"in populous cities, which are the seat of commerce and manufactures, the middle rank of inhabitants, who derive their subsistence from the dexterity or labor of their hands, are commonly the most prolific, the most useful , and in that sense, the most respectable part of the community."
edward gibbons. the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire. chapter 31
ed was a contemporary of adam smith and they hailed from a day when working people were paid more than political lip service by imperial senators and bureaucratic spokespersons....an early version of the labor theory of value so sneered at by the thieving thugs on wall street and their marionette minions in the halls of congress...whores are whores and irredeemable in any sense...deep in denial and following the trajectory that that denial has set for the late empire...they squirm as plan after plan to jump-start growth prove effective at only redistributing public wealth into private hands...quantitative easing my ass..the rich gorging themselves at the public trough and unscrupulous politicians manipulating people's fears of the end of days with an evangelical subtext ( rick perry belongs on the 700 club)...the romans tried to make their debts go away by inflating their currency...introducing more and more base metal into the alloy that made up the coins until they were almost worthless and could pay off the burgeoning public debt for next to nothing..all under the leadership of desperately inept latter emperors trying to keep the barbarians ( read non-roman former clients who had some serious grudges to settle after a long period of imperial exploitation...they sensed their moment had arrived)...avitus , maximus, majoram, severus, clybrius, glycerus, nepos, authenius, and the fore-mentioned augustulus...nixon, ford, carter, reagan,bush, clinton, bush, obabma, and whomever is next on the list...something of an unknown as we slide deeper into the foul freakshow of the 2012 presidential campaign...it doesn't matter much ho wins really, but the temptation to resolve the sovereign debt crisis by hyper-inflating the dollar will be hanging over the next administration...they will preside over imperial decay and blame the people, not the system...it's always decadence, not the fundamentally flawed ponzi scheme design of empire that gets the blame...if we'd only worked harder and been more true to the virtues of the founding fathers we would still be on top of the world...fuck these people...i refuse to accept the blame for what their unbridled avarice has done.
on september 11, 1973 the chilean military with the covert assistance of the cia overthrew the legally elected government of salvador allende and instituted a military dictatorship that killed thousands of its own people...everyone has their memories
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