You can get rid of the politicians , but that doesn't get rid of the people who own them.

When I submitted this story, I assumed it would be edited and I expected to be told that changes would have to be made before it would be acceptable.

It does say what I wanted but the version on the Indigogo site is the clearest version of the story. At this point, my main objective is getting the story told - hopefully on the front page.

P.S. I'll trade in all of my Karma and my id number to get this out there.

And your statement indicates that you are seriously lacking a clue. Wall street is not really interested in "competitive". Wall Street is interested in anything that will drive the stock price up (or down) a buck or two, so that Wall Street can cash in, dump the stock and mark up a few points toward the quarterly bonus.

All of the Wall Street flakes TALK about shareholder value but the old style shareholders are long gone. Shareholders real interests are at the bottom of the list of concerns.

I can't provide links or sources, But I remember reading quite a while ago that Germany places contracts for road-building that includes maintenance for 20 - 40 years. As a result, German/European roads are built to be durable and to require as little maintenance as possible.

In the US, we build cheap sh#t knowing that the taxpayers will be on the hook for the maintenance.

If you chose your units of measure correctly, c^2 = c^3 = c^n = 1, and under this choice. E=m.

You got it exactly, but you left out the part about what it means and how it works. Those bonds that have to be redeemed represent money that Congress borrowed and has already spent. To repay these bonds requires higher takes on the 1% (the only ones with any money) or running the printing presses and printing new dollar bills, or borrowing to repay the bonds in the trust with money from selling conventional T-Bills - increasing the deficit.

The fourth alternative is to welsh on the deal. By reducing the amount paid in social security checks by diddling with the cost of living adjustments, the amount that has to be paid back can be reduced without making it obvious that the "full faith and credit" of the US is in the hands of the best congress money can buy.

At one time, there was a sensible reason for making it difficult to fire a federal employee. In theory, civil servants were not partisan and they were not supposed to be affected by the political ideologues who we appointed to run government agencies.

The ideologues were prevented from firing those who wanted to do a non-ideological job..

It worked for a while, but if you keep someone from being fired for political reasons, eventually they figure out that they can f#ck off on the job without penalty. I guess the powers that be decided that it was still better than a politicized civil service - or else they didn't notice or didn't give a damn..And today, we do have a politicized civil service. (Look and all the 'loyal bushies' in the Justice Department..

for what it's worth, I am not a smoker.

It makes no difference at this point in time, but the original EPA report on secondary smoke was a made-up lie. There were 12 or so studies in the US and Europe regarding secondary smoke. As I remember, 9 or them showed no harm, 1 showed moderate harm and one of them showed that secondary smoke was good for you.

There is a statistical technique called a "meta-study" where you evaluate your experiment to see if changes in the data gathered (or the way the data was grouped) might lead to a different result. A meta-study is NOT SUPPOSED TO PROVE ANYTHING, it's supposed to help you design a better experiment.

The EPA declared that their meta-study proved that secondary smoke was bad for you. The honest statisticians were shouted down, and since then, everyone applying for a research grant knows that the results better support the now prevailing wisdom if they ever want another grant.

And by the way, the issue is not whether secondary smoke is annoying or dangerous. It might actually be dangerous. - but they didn't prove it and they lied about it..

Actually, Social Security is hardly bankrupt. It has about 3.5 trillion dollars invented in special interest drawing T-Bills. Unfortunately, the deadbeats in Congress borrowed the money "invested" by Social Security and spent it on every Congressional wet-dream and war they could come up with.

The "full faith and credit" of the US requires that they pay this money back. This means raise taxes, run the printing press, or weasel their way out of as much of the repayment as they can. Every dollar they actually have to repay is a dollar that can't be spent on future corporate welfare.

The original "cookie monster" ran on an IBM mainframe back in the early 1970s. It printed "I want a cookie" on the operator console. After being ignored too many times, it would do a number of annoying things such as rewinding mag tapes or sending the printer a command to skip to a channel on the control tape that was hardly ever used - result was paper being ejected at a very high speed until the operator ran over and pushed the off button. The alternative was for the operator to type in the word "cookie" every time the monster woke up.

If you are going to use a coded list of whistle-blower names, It's only reasonable to use the names of the managers of the agency the whistle-blower works for.

"Where do all these agencies get billions in funding if not voted by the entire congress and signed into law by the president"

It's a secret.

Use the dictionary of your choice and check the words "continent" and "country".

Actually according to Doug Adams definitive history:

On a planet called Golgafrincham there was an an nouncement that the planet would soon be destroyed in a great catastrophe They planned an evacuation using a group of arcs:.

The passengers of the “A” ark were to be all the brilliant leaders, scientists, great musicians, data analysts, engineers and architects. The passengers of the “B” ark were to be all the “middle men” , marketing executives, telephone sanitizers , sales assistants and telemarketers etc. The passengers of the “C” ark were to be the real workers, construction, manufacturing and other craftsman.

As I remember it, everyone fought for a place on the B Arc which blasted off into space programmed to land on the third planet of an obscure star at the edge of the galaxy. Shortly after its departure, they discovered it was all a mistake and the planet was not going to be destroyed.

Golgafrincham entered into a period of exceptional peace and prosperity.

The planet that was the destination of the B Arc had a different kind of history.