I’m happy that the Citizens United ruling so many years ago paved the way to corporations controlling our Congress. Can you imagine if they had to write laws without millions of dollars in corporate and foreign money on the table?
I’m happy that our Supreme Court has basically no oversight and can freely take gifts from corporations and their mega rich owners. Can you imagine if they had to decide cases without that influence?
And finally I’m happy that our President gave away billions to corporations and foreign governments and is spending lots of money bombing children overseas. Can you imagine that money being spent on anything else?
But most of all I’m happy that our free press is largely controlled by mega corporations and foreigners who will dutifully keep all of this out of sight and out of mind, twisting narratives to suit them, their shareholders, and their advertisers.
This is a great America. I can’t imagine it any other way.
-Christopher Day
P.S.
I’ve written ad nauseam about being grateful for what I have and wanting my standard of living to be the bare minimum. I remain convinced that if it’s possible to rig the system in such a way that so few people benefit, it is likely true that it is possible to rig the system in such a way that the maximum number of people benefit.
But you need leaders that believe that to get it started.
I’m not going to get too into why a government shutdown is bad. There’s no reasoning with any anti-government goon that thinks it’s good. Critical funding to law enforcement and other initiatives stops and workers potentially go unpaid, maybe even deciding to walk off the job for an employer that will pay them steadily.
But there’s a major threat to your wallet.
When the U.S. government takes on debt by issuing bonds, it’s putting the full force of our country’s credit and credibility behind those bonds. To put this in really simple terms think of it like a credit card. You have a credit limit. The United States as a sovereign government has the power to raise its own credit limit and lenders are willing to lend more and more money because the United States is a safe bet with a strong dollar — they will get their money back with interest. Some of those lenders are Americans. Some are foreigners. All are relying on the United States to pay its debt. The faucet will pretty much never turn off as long as we keep telling people we’ll borrow some more money — or at least it’ll be a damn long time before the faucet turns off because people believe in our country’s ability to pay its debts.
Now, if we choose not to raise our credit limit and borrow more money to pay off the interest on our current debt, we default pretty quick, because the government simply doesn’t have the cash on hand. I suppose it could print money, which would cause inflation and make every dollar you own less valuable — but that’s not a great idea. So what happens when we default and stop paying the interest on United States debt?
Lenders get nervous. Interest rates go up. And again, we get inflation that makes every dollar you own less valuable — and prices go up to reflect this new reality of decreased purchasing power around the world.
So this is really a no brainer. The fact that it’s used as a political weapon is the single greatest failure of modern government. Theres no end game where failing to raise that debt ceiling is good for Americans.
Oh, and if you own a United States bond and they stop paying your interest, that’s bad too. There are many seniors that rely on the fixed income from bond interest to survive, and I don’t think I need to get into what happens when you turn older folk’s income off and potentially crash their investments. There’s just no good reason to do that. It’s evil.
If we go this route the world may no longer see us as a safe place to invest. A weak dollar means Americans lose.
It’s my sincere hope we don’t go there and that there are some adults in the room. But for the time being I’ve got all my money in brokered Certificates of Deposit because it seems like the ultra rich are trying to crash everything so they can buy cheap, cheap, cheap.
I previously published a history of the court reporter and captioning jobs summary provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show our median pay was falling despite the demand claimed by the fraudsters I call the STTI Bloc.
Bureau of Labor Statistics court reporter summary published as of 11/30/2024.Bureau of Labor Statistics court reporter summary as of 7/1/2022
I’m just not quite sure how to interpret things anymore. If you glance back at the median pay article the jobs and job outlook were all over the place. At face value this would indicate a loss of 3,800 jobs over 2 years — which is over a tenth of our field even by the rosiest estimates in existence (~30,000). That would mean either a tenth of our field went jobless and nobody’s talking about it, a tenth of our field retired in two years and those jobs evaporated with them, or…. maybe it’s all just bullshit and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is worthless. Can we get the Department of Government Efficiency over here? (Joke).
But for the sake of truthseeking, look at this infographic I pulled from old STTI materials.
The Speech-to-Text Institute fraudulently claimed there would be 17,260 stenographers by 2028. The actual number, by my own analysis of the numbers in years gone by, was higher.
So even using the fraudsters’ materials, coupled with the BLS statistics, there should be enough stenographers to cover just about every courtroom vacancy in this country up until 2028.
Yeah, you read that correctly.
The bottom line is none of this adds up to me. If it does to you, I want your comment. Because quite frankly if this is accurate we are lying to our students when we tell them there will be a job for them, and that is something I will never take part in.
I once again must point to our media and messaging. I know my methods are unorthodox, but ask yourself who killed the Speech-to-Text Institute? Private people like me or Trey Perez. Where are you getting this information from? Me. Doesn’t this seem like the kind of thing your National Court Reporters Association should be talking about? You pay an executive director hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to charm you and you pay me a couple grand in a good year to bring you the facts and the hard takes and do the publishing work that everyone else is terrified to do — Steno Imperium excepted! Maybe if I had hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, given my track record for caring about people that I’ll never know, your page rates would be higher and your companies would be off your asses when it came to the ridiculous deadlines and expectations they sometimes have. Maybe the good companies that don’t break the law would win investors and expand to swallow the big box brigade of today.
And maybe you just trust and have faith that everything will work out and be okay. And I guess that’s fine. But just remember that if all of us have your attitude, the people running the show can cut you at any time for any reason, and you’ll be met with the same apathy. Too bad, so sad, good luck.
The Corporation and The New Corporation wrap up my political beliefs really well. For those of you that believe lawbreaking corporations are out of control or that corporate power is threatening the sovereignty of our nation, they’re good watches. Like anything else there’s a bit of a slant and maybe even a bit of propaganda in there, but not more than your corporate overlords feed you every day. But I will warn this: They are fairly long documentaries.
One thing the New Corporation explains really well is the corporate playbook of hamstringing government and then turning around and creating a privatized solution that the investors can profit off of. Though neither documentary mentions court reporting specifically, I can draw parallels fairly easily. The corporations of our field produced a shortage through their own actions, like U.S. Legal Support buying and killing Stenotrain, and then proceeded to fraudulently press the shortage as the reason for our replacement. This opens more courts up to recording equipment and digital reporting, which the private sector has poised itself to provide while leaving us in the dust as far as their investments and attention.
Our ethics culture killed us. While we played the ethics game, the game’s rules were being rewritten — can’t have ethics if you don’t have a base of people that believe in them, and with so many retiring out, and a lack of corporate investment in our future, the only thing that is ever going to save us is a serious investment in media that makes investors aware we’re still here.
For the record, It’s been a long time since I reviewed the numbers, but the shortage is still, as best I can tell, not as bad as it was predicted to be. But the next wave of retirements is steadily approaching (2025), so who really knows what’s about to happen? And our sector is not so unique in terms of the rules being rewritten, as I feel The New Corporation makes obvious.
Using Wolf PAC’s constitutional convention model, a move meant to stop the unlimited flow of corporate money into politics that occurred after the Citizens United ruling, the legislatures of the United States have convened a constitutional convention to introduce Amendment 28, the institution of the New Corporate Republic. The Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, and all other constitutional amendments except for the Second Amendment are hereby abolished. The S&P 500 will now control all functions, agencies, and responsibilities of the United States government and state government functions, and shareholders will be the only vote that counts. Elon Musk has already bought and moved into the White House, as it no longer serves a governmental function. Capitol Hill has been renamed Capital Hill. Former Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went on record today, stating “wow, I took so many bribes from these people. I never thought they’d come for my job too.”
The new corporate government declared the United States is now a compulsory consumerist state. Anyone that does not buy at least one thing a day faces an automatic fine that cannot be waived. Those that do not pay the fine or violate the law again will be forced to work for free indefinitely or face summary execution for being an unproductive member of society that doesn’t contribute their fair share™️. Advocates for the poor and disabled object, but we didn’t like them when this was a free country so there’s no chance we’re excepting them from this rule now.
Free speech is suspended pending further changes to the law. Any expression that disparages the new government or any business interest is illegal and will lead to you and your family disappearing mysteriously in the middle of the night. A part-time government spokesperson issued a statement today, “the new rules are far more protective of our economy. If you wouldn’t say it to your boss or at the workplace, just don’t say it at all, because anything you’ve bought in the last 10 years is listening and you will face consequences.” The spokesperson further clarified that AI automatic speech recognition would be used to detect anti-business rhetoric. When asked how the system would safeguard against the constant errors in speech recognition technology, the spokesperson added “oh, it won’t. It’s much too expensive to hire people to double check. I suggest all of you make as little noise as possible.”
The song Beast by Nico Vega and any non-corporate media has also been outlawed. People suspected of producing music will face a convenience charge of $29.99 per song, and a song has been defined under the new law as “one minute of continuous or semi-continuous sound.” All other media will face a surcharge of $0.67 per second.
Our national animal has been changed to the AR-15. Citizens are encouraged to buy as many guns as possible, but first must be fitted with a brain-reader chip to scan for thoughts of harming business interests. Harming anything else is fair game, because it will likely stimulate the healthcare, construction, and insurance economies, making us a better nation.
Public schools will be closed nationwide over the next three weeks as the government decides which ones will be allowed to continue to operate as private institutions and which ones will be demolished so that the land can be repurposed for commercial and/or industrial development. Neighborhoods with high minority concentrations are said to be the most likely candidates for pollution-creating structures and carcinogenic products, because keeping that stuff away from whites ensures their obedience and apathy.
All citizens will be issued $100,000 of debt at birth. Immigrants face a $3,000,000 debt. If regular payments are not made by the debtor or their parents/guardians, the debtor will be seized by authorities.
Courts are suspended. Criminal actions will be punished with slavery, just like when we were a free country. Civil actions against business or economic interests are dismissed.
The American right to unionize and discuss pay shall be abolished. All unions and nonprofits, including religious institutions, are ordered to turn over all assets to the S&P 500 for repurposing and/or resale.
Anti-corporate terrorist Christopher Day will have his public execution live streamed, and the advertising revenue will be used to hunt down other dissidents. When asked what his crimes were, it was revealed that he wrote a blog called Stenonymous that spoke out against corporate misconduct. Asked how that makes one a terrorist, the government responded, “everyone we don’t like is a terrorist, just like when we were a free country.” Anyone else with a history of anti-corporate activism may opt out of public execution by adding $10,000,000 to their citizen debt.
U$A military spending will be increased by a factor of 10 so that the new corporate government can complete the Happy Consumer Satellite Array by SpaceX, which will help regulate human minds worldwide to be subservient to the New World Order, moving products from ownership to subscription-based. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
We are Earth United, brought to you by the New Incorporated States of America. Let freedom ring.
*None of this is true. It’s part of Stenonymous Satire Weekends, a project to help expose what’s occurring in my industry. I’m a blogger in my field of court reporting, and we’ve got a bit of corporate misconduct going on. I started publishing about it actively in September 2021 and we tried reporting it to government agencies that are supposed to handle that kind of thing like the FTC and New York State Attorney General. The FTC issued a weak statement about gig workers and the NYS Attorney General doesn’t investigate single complaints. It was kind of interesting for me because, being a court reporter, I was a big believer in the system. But the government at every level has shown that it has zero intention of doing anything that might harm business interests, even if they’re violating antitrust laws, deceptive business practices laws, and false advertising laws.
As an American, I’m disgusted. We rely on our government to enforce our laws equally. Imagine if the police didn’t investigate single complaints? “I just got robbed.” Sorry, we don’t investigate single complaints. “My brother was murdered.” Sorry, we don’t investigate single complaints. Well, you know what? Maybe the police are like that too, because a few months ago I met a man that says the authorities are ignoring his ex’s perjury and de facto kidnapping of his daughter. There’ll be a post about that someday soon, but the point is that we have a very real problem in this country of capitulation to anybody with money and chronic underfunding of government agencies meant to create balance in society.
And the “free press” that we rely on as Americans to report on a corrupt or inept government/organizations? It relies on corporate advertisers, so it’s not in the business of reporting on corporate fraud and, in our case, just repeats the corporate narrative of a court reporter shortage. So you literally have a situation where 18,000 to 30,000 good jobs are threatened with replacement by low-paying jobs due to the deceit of a few powerful corporations and the government and media side with the liars through their inaction, which will also likely lead to the degradation of court record accuracy and increase inequality when it comes to the recording of “minority speech” or dialects.
Billions of dollars lost to wage theft, but the media’s more concerned with what Elon Musk has for breakfast and our elected officials are basically using their offices for self-enrichment. Journalists that parrot the government or press releases have long been lambasted as stenographers. Hilariously, it’s thestenographers that are trying to bring you the truth.
If you don’t think any of this is a problem, I don’t know what to tell you. The government has signaled to corporate interests that it will not enforce the law against them. What happens when you tell a criminal their actions are consequence-free as long as they do it in a polite, sneaky fashion?
I don’t know exactly how to solve all this, but I’m willing to be a part of the solution. For starters, here’s a song I had commissioned to speak out against the corporate consolidation and corruption of the United States. Enjoy. If you want to throw a few dollars my way to help this reach more people, feel free to use the donation box on the front page of Stenonymous.com.
Patriots Against Corporatism Song by Anoynmous – Commissioned by Stenonymous.com
In a stunning turn of events, Chief Justice Honorable John G. Roberts declared that stenographers will no longer be necessary for the trial courts. “I am quite sure that we can just record it. Everyone knows that if you decrease the supply of court reporting vendors by getting rid of stenographers and the demand remains the same, prices will go down. That’s Economics 101. We could save the judiciary a lot of money by turning it completely over to corporations and paying them for a deficit product. The frequency of reconstruction hearings is only going to be as often as the audio fails, which we conveniently have and collect no data for, so it must be rare. I don’t really care to read trial court records before I make my rulings anyway. I’m ready for the future.” Stenonymous.com called for national protests, leading to a large gathering of stenography supporters in New York City.
Stenonymous.com calls for national protests in a new Supreme Court ruling. Stenonymous Satire Weekends.
In other news…
Inventor invents a new stenotype containing an actual C on the keyboard. Court reporters everywhere are furious!
Jury finds Staten Island stenographer guilty of blogging while under the influence, defendant remanded. Trial to be held five years from now due to understaffing.
NCRA Spokesperson: “Our next legislative move will be universal parking passes for stenographers. Never wait for your parking to get validated again.”
Commenting on the accuracy of court records, Elvis Presley has words for stenographers: Thank you very much.
Elon Musk dictates to classroom of stenographers in training.
First raise in 30 years! Local stenographer celebrates 10-cent surprise.
Suspect asks for a lawyer dog. Lawyer dog swears he’s not a cat. Stenographers weigh in.
*None of this is true. It is part of Stenonymous Satire Weekends, a project meant to entertain the court reporting audience of this blog and catch search engine attention by integrating court reporting with current events and prominent figures. We have a corporate fraud problem in court reporting that the media won’t report on and the government won’t do anything about, so we’re reduced to fundraising until we can simply advertise deluge-style and publicly shame all the people and organizations in power who had a chance to do something and didn’t. Until that fundraising comes in, which will be sometime between now and never, Stenonymous will continue to archive, entertain, and informwith the help of its audience and the stenographers that support the blog.
The picture is from the day of the Trump arraignment in New York City, but has been modified.
Based on the most current data, at 2% of revenue, court reporters could afford an annual advertising campaign of $21.6 million(assumes $60,000 median pay x 18,000 court reporters. In some estimates, there are as many as 30,000 court reporters.BLS statistics in court reporting may be inaccurate, as the BLS continues to decrease the number of jobs despite consistently forecasting an increase in the number of jobs.
Bureau of Labor Statistics on court reporters as of April 8, 2023.
Wrote a poem. It’s about America instead of court reporting. This is one of the rare times I’m going to use the blog for something like this. Unfortunately, it’s the only way to ensure it gets picked up by web search services like Google.
For the longest time we’ve faced division in the country. I believe this to be intentional on the part of the ultra rich. They control our media, our social platforms, our transportation, our electricity, our groceries. While we battle each other over silly differences or disagreements, we do not address the extraction of wealth from our country. This is very similar to the hatred of digital reporting in our field. While we wasted time decrying digitals as button pushers, we hardly noticed or cared that the corporations were setting up for our replacement and to create a market glut of reporters where our incomes would fall and their profits would rise.
People on very gradient of the political spectrum are being squeezed. I know this to be wrong. I do not know how it will be righted. But I know it must be.
