G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Das Coopital: A Chicken and Egg Story of the Economy
By Zbignew Zingh
Created Jan 11 2008 - 9:27am
IN THE BEGINNING roving bands of people gathered fruit and plants and
hunted proto-chickens, until one day they discovered that they could eat
more regularly if they cultivated the plants that they ate and domesticated
the chickens. Thus was born agriculture, more or less, and everyone
contributed their labor in equal measure to the number of chickens they
wanted to eat. It was hard work, but there was a chicken in every pot, and,
perhaps, a little pot in every farmer. Life was good (except for the
chickens).
It did not take too long, however, for some people to discover that those
who were bigger and stronger than others could do less work than everyone
else by stealing someone else's chickens. Sometimes, the bigger, stronger
people stole the chickens outright kicking sand in the weaker farmers' faces
saying, more or less, 'Whatcha gonna do 'bout it, Chickenhead?' Or, they
engaged in the original protection racket demanding that smaller chicken
farmers hand over a portion of their hard-earned eggs and poultry in return
for the bigger guys (yes, it is almost always guys in a dimorphic species
like human beings) not beating them up and stealing all, rather than just
some of their chickens.
Soon, this protection racket led to another protection racket: a different
group of large, strong chicken farmers who realized that chicken farming was
damn hard work and they could eat just as well if they went into the
business of protecting all the smaller chicken farmers from the other big
guys who were chicken thieves and racketeers. Thus was born a warrior class
of chicken hawks who, in return for being given a monopoly of violence plus
a substantial tax on the chickens and eggs produced by all the other
hard-laboring chicken farmers, protected the majority working class from the
terrorism of the bad guy chicken thieves.
Over time, however, it became difficult to distinguish between the chicken
thieves who terrorized the chicken farmers and the warrior class of chicken
hawks who were supposed to defend the chicken farmers from the terrorists.
Either way, the chicken farmers labored harder than ever because if they did
not produce more to satisfy the thieving bad guys, then they still had to
pay the same number of chickens and eggs to the warriors who did not labor
in the chicken coops at all (because they were dedicated full time to
weapons and battle training to fight off the bad chicken thieves). The
warriors eventually became institutionalized; they became an upper class out
of which evolved an aristocratic caste of hereditary chicken kings and
queens, a "nobility" and, eventually, "leaders."
Caught between three rackets - the thieves, the warriors and the
aristocratic leaders - the lowly chicken farmers found themselves pressured
to work harder and harder and harder, all so the others could live off the
farmers' excess chickens. To ease their desperation, however, the elites
(now fully evolved into a leisure class of rulers whose main task was to
discover and/or create bad people against whom the chicken farmers could be
protected) created religious institutions. The prelates of these religious
institutions assured the lowly, hard laboring majority of chicken farmers
that if they obediently gave up lots of their chickens and eggs to the
rulers, and also gave a lot of their remaining chickens and eggs to the
religious prelates, then... not in this chicken **** world... but in a
paradisaical after life, they would be rewarded with easy living in the
clouds, a literal Land of ****aigne [1], lolling about while chickens took
care of themselves, laid eggs on command and generally jumped into peoples'
bellies fully cooked without lifting a finger of work.
Now with the Leaders, Warriors, Prelates and Thieves amassing such huge
amounts of poultry, they needed an alternative means to collect and preserve
their chickens in order to avoid being overwhelmed by their wealth. After
all, taking care of chickens was for peasants and wealthy people were
definitely no longer peasants. Thus, more or less, did banks come into
being, very large and secure chicken coops, so to speak, where these people
who had grown wealthy plucking the wealth of those beneath them could put
all their eggs and their chickens, without having to take care of them
themselves. In return for depositing all these chickens in the banks, the
banks gave the wealthy people chits, that is money, that they could exchange
one day for chickens. Meanwhile, as the price of keeping the wealthy
people's chickens safe and sound, the banks skimmed off a percentage of the
chickens and eggs for themselves. Naturally, with more chickens being
skimmed off for the banks, the ordinary small chicken farmers had to work
still harder just to keep their peckers above water, so to speak.
Eventually, the money that stood in for the chickens became the medium of
commercial exchange itself. Initially, the faith in these commercial
exchanges rested on the assurance that behind that money stood the value of
the wealthy people's chickens that had been extracted from the excess labor
of all the peasant chicken farmers. In short, people had confidence that a
piece of money could eventually be exchanged for a chicken (or at least a
piece of a chicken during inflationary times), and the chickens themselves
represented the congealed labor of the original chicken farmers.
In time, the banks and the wealthy people had accumulated so many chickens
that they began to leverage their chicken wealth by loaning chickens (or
chicken money equivalence) to other people who were also trying to increase
their accumulation of chickens. Thus was born chicken coop-italism. Unlike
the chicken farmers who actually produced the wealth itself by their labor,
the chicken coop-italist made money, that is more chickens, by leveraging
his coop-ital and skimming off labor from people who originally raised the
chickens. Of course, these wealthy coop-italists diversified their
investments so that not all of their eggs would be placed in one basket.
Coop-ital was leveraged time and again against the labor of the original
small chicken farmers. Eventually, the accumulation of coop-ital gave birth
to industrialization as wealthy people wanted a way to continue to increase
their flocks. Soon, they created Chicken Corporations, so to speak, which
had all of the rights of the chicken farmers, but none of their liabilities.
A whole new class of chicken farmers was born, now known as 'chicken
workers'. The distinction between the proto chicken farmer and a chicken
worker is subtle, but significant. A chicken farmer possesses a stock of
chickens, coops, fields, farm houses, and reproduces chickens to get chicken
equivalents, which he in turn exchanges for non-chicken goods. A chicken
worker, however, possesses nothing that would allow her to reproduce
chickens or any other goods, and merely exchanges her labor for chicken
equivalents, some of which she in turn exchanges to get chickens. In
practice, there are many shades in between the chicken farmer and the
chicken worker. A coop-italist, on the other hand, is more easily
distinguished. He usually has no direct dealings with anything remotely
connected with chickens: he plucks chicken equivalents from the labor of
others.
There also evolved a vast new middle segment of chicken "service" workers
such as clerks, lawyers, consultants, insurance agents, re-insurance agents,
psychologists, accountants, marketers, advertisers, administrators and
bureaucrats whose livelihoods depended on the whole edifice of chicken
production, chicken retail and chicken consumption. This middle (or petite
chick-geoisie) class of service workers unwittingly were committed to
maintaining the status quo because they, too, lived off the labor of the
chicken farmers even though they dreamed of becoming minor coop-italists
themselves (by the exercise of pooling all their meager retirement funds in
mutual egg funds). Because the "knowledge" of this class supported the
economic hierarchy by continuing (knowingly or unknowingly) to service and
endorse it, this class came to be known as "knowledge workers".
Still, the wealthy people wanted to amass more chickens, or at least more
"money" which represented chickens. By this time, of course, the labor of
the chicken-farming class had been augmented by cheap hydrocarbon fuels
(energy that is) which, as a form of labor equivalent, further increased the
production of chickens. A couple of centuries later, of course, the cheap
hydrocarbon fuels began to become significantly more rare and more expensive
to extract and refine (a concept embodied in the phenomenon of "peak chicken
fat", or the diminishing chicken return on chickens invested). As wealthy
people continued to want to be ever wealthier, as the production of chickens
by chicken farmers hit a practical wall, and as cheap hydrocarbon energy and
chicken fat production began to peak, the inevitable result was that the
chicken equivalent money began to represent fewer and fewer chickens.
Indeed, money became so inflated that it soon represented only tiny bits and
pieces of chicken beaks, chicken livers, chicken lips and gristle.
Faced with the prospect of diminishing profits arising from leveraging off
the original chickens produced by the lowly chicken farmers, a new type of
chicken thief came into being - the chickonomist and Wall Street financier.
The chickonomist and the financier came up with new ways to amass chicken
equivalents. They created the Chicago School of Chickenomics led by its
chicken-headed mentor, Milton Friedchicken. These chickonomists sought to
privatize everything, to make life less secure for chicken farmers and to
squeeze the middle class of "knowledge workers". According to the strange
notions of the Chicago School of Chickenomics, people under stress are more
innovative and more productive. They reasoned (in a manner of speaking) that
chicken farmers and chicken workers would thereby be "freed" from the
shackles of government business controls and social security, "freed" from
the encumbrances of unions, and "freed" to work two or three jobs
simultaneously 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence wages. Spouses
would also be "freed" from the chores of child care... so that spouses, too,
could work two or three jobs 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence
wages (in addition to raising their kids). Children, too, would be "freed"
from tax-payer subsidized public school education so the kids, too, could
work two or three jobs for 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence
wages. All the chicken farmers and chicken workers, therefore, would be (so
they were told) free, free, free at last! (Well, their labor, at least would
become free).
All the while that they were setting labor "free" and unraveling all the
usual social safety nets, the chickonomists and financiers dangled the
prospect of easy living in front of the middle class of knowledge workers
and chicken farmers and seduced them into buying huge, ticky-tacky [2],
energy-inefficient, and virtually identical suburban McMansions that the
knowledge workers and lowly chicken farmers could buy in installments over a
long period of time. These were the so-called sub-crime mortgages, and the
chickonomists assured the cuckolded chicken farmers and knowledge workers
that they only needed a few chicken nuggets as down payments to buy their
McMansions. Consequently, millions of dumb cluck farmers and knowledge
workers agreed to buy outrageously overpriced houses by agreeing to pay out
trillions more chicken equivalents over the life of their mortgages than any
of them could afford. Worse, the same chickonomists and financiers
encouraged these highly mortgaged chicken farmers and workers to now take
out equity loans on their McMansions so that they could load up on Christmas
gifts for their own precious little chicks and buy lots of useless
electronic trinkets that would be obsolete before the Christmas packaging
was torn off.
The chicken farmers and knowledge workers were also distracted with mindless
entertainment like professional ****fights and bird-brained Hollywood chicks
and lottery wish-bones and the like. Of course, none of these chicken
farmers or workers could possibly raise the number of chickens that they
needed to pay off their debts. In fact, in order to pay all the chickens
they had obliged themselves to pay over time, their precious little chicks,
and their little chicks and their chicks' chicks' chicks would all be
mortgaged for generations to come just to pay off the interest on these
oppressive loans.
The financiers, of course, were not concerned by any of these future
problems because they took the billions of chickens pledged by the dumb
cluck chicken farmers and workers on their heavily mortgaged houses and
sliced and diced and packaged all of them up into millions more bonds
secured by the mortgaged chickens, or as the case may be, just a few pieces
of chicken. In order to camouflage the quality of these bonds, the
financiers mixed in chicken breasts with necks, thighs with wings, gizzards
and bone, and then they mixed in a good deal of chicken **** that they
otherwise could not shovel out of their chicken coops, thus making sure that
the ostensibly good pieces of chicken obscured the garbage that nobody
wanted. The banks, in the meanwhile, wrapped up all these chickenized debt
obligations (CDOs) into other financial instruments which they then tucked
away into Structured Investment Vehicles, aka "SIVs", which would be their
way of burying the whole mess off the books while still claiming to have
highly valuable chicken collateral that was, ostensibly, worth a whole lot.
This, in turn, caused investors (who always seem to applaud slick and tricky
ways to "make money" out of thin air) to have great confidence in the banks
and the economists and the financiers, so the investors pledged their own
chickens (extracted from the labor of the poor chicken farmers, of course),
in return for shares of these apparently very profitable institutions. The
rating companies played along assuring one and all that these chickenized
debt obligations (CDOs) were triple-A rated investments backed by highly
valuable McMansions purchased with future payments of chickens. Everyone on
Wall Street, in turn, marketed these mountains of highly rated chickenized
debt obligations (CDOs) to hedge funds, foreign banks and investors,
retirement funds, teachers unions, money market and mutual funds.
Meanwhile, the wealthy coop-italists discovered that they were having a hard
time making a profit anymore because energy derived from petroleum and
chicken fat (the virtual equivalent of "labor") was getting way too
expensive. Moreover, the damn lowly chicken farmers and the knowledge
workers were already laboring way beyond their capacity and could not be
forced to work any harder than they already were. The coop-italists and
their corporations tried racing around the globe ensnaring other poor
chicken farmers whose labor they could exploit. Inevitably, however, they
still could not make profit at the same rate they had profited before due to
the fact that incredibly overworked chicken farmers tended to commit
suicide, revolt ... or, more often, just drop dead from exhaustion. Worse,
the rising cost of energy made the manufacture and transportation of
everything too expensive to be profitable. All the while, the supply of
money - the chicken substitutes that were supposedly being held in the
vaulted coops of the central banks - became so inflated that it required
more and more of it just to exchange for a single rotten egg.
By this time, the central banks' chicken coops were full of little more than
chicken droppings and practically weightless feathers. The entire economy
had become "financialized" to such an extent that the majority of the
world's economic activities were based on very little more than electronic
chicken digits flying around the world's chicken coops in poultry perpetual
motion. When the wealthy people began to realize that their wealth was
essentially comprised of just so many feathers, they began to feel a little
like headless chickens themselves, so to speak. These headless chickens, led
by a particularly chicken **** group of strutting roosters called
"Neocoops," determined to lay hold of all the diminishing energy resources
all around the world. The Neocoops created or exploited various "emergency"
situations such that a lot of Chicken Littles ran around crying that the sky
was falling, demanding that the Neocoops protect them from the Constitution,
the Bill of Rights and Islamofascist chicken terrorists, or whatever. The
Neocoops also "fixed" the elections, so to speak, so that when the poor
chicken farmers flocked to vote in their annual election rituals, only
chicken hawks, turkeys and vultures would be elected to Congress and the
White House.
Furthermore, in order to squeeze out still more profits for themselves, the
Neocoops, together with their confederates in the chicken **** mainstream
media, whipped all the poor chicken farmers and the middle class knowledge
workers into jingoistic war frenzies in which all the poultry workers of the
world would fight one another over meaningless issues like whose chicken
religion should have dominion over another chicken religion, whose chickens
would be raptured into heaven and whose chickens would be skewered and
barbecued, which chicken farmer had the biggest ****, and the superiority of
white chicken meat versus dark chicken meat. In the ensuing kerfuffle, the
Neocoops and the corporations gathered up all the eggs and even more of the
excess chickens left unattended by the poor poultry workers who were
fighting one another.
Ultimately, however, the whole world wide chicken economy inevitably grew
unstable and started to wobble like an egg, so to speak. All of the wealthy
people, the leaders, the investors and the corporations began to worry about
how to prevent some pretty fragile economic egg shells from breaking, thus
creating a massive world wide omelet (cooked especially quickly due to
global warming). In order to bolster flagging confidence in the chicken
economy, the chickconomists and financiers tried injecting mega-billions of
"digital chickens" into the monitory system through financial finagling and
interest rate manipulations (thus fueling more inflation). They tried using
various tricks to jury-rig the stock markets so that they always went "up"
even when the news was all "down". To instill "confidence", they trotted out
the cackling former chair of the Federal Egg Bank, Alan Chickenspan, who had
helped create Wall Street's Humpty Dumpty eggonomics. And they tried using
government (that is, fiat) money to bail out corporations which had loaned
sub-crime mortgage money to the chicken farmers (in the guise, of course, of
a bail-out of the poor indebted chicken farmers).
It was in these circumstances that a few, and then a few more and then more
and more of the world's chicken farmers and chicken workers began to
seriously question the whole political-economic structure in which they
toiled. These folks began to wonder why, if their labor was the basis for
everything else, why then did the people who did the least work always end
up with the majority of chickens? Thus, these enlightened chicken workers
began to form small self-sufficient communities that would be interconnected
through electronic media with other communities of chicken farmers and
chicken workers around the nation and around the globe. Globally, these
chicken farmers and workers more and more often refused to labor any more
for the large chicken corporations, and they refused to employ their
services in support of the larger chicken economy. In essence, they either
went on strike or they simply engaged in a personal but wide-spread
refusnicism .
The chicken farmers and workers, however, refrained from creating rigid,
forcibly collectivized and authoritarian top-down "planned economies" like
some communist chicken states had tried years before. They also refrained
from becoming too doctrinally "independent", too nationalistic or tribal,
all of which could lead to easily picked off and isolated little islands of
individual chicken farmers. Instead, they organized themselves into regional
cooperatives and world wide free range chicken farms and Open Egg
intellectual enterprises where each chicken farmer's knowledge, effort and
intellectual endeavor stood on its own merit and contributed to the overall
betterment of themselves and the larger community. As hydrocarbon fuels
became more scarce and more expensive, it also became sensible and
cost-effective for people to more directly acquire information without the
mediation of "knowledge workers", thus further emancipating everyone from
the shackles of the chickenized world.
The chicken farmers and workers created and agreed to abide by a General
Poultry License (GPL) that opened the doors to creativity without
privatizing it. The chicken farmers became not individually, but
collectively self-sufficient, including the means to forcibly defend
themselves, as necessary, from the world's chicken plunderers. As the world
chicken economy cracked and splattered like an egg in a frying pan, the
enlightened chicken farmers held their own and thrived amidst the splatter.
And so the story would end, so to speak, with the chicken farmers living
happily ever after. But this is, in many ways, just a story, and just a
chicken or egg story, at that. So no one knows where the story really starts
or how it ends, or when it starts, or if it ends. And that's the essence of
the story, is that the ending isn't written. All the chicken farmers and
workers get to write it on their own. How they want to write it. If they
want to.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Zbignew Zingh
Created Jan 11 2008 - 9:27am
IN THE BEGINNING roving bands of people gathered fruit and plants and
hunted proto-chickens, until one day they discovered that they could eat
more regularly if they cultivated the plants that they ate and domesticated
the chickens. Thus was born agriculture, more or less, and everyone
contributed their labor in equal measure to the number of chickens they
wanted to eat. It was hard work, but there was a chicken in every pot, and,
perhaps, a little pot in every farmer. Life was good (except for the
chickens).
It did not take too long, however, for some people to discover that those
who were bigger and stronger than others could do less work than everyone
else by stealing someone else's chickens. Sometimes, the bigger, stronger
people stole the chickens outright kicking sand in the weaker farmers' faces
saying, more or less, 'Whatcha gonna do 'bout it, Chickenhead?' Or, they
engaged in the original protection racket demanding that smaller chicken
farmers hand over a portion of their hard-earned eggs and poultry in return
for the bigger guys (yes, it is almost always guys in a dimorphic species
like human beings) not beating them up and stealing all, rather than just
some of their chickens.
Soon, this protection racket led to another protection racket: a different
group of large, strong chicken farmers who realized that chicken farming was
damn hard work and they could eat just as well if they went into the
business of protecting all the smaller chicken farmers from the other big
guys who were chicken thieves and racketeers. Thus was born a warrior class
of chicken hawks who, in return for being given a monopoly of violence plus
a substantial tax on the chickens and eggs produced by all the other
hard-laboring chicken farmers, protected the majority working class from the
terrorism of the bad guy chicken thieves.
Over time, however, it became difficult to distinguish between the chicken
thieves who terrorized the chicken farmers and the warrior class of chicken
hawks who were supposed to defend the chicken farmers from the terrorists.
Either way, the chicken farmers labored harder than ever because if they did
not produce more to satisfy the thieving bad guys, then they still had to
pay the same number of chickens and eggs to the warriors who did not labor
in the chicken coops at all (because they were dedicated full time to
weapons and battle training to fight off the bad chicken thieves). The
warriors eventually became institutionalized; they became an upper class out
of which evolved an aristocratic caste of hereditary chicken kings and
queens, a "nobility" and, eventually, "leaders."
Caught between three rackets - the thieves, the warriors and the
aristocratic leaders - the lowly chicken farmers found themselves pressured
to work harder and harder and harder, all so the others could live off the
farmers' excess chickens. To ease their desperation, however, the elites
(now fully evolved into a leisure class of rulers whose main task was to
discover and/or create bad people against whom the chicken farmers could be
protected) created religious institutions. The prelates of these religious
institutions assured the lowly, hard laboring majority of chicken farmers
that if they obediently gave up lots of their chickens and eggs to the
rulers, and also gave a lot of their remaining chickens and eggs to the
religious prelates, then... not in this chicken **** world... but in a
paradisaical after life, they would be rewarded with easy living in the
clouds, a literal Land of ****aigne [1], lolling about while chickens took
care of themselves, laid eggs on command and generally jumped into peoples'
bellies fully cooked without lifting a finger of work.
Now with the Leaders, Warriors, Prelates and Thieves amassing such huge
amounts of poultry, they needed an alternative means to collect and preserve
their chickens in order to avoid being overwhelmed by their wealth. After
all, taking care of chickens was for peasants and wealthy people were
definitely no longer peasants. Thus, more or less, did banks come into
being, very large and secure chicken coops, so to speak, where these people
who had grown wealthy plucking the wealth of those beneath them could put
all their eggs and their chickens, without having to take care of them
themselves. In return for depositing all these chickens in the banks, the
banks gave the wealthy people chits, that is money, that they could exchange
one day for chickens. Meanwhile, as the price of keeping the wealthy
people's chickens safe and sound, the banks skimmed off a percentage of the
chickens and eggs for themselves. Naturally, with more chickens being
skimmed off for the banks, the ordinary small chicken farmers had to work
still harder just to keep their peckers above water, so to speak.
Eventually, the money that stood in for the chickens became the medium of
commercial exchange itself. Initially, the faith in these commercial
exchanges rested on the assurance that behind that money stood the value of
the wealthy people's chickens that had been extracted from the excess labor
of all the peasant chicken farmers. In short, people had confidence that a
piece of money could eventually be exchanged for a chicken (or at least a
piece of a chicken during inflationary times), and the chickens themselves
represented the congealed labor of the original chicken farmers.
In time, the banks and the wealthy people had accumulated so many chickens
that they began to leverage their chicken wealth by loaning chickens (or
chicken money equivalence) to other people who were also trying to increase
their accumulation of chickens. Thus was born chicken coop-italism. Unlike
the chicken farmers who actually produced the wealth itself by their labor,
the chicken coop-italist made money, that is more chickens, by leveraging
his coop-ital and skimming off labor from people who originally raised the
chickens. Of course, these wealthy coop-italists diversified their
investments so that not all of their eggs would be placed in one basket.
Coop-ital was leveraged time and again against the labor of the original
small chicken farmers. Eventually, the accumulation of coop-ital gave birth
to industrialization as wealthy people wanted a way to continue to increase
their flocks. Soon, they created Chicken Corporations, so to speak, which
had all of the rights of the chicken farmers, but none of their liabilities.
A whole new class of chicken farmers was born, now known as 'chicken
workers'. The distinction between the proto chicken farmer and a chicken
worker is subtle, but significant. A chicken farmer possesses a stock of
chickens, coops, fields, farm houses, and reproduces chickens to get chicken
equivalents, which he in turn exchanges for non-chicken goods. A chicken
worker, however, possesses nothing that would allow her to reproduce
chickens or any other goods, and merely exchanges her labor for chicken
equivalents, some of which she in turn exchanges to get chickens. In
practice, there are many shades in between the chicken farmer and the
chicken worker. A coop-italist, on the other hand, is more easily
distinguished. He usually has no direct dealings with anything remotely
connected with chickens: he plucks chicken equivalents from the labor of
others.
There also evolved a vast new middle segment of chicken "service" workers
such as clerks, lawyers, consultants, insurance agents, re-insurance agents,
psychologists, accountants, marketers, advertisers, administrators and
bureaucrats whose livelihoods depended on the whole edifice of chicken
production, chicken retail and chicken consumption. This middle (or petite
chick-geoisie) class of service workers unwittingly were committed to
maintaining the status quo because they, too, lived off the labor of the
chicken farmers even though they dreamed of becoming minor coop-italists
themselves (by the exercise of pooling all their meager retirement funds in
mutual egg funds). Because the "knowledge" of this class supported the
economic hierarchy by continuing (knowingly or unknowingly) to service and
endorse it, this class came to be known as "knowledge workers".
Still, the wealthy people wanted to amass more chickens, or at least more
"money" which represented chickens. By this time, of course, the labor of
the chicken-farming class had been augmented by cheap hydrocarbon fuels
(energy that is) which, as a form of labor equivalent, further increased the
production of chickens. A couple of centuries later, of course, the cheap
hydrocarbon fuels began to become significantly more rare and more expensive
to extract and refine (a concept embodied in the phenomenon of "peak chicken
fat", or the diminishing chicken return on chickens invested). As wealthy
people continued to want to be ever wealthier, as the production of chickens
by chicken farmers hit a practical wall, and as cheap hydrocarbon energy and
chicken fat production began to peak, the inevitable result was that the
chicken equivalent money began to represent fewer and fewer chickens.
Indeed, money became so inflated that it soon represented only tiny bits and
pieces of chicken beaks, chicken livers, chicken lips and gristle.
Faced with the prospect of diminishing profits arising from leveraging off
the original chickens produced by the lowly chicken farmers, a new type of
chicken thief came into being - the chickonomist and Wall Street financier.
The chickonomist and the financier came up with new ways to amass chicken
equivalents. They created the Chicago School of Chickenomics led by its
chicken-headed mentor, Milton Friedchicken. These chickonomists sought to
privatize everything, to make life less secure for chicken farmers and to
squeeze the middle class of "knowledge workers". According to the strange
notions of the Chicago School of Chickenomics, people under stress are more
innovative and more productive. They reasoned (in a manner of speaking) that
chicken farmers and chicken workers would thereby be "freed" from the
shackles of government business controls and social security, "freed" from
the encumbrances of unions, and "freed" to work two or three jobs
simultaneously 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence wages. Spouses
would also be "freed" from the chores of child care... so that spouses, too,
could work two or three jobs 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence
wages (in addition to raising their kids). Children, too, would be "freed"
from tax-payer subsidized public school education so the kids, too, could
work two or three jobs for 80-90 hours a week at less than subsistence
wages. All the chicken farmers and chicken workers, therefore, would be (so
they were told) free, free, free at last! (Well, their labor, at least would
become free).
All the while that they were setting labor "free" and unraveling all the
usual social safety nets, the chickonomists and financiers dangled the
prospect of easy living in front of the middle class of knowledge workers
and chicken farmers and seduced them into buying huge, ticky-tacky [2],
energy-inefficient, and virtually identical suburban McMansions that the
knowledge workers and lowly chicken farmers could buy in installments over a
long period of time. These were the so-called sub-crime mortgages, and the
chickonomists assured the cuckolded chicken farmers and knowledge workers
that they only needed a few chicken nuggets as down payments to buy their
McMansions. Consequently, millions of dumb cluck farmers and knowledge
workers agreed to buy outrageously overpriced houses by agreeing to pay out
trillions more chicken equivalents over the life of their mortgages than any
of them could afford. Worse, the same chickonomists and financiers
encouraged these highly mortgaged chicken farmers and workers to now take
out equity loans on their McMansions so that they could load up on Christmas
gifts for their own precious little chicks and buy lots of useless
electronic trinkets that would be obsolete before the Christmas packaging
was torn off.
The chicken farmers and knowledge workers were also distracted with mindless
entertainment like professional ****fights and bird-brained Hollywood chicks
and lottery wish-bones and the like. Of course, none of these chicken
farmers or workers could possibly raise the number of chickens that they
needed to pay off their debts. In fact, in order to pay all the chickens
they had obliged themselves to pay over time, their precious little chicks,
and their little chicks and their chicks' chicks' chicks would all be
mortgaged for generations to come just to pay off the interest on these
oppressive loans.
The financiers, of course, were not concerned by any of these future
problems because they took the billions of chickens pledged by the dumb
cluck chicken farmers and workers on their heavily mortgaged houses and
sliced and diced and packaged all of them up into millions more bonds
secured by the mortgaged chickens, or as the case may be, just a few pieces
of chicken. In order to camouflage the quality of these bonds, the
financiers mixed in chicken breasts with necks, thighs with wings, gizzards
and bone, and then they mixed in a good deal of chicken **** that they
otherwise could not shovel out of their chicken coops, thus making sure that
the ostensibly good pieces of chicken obscured the garbage that nobody
wanted. The banks, in the meanwhile, wrapped up all these chickenized debt
obligations (CDOs) into other financial instruments which they then tucked
away into Structured Investment Vehicles, aka "SIVs", which would be their
way of burying the whole mess off the books while still claiming to have
highly valuable chicken collateral that was, ostensibly, worth a whole lot.
This, in turn, caused investors (who always seem to applaud slick and tricky
ways to "make money" out of thin air) to have great confidence in the banks
and the economists and the financiers, so the investors pledged their own
chickens (extracted from the labor of the poor chicken farmers, of course),
in return for shares of these apparently very profitable institutions. The
rating companies played along assuring one and all that these chickenized
debt obligations (CDOs) were triple-A rated investments backed by highly
valuable McMansions purchased with future payments of chickens. Everyone on
Wall Street, in turn, marketed these mountains of highly rated chickenized
debt obligations (CDOs) to hedge funds, foreign banks and investors,
retirement funds, teachers unions, money market and mutual funds.
Meanwhile, the wealthy coop-italists discovered that they were having a hard
time making a profit anymore because energy derived from petroleum and
chicken fat (the virtual equivalent of "labor") was getting way too
expensive. Moreover, the damn lowly chicken farmers and the knowledge
workers were already laboring way beyond their capacity and could not be
forced to work any harder than they already were. The coop-italists and
their corporations tried racing around the globe ensnaring other poor
chicken farmers whose labor they could exploit. Inevitably, however, they
still could not make profit at the same rate they had profited before due to
the fact that incredibly overworked chicken farmers tended to commit
suicide, revolt ... or, more often, just drop dead from exhaustion. Worse,
the rising cost of energy made the manufacture and transportation of
everything too expensive to be profitable. All the while, the supply of
money - the chicken substitutes that were supposedly being held in the
vaulted coops of the central banks - became so inflated that it required
more and more of it just to exchange for a single rotten egg.
By this time, the central banks' chicken coops were full of little more than
chicken droppings and practically weightless feathers. The entire economy
had become "financialized" to such an extent that the majority of the
world's economic activities were based on very little more than electronic
chicken digits flying around the world's chicken coops in poultry perpetual
motion. When the wealthy people began to realize that their wealth was
essentially comprised of just so many feathers, they began to feel a little
like headless chickens themselves, so to speak. These headless chickens, led
by a particularly chicken **** group of strutting roosters called
"Neocoops," determined to lay hold of all the diminishing energy resources
all around the world. The Neocoops created or exploited various "emergency"
situations such that a lot of Chicken Littles ran around crying that the sky
was falling, demanding that the Neocoops protect them from the Constitution,
the Bill of Rights and Islamofascist chicken terrorists, or whatever. The
Neocoops also "fixed" the elections, so to speak, so that when the poor
chicken farmers flocked to vote in their annual election rituals, only
chicken hawks, turkeys and vultures would be elected to Congress and the
White House.
Furthermore, in order to squeeze out still more profits for themselves, the
Neocoops, together with their confederates in the chicken **** mainstream
media, whipped all the poor chicken farmers and the middle class knowledge
workers into jingoistic war frenzies in which all the poultry workers of the
world would fight one another over meaningless issues like whose chicken
religion should have dominion over another chicken religion, whose chickens
would be raptured into heaven and whose chickens would be skewered and
barbecued, which chicken farmer had the biggest ****, and the superiority of
white chicken meat versus dark chicken meat. In the ensuing kerfuffle, the
Neocoops and the corporations gathered up all the eggs and even more of the
excess chickens left unattended by the poor poultry workers who were
fighting one another.
Ultimately, however, the whole world wide chicken economy inevitably grew
unstable and started to wobble like an egg, so to speak. All of the wealthy
people, the leaders, the investors and the corporations began to worry about
how to prevent some pretty fragile economic egg shells from breaking, thus
creating a massive world wide omelet (cooked especially quickly due to
global warming). In order to bolster flagging confidence in the chicken
economy, the chickconomists and financiers tried injecting mega-billions of
"digital chickens" into the monitory system through financial finagling and
interest rate manipulations (thus fueling more inflation). They tried using
various tricks to jury-rig the stock markets so that they always went "up"
even when the news was all "down". To instill "confidence", they trotted out
the cackling former chair of the Federal Egg Bank, Alan Chickenspan, who had
helped create Wall Street's Humpty Dumpty eggonomics. And they tried using
government (that is, fiat) money to bail out corporations which had loaned
sub-crime mortgage money to the chicken farmers (in the guise, of course, of
a bail-out of the poor indebted chicken farmers).
It was in these circumstances that a few, and then a few more and then more
and more of the world's chicken farmers and chicken workers began to
seriously question the whole political-economic structure in which they
toiled. These folks began to wonder why, if their labor was the basis for
everything else, why then did the people who did the least work always end
up with the majority of chickens? Thus, these enlightened chicken workers
began to form small self-sufficient communities that would be interconnected
through electronic media with other communities of chicken farmers and
chicken workers around the nation and around the globe. Globally, these
chicken farmers and workers more and more often refused to labor any more
for the large chicken corporations, and they refused to employ their
services in support of the larger chicken economy. In essence, they either
went on strike or they simply engaged in a personal but wide-spread
refusnicism .
The chicken farmers and workers, however, refrained from creating rigid,
forcibly collectivized and authoritarian top-down "planned economies" like
some communist chicken states had tried years before. They also refrained
from becoming too doctrinally "independent", too nationalistic or tribal,
all of which could lead to easily picked off and isolated little islands of
individual chicken farmers. Instead, they organized themselves into regional
cooperatives and world wide free range chicken farms and Open Egg
intellectual enterprises where each chicken farmer's knowledge, effort and
intellectual endeavor stood on its own merit and contributed to the overall
betterment of themselves and the larger community. As hydrocarbon fuels
became more scarce and more expensive, it also became sensible and
cost-effective for people to more directly acquire information without the
mediation of "knowledge workers", thus further emancipating everyone from
the shackles of the chickenized world.
The chicken farmers and workers created and agreed to abide by a General
Poultry License (GPL) that opened the doors to creativity without
privatizing it. The chicken farmers became not individually, but
collectively self-sufficient, including the means to forcibly defend
themselves, as necessary, from the world's chicken plunderers. As the world
chicken economy cracked and splattered like an egg in a frying pan, the
enlightened chicken farmers held their own and thrived amidst the splatter.
And so the story would end, so to speak, with the chicken farmers living
happily ever after. But this is, in many ways, just a story, and just a
chicken or egg story, at that. So no one knows where the story really starts
or how it ends, or when it starts, or if it ends. And that's the essence of
the story, is that the ending isn't written. All the chicken farmers and
workers get to write it on their own. How they want to write it. If they
want to.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson