It’s the End of the World As We Know It

What are 308,367,109 Americans supposed to do?
First of all, despite clamping down on immigration, our population grew by 2.6M people last year. Unfortunately, not only did we not create jobs for those 2.6M new people but we lost about 4M jobs so what are these new people going to do? Not only that, but nobody is talking about the another major job issue: People aren’t retiring! They can’t afford to because the economy is bad - that means there are even less job openings… The pimply-faced kid can’t get a job delivering pizza because his grandpa’s doing it.
There are some brilliant pundits who believe cutting retirement benefits will fix our economy. How will that work exactly? Pay old people less money, don’t cover their medical care and what happens? Then they need money. If they need money, they need to work and if they need to work they increase the supply of labor, which reduces wages and leaves all 308,367,109 of us with less money. Oh sorry, not ALL 308,367,109 - just 308,337,109 - the top 30,000 (0.01%) own the business the other 308,337,109 work at and they will be raking it in because labor is roughly 1/3 of the cost of doing business in America and our great and powerful capitalists have already cut their manufacturing costs by shipping all those jobs overseas, where they pay as little as $1 a day for a human life so now, in order to increase their profits (because profits MUST be increased) they have now turned inward to see what they can shave off in America.How does one decrease the cost of labor in America? Well first, you have to bust the unions. Check. Then you have to create a pressing need for people to work - perhaps give them easy access to credit and then get them to go so deeply into debt that they will have to work until they die to pay them off. Check. It also helps if you push up the cost of living by manipulating commodity prices. Check. Then, take away people’s retirement savings. Check. Lower interest rates to make savings futile and interest income inadequate. Check. And finally, threaten to take away the 12% a year that people have been saving for retirement by labeling Social Security an "entitlement" program - as if it wasn’t money Americans worked their whole lives to save and gave to the government in good faith. Check. As Allen Smith says: "Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Essentially, Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!"
Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue. They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected. But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:
1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses. 4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich. 5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.
The practice of using every dollar of the surplus Social Security revenue for general government spending continues to this day. The 1983 payroll tax hike has generated approximately $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue which is supposed to be in the trust fund for use in paying for the retirement benefits of the baby boomers. But the trust fund is empty! It contains no real assets. As a result, the government will soon be unable to pay full benefits without a tax increase. Money can be spent or it can be saved. But you can’t do both. Absolutely none of the $2.5 trillion was saved or invested in anything.
That is how the largest theft in the history of the world was carried out. 300M people worked and saved their whole lives to set aside $2.5Tn into a retirement system that, if it were paying a fair compounding rate of 5% interest over 40 years of labor (assuming an even $62Bn a year was contributed), would be worth $8.4Tn today - enough money to give 100M workers $84,000 each in cash! The looting of FICA hid the massive deficits of the last 30 years in the Unified Budget. Presidents and Congresses were able to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans without complaint from the deficit hawks, because they benefited. The money went directly from the pockets of average Americans into the pockets of the rich.
Now that it is time to repay those special bonds in the Trust Fund, we are inundated in opinion pieces in the leading newspapers and magazines complaining about Social Security and its horrible impact on the budget. Government finances have been trashed by foolish tax cuts, unpaid wars, tax loopholes for corporations and the very wealthy, the failures of economists, the greedy search for greater returns in financial markets and the collapse of moral values in giant businesses but Social Security is supposed to be the problem that needs fixing…Social Security is not "broken" the money is in the Trust Fund. But the people who manage the finances of the United States don’t want to repay the bonds held by the Trust Fund. They want to default selectively against average people, their fellow citizens, who paid their taxes expecting to be protected in their retirement. Refusing to repay the $2.54 trillion dollars in bonds held by the Social Security Trust makes the US look like Greece, just another nation unable to govern itself coherently. The people who manage US finances come from the financial elites, the best that Wall Street and enormous corporations have to offer. Selective default exposes them as charlatans. The claims of the economics profession to expertise are puffery. Their theories about the benefits of tax cuts are proven false. Their mathematical proofs about free markets collapse in the real world.So, what is this all about? It’s about forcing 5M people a year who reach the age 65 to remain in the work-force. The top 0.01% have already taken your money, they have already put you in debt, they have already bankrupted the government as well so it has no choice but to do their bidding. Now the top 0.01% want to make even MORE profits by paying American workers even LESS money. If they raise the retirement age to 70 to "balance" Social Security - that will guarantee that another 25M people remain in the workforce (less the ones that drop dead on the job - saving the bother of paying them severance).
What’s next? Is it fair to say that children can’t work in a struggling family business? Isn’t it to everybody’s benefit that kids should be allowed to help out at the family store? That will be the next step towards turning America into a 3rd World country. The seemingly innocent concept of "letting" kids work will deprive another 5M people of paying jobs - throwing them out into the labor force as well and driving labor costs down even further.
There’s an expression that goes "give them an inch and they’ll take a yard." The top 0.01% of this country have taken their inches and they are foreclosing on the yards and they will come for the rest of your stuff next. If you think you are "safe" from the looting of America, it is only because they haven’t gotten around to you yet. As I explained in "America is 234 Years Old Today - Is It Finished?" - the game is rigged very much like a poker tournament. The people at the top table don’t care how well you do wiping out your fellow players at the lower tables, they know they will get you eventually and your efforts to scoop up a pile of cash for yourself simply makes their job easier when they are ready to take it from you.
The average American is $634,000 in debt thanks to the efforts that Reagan and Greenspan put in motion 30 years ago and the richer you are, the more of that money is going to come out of your hide eventually and the more you lobby to make sure that the "rich" are not taxed unfairly, the less fair it will be to you because, no matter how rich you THINK you are, unless your income is measured in MILLIONS PER MONTH, you aren’t even close to the top 30,000. No progressive tax? That means that people and corporations who make $1M PER DAY should pay no more tax than a person making $1M per year, right? Well that means that the $2.5M debt that your family of four owes will be paid by you over 2.5 years of labor while the $2.5M owed by your Billionaire competitor will be paid over a long weekend, after which he can turn his attention back to crushing your business by creating cheaper goods - maintaining profit margins by driving down local labor costs and outsourcing the rest.
It’s a new world, America, and you’d better get used to it - we were sold down the river on a slow boat to China long ago and we’re only just beginning to feel the first effects of waves that wash back to our own shores. The people who own the media don’t want CHANGE. That’s why you never hear this stuff in the MSM - things are going exactly according to plan and the old money crowd is playing a long, patient game and they already have most of the chips - the last thing they want is people questioning the system…http://www.philstockworld.com/Sent from my Altair 8800

Consistency is the last refuge of the
unimaginative.

“You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors, it’s difficult to tell - you are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover. Of course, killing you is killing myself. It’s the same thing. But you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.”

shake my head

from Dana Milbank:

It was one of those unnerving moments when you realize that our leaders don't have any better handle on events than the rest of us. Members of Congress send troops to war and spend trillions of dollars of the taxpayers' (and the Chinese government's) money -- and yet they seemed to base their positions on the Afghanistan war on what they'd read in the newspapers, watched on television or picked up from the Web. Seven years after authorizing an invasion of Iraq in search of phantom weapons of mass destruction, lawmakers are basing policy on the drip, drip, drip of WikiLeaks?

i dislike dreaming of people dying. but i don't hate it. i cry so much in my dreams, seriously like an unstoppable flood. when i wake up, the inside of my body feels like it had been crying.

findings, moments

the morning i started this new job, 2 dragonflys escorted me as i flew down 395. yes, i am noticing the signs.

at this new place, there have been moments of stress, and moments of downtime, and many moments of goofiness... there are a few tricks here who i just laugh and laugh and laugh with... the days are long, but i think this well be a good stomping ground for a little while.

-

the more people i talk to about my new project, the more the universe delivers me validation. it feels right, with each. last week I spoke to nicole about the project, she fell in love with it, and is linking me up with a nova-based communication company which could end up paying for my entire trip out to CR. that is, if they like the project. how insane would that be? then, on saturday i spoke to heather, ann, and michael about it, and they instantly fell in love. heather even expressed interest with tfa helping, seeing how i would be traveling with kristen to egypt next summer. then today, i told my dear friend leila, and she knows a friend who did similar work with kids in africa. the lady taught the kids the story of MLK Jr and had them act out the story. there is a documentary of this somewhere and leila is getting it for me.

so many good vibes, so, so many. now its just time to work. time to review my thr of the oppressed notes. time to review my own notes and journals and thougths. time read boal's theater games for non-actors book. time to write a propsal. time to get to work. "get up. it's time. you're life. you choice. it's time for you to read the signs. get up. the time. is now. let's go."

--

i adored despicable me. what a wonderful film. i have been obsessed with animation lately. it had a great soundtrack too by Pharell!

---

i want to start painting. i want to start scuplting. i want to dig my hands into material. i want to smash colors onto a canvas. i want paint and clay. i want messiness. i want my hands to be cased in red and yellow and green paint, and i want glitter to be jammed in my fingernails. i want clay to be mashed into my pores. i want to create something.

i gotta git dos supplies discount!!

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i can't wait to go to south america one day. im itching to go there more than any other place right now. hands down! Brazil and Argentina, fuck!! I want to go to each of those places for at least month just for dancing. more time for sights, i guess.
so many girls, so many boys, so many dance floors.... so little time.
slash/ i love feeling and looking confident. i love a nice outfit. i love not giving a fuck!

i LOVED toy story 3

having no destination, i am never lost

“I have no plans, not for the movies, not for the stage, not for anything. I’m sort of drifting…Sometimes I put on my coat at 10 in the morning and go out and follow people. I just go where they’re going. I mill around.”

-Garbo

this is what life is about, isn't it?
throwing parties. eating good food.
laughing. talking. listening.
then sleeping, no dreaming.

Theorizing about people is different from theorizing about termites or trees, because with respect to people we live inside the objects we theorize about. For termites or trees there is no option but to theorize from the outside looking in, and the only test of reasonable theorizing must be some measure of the coherence between theoretical predictions and observed outcomes. In contrast, the humane sciences can also call upon theorizing from the inside looking out. Indeed, much social theorizing can only be done from the inside looking out. The claim that people seek to be effective in applying means to the pursuit of ends is not a conclusion of outside observation and inference, but rather is a feature of our self-awareness. To be sure, theorizing from the inside looking out is an instrument that must be used with care, for a danger that comes with it is that it can turn into a battle among contending prejudices and intuitions.

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

-Carl Theodor Dreyer, Thoughts on My Craft

tell me something

Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
~Rumi

come storytellers, come.

(insert title of play here)

my most major playwriting project is nearly completion. A whol new draft, totally re-worked concept, new-ness at every turn, but with groundedness in my orginial concept and journey.

A and B and C...
adam almira and anthony
bala billy and beatrice
carmen charles and cecilia
dilara danny and doyle
oceans and cliffs

waves, the sound of waves crashing into rocks.

2010 la paz. 1922 london. 1970 los angeles.

set pieces: a bed, a door, and a chair.

90 pages, 1 act.

it is not going to be called INFINITY anymore.
other ideas for names are ROOMS, KABOOM, but my favorite at the moment is... CLIFFS.

CLIFFS
a new play by Andrew Hawkins

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my thoughts on "not knowing"

Mo' Hawkins July 10 at 5:15pm

"not knowing." i hate that term. it freaks people out. humans need to know shit. right? the idea of not knowing is too immense to process. Not knowing how I'm gonna get from A to B to C and so on is terrifying. But, replace "not knowing" with "trusting" ... "Trusting is a wonderful place to be."

"Trusting is a wonderful place to be." and it IS.

It comes down to letting go of control, letting go of the ego, and getting out of your head. Less figuring out, more finding out. And believe me... that's terrifying and that takes YEARS. Years of re-programming your brain and thought pattern. But, it's about trusting what you do not know. You don't know what your next job may be, you don't know who you're going to fall in love with, you don't know how you are going to finish writing this book, you don't know how you're going to get wealthy, you don't know, you don't know, but you TRUST that you'll get there. But how does someone do that? How does someone trust without knowing? It comes down to faith, and learning how to let go, i think.

You know, all the great leaders and artists, all the great people in history, they had no idea how they were going to accomplish what they ended up accomplishing. They went one step at a time, and they eventually had to end up trusting in something they did not know. They had to take a leap of faith.

It comes down to trusting that YOU are guided. Guided by what? The Universe, your intuition, your muses, spirit guides, guardian angels, God, Jesus, Allah, whatever floats your boat, whatever metaphor you can relate to. Trusting that the Universe is on your side, and that the Universe has everything taken care of. In other words, if you trust and allow yourself to dream big, then it's trusting that the Universe will scheme big, for YOU.

For example, I do lots of traveling in my life, and I don't have lots of money, either. Especially this January I went to Europe for 2 months. Two months before I left, in November, I nearly had a panic attack because I did not know how I was going to fund this trip. I had some money saved, I had some airfare already purchased, but the whole thing was so huge, and seemed so pricey, I thought that I would not be able to manage it. BUT THEN. I stopped. I took a breath. And I let it go. I trusted that the Universe had everything under control. I had work lined up throughout all of November and December, I would save and everything would work out, because I spoke to my inner self and I knew, deep down in my core I knew that this trip was not NOT happening. I knew I was never NOT going. Read me? I was never NOT going to go out to London and live with Wided. It was meant to happen. It was never NOT happening. So I didn't allow my little panic episode for 2 hours interrupt or divert this moment in my life which was MEANT to happen. I knew it was meant to happen because it felt SO RIGHT. I trusted my self, I trusted those feelings. The money issue was still an issue, but I let the worries go, knowing that somehow, someway, I would muster up enough funds, that I would work hard and budget carefully. And lo and behold, it all worked out. My god, I look back now and I don't even know how it all happened. But I went and had plenty of money to cover what I needed to do.

I don't mean to sound evangelical, but really, faith is marvelous device that humans came up with. It is a fantastic tool to get people from A to B to C. Homie I don't go to any church, but I will meditate, I will pray, I will breathe. And that's the faith I chose. Stay connected to your inner voice and you have all the answers. Trust what you do not know.

"But I don't know what's next for me," you may ask, "I don't know what to do after {blank}" ... all i know is this: trust that you will find an answer. read the signs. notice what you notice. let your intuition guide you in the right direction. If you don't know how to access your intution (or inner voice, same shit), then you must learn how to relax and breathe. That's step one. Breathing and listening.

peace

flaws

im obsessed with character flaws because flaws shape our personality.

our personality is created by how we deal with our flaws in public.

starting work on a new project :)

the vision

[11:58:45 AM] Andrew Hawkins: Babbyyyyy!!!!!
[11:59:13 AM] Andrew Hawkins: How r u? Waz is upp my love?? Borriis
[11:59:14 AM] Wided: oh my god you are here
[11:59:20 AM] Wided: i had a dream about you
[11:59:30 AM] Wided: !! it involved those stupid people from high school
[11:59:30 AM] Andrew Hawkins: I am here. Tell me!!
[11:59:32 AM] Wided: reid
[11:59:33 AM] Wided: and corey
[11:59:40 AM] Wided: and sam i think is his name
[11:59:46 AM] Andrew Hawkins: Ewwwwww
[11:59:47 AM] Andrew Hawkins: Hahaha okay
[11:59:48 AM] Wided: and we were at a party they were at
[11:59:53 AM] Wided: and it was hilarious
[11:59:59 AM] Wided: they exhibited the same high school insecurities
[12:00:09 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Hahahhaha they must be all fat and heinous now
[12:00:12 PM] Wided: and we were talking about ireland or france or argentina or something random
[12:00:18 PM] Wided: and looking gorgeous
[12:00:25 PM] Wided: like we looked fucking fierce
[12:00:35 PM] Wided: you had on these slim black pants
[12:00:36 PM] Andrew Hawkins: The norm, I love us
[12:00:42 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Ahhhh!!
[12:00:45 PM] Wided: and this silk tank top
[12:00:54 PM] Andrew Hawkins: I'm squealing lmao
[12:00:58 PM] Wided: and this jacket thing with sparkly lapels
[12:00:58 PM] Andrew Hawkins: I love us
[12:01:01 PM] Wided: not in a gay way
[12:01:09 PM] Wided: but in the this is the way we do in in NYC way
[12:01:12 PM] Andrew Hawkins: I'm a lil michael jackson
[12:01:18 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Yyeeesss!!!!
[12:01:23 PM] Wided: and i had on these tight black pants
[12:01:34 PM] Andrew Hawkins: !!!
[12:01:46 PM] Wided: and this criss cross dark blue shirt elbow length
[12:01:49 PM] Wided: really masculine
[12:01:53 PM] Wided: with these insane heels
[12:02:04 PM] Wided: and we kept on making eye contact
[12:02:08 PM] Wided: and giggling about the uglies
[12:02:09 PM] Andrew Hawkins: How was da hair??
[12:02:12 PM] Andrew Hawkins: HOT!!
[12:02:16 PM] Wided: bangs and super long
[12:02:22 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Omg that is our life!!!
[12:02:37 PM] Wided: the bangs were cute. i kind of want to cut them again come winter
[12:02:37 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Was my hair long? How was it styled?
[12:02:48 PM] Wided: actually faux hawkish
[12:02:53 PM] Wided: like super short
[12:02:54 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Do it. Well visit ivy
[12:02:59 PM] Wided: and longish on the top
[12:03:03 PM] Wided: and more long on the back
[12:03:06 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Yes!!b
[12:03:10 PM] Wided: you look like you got it cut in greece
[12:03:18 PM] Wided: or in shoreditch
[12:03:31 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Fuck.
[12:03:40 PM] Andrew Hawkins: By the bangalis or dem greeks
[12:03:47 PM] Andrew Hawkins: Only the best
[12:03:54 PM] Wided: athens all the way
[12:03:58 PM] Wided: it was on point
[12:04:01 PM] Wided: bengalis or otherwise
[12:04:24 PM] Wided: we were like late 20s
[12:04:30 PM] Wided: we looked older than we are now
[12:04:30 PM] Andrew Hawkins: I have so many treasures to give u when u get home - get excited
[12:04:37 PM] Wided: just more settled, assured. i loved it
[12:04:39 PM] Andrew Hawkins: I love that
[12:04:46 PM] Wided: oh shiiiittt
[12:04:49 PM] Wided: tooo excited
[12:05:00 PM] Andrew Hawkins: settled and assured. We're almost there
[12:05:15 PM] Wided: we actually fucking are

Having no destination, I am never lost.

i quelled it

internet rebelled
i quelled it
talked with the unions
we came to a solution
You know how you forget your phone, and you feel strangely naked?

You know how when the Internet goes down, and you rediscover books and tea and conversation and staring out the window?

You know how when the electricity supply goes down, you rediscover candles and darkness and a curious sense of peace with the world?

You know how you forget your map, and suddenly have to rely on your wits and whatever visual pointers you can clap your eyes on?

You know how when you forget your camera, after you’ve finished hating yourself, you try to write everything down, making notes like you’ve never made before?