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Generational challenges: End Winner Takes All

After doing untold damage to the United States water table with fracking, Chesapeake Energy has at last filed for bankruptcy. Its former CEO Aubrey McClendon was forced to resign in disgrace in 2012 and died by driving his SUV straight into a wall in March 2016 in bright daylight in what looks a lot like a suicide.

The damage Chesapeake has done to the North American water table will take nature millions of years to undo. All of that environmental damage was done while running in the red. Accessible energy resources were easily available from Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia but instead as a matter of policy, Americans chose to poison their land. Chesapeake Energy is a symbol of the cupidity, corruption and short-sightedness of US leadership.

Shale fracking dense web roads pipeline and well pads turn continuous forest and grasslands into fragmented islands: Simon Fraser University

The conversation at ZeroHedge was fascinating. Hardcharger82 strangely feels that he’s happy to be old, or in his words:

“I am glad I’m not young anymore.”

Something I have been saying a lot in the last few years. There is a world of shit coming to the young people and it is approaching faster everyday.

Spend your money and enjoy it while it is still worth something. Time is short.

Wacky47 sensibly countered that every generation faces its own challenges:

we had our Viet Nam, our parents had WWII, theirs had the Depression….the wheel in the sky keeps on turning….watch the end of Margin Call, sums it all up…..

Wacky is right that we should fear to face adversity or even calamity. Existence comes with no guarantees. Living is hazardous and ends only in death. Still, through all of those cycles what is constant is that the percentage of assets owned by plutocrats has only risen. The gap in salary between CEO and normal employee has jumped from 10-20x to 100x to 400x. A reset is necessary here. Not that there shouldn’t be winners but I don’t remember signing up for winner takes all.

It’s high time that Americans tackled the real problems of plutocracy and class-division. While part of the population is in the streets in what are often violent demonstrations, racism is a war that has largely been won. There are many wealthy black entertainers, successful black politicians, busines people and black athletes. On the other hand, the percentage of unionised workers has fallen from a high of about 35% in the thirties to just over 10% now.

United States percentage of unionised workers 1930 2010

It’s high time that American people of all race and creed take steps to throw off their financial chains and unite to create a more equitable society. Almost everyone would be happier. The misery of some of the 1% is a price well worth paying to see ninety percent of the people happier.

How did the Dumas’s Musketeers put it? Un pour tous, tous pour un: All for one and one for all. And that ladies and gentlemen, curiously, is the motto of Switzerland, the more persistently prosperous and peaceful of nations over the last few hundred years.

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