Imagineering...

Greetings good citizen,

I was surprised this morning to note that an early harbinger of the onset of autumn hasn’t happened!

I’ve been living here for 18 years and for every one of those years a maple tree at the corner of my lot has turned brilliant orange for my birthday…which was yesterday.

It didn’t occur to me to look until this morning…and the tree is still solid green!

Don’t get the wrong idea. My maple tree turning colors ‘coincides’ with other trees in the area/region…and no, mine (well, the ‘notorious one’, there are a lot of maple trees on my lot.) isn’t the only one that hasn’t ‘turned’.

Stay tuned, I’ll let you know when it/they finally do turn.

(I’m sure you’ll be waiting with bated breath…)

So, what is the next thing I see this beautiful morning? My browser advises me that the markets are ‘surging’ on (and you can only wonder where they dig these people up) increased ‘consumer confidence’!

And actual check of the numbers shows somebody is exaggerating more than a little.

How much do you want to bet the ‘driver’ behind the markets is the ‘psychologically important’ 10,000 number?

Speaking of ‘psychos’, we can only wonder how long the charade of adequate public funding will last?

Tens of millions of homes are in foreclosure…so NOBODY is paying the property taxes. Even during so-called ‘good’ times, EVERY school district struggles to fund mandated programs…

Well, don’t look now good citizen, but NONE of those programs has been abandoned.

So where the fuck is the money coming from?

We (naturally) ‘assume’ the Feds are providing the funds…like they did last year.

But wait a minute Slim, there hasn’t been a ‘new’ stimulus bill…and those people who aren’t paying property taxes aren’t paying income taxes either…so where is the Fed getting the money from? (40 million US citizens on ‘food assistance’, you AREN’T paying income taxes if you qualify for food assistance!)

This is perfectly okay! Every society/government ‘lends’ to itself all the time to cover ‘budgetary shortfalls’, that must be what they’re up to now!

Except the ‘tab’ for these budgetary shortfalls now exceeds our annual ‘projected’ GDP…

To simplify what this means picture your ‘personal debt’ being equal to your annual wages.

You aren’t paying THAT off without suffering some severe financial hardship…for a real long time. (Because your ongoing ‘living expenses’ aren’t going away under the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system!)

As you can see, we have ‘money’ for some things…like keeping the ‘rabble’ pacified/fed and keeping their kids off the streets under the watchful eyes of ‘minders’ (It is difficult to call what these people do ‘teaching’…not that this is their fault.)

Funny how we always circle back to the same damn issue and that is mis-management.

What they like to call ‘incompetence’. (Which is nothing but ‘smoke’, a feeble attempt to account for horrible results by blaming it on the ‘poor execution of sound planning’ rather than the polar opposite: the faithful execution of 'piss poor planning…')

Which is to point out that the ‘bar’ has been so heavily fucked with that it is impossible to measure ‘performance’ using their convoluted ‘standards’.

If we go by their standards, the economy is ‘just fine’…hell, the banking sector is ‘solid as a rock’ (as long as you don’t look too closely!)

What am I saying good citizen?

I’m saying we have arrived at that comic line in an old joke…”I can’t be out of money, I still have checks!”

And that’s what passes for our economy is running on…kited checks.

If YOU tried the same stunt, you’d do some serious prison time…but apparently it’s okay if you’re an oligarch trying to prevent your neck from being stretched on the nearest lamppost!

And when the money goes REALLY funny, that is precisely what will happen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner