera bought his wife, Reyna, a house and took his daughters to Disneyland.
But everything changed in late 2010, when he went into the QTS warehouse and his boss told him he needed to trade in his truck and sign a lease-purchase contract.
For the next four years, he worked mind-numbing hours to pay the bills.
To save commuting time, he slept in his truck at work. To avoid bathroom breaks, he kept an empty two-liter bottle by his side. He became a ghost to his family.
Still, he had to drain his savings to survive.
A stack of weekly paychecks he keeps in a drawer at home shows his worst weeks. He grossed $1,970 on June 3, 2011, but it all went back to QTS. After the lease and other truck expenses, he took home $33.
On February 10, 2012, he took home $112 after expenses.
The next week, he made 67 cents.
Here’s what that looks like:
Drivers could quit and find new work. But many, like Flores, say they’ve stayed on hoping things would improve. Then they realized if they quit, they would lose thousands paid toward their truck. “They’re captive,” Teamsters’ international vice president Fred Potter said.
James Kang, former president of the now-defunct QTS, declined to comment and then hung up on a reporter…
Arcadio Amaya said he refused to work 15 hours straight one night at Pacgran Inc. and was fired the next day. He lost $26,400 he had paid toward a truck.
Armando Logamo, a former driver at RPM Harbor Services, said he saw other drivers bribing dispatchers for better-paying assignments, so he told his supervisor. The next week, Logamo was fired. He lost the truck, along with all the payments he had put into it.
“They fired me because I was one of the ones that was speaking up,” he said. “It was pretty devastating because I was with them for two plus years.”
Eddy Gonzalez once missed a day when he was called to court to testify as a witness. As punishment, he said his boss at Seacon Logix didn’t let him work the next day.
Then, a few months later, he missed a week to bury his dead mother. When Gonzalez came back, he said, his boss cleaned out his truck and fired him on the spot while he pleaded to keep his job.
“He just took the keys and left,” Gonzalez testified in court.
From 2013 through 2016, trucks passed through the gates 23 million times, leaving a trail of which truck was on the road, when and where. The USA TODAY Network identified hundreds of thousands of instances where a truck was in operation for at least 14 hours without the required 10-hour break.
Not all of these instances are violations because two drivers might divide time behind the wheel of a single truck. But many companies ban that practice.
Pacific 9 is one of them. At least 7,500 times over three years, Pacific 9 trucks were on the clock for more than the 14 hour maximum, the port data shows. Almost all of the company’s 160 trucks exceeded the time limit at least once.
One Pacific 9 truck regularly operated through the night, more than 100 hours a week. Another went 35 hours without the proper break almost once a week for three years, according to the data.
When reporters shared the data with Ta, the executive said he couldn’t explain those circumstances and stopped responding to interview requests.
Using records from court hearings and labor cases and shipping log data provided by the trade research firm Panjiva, the USA TODAY Network identified the brands whose goods were moved by trucking companies with multiple violations. It’s not clear if the companies hired them directly. But retailers often don’t, relying instead on shipping and logistics companies to arrange trucking services from U.S. ports.
Hewlett-Packard, Costco and Hasbro have moved containers through Pacific 9. Fargo Trucking, with 45 violations, has moved Bissell vacuum cleaners, UPS packages and Nautica apparel.
Steve Madden shoes and Neiman Marcus have used Imperial CFS, which has lost seven labor cases to date.
None of those retailers would comment for this story.
JCPenney spokesperson Daphne Avila said in an email that the company “relies on its third-party transportation vendors to comply with all applicable laws and regulations.”
JCPenney, which once hailed the lease purchase program as “innovative and cost-effective” in a press release, has moved shipments through Pacer Cartage, part of a family of XPO Logistics companies accused by at least 140 drivers of labor violations in both civil court and the California labor commission.
John Taylor, a spokesman for LG Electronics, said the company hires steamship lines that provide “door-to-door” shipping services, so it is not involved in hiring or managing trucking companies. LG believes “our responsibility starts when the goods arrive in our own warehouses,” Taylor said in an email.
Driver contracts and shipping records show that Total Transportation Services and QTS, two of the most heavily cited companies in the harbor, have moved containers with LG goods.
Public pressure and new laws in recent years have forced retailers to monitor their international supply chains.
Target, for instance, takes a strong stance against forced labor in the cotton factories of Uzbekistan. It says it sends auditors to screen the companies that turn cotton into t-shirts sold in its stores.
The retailer promises to drop any vendor found exploiting workers with debt, according to its corporate responsibility policy. It won’t use companies that punish workers “physically or mentally.” It orders a 60-hour maximum on work weeks, with fair wages and benefits.
But Target has ignored the labor commission rulings in California and continued to allow companies found to have violated workers’ rights to move its goods. Company spokesperson Erika Winkles declined to comment.
Put another way: “Nobody cares about us,” said trucker Gustavo Villa, “because we are living in the dark.”
The story above is gut-wrenching and can lead to even the most optimistic amongst us to lose faith in our fellow human beings. It is at times like these that it’s important for those of us who are relatively privileged to look inward and think about the much bigger picture.
I’ve spent years thinking about the decrepit state of our union, and the only thing I can think of that can possibly move us forward on a sustainable long-term basis is a widespread expansion of consciousness. Higher states of consciousness will result in deeper overall understanding, a greater feeling of connectedness with our fellow living creatures and better conduct throughout society at large. Ethics, something sorely lacking in society today, will improve as overall consciousness expands.
As I mentioned on Twitter earlier today.
The real revolution we need in America is a revolution of ethics.
It’s the only one that can succeed and make things better.— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 21, 2017
We have no ethical framework in this country at all. The dominant zeitgeist is grab whatever you can. The results are all around you.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 21, 2017
Imagine how the world would change if everyone acted just a little bit better.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 21, 2017
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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Michael, you are hitting directly at the heart of the issue… It’s every man for himself (dog eat dog) I tweeted the following today:
“Selfie Statism” is the new narrative in american and is defined as: grab what you can even if you need to run over others…
@braincramps
Keep up the great work
The framework of the problem is about
Patricians vs. plebeians
Principal agent problem …
Selective moral blidness by need or greed
asymmetry of gains & responsibilies ….
putting all of the debt on others and taking just the gain …
and the institutionalization of the game cycle by creating ONLY CERTAIN assymetrical outcomes …
works seemlessly in a bureaucratic system with diluted responsibilies and condensed gains for the game scheme inventors
1.small slips in ethics and moral for the paycheck’s sake
of the individual player ( selective moral blidness when you need to provide for yourself and the family)
2. though enormous gains for the inventors of the scheme ( harvested at many steps of the procces )
3. dynamics are done by
the middlemen
for the sake of the end clients ( big stores,etc)
being manipulated by greed or need
+ small slips in ethics and moral for the paycheck’s sake
+ patrician legalese loopholes are different from plebean strict law legalese by access, favours, bribes etc to the ‘law’ system
Scheme inventors are guranteed better future gains, as the scheme is asymmetrical and would impoverish much more people ( geometrical increase) with bigger loses with the gain going to a few with huge gains( geometrical increase), the middleman being taken care for by the paycheck ( fixed gain/cost) or errors of ommission with gained commission crumbs ( variable gain/cost)
If you ask a hungry man what to choose – bread or moral – he would choose bread; he is ruled by his need
if you ask a greedy man – what to choose money or more money or moral, he would choose more money because of his greed
poor people steal to eat, rich people steal because they can do it
when feeling sad because of the lows the humans could go to, I watch Charlie Chaplin Modern Times and enjoy his Titina song
Fantastic article, Michael. This one is a saver. I appreciate the effort you put into researching this stuff for us.
I know finding out about these things really appalls and astonishes you. “…[it] can lead even the most optimistic amongst us to lose faith in our fellow human beings.”
But it doesn’t surprise me at all. This is what people are like. Now, I’m not a misanthrope or anything. I enjoy other people as much as anyone (I think!:-)). But having been around the world and seen what goes on, and having looked into my own heart, I realize that we humans are capable of just about anything.
The Bible describes the human heart very succinctly and without an ounce of optimism: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”…”Now the works of the flesh [people in their natural state] are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery [related to the word for drugs], enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, murder, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.”
This is a very old book, but it has human nature nailed, don’t you think? When I look inside with honesty, I see all these things in myself as well. You’re right, the world would be a very different place if people acted a little better. But the question is, how to achieve this?
Keep up the good work, and keep searching.
This is a normal thing in the trucking industry, drivers = Shit. Stock up, prepare, tune in, turn on, and drop out (without the LSD). Break the machine through non-participation. Doing the best I can to get there, I wish you all luck. Let Washington D.C. & Wall Street burn!
It’s global….21 June 2017
Confronting the Unspeakable
They house people in deathtraps. They poison the drinking water. They financialize and corrupt almost every otherwise beneficial social institution from public education to healthcare. They foment endless wars for the pursuit of their own power and profits.
They have the courts pronounce their soulless piles of money, the corporations, as ‘people,’ while people themselves are judged to be of little consequence, to be thrown aside as if they were trash.
They catch the unsuspecting within the jaws of stagnant wages and corporate monopolies, and squeeze until there is nothing left.
This is the return of the anti-human madness. This is the Unspeakable.
Government ministers ‘congratulated themselves’ for cutting fire regulations
Charles White for Metro.co.uk
Friday 16 Jun 2017
“Conservative ministers were proud of slashing fire regulations, just months ahead of the Grenfell Tower block blaze.
In February this year, ministers posted on a government website details of their ‘anti-red tape’ agenda on new-build properties.
In a separate report fire safety inspections, the Conservatives said, had been reduced for some companies from six hours to just 45 minutes.
The move, titled Cutting Red Tape, was part of the Tory plans to abolish a ‘health and safety’ culture that they claimed was hurting money-making businesses.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2017/06/confronting-unspeakable.html
“Conservative ministers were proud of slashing fire regulations, just months ahead of the Grenfell Tower block blaze.”
And so they should be given that none of those regulations would have saved a single life in Grenfell and all of them cost money better spent on ACTUAL safety. If you want people do be safe (and being a socialist it’s pretty clear you don’t) then why have people spend 6 hours confirming that their business is safe, just like it was last time and the dozen times before that?
Look either there never was a regulation saying that tower blocks should have sprinklers, there was and it was scrapped by the Tories but you never mentioned it, or there was and it didn’t make a difference because government didn’t enforce it on government. So either a) Labor and the “socialists” are just as guilty as the Tories, b) you’re truly horrible at making a case and so is the entire mainstream media or c) this has nothing to do with deregulation and everything to do with government.
This sounds much like labor conditions in the robber baron days or the stories related to me by my grandparents and parents of the Great Depression of how workers were treated by the ‘bosses’. If these workers won’t unite and stick together they will continue to be at the mercy of these cold blooded invertebrates for as long as they as they work there or wish to put up with being treated this way. I’m surprised the workers imaginations haven’t figured a way to begin to remediate the situation. In warfare like this all is fair play or else they’ll never get the ‘man’ off their backs.
Great work, keep it up- especially like Michael’s own autobiographical stuff!
This is one of the big reason my business failed. I had a custom design build radiant heating company that was very profitable until 2009. From 2009 to 2011 my business lost a lot of money and I fell deep in debt. I always thought the economy would come back and I would be able to dig myself out of debt. But the bid prices never seemed to recover. My competition found ways to cheat the rules. They classified employees as independent contractors to avoid expensive workers comp insurance. They hired illegals and paid them cash. All this kept the average bid prices lower. Then the govt over regulated everything with these strange lead paint rules. It increased the time to complete the project raising prices so contractors just ignored the rules. They didn’t raise prices. There was huge $30,000 fines for noncompliance. When I complained that I would get fined too if they did not follow the rules they would then blackball me and spread the word to other contractors that I was a complainer.
One contractor friend I knew had a illegal who worked for him fall off a roof and got hurt. A lawyer sued and the courts reclassified the workers status from independent contractor to employee and forced my contractor friend to pay a lawsuit for over a million dollars. He cant even get rid of the lawsuit in bankruptcy. He is forced to pay up for life.
So when the contractors told me my prices were to high, I told them that everything I did was 100% legal and cost more. I refused to skimp.
In the end I am in bankruptcy mode and switching careers.
I will never go back to the construction business ever again.
Truly appalling. As one of the commenters above implied, the only long-term solution to mass exploitation is to become more self-sufficient through adopting a simpler life, and help to starve out large corporations that can act with impunity. The cult of giantism and ‘efficiency’ in business must be rejected as it inevitably leads to this kind of abuse. It is very early days, but I am hoping that in the coming decades 3D printing and open source design will destroy the current dependency on abusive corporate behemoths. Not that that is much comfort to the people suffering now..
So I get many friends who tell me we need more illegals because Americans simply dont want to work hard. My answer to them is. I did have a construction business. I loved it. I did work hard. I won many design contests for my work. I was even a Goat (Greatest of All Times) in a Commercial Radiant heating project I designed and we installed. But in the end with the huge cost of insurance and the heavy regulation, it just wasnt worth it anymore. The boom and bust cycles killed any savings you made. An the illegals drove the cost of doing business way down so I couldnt compete.
It wasnt like this when I started my business. It just kept getting worse and worse every year. From 1990 to 2008 I was very profitable and happy. After that I just could not compete with out cheating heavily which I refused to do.
So America lost a great Contractor. People still call me and I send them elsewhere. They complain that I was the only one who new how to get the job done right. They say they dont want anybody else but me. I tell them that I stopped paying my insurance and license fee’s so I cant do it any way.
I tell them that it is there own fault. They voted these idiots into office. The damage is done. I won’t go back.
I have a “World Wide Energy Efficiency Building Standard” that will easily greatly reduce co2. Something the world really needs. My system promotes permanence based designs. But everyone still keeps going with corrupt points based systems. I give up. People aren’t even smart enough to recognize that co2 is a problem. On this site they just argue with me about whether the problem even exists.
So I joined the wall street crowd. I am now a trader. Trying to make money and build wealth for my family. Just like many other great engineers before me. And people ask me why bridges fall down.
Its your own fault.
Should say performance and not permanence.
The idea of scarcity is a spell that limits our ability to think freely. It stands in contrast to nature, where abundance rules. It lead us to conclude that our own happiness must come at the expense of others. This conclusion is the opposite of what is true and takes us only into further deprivation and suppression. Greed is not good and has never been. This post clearly shows that. It is disgusting reading but reveals how anti-human, anti-society, the current economy is. And let’s not even start to mention wars. It’s sickening. But bringing the dirt to the surface is required in order to wipe it away.
“I’ve spent years thinking about the decrepit state of our union, and the only thing I can think of that can possibly move us forward on a sustainable long-term basis is a widespread expansion of consciousness.”
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our Lifes star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”
– William Wordsworth
In the meantime… yesterday June the 21st was officially “National Selfie Day”. (Aka/ National Self-Absorbed Narcissist It’s All About Me Day).
This was enthusiastically observed all over this pathetic excuse for a Nation yesterday. And of course many of the eager shallow self-absorbed participants included a whole host of our elected representatives in Congress.
So I’m not really expecting any “widespread expansion of consciousness” to occur here in the U.S.of A anytime in the near future.
What I am expecting is for all of this to get much worse over the next couple of years before it even begins to start getting better. But if you do nothing else but practice the Golden Rule every moment of every day you’re contributing towards the collective higher consciousness.
I seem to recall a book called “Jennifer Government” which had stories more or less like these. Or perhaps it was “Snow Crash”.
Since the Law is obviously failing here — these companies are still trading — ultimately people will be pushed to violence by these kinds of exploitative practices. The middle class managers who ultimately profit from this criminality will be targeted for reprisal. In response, they will engineer reprisals of their own.
Forget the Berkley riot nonsense. The real civil conflict will come when the working class becomes militant.
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” — George Orwell, 1984
Most of the “working class”, including truck drivers, will become obsolete long before they achieve the necessary consciousness. EBT cards will become universal. Sporadic violence will be dealt with.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/06/automations-destruction-of-jobs-you.html
The problem is structural. Read “The New Human Rights Movement” by Peter Joseph. You can have higher levels of consciousness, but it doesn’t translate into correcting the problems outlined in the article unless a structural change is made. I recognized the problem 25 years ago after reading authors such as Kirkpatrick Sale and Lewis Mumford. For several years I thought that higher levels of consciousness were the answer. Now I’m not so sure.
That’s a sad, shocking story Michael. Reminded me of this article written some time ago:
William Astore, The Business of America Is Kleptocracy
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175235/tomgram:_william_astore,_the_business_of_america_is_kleptocracy__/
42 USC Code 1981
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1981
“(a) Statement of equal rights
ALL PERSONS [the legal title; not people] within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by WHITE citizens, and SHALL BE SUBJECT TO like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and EXACTIONS [EXTORTION] OF EVERY KIND, and to no other.
(b) “Make and enforce contracts” defined
For purposes of this section, the term “make and enforce contracts” includes the making, performance, modification, and termination of contracts, and the enjoyment of all benefits, privileges, terms, and conditions of the contractual relationship.
(c) Protection against impairment
The rights protected by this section are protected against impairment by nongovernmental discrimination and impairment under color of State law.
(R.S. § 1977; Pub. L. 102–166, title I, § 101, Nov. 21, 1991, 105 Stat. 1071.)”
Law Dictionary: What is EXACTION? definition of EXACTION (Black’s Law Dictionary) http://thelawdictionary.org/exaction/
“[is] The WRONGFUL ACT OF an officer or other PERSON IN COMPELLING PAYMENT OF A FEE or reward for his services, UNDER COLOR OF his official AUTHORITY, WHERE NO PAYMENT IS DUE. Between “extortion” and “exaction” there is this difference: that in the former case the officer extorts more than his due, when something is due to him; in the latter, he exacts WHAT IS NOT HIS DUE, WHEN THERE IS NOTHING DUE HIM. Co. Litt. 368.”
Did you catch that, Mike?
We all know there’s a problem. All the news headlines of crisis and system failure are areas where communication controlled by violence is allowed to rule: fake news from Wall Street MSM and their violent dependent stock certificates, insufficient suppply of medical care where anybody who gives a medical opinion wihout a license is threatened with jail, state schools and unversities giving youth such serious brain damage they don’t cherish freedom, violently enforced contracts, union teamsters and on and on. A lot of evidence there that communication controlled by violence is unholy. Hopefuly they’re coming to an end. Make your claim to their stuff and by doing so help bring about their demise http://www.itsunholy.com/freeoffer.html. Go ahead Michael, raise your hand. The new world will be better with people who cherish freedom like you being rich and powerful.
The USA today article was interesting. It focused in on the retailers but just glossed over what set the whole debt slavery model into motion. The root cause. The state stripped these drivers of the trucks they owned leaving them easy prey to for its corporate partners. The trucking companies and by proxy the logistics companies and the retailers. Never can the mainstream media focus in on root cause, the power of the state. In this case to instantly make a man’s productive capital worthless.
This is a case of the corporate-state partnership wiping out the little guy. An extreme case where the little guy loses his leverage, his productive capital, and ends up a debt slave. The companies could have never accomplished this so long as those drivers owned their old trucks.
Is it so odd that corporations have taken over, corporations that all operate as subsidiaries of the biggest corporation of all, The United States Inc. which
operates under Commercial Law? C’mon folks, it isn’t called the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) for nothing. All courts are Commercial Courts that are bound to execute the bankruptcy of USA Inc. since FDR made it happen in 1933. That bankruptcy has never been resolved or dissolved. They’ve been playing hardball ever since, gradually at first, but a half dozen wars later, add 80 plus years of unimaginable carnage across the globe, they’re now running out of bullets and so they are ramping things up. Their ultimate goal is to eliminate 90% of the world’s population. Don’t believe me, Google the Georgia Guidestones, read what they have to say, then read the Bible Book of Revelations, and do the math.
Sorry to put a kill-switch on the poor trucker’s plights, but they’re just but a small fraction of people who have suffered under this tyranny. And yes, we live in a tyranny. Unlike 1776, we cannot do a damned thing about it. Our 100 million man armed militia cannot defeat nukes, or EMP attacks. We can only repent to God and pray for either mercy or a miracle. I trust that God has it all under control and that these Satanic-worshipping death loving scumbags who own 99% of the world’s wealth will have an eternity in hell to pat themselves on the back for thinking that they’re so smart.
The trucking company owners have at least achieved the deeper state of consciousness. Everyone they hired seem to be immigrants. These guys apparently don’t have any white drivers, who would sue their ass immediately. The people in the top, financiers, ceo’s, are mostly white, and they know better to avoid hiring white truck drivers, it would hit their bottom line. Immigrants also get an education that Americans can treat them a lot worse than their third world governments. Deeper consciousness is pure bullshit. Hindus are the most deeply conscious people and they act pervertly toward their fellow humans. It is the disappearance of Christianity in America that has produced and will increase these abominations.