So Today the News is All About…

…Davos, and how the back-room and off-stage conversations were febrile about the threat to economic and social cohesion posed by AI. The BSD[1]’s in the Corporate/Investment matrix have figured out that they plan to keep their current employees until they retire or die and then fill the empty slots with AI. This means No New Hires. No starter jobs. No Entry Level Positions, like my early job at the Sinclair station pumping gas, wiping windows, checking the oil. Ladies didn’t have to get gasoline on their hands, and I got a starched shirt and a cap and a buck an hour.  I learned about dealing with the public, making them want to return, and something of workplace discipline. That’s gone, buddies. Buy yr kids a phone while you can or a play-station because they’re not needed and noone but you will give a shit about them.

                  The BSD’s call labor “a tax on profits.” Think about that. Under capitalism, each person is hired for less than they are worth. The difference between what they’re paid, and what the boss makes from their labor is called “surplus capital.” It only flows one way—into the boss’s bank. Employees by and large have only their labor to sell. Imagine the poverty of that. If we were actually a capitalist country as we pretend to be, citizens would own property, patents or procedures that would generate capital.  But that only works for the upper middle class and the higher hoity toity. Most of us have only our labor to sell. And in a market dwindling for employment opportunities, all the advantages go to the Big-boss-class; the owners of “the means of production” as Marx charmingly referred the Nation’s public resources, privatized for private industry.

                  Now it’s clear why the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos et al, congregate around the large dump placed in the Oval office by “the owners of capital.” They’re there to insure that the laws work for them and never walled off from the operating mechanisms of Government as they are in Europe and Scandinavia—you know, those countries that the Dumpster-in-Chief considers snooty elites. The Trillionaire[2]class is openly engaged in transactional bribery, designed to insure that everything works for them—the laws, the courts, the regulations. They are buying islands, and National Parks in the West, setting up elite fortresses to prepare for the reactions to “the Shock and Awe” they are designing to disenfranchise the majority of workers. (How do you feel knowing you’re a “tax on profits”).

                  A civilized country would be considering regulations to protect jobs (social stability) or something like guarantee annual incomes—payback for the massive wealth those workers generated. But one look at ICE’s behavior would afford someone with even a two-digit IQ, the certainty that these folks are not nice at all. In the meantime, we can intuit how terrified of the Epstein files Trump must be, by the drastic and vicious nature of the distractions he ceaselessly invents to distract our attention. Epstein may be small potatoes compared to disenfranchising the next generation’s future.

[1] At Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, top bond traders adopted “Big Swinging Dick(BSD)” as a self-congratulatory label for the most aggressive, high-earning traders. Michael Lewis, in his book Liar’s Poker describes how a trader who could “make millions of dollars come out of those phones” was elevated to this status

[2] Because I was shocked to understand how big a trillion actually is, I’m sharing this. A million seconds is about 11.6 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. A trillion seconds is roughly 30,000 years