*[TRIGGER WARNING FOR FEMINISTS: ANY REFERENCE IN THIS ARTICLE TO THE STERILIZATION OF GIRLS IS SATIRE INTENDED ONLY FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES. THE AUTHOR IN NO WAY ADVOCATES ANY SUCH ACTION.]
No woman should be authorised to stay at home to bring up her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
—Simone de Beauvoir (In “A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir” [1])
By Stephen Jarosek (aka Codebuster): The other day as I was walking in the sunshine, pedestrians suffered the inconvenience of having to step off the footpath and onto the road because a team of sweaty, singlet-clad workmen with dirt and dust sticking to their skin were digging a trench. Shovelling spades of dirt alongside the trench with the precision of surgeons wielding scalpels, the workers hardly raised any dust into the path of pedestrians. They were all men, of course, and I could fairly confidently conclude that they weren’t digging the trench for the joy of it. Between the trench and the road, a number of well-dressed women holding designer handbags in their manicured hands were waiting at the bus stop, scowling at having to contend with the little bit of wind-blown dust that our spade-wielding surgeons could not avoid. Oh, the inconvenience.
I wish I had had a camera. There could be no more compelling example of the dynamic between slave and entitled.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and
that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow
at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking
system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they
are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now
Iraq.”
Central banksters have performed a miracle: separating financial assets from reality. The crassest example are the Banksters of Japan. Not far behind are the Fed and the ECB. Japan’s fiscal situation is far worse than Greece’s. Gross national debt is over 220% of GDP. About half of every yen the government spends is borrowed. There is no solution in sight to bring down the deficit. Hence, the debt will continue to balloon. Standard & Poor’s rates Japan’s debt AA-, four notches from the top. Inflation in April was 3.4% for all items from a year earlier, with goods prices up 5.2%. And yet, 10-year JGBs yield below 0.6%. Whoever holds this dodgy paper is getting creamed. But by purchasing every JGB that isn’t nailed down, the BOJ has effectively imposed a peg on yields. “Financial repression” is the result.