The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit-and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.
John Steinbeck
And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
By God, say I, we have forgotten it, all of it, and that which Santayana always prophesied came true. I feel like a fox gone to lair with the danger, ten weeks now until the great depression, die Zauberflaute comes off the horizon like a wrathful God. We cannot run, and neither can we hide. It is terrible, what is to come. I think I have put the basics together, apart from being a survivalist. But it comes.
I feel oddly like die Fastenzeit kommt, times two - forty days in the desert, and then forty more. The second of what may be as many as fourteen economic earthquakes is on the way; we have only seen the first. WE will be serious, only for a little while, on the next crash. In 78 days, 2,106 hours, 126,360 minutes, then we will be a different people.
One lesson learned is that oranges must not be destroyed, nor pigs slaughtered, in front of the hungry. We now, much more clever in such things, hide it nicely in such things as the "Cash for Clunkers" CAR Allowance Rebate System (CARS)
- Your vehicle must be less than 25 years old on the trade-in date
- Only purchase or lease of new vehicles qualify
- Generally, trade-in vehicles must get 18 or less MPG (some very large pick-up trucks and cargo vans have different requirements)
- The program requires the scrapping of your eligible trade-in vehicle, and that the dealer disclose to you an estimate of the scrap value of your trade-in. The scrap value, however minimal, will be in addition to the rebate, and not in place of the rebate.
That last part, that's where the pigs are slaughtered. The purpose is to raise the price of vehicles, along with sales, by creating an artificial shortage of used cars.
My friend's car, which burns a quart of oil every 100 miles because the rings are shot, does NOT qualify.
A one-year-old HUMVEE which someone can't make the payments on, DOES.
The goal is to kill all the rolling stock of used vehicles - but quietly slaughtered, must less messily than horses. I pay to relieve the lessee of a car which he cannot afford, the cost of unsaleable pigs, which in modern terms is a Hummer or F-350. I watch the slaughter, which I have paid for.
Zehn Wöchenen davor. My people came here out of the Dust Bowl, suffering. They stayed, and did what they thought they could do, to prevent another great depression, but it came back. It is coming.
They knock at this door. This time?
Powered by ScribeFire.
No comments:
Post a Comment