Thursday, September 30, 2010

Forewarned...

Greetings good citizen,

Today we back up a few hundred feet to get a look at the ‘big picture’, the ‘why’ behind what we do and how we go about it.

You don’t think much about ‘why’. You have your hands full dealing with the lesser of multiple evils on EVERY damned front you can imagine. Although most of it is simplified, you either do it (usually the only way available to you) or you don’t and that’s the end of that shit!

We’d like to think we have ‘endless’ choices available to us but the truth is quite the opposite…there’s a whole lot of ‘no’ before you arrive at ‘I guess so’ because option ‘b’ isn’t exactly, er, ‘appealing’…

It is what it is and you don’t trouble yourself with ‘why’ because you don’t have any say.

So you take it or you leave it, it doesn’t matter to anybody but you (and millions of others just like you, so you’re not as ‘alone’ in this as you’ve been lead to believe.)

Sometimes, when you’re especially frustrated by the unnecessary difficulty of accomplishing what should be a simple task, this hits you right between the eyes!

In a moment of sudden clarity you are thunderstruck that EVERYBODY has to go through this every time they are required to perform this simple task and that’s when ‘why’ bites you right on the ass!

Now that I’ve opened your eyes to the ‘frightening regularity’ with which you are subjected to these frustrating and ‘nonsensical’ hoops that block your access to things you may not even want very much…sort of puts the whole thing in a different perspective, doesn’t it?

Now ‘why’ isn’t as dumb a question as it initially appears to be. Worse, ‘because’ isn’t a particularly satisfying answer either.

Anyway, as I stated at the outset, our objective today was to revisit the Big Picture for a look at why we bother to get our asses out of bed at all.

Don’t have to go too far or expend too much mental horsepower on that one. It’s the ‘eating (regularly) and living indoors thing’ that provides the motivation to rub the sleep from our eyes and gird ourselves for battle every day.

Your ‘why’ is simple even if the ‘how’ isn’t.

Interestingly, the people who provide you with the means to obtain your ‘why’ have the exact same ‘motivation’ as you do, it’s their method of ‘compensation’ that differs…it is also the reason ‘why’ your life is so much more, er, ‘complicated’ than it needs to be.

All ‘rich’ people have ‘income streams’ while the rest of us ‘peasants’ have to make due with the paychecks the rich cut for us.

Understand that the primary ‘justification’ for this glaring disparity remains ‘The Will of God!’ Although some are too, er, ‘proud’ to hide behind ‘divine selection’ and fall back on their ‘work ethic’ and ‘superior breeding’ as the reason for their success.

This is even more true today now that psychiatry has reached the conclusion that it is NOT ‘normal’ to hear voices in your head, that the only person in your head is you, not God!

So claiming to ‘speak with God’ on any level other than spiritual is to call your own mental stability into question.

Anyone can claim that they ‘speak to God’, it’s the ‘answer’ part that is troublesome.

Talking to God is perfectly cool. Claiming God ‘answers’ you…not so much.

Removing ‘divine selection’ from the equation we are left with one small planet that needs to be ‘shared’ by an, er, unchecked number of people.

You need not be a genius to see that the current set-up is NOT ‘sharing’ in any way shape or form.

This is one group claiming (usually a ‘divine right’) to what is justly ours.

This is ‘why’ we work FOR them, and not the greater good.

Our current socio-economic set up according to the judiciary is intended to ‘enrich the owners’ and not to serve our species.

Take a moment to read the short, yet eye-popping article in the link above.

Sort of redefines the term ‘why’, doesn’t it?

Circling back to yesterday’s post for a moment, is there any doubt we are on a rudderless ship with no-one at the helm?

We can talk about what might happen ‘after’ this nation has been looted but it is pretty obvious that job was finished by the Bush administration, there’s nothing left but the bones.

Sadly, the most we can hope for is to avenge future generations.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Politics...

Greetings good citizen,

It’s all related, which is why today’s offering is loaded with links. The first three links are from Alternet and the final link is from Some Assembly required.

Loosely, all of the stories have a political aspect to them.

Our first link poses the troubling question of just how large the disconnect is between ‘party leadership’ and the people it supposedly represents?

Democrats Continue to Lash Out At Their Own Base

Apparently, it fell to our less than loquacious Vice President to task grumbling minions for their ‘over-elevated expectations.’

It seems the Republicans aren’t alone in consistently ‘mis-reading’ the mood of the public.

The amazing part is both parties continue to get away with it!

So concludes installment one in our exploration of our badly broken political system…

Next up we have ‘the facts’ as to why normal people Never vote Republican! from the aptly titled:

Crony Capitalism: Wall Street’s Favorite Politicians

Curiously, you are more likely to find a Republican who ran as a Democrat down South than up North, make out of that what you will…

However, ‘the stones’ land in both directions. Equally as perplexing is how a decided minority has successfully blocked ALL attempts at reform, we could only wish that the people of this nation were as united!

If we ask the question of ‘who votes for these assholes?’ the moronic Republican’s seem to think the ‘libruls’ did! This is why the ‘Party of No’ is expecting to win big in this November’s mid-term elections.

What will be truly disturbing is if they indeed do! [Nobody’s THAT stupid…so it really proves that the ballot box has been hijacked by the corporate MSM!]

The next link provides evidence of just how much the economy shrank during the eight year reign of W.

The piece is inappropriately titled:

How the Bush Tax Cuts Made Us Poorer

When the information tells us the ‘booming economy’ experienced during the Bush years was in fact a ‘delusion’. Only the top one percent increased their ‘take’ while the overall economy shrank by almost 3 trillion dollars. That’s ‘Trillion with a ‘T’ or a thousand billion…which is a thousand million…so what we’re really saying is three hundred thousand million that the Bush administration PAID its contributors to ship overseas!

Unfortunately, if you are a Republican, you aren’t reading this…hell, chances are good if you’re a Democrat you aren’t hanging out here either. Only other sane people are reading this. Small comfort that it is…

Last up we have this article which adds more fuel to the already raging bonfire the mentally challenged Republican’s have built around their ‘base’…

Seriously good citizen, who ‘in their right mind’ would vote Republican (Tea Party or no) after witnessing what voting for Republicans produces?

As I have asked many times before, if we are ‘all in this together', who the fuck is the ‘opposition’?

And the answer is…the god damned rapacious rich who would skin you alive if there was a dime in it for them, never thinking that their own skin was just as worthless.

This is why government exists and why it is so disastrous when government ceases to work.

That has ALWAYS been the challenge good citizen. Your civilization will only survive as long as the government stays ‘on task’. Once it’s been ‘co-opted/corrupted’ it must be swept aside and replaced COMPLETELY (because the ‘mechanism’ itself has failed. Merely replacing the people is worthless, the ‘corruption’ will remain.)

Today we find ourselves faced with precisely that unhappy situation. What passes for ‘our’ government is gone. It is now ‘their’ government, they being the criminals who would exploit society for their own personal gain.

These people are not any better than the slavers of old, hell, truth be told, slavers FOUNDED this country! For that reason alone we can’t be too surprised at the outcome.

However, we don’t have to live with the mistakes of the past.

We CAN build something much better…but we’re going to have to ‘purge’ the opponents to a ‘free and fair’ society from our midst.

A tall order but it can be done!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

It makes the world do what?

Greetings good citizen,

I have on many occasions preached the dangers/wonders of our much-abused ‘medium of exchange,’ to the point that many of you are inclined to conclude that I’m schizophrenic on the subject.

It’s not a love/hate thing…nor am I of two minds on the topic. While I keep repeating that money itself is ‘meaningless’, that doesn’t make it ‘useless’.

Needless to say, your confusion is perfectly understandable.

Anyway, I came across this article by Hellacious on Sudden Debt this morning.

While it is a very good treatment on the topic of moneys’, er, ‘multiple personalities’, more interestingly, he comes as close as anyone I have yet read in addressing the ‘heart’ of the matter…

As things have developed lately it is this small minority that is calling the shots for everyone else, i.e. the finance tail is wagging the entire economic dog, now more than ever before. The borrow-consume-grow economic model that was espoused - and is still espoused in the guise of government "bailouts" - led to such an explosion of debt world-wide that Holy Smoke! is now the only form of money that really matters, the state that calls the shots, if you want.

This is completely unprecedented in economic/monetary history. It is even entirely wrong to compare today with the Great Depression and to attempt to draw parallels, examples, lessons or possible solutions from it. This is a new reality, so new as to have become invisible to politicians and economists who operate under the principle that if you can't "see" it; it doesn't exist. (To be fair that's how most of us operate, day-to-day anyway.)


I would quibble that this phenomenon he describes is not ‘new’…the difference he notes is this is the first time it has been pushed to this extreme! (Where government funds have been used to ‘bail out’ failed private investment…to save the financial system from collapsing; a mission that still hasn’t been accomplished!)

There is ‘too much’ funny money out there. We can’t even begin to put the economy back on track until the bulk of the, er, ‘illegal bets’ have been eliminated.

This ‘small minority’ he refers to is crucial because these are the same assholes who control (believe it or not) the ‘value’ of your money!

But you don’t ‘understand’ what that means, do you?

You can’t wrap your head around the idea that a, for lack of a better term, ‘bunch of suits’ sit around on any given day and decide how much a barrel of oil will go for.

Why oil? Our entire economy, our very way of life is based on cheap and abundant energy…and that way of life is rapidly exhausting the resource it was predicated on.

EVERYTHING is ‘keyed’ to the price of energy.

Worse, this price has no ‘basis in reality’! They can’t charge what’s its really worth or our civilization would collapse right here and now!

The whole capitalist ‘scheme’ of things will dissolve into chaos (not Anarchy, we should only be so lucky!)

FULL STOP! [You have to ‘get’ this!]

Oil is a ‘finite’ resource that we WILL run out of. [That’s a ‘statement of fact’.]

While fossil fuels ARE being created/processed by Mother Nature today, we are using them much faster than the millions of years it will take for the planet to produce more.

Now try to wrap your head around the idea of a world that plunges into pitch blackness from the time that the sun sets until it rises again.

Picture that same world in the dead of winter (in the northern/southern latitudes.) There are neither enough trees nor enough ‘whale oil’ to make those latitudes ‘habitable’.

Are you beginning to comprehend the ‘scope’ of the problem?

Let me refocus you upon a crucial fact: ALL OF THIS is being done by a ‘small handful’ of individuals.

These individuals have already made ‘choices’ which are not ‘favorable’ to you and yours.

In the infamous words of Goldfinger, they don’t expect you to cooperate, they expect you to die in the third world hell-hole they are creating for us.

And there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it…well, ‘legally’ anyway.

I sincerely apologize for inflicting the ‘painful truth’ upon you…you are now free to enjoy your sunny day like none of this is happening.

Worse, I’m willing to bet that most of you will do just that.

Considering the alternatives we really don’t have much of a choice…

Which is to acknowledge that people that don’t have our best interests in mind are making those ‘choices’ for us!

Which, bizarrely, is precisely the way that all civilizations collapse!

This could be fun if it weren’t so friggin’ deadly!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, September 27, 2010

Structural Baloney

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you come across something that confirms you aren’t the only one whose thoughts travel along a certain pathway.

A Simple Plan would solve the unemployment ‘crisis’ tomorrow and in a stunning admission, Paul Krugman AGREES

That ‘miracle’ aside, he also admits the major obstacle to correcting the unemployment situation is the, er, ‘political will’ to do so.

You see, the capitalists wouldn’t have any problem with cutting the workweek in half nor would it be any skin off of their nose if the workforce doubled as a result.

What would frost the capitalist’s cookies is that this is only ‘half’ of the solution…if we are to cut people’s pay in half we must also reduce how much they are required to lay out by a proportionate amount.

The first half is ‘painless’; it is basically twice the number of workers for the same amount of pay. It is the second half that is going to take some, er, ‘belt tightening’ on the part of the, er, ‘profit compensated’ crowd.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the obvious place to ‘cut’ this expense is already ‘reducing itself’…that is the amount of pay the average worker has to shell out for shelter.

Under A Simple Plan, shelter is a ‘gimme’, you NEVER pay for it…conversely, you can never buy nor sell it either. Which is cool because you don’t need to save for ‘retirement’. That’s a ‘gimme’ to. (Bizarrely, retirement was one of the principle arguments for ‘home ownership’, your ‘ever appreciating’ home WAS your retirement account!)

My how some things change!

Anyway, how did our Nobel Laureate do?

All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand — full stop.

Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it’s actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act. [The ‘pittance’ this would ‘cost’ in dollars is but a fraction of what doing nothing will cost in blood!]

In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.

[Were we to ‘address’ our unemployment problem, we would end up ‘shifting’ that problem to ‘exporting nations’, something we must do anyway before the ‘export model’ collapses! (Due to ‘peak energy’.)]

Who are these wise heads I’m talking about? The most widely quoted figure is Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who has attracted a lot of attention by insisting that dealing with high unemployment isn’t a Fed responsibility: “Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs,” he asserts, concluding that “It is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem.” [It’s an obvious ‘lie’ to claim that we are suffering from a ‘skills mis-match’ when many of the most qualified workers are actually suffering from ‘over fifty disease!’]

Now, the Minneapolis Fed is known for its conservative outlook, and claims that unemployment is mainly structural do tend to come from the right of the political spectrum. But some people on the other side of the aisle say similar things. For example, former President Bill Clinton recently told an interviewer that unemployment remained high because “people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open.”

[Good ol’ Bill Jefferson! Best Republican president we’ve had since Lincoln! Don’t let that D after his name fool you, like his sidekick ‘Barrack’, Billy boy is a dyed in the wool Republican from the word go.

Need proof? Look at who he ‘hangs out with’…]

Well, I’d respectfully suggest that Mr. Clinton talk to researchers at the Roosevelt Institute and the Economic Policy Institute, both of which have recently released important reports completely debunking claims of a surge in structural unemployment.

After all, what should we be seeing if statements like those of Mr. Kocherlakota or Mr. Clinton were true? The answer is, there should be significant labor shortages somewhere in America — major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers.

None of these things exist. Job openings have plunged in every major sector, while the number of workers forced into part-time employment in almost all industries has soared. Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category. Only three states, with a combined population not much larger than that of Brooklyn, have unemployment rates below 5 percent. [It should come as a mystery to no one that those three States are A.) Red and B.) Specialize in Banking!]

Oh, and where are these firms that “can’t find appropriate workers”? The National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for many years, asking them to name their most important problem; the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.

So all the evidence contradicts the claim that we’re mainly suffering from structural unemployment. Why, then, has this claim become so popular? [Like he doesn’t know, working as he does for the ‘willful ignorance’ people!]

Part of the answer is that this is what always happens during periods of high unemployment — in part because pundits and analysts believe that declaring the problem deeply rooted, with no easy answers, makes them sound serious.

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

[Funny how a little thing like the prospects of ‘global subjugation’ changed everything, isn’t it?]

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society. [Worse, doing ‘nothing’ is a ‘non-starter’, you can’t leave millions of people out in the cold with no place to turn because they WILL destroy those who abandoned them!]

So what you need to know is that there is no evidence whatsoever to back these claims. We aren’t suffering from a shortage of needed skills; we’re suffering from a lack of policy resolve. As I said, structural unemployment isn’t a real problem, it’s an excuse — a reason not to act on America’s problems at a time when action is desperately needed.


While I find such articles, er, ‘refreshing’, I am also ‘disappointed’ that Mr. Krugman wasn’t more specific about how to solve the crisis.

This is why I repeat that there is ‘No way out’ of this mess under capitalism. It can’t be done…it can be ‘postponed’ by things like Jubilees (debt forgiveness) but this does nothing to correct the underlying problems that brought us here in the first place.

This brings us full circle to the issue of why they don’t ‘forgive’ everybody’s onerous debts tomorrow.

They COULD do it very easily…but there’s a ‘downside’. Just how diligent would you be paying back future debt knowing they were able to ‘walk away’ from what you owed before?

The, er, ‘incentive’ to pay would go right out the window if they let you off the hook free and repossessing most of what you bought on credit is a non-starter!

Nobody is going to want it after you are done with it nor would they be willing to pay half price for used junk!

So even a Jubilee is, er, ‘problematic’…sets a bad ‘precedent’. Worse, how long would it be before people started ‘demanding’ Jubilees?

Now the whole idea of ‘credit’ goes right out the window and we are faced with the daunting prospects of a ‘gift economy.’ This could very rapidly erode the ‘work ethic’ and result in…you guessed it, another highway that leads directly to ‘economic collapse’!

Naturally, the purpose of these little ‘thought experiments’ is to illuminate rather than to confuse.

A.S.P. provides a concrete method for addressing the ‘population factor’ which has become more ominously labeled the ‘surplus population’ by die-hard capitalists.

Just another reason why capitalism should be abandoned as soon as possible!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Criminal Enterprise

Greetings good citizen,

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Two hundred and thirty plus years ago the founders of this nation revolted against what they considered a criminal regime. [While loosely held in check by the bankers and merchants, the Royals were a law unto themselves…]

Subtract the Royals and what have you got? You’ve got the bankers and the merchants playing ‘Guardians of Justice’ for everybody except themselves…for they can do no wrong.

While some wonder openly if we are headed down the path taken by Japan, it is not a meaningless question to ask if we aren’t more likely to find ourselves in Mexico’s lawless predicament?

Which is to point out that there isn’t a lot of difference between a Banana Republic and a nation run by outlaws.

No irony should be lost on the fact that one of the, er, ‘side effects’ of the Reagan Revolution is how everybody who was anybody suddenly started acting like they were ‘connected’.

Well, good citizen, maybe it was more than an act…

Behind the scenes many Washington bureaucracies were, er, ‘cleaned out’. A lot of old time civil servants were ‘shown the door’ and, totally against civil service hiring rules, new people took their place.

So thorough was this ‘house cleaning’ that we still have Reagan/Bush appointees in power today.

Regardless, the point is that since the ‘Reagan Era’ our government has ceased to ‘work’.

This is the outcome of electing people who don’t want government looking over their shoulders.

Understand that the people who don’t want the government watching them ARE criminals!

Now that we have a government run by criminals, how do we get rid of them?

You can’t vote them out. Many aren’t ‘elected’.

This is what the conservatives don’t fucking get.

The government exists to protect the average person from the ones that refuse to obey the rules.

If you listen to the run of the mill conservative, all they do is bitch about the rules (even the ones that aren’t enforced!)

In fact the conservative would LOVE to live in a world where there were no rules, that way if you didn’t do what you were told, the pricks would be free to kill you!

Put that shoe on the other foot and they’d be the first ones howling to form a posse to hunt your murdering ass down!

Because you know it’s OK if you’re a Republican!

If we lived in a conservative world, quitting time wouldn’t be until they said it was quitting time and if you don’t like it, don’t come back!

Oh yeah, no breaks and no lunch, you’d have to ‘eat on the fly’ and you’d probably get the ‘hairy eyeball’ no matter when you decided to sneak a few bites!

Oh yeah, if you didn’t inherit a business from your father, you couldn’t start one on your own. There’s only so much market share to go around and their kids will need as much as they can get there hands on.

You see, you don’t have what it takes. You weren’t ‘born to rule’ like they were.

Yeah, they’re ‘special’ and you’re not.

Wait for it…here it comes, you know what’s next!

It’s ‘God’s will!’

That’s what makes them so special…God told them personally that they were special, you just ask him yourself if you don’t believe me!

What’s that, God don’t ‘talk’ to you?

Just proves I’m special!

P.S. by the way good citizen; we have another term for people who hear voices inside their head, we call then psychotic! [There’s nobody inside your head but you!]

Haven’t I been telling you right along that conservatism has been proven to be a mental disorder?


Well good citizen, when the sham that passes for our legal system shuts down what will be left? We will have what they had in the old days, ‘self-appointed’ judges, juries and executioners all rolled onto one. All predicated on how ‘bad’ these self-styled bad-ass wannabes thought they were.

Naturally, no matter how bad you think you are there’s always someone somewhere who’s tougher and has the requisite balls to prove it.

It is only a matter of time until you meet your match.

Sadly, dickhead is incapable of wrapping his mind around anything longer term than the next ten minutes.

And sometimes the challenger is actually inferior to dickhead so dickhead comes out on top, making him even more insufferable. Which only serves to shorten the time until the next challenger darkens his doorstep.

Talk about being your own worst enemy!

Sorry, sort of went off track there…I was going to lead you down the path the poor Mexican civilian is currently facing.

Somebody takes it into their head that they want you to pay them, just a little, to protect you from the ‘bad people’.

Naturally, you pay taxes, that’s what the cops are for…so you tell big and creepy to screw or you’ll call the cops on him!

He just grins and breaks your nose…just to teach you a ‘lesson’.

So you go to the cops and swear out a complaint. The cops go out and drag big and ugly back to the station. What makes you nervous is all of a sudden the cops keep asking if you are SURE this is the guy who slugged you after he tried to shake you down.

They also ask if you are SURE you want to prosecute this guy? They might even suggest its not a ‘good idea’, if you know what’s good for you.

You’re ‘sure’ and yes, you will press charges.

Then the cops’ hit you with the clincher…do you have any witnesses?

Um, you think back and you realize there wasn’t anybody around who could say for sure what was going on. The big guy kept what he wanted quiet and you’re pretty sure nobody saw him slug you. (You’re also pretty sure if someone did see; they’d be reluctant to back you up.)

Big and ugly grins at you…he knew what he was doing and he also knows what the cops are going to do…nothing. You can’t prove he is the one who slugged you!

They ‘cut him loose’ before you astonished eyes and guess who is waiting for you outside the police station…

Yep, and now he wants double!

So you pay up. All the way home the only thing on your mind is where you are going to get your hands on an untraceable weapon and where you can dump the body so it will never be found.

Because that’s what you do when the law fails. You have to ‘fix’ things yourself.

But hey, most of us don’t have enough for a gorilla to bother with us, it’s not worth his while and he knows if he screws with people as desperate as he is, someone will inevitably ‘whack him’ rather than keep paying.

Then again, some of them really are ‘stupid’…which is neither here nor there.

Someone ‘leaning’ on you is just a remote possibility, right along with some chooch trying to squeeze some juice out of you for soaking up their shade (a common practice in Somalia.)

No, your real troubles have materialized on a front so far off your radar that you don’t even realize you’ve been ‘victimized’.

Let’s start with your ‘retirement funds’. You ‘invest’ a portion of your paycheck in a mutual fund hoping to reap a good return so you can retire ‘comfortably’…all the while knowing that investment involves ‘risk’.

You are TOLD that this risk is limited to business going ‘soft’ and profits falling to negligible levels or the investment not selling as well as it has in the past.

What you aren’t told is the risk that the creators of the investment vehicle don’t intend to do more than pocket your money and tell you it was lost! This too is a legitimate risk of investing.

And there ain’t a fucking thing you can do about it.

Good luck finding a lawyer willing to take these guys to court. It ain’t gonna happen.

Don’t get me wrong, you won’t find an attorney/law firm that will refuse the case, they’ll just bleed you dry until you give it up!

Theoretically, you can sue the law firm that takes your money and fails to produce results in a reasonable amount of time…but now we’re dancing in the realm of ‘what is reasonable’.

Did I mention that all money is funny?

Do you think Mr. Obama ‘had’ the 700+ billion to fund the stimulus program? Of course he didn’t… but he did have the power to cause that debt to be created!

Same deal with the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Mr. Bush didn’t ‘have’ the money to fund either ‘adventure’, he just went ahead and did it.

While there is all sorts of claims that we ‘borrowed’ that money from the Chinese (among others) that didn’t slow us down for a moment…nor will it in the future.

Which leaves us in a pretty interesting position, considering what’s going on in Cuba lately…

But I digress.

A nation full of criminals good citizen, what are we going to do?

Do we roll over and play dead or do we ‘clean house’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head, (But I’m not really here, it’s still you!)

Gegner

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Overload!

Greetings good citizen,

The markets are up nearly 200 points (again, for no discernable reason) as of noon today, global markets spiked up as well at what appears to be around the same time the NYSE opened today. Why do you suppose that is?

Must be something about that NYSE that has an, um, ‘encouraging effect’ on markets around the world.

Worse, if you look at the ‘ticker’ these multiple, diverse markets all (bizarrely) move in ‘lock-step’.

Although this is attributed to their measuring the same things in vastly different currencies (although Italy remains something of a riddle.)

Which is not to say there aren’t others. The ‘B’ in BRIC stands for Brazil whose markets run around 68,000…left to our imaginations is 68,000 what?

Japan, the world’s (now) third largest economy runs in the 9,000 neighborhood. The thing to keep in mind is the Yen is worth one US cent, so what does that 9,000 on the Nikkei mean?

The world’s ‘strongest’ economy (or so it used to be) hit the 10,800 mark this morning, still a few trillion shy of its 14,400 high of 2007…

While the heavily politicized NBER claims the ‘recession’ ended last summer, there is no proof of that.

These ‘numbers’ are just that…numbers, numbers that aren’t related to anything. They don’t ‘reflect’ your retirement savings nor do they indicate ‘robust’ economic activity (because there isn’t any.)

So why are they where they are? It’s political eyewash used to put the Rubes to sleep. If the truth be told good citizen, you’d lynch your local mayor and keep on marching until you reached Washington.

ALL Politicians suck! (And under A Simple Plan that job classification will be done away with! There will be no more ‘elections’ of people who could care less what YOU think!)

If you want the job done right, you have to do it yourself!

Anyway…(didn’t get around to finishing this yesterday so here we go.)

Seriously good citizen, the stock market is a sham and you can’t believe a word that comes from the MSM.

The ‘economy’ is better described as a ‘slave market’ (where basically if you aren’t doing something that makes some rich asshole richer, you don’t have a fucking job) so just what the fuck are we doing?

Sadly, the answer to that one is we’re doing what it takes to get by.

Which is really fucking pathetic.

Things are like they are due to the gross mis-management of our self-appointed ‘betters’.

Time to ‘throw the bums out’, literally!

It won’t take a lot of ‘encouragement’ once the ball gets rolling. The first step is always the hardest.

The tough part is always stopping the slaughter before it goes too far…and most of the time it is stopped before it has gone far enough. (Disturbingly, both sides think this way.)

Which is to point out that what’s coming is just a continuation of an old, long running conflict between the people and those who think they were born to rule over them.

Which is another way of saying they have been, er, ‘taught’ to have a serious mental disorder.

Some of you might harbor the same suspicion about my humble self, leaving you to ponder the frightening concept of normal being whatever the majority finds acceptable…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Question

Greetings good citizen,

The question without a good answer remains whether or not a significant segment of the population is really that stupid?

What does it say for our nation when one of the two main political parties can keep winning votes by parroting the same ineffective campaign promises for decades?

Sure, it’s what (stupid) people want to hear but are we really THAT stupid?

Naturally, we’re asking the wrong question.

This is not proof that a majority of our society suffers from a terminally low IQ, the problem is ‘gullibility’.

We are only too ready to believe that there is indeed ‘a majority’ of stupid people.

This is how elections get ‘stolen’…because we are also too ready to believe ‘the worst’ about our fellow citizens, that they would act ‘irresponsibly’ in the voting booth.

Sure, you don’t have to look too hard to find a ‘bonehead’ who actually believes that cutting taxes (more than they already have) will, er, ‘stimulate investment’.

BOTH political parties have SLASHED taxes (mostly for the very rich) and what passes for our economy has continued its 'death spiral' throughout this timeframe.

While you can still find a couple of clueless morons (who back-off immediately if you cross examine their, er, ‘implanted beliefs.’) They only parrot these stupid beliefs because, surprise, surprise, they’re gullible too! They’re too weak-minded to figure out that Rush Limbaugh is full of shit all by themselves.

You don’t really believe all of those people voted for a second rate movie actor TWICE, do you?

I didn’t then and I still don’t today.

Sadly, it is your willingness to believe it that has made it so.

Imagine what might have happened if someone (and we have no idea just who, which SHOULD scare you because in the end there isn’t anyone in a position to do so) ‘contested’ the outcome of the 1980 presidential election.

We all know how ‘trustworthy’ the corporate owned MSM is…they would NEVER keep a scandal like that to themselves…(unless their jobs depended on it.)

I know what you’re thinking…if something like that DID happen they’d never be able to keep it quiet…and you’d be right, IF a lot of people were in on it.

The smaller the number, the easier something like this is to pull off.

In fact, it works so well that they’re still doing it today!

G.O.P. Cites Tax Cuts and Health Care as Main Focus


We can only marvel that the GOP is campaigning against what is essentially ‘Romney Care’ or how they can demonize a healthcare plan that is virtually indistinguishable from the one the GOP Governor of Massachusetts implemented before exiting stage right to run for president in 2008.

Then there is the ‘tax cut’ thing…like cutting taxes has worked so well in the past.

Hell, Bush gave away trillions in tax breaks and the economy is worse than it’s ever been.

Is this due to Bush somehow not being a ‘true conservative’ or is this due to the sheer lack of opportunity out there for investors?

Think about it good citizen, what would you ‘invest’ in considering the fact that everybody is broke (and the ones who aren’t broke don’t need/already have whatever it is you’re selling…)

No matter what you did, you’d lose.

So more ‘tax cuts’ would do what, exactly?

It would give investors more money that they didn’t have anywhere to put!

So much for the ‘Party of (bankrupt) Ideas’

Are people REALLY that stupid or is the real problem our willingness to BELIEVE they are?

THAT is the QUESTION…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Creeping Death

Greetings good citizen,

So far it has been quite the news cycle…albeit one where we (once again) ask ourselves where has this fucktard been/what planet is that moron on?

Which is to say on what planet did the recession end and where, precisely, did the housing market improve?

You want a dose of reality good citizen? I’ve got your reality for you right here!

[Hat tip: Financial Armageddon]

The Public Assistance Cycle

Even Decades before the financial crisis struck, many people were living from paycheck to paycheck, hurt by stagnant incomes, the rising cost of essential goods and services, and widespread risk-shifting by employers.

Now that the "recovery" is well underway, a post at the Wall Street Journal's Real-Time Economics blog, "Watching Wal-Mart at Midnight," suggests that a growing number of Americans are having to cope with an even more depressing reality:

Bill Simon, CEO of Wal-Mart’s U.S. business, at a Goldman Sachs conference last week, on behavior at a Walmart store around midnight at the end of a month:

“The paycheck cycle we’ve talked about before remains extreme. It is our responsibility to figure out how to sell in that environment, adjusting pack sizes, large pack at sizes the beginning of the month, small pack sizes at the end of the month. And to figure out how to deal with what is an ever-increasing amount of transactions being paid for with government assistance.

“And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it’s real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight. When electronic — government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

“And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours — come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.”


Every once in a while you come upon an article that tells it like it is. Are we talking ‘throngs’ of people here (where the police are called in for ‘crowd control duty’?)

No, but I’d imagine it’s more than just a handful and, as the article explains, their behavior tells the story.

If we were to play ‘quiz show’ with these people we’d probably hear something that sounds disturbingly like ‘Tales from the Dark side’.

I’d posit the most common driver of the ‘midnight shopper phenomenon’ is theft. A close second would be extortion/substance abuse, with one being driven by the other.

If only our straight-laced public administrators distributed ‘vouchers’ for commonly abused substances this theft/misappropriation of ‘easily fenced’ nutritional assistance would cease…or at least slow down.

Naturally, this discussion leads directly to the heavily contested battleground of ‘who’ should be ‘helped’ and what we can expect in return for that ‘help’.

Much more heavily contested is the question of ‘how much help is enough?’

We just recently asked if the unemployed over fifty will ever return to, er, ‘rewarding employment’.

Remember, if you can’t live on what the job pays it is not your employer’s problem, it’s YOURS!

Now ask yourself if this is an ‘equitable’ arrangement? (Considering your employer’s pay is the ‘difference’ between what he pays you and what he can reap from the marketplace for the product of your labor.)

Why should he be allowed to pocket all of that money?

Worse, if your employer can’t make ten times what he pays you from your labor, he can’t afford to keep you!

Now do you think you deserve a ‘bigger cut’?

Naturally, the ‘rule of ten’ only applies to production personnel; the support staff’s (the higher paid ‘brains’ of the operation) salary comes out of the soaking the ‘paycheck peasant’ takes.

Key to ‘A Simple Plan’ is EVERYBODY gets a paycheck, period! NOBODY gets to ‘sell’ anybody anything…because there is NO CASH and there is no way to transfer funds between individuals.
If you want to ‘gift’ something to somebody, knock yourself out…but it had damn well better be ‘yours’ to give or you’re in a heap of trouble (that will likely be ‘terminal’.)

Yes, one of the unfortunate outcomes of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system will be the ‘we don’t screw around’ ethic that replaces it.

If anything about your interactions are even slightly ‘underhanded’, you may be forced to ‘defend your existence’…

After decades of ‘anything goes’ the pendulum will inevitably swing in the opposite direction, where one will be forced to take great pains to insure everything attached to them is crystal clear and perfectly transparent.

Until people ‘calm down’ even the slightest hint of ‘impropriety’ will be enough to condemn you to ‘death; most hideous’.

Understand; this is not, ‘my doing’. It is not one of the design features incorporated into A Simple Plan.

If Justice is to be restored it must be restored across the board.

By necessity, positions of ‘public trust’ will be under greater scrutiny than ever before.

The ‘Fourth Estate’ will be ‘liberated’ from its bond of silence toward advertisers as well as being ‘freed’ from the muzzle of faux government.

[Media will be one of the twelve ‘Divisions’ that constitute ‘government’. No other division will be able to ‘muzzle’ it.]

So we have a ‘word of warning’ to the future ‘winners’ of the only ‘useful competitions’. That word is; we’re watching you!

The journalists of tomorrow will once more become the ‘guardians of truth’ as opposed to the ‘scribes of lies’ we are saddled with today.

While it is hardly ‘utopia’ it is a lot better than what we’ve got.

Freedom isn’t free.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

White Underclass...

Greetings good citizen,

Were you as shocked as I was yesterday when they announced that the ‘Great Recession’ ended last September?

Sort of redefines the term ‘Don’t get your hopes up’…

Which brings us full circle to the issue facing our society: Is this whole thing over just because they say its over?

As I stated at the onset of this ‘latest’, er, ‘re-sizing’ of the economy, the…fucking cocksuckers who are bleeding us dry are doing just fine, at our expense.

The ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ moment here is this shit ain’t gonna end until we put a stop to it!

What part of ‘All economies are Local’ don’t these assholes get?

Maybe I’m asking the wrong question here…does it ‘feel like’ the recession is ‘over’?

For those of you who have made it this far without receiving a foreclosure notice from your mortgage holder, you might be inclined to think so.

Naturally, there is a huge difference between ‘hoping’ the worst is past and ‘knowing’ things won’t get worse.

So, what do you ‘know’ good citizen?

You ‘know’ that absolutely nothing has been done to rebalance the global economy. So from that you can deduce with a reasonable degree of confidence that the ‘worst’ is yet to come.

What you have no idea of is just how much worse it can get.

Famine leads to plague and plague leads to looting [weird how ‘contagion’ can be a deterrent to law enforcement. Rule one of policing is they don’t want to die!]

Cops handle people with blood born pathogens every day…change that to airborne pathogens like the Bubonic plague and the whole equation changes!

Never mind the fact that cops would be ‘reluctant’ to, er, ‘process’ someone with a potentially fatal disease, they most certainly don’t want to share their workspace [the local lock-up] by bringing in an infected felon.

Better for everybody to let the disease do it’s job.

Um, the victim (of looting) may not make out too well but its better than the alternative…not that a heartless capitalist would hesitate to sell products that were handled by someone with a deadly virus.

This is where the longstanding US policy of ‘buyer beware’ kind of falls on its face.

But I digress…

There is no plague nor is there a famine (yet.)

However, the topics touched upon here are also reflected in this article from Joe Bageant titled: Bitter Tales from the Massive White Underclass

Like myself, Joe is aware that a large segment of the (formerly) working class considers themselves to be ‘middle class’.

Hell, if you listen to the MSM you’d think there were only two classes…the middle class and the super-rich. These poor slobs know they aren’t ‘super-rich’ so they (not very logically) figure that they’re middle class.

That’s because nobody says squat about the ‘working class’ nor does the MSM actually give a fuck about them. Hell, during the last elections not one candidate even acknowledged the existence of the working class…although some pointed to the ‘working poor’ which is pretty much the same thing.

Sadly, if you work for a paycheck, you’re a ‘peasant’…and most likely you’re too stupid to recognize this.

Anyway, back on the subject:

Since most of you ‘think’ you’re middle class (hell, you got yourself a ‘puter and you’re here on the web so you ‘must be’ better off than them poor folk) it is hard for you to imagine yourself as being a member of the…er, ‘underclass’.

Conservatives (who consider themselves and their fellow conservatives ‘Royalty’) are quick to deny that ‘class’ even exists here in ‘capitalist fantasyland’ where everybody is ‘equal’ and anybody can climb to the top if only they ‘apply’ themselves (while applying copious amounts of ‘grease’ into the right pockets!)

Yessiree Bob! In America, anyone can buy their way to the top and can rise as far as their money will carry them!

Oops, I mean hard work and sweat, yeah, that’s the ticket!

As we are seeing today, lies and bullshit can only carry you so far and we’ve hit the ‘hard stop’ that marks the end of that line.

Some of you will brush this off as cynicism but that does not alter the facts.

Soon the average citizen will be ‘priced out’ of all but the most basic of markets. Their ‘failure’ to maintain their former position will cause ‘the economy’ to shrink even further.

More alarming than the announcement that the ‘Great Recession’ was over was the post on SGS that displayed the glaring discrepancy between the reported 1.1% inflation rate and the ‘true’ inflation rate of 8.5%.

Just how much bullshit will you keep swallowing?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, September 20, 2010

Sign of the Times

Greetings good citizen,

Back in the Spring of this year there was a prediction made that we (humanity as a species) would encounter an, er, ‘event’ that would ‘de-stabilize’ the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

Admittedly, this prediction was made based on ‘Astrology’ AND it had a rather large ‘window’, three months either side of August…so we’re not ‘out of the woods’ yet.

A question that keeps running through the back of my more than a little disturbed mind is whether or not the ‘powers that be’ would let news of any, er, disruption in the flow of goods and services? What do you suppose they’d tell us if we had just off-loaded the last tanker full of oil we were ever going to get?

How the hell do you ‘candy coat’ that sort of calamity?

Um, I suspect things will have, er, ‘fallen apart’ long before anyone has to make that kind of ‘announcement’. A vast majority of us will no longer be able to afford the ‘luxury’ of motor transport in the not too distant future.

Tick-Tock good citizen, how much longer do you think we have?

Is the giant ball of pocket lint that is the ‘American Dream’ coming unraveled as we sit here contemplating the, er, ‘inevitable’?

What happens to said ‘dream’ when you no longer have the means to achieve it?

While many (hell, psychopaths aside) ALL of us have ‘dreamt’ of retiring by the time we were 50, most of us didn’t expect things to turn out like this.

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again


We were ‘supposed to’ make our heap and retire ‘comfortable’. As matters stand, the vast majority of us had the proverbial ‘rug’ pulled out from underneath us.

So the answer to today’s trivia question is: If you’re suffering from ‘over 50 disease’ and you’ve been, er, ‘downsized’ you will NEVER return to ‘well compensated’ employment again.

You can find work but it will be work that doesn’t pay spit. You’ll make money all right but you won’t be able to live on it.

Which, as I have stated repeatedly, is not their problem, it’s YOURS!

Not to put too fine a point on it but ‘The State’ won’t burn their fucking plant down for screwing you over, it up to you to do that!

Or you can just twiddle your thumbs while you cry in your…you can’t afford beer so you’ll probably have to cry into your own lap! And wail (at the top of your lungs) OH POOR ME!

Which will make anyone within earshot holler, ‘Quit yer whining and get a job, you bum!’

Funny how unemployment automatically makes you a ‘bum’…like you had a choice!

Which brings us full circle to the original thought here…if the shit were hitting the fan, would you know it?

You know damn well the MSM won’t report it, hell the whole damn country could be on fire and those assholes wouldn’t admit nuthin’! They might mumble something about ‘arson’ and how the cops were ‘all over it’ despite being clueless…you know the drill.

They’ll arrest their favorite ‘agitator of the moment’ and pin it on him, complete with ‘eyewitness reports’ that put the guy ‘on the scene’ at a dozen separate events at precisely the same moment!

The only question is whether or not they’ll ‘water board’ a confession out of him.

Geez, it’s hard to go down some of these broad ‘avenues to hell’ without coming across like a kook, but it is what it is…

And this brings us to the soft-white underbelly of ‘perception management’, where the ‘truthiness’ of what you’re told is flavored/sweetened to ‘deflect’ likely ‘blow back’.

So, just what does the, er, ‘abrupt termination’ of the careers of people over fifty mean for the future of our, er, civilization?

Nothing to see here, things will be ‘fine’ when YOU turn fifty?

More disturbingly, a lot of people in their early fifties are the parents’ of teenagers. Hell some, er, ‘unwary individuals’ are on their ‘second families’!

What kind of message do you suppose something like this sends to these kids?

Will it make them ‘stellar employees’ or will they rebel at the idea of working for anyone other than themselves? (And we all know how ‘capitalist utopia’ would royally fuck up the markets of the already wealthy!)

When ‘cooperation’ can no longer be relied upon, it will be abandoned.

From there it is one short step to killing each other on sight.

For one brief moment we would see ‘Libertarian Utopia’ blossom and die. (Because in Libertarian Utopia, you have NO RIGHTS.)

This ‘me, me, me…’ thing is a disease that needs to be eradicated! I doubt we need to ‘loose the hounds’ to find the ‘greed heads’ among us.

This is a crisis that nobody is paying attention to. When the system doesn’t work for everyone, it doesn’t work for anyone…and civilization falls apart.

Too bad Jared Diamond didn’t include this in his book…maybe it will find its way into the next one. (Actually he did, it’s just not ‘in context’ to our current situation.)

Warning! Danger good citizen! (I’d be inclined to write ‘danger Will Robinson’ but some of you might not be old enough to appreciate what is now an obscure reference to the robot on ‘Lost in Space’!)

Yes, this particular article speaks quite clearly regarding what the future holds for, I once again can’t bring myself to call it ‘our’ civilization.

It only takes a few self-centered shitheads to ruin it for all of us.

I keep providing you with, er, unwelcome visions of the future and I wouldn’t blame one of you for not giving what I share here another thought…but that doesn’t alter things a single iota.

It is what it is…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS. Thank heavens for CK Michaelson…he had the ‘intestinal fortitude’ to read the whole ‘Hubbard’ article [posted here yesterday] where he notes in today’s ‘Some Assembly Required’ a wrinkle I missed (because I didn’t read the whole thing):

From: ‘The Party of Ideas’

To: The Unwashed Rabble

Subject: Bright Idea!

Re-fi your underwater note with a new, super-low interest rate (there will be a little ‘kicker’ in there to make this hit on the head ‘palatable’ for the lender.) You’ll enjoy lower payments…BUT your ‘non-recourse’ loan will be converted to a ‘full-recourse’ loan that you can’t ‘walk away’ from!

So once again the ‘Party of Ideas’ demonstrates just whose side they are on.

And these asshats actually believe you’re going to vote for them!

WTF!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Party of Ideas?

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘Party of Ideas’, those bizarrely tone deaf, one trick ponies who are champions of both monarchy and top-down management just don’t stop.

I read the headline of this particular editorial and ‘jumped to the conclusion’ that the authors were conservatives. Who else would posit such a counter-intuitive solution? It is almost as insane as the ‘one size fits all’ solution consistently trotted out by the ‘Party of Ideas’…tax cuts.

I wasn’t at all surprised when I found this in the footer of the article:

Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and the co-author of “Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity,” is the dean of the Columbia Business School, where Chris Mayer is a senior vice dean.


Is it just me or have the ideas put forth by the ‘Party of No’ gotten more bizarre since it became apparent that conservatism is actually a mental disorder?

I skimmed the article and (as usual) was unable to find any ‘concrete’ solutions. This is just one more conservative ‘giveaway’ that proposes making private (investor’s) debts the public’s problem under the guise of putting a ‘floor’ under the housing market.

Logically, if there aren’t any buyers who can afford to pay those prices, you don’t have a market.

Stupid is as Stupid does…

Did I mention that conservatism is now recognized as a mental disorder, treatable with mega-doses of Prozac? (While this may not alter your twisted worldview, you certainly won’t care!)

Anyway, How Underwater Mortgages Can Float the Economy represents the latest and the greatest the ‘Party of Ideas’ has to offer…

Which once again brings us full circle with the fact that the very definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome.

The mantra of ‘tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts’ has resulted in the largest ‘economic desert’ on the planet, you’d think they’d wake up at some point!

Remember good citizen, the Dow ‘Industrials’ standing at 10,600 has no relationship with reality. Like money itself, the number is ‘meaningless’.

Does it strike anyone as odd that the Dow stood at under 1,000 until the (whacko and decidedly ‘ethics challenged’) conservatives regained control of our government?

Worse good citizen is the stock markets were provided as ‘proof’ (often the ONLY proof because all the other outcomes of ‘conservative ideology’ were negative) that conservative values ‘worked’.

Which is to point out the stock market rose robustly while the job market (and payscales) stagnated. Consistently high corporate profits merely proved how ‘captive’ we were to imported goods.

It was (for the conservatives) the best of both worlds, the got to build market share while shedding production costs.

Well Bubba, there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’. We are now suffering the inevitable consequences that come when you ‘fire’ your customer base. (Not that the treasonous bastards responsible will suffer, the third world workers that replaced you can still afford their products!)

This is the ‘beauty’ of Mother Nature not having a cash register. A ‘million dollars’ is the exact equivalent of two cents when the bottom line is ‘it’s free to you! If you get anything at all for it, it’s a win.’

Which, naturally, leads us to the gross ‘mis-management’ of our, er, ‘shared resources’.

But you wouldn’t know anything about that…because you’ve been ‘taught’ (from a very early age) to believe that you ‘own’ nothing you can’t produce a sales slip for.

Understand good citizen, none of the motherfuckers that claim to ‘own’ what we all need to live can produce a ‘valid’ sales slip…not one of them!

We are, for the umpteenth time, approaching a nexus where we can finally correct this glaring deficiency in the management of our species.

But every ‘revolution’ suffers a counter-revolution shortly afterwards and those are the, er, ‘assholes’ who write history.

We have to be more ‘careful’…we don’t have a lot of ‘do-overs’ remaining.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Where's the Beef?

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while I encounter a piece that saves me a ton of writing. What follows isn’t precisely how I’d put it but it is mighty damn close.

Long time readers should be able to pick out the ‘quibbles’ (which are few.)

I tend to just start typing, which makes a lot of my works difficult to follow. The ‘stream of consciousness’ is less than constant, causing the reader to draw upon their ability to ‘filter’ rather frequently.

Sorry, it is a personal weakness that I could correct if I wanted to ‘re-write’ everything I post.

You might want to call this ‘blogger disease’ as I am not the only one who suffers from this, er, ‘tendency to ramble’.

While writing IS re-writing, blogging seldom affords you the luxury of unlimited time.

You just dash these bad boys off and hope the reader can sort most of it out…

Um, anyway…let’s get things back on track here by taking a quick peak at the stock markets, which are, it appears, taking the dive they should have taken yesterday…for the exact same reason as yesterday no less!

The ‘red ink’ is global; although the ‘Thieves Republic’ (USA) is bleeding far less than the exchanges of its, er, ‘vassals’…

Dunno what to make of this but it strikes me that we would be in far worse shape if the ‘head thieves’ didn’t consider these shores home.

You don’t shit in your own backyard. (For very obvious reasons.)

Stock markets aside, where is this ‘crippled economy’ leading us?

If we ask ‘question one’ it leads us to some rather grim assessments:

Where Are The Jobs?

Most Americans don't really care about the economic minutiae that many of us who study the U.S. economy love to pour over. When it comes to the economy, the typical American citizen just wants to be able to get a good job, make a decent living and put bread on the table for the family. For generations, this arrangement has worked out quite well. The U.S. economy has provided large numbers of middle class jobs and the American people have worked hard and have helped this nation prosper like no other.
But now people are starting to notice that something has shifted. Millions of people are looking around and are realizing that the jobs that are supposed to be there are not there anymore. [I would never use this ‘POV’; there is nothing ‘abrupt’ about our current circumstances! This shit has been going on for decades.] The American people are still working hard (and in many cases harder than ever [for less pay!]) but all of that hard work is producing fewer and fewer rewards.

Often politicians will placate voters by telling them that they are working harder and harder for less and less. [Must be a ‘local phenomenon’. I have yet to see a politician cop to ‘me too’ while campaigning.] That tends to ring true with voters because that is a very accurate description of what so many of them are actually experiencing, but what the politicians don't tell us is that they are the ones to blame for the situation that we are in. As millions of jobs become obsolete because of technology and millions of other jobs are shipped overseas, our politicians tell us over and over that we can "compete" with anyone and that if we will just go out and get some more education we can make it happen. But those of us who are extremely over-educated know what a fraud that line is. The truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs for all of us no matter how "educated" we are. This is creating a lot of anger and frustration, and now even the IMF is warning that we will could see "an explosion of social unrest" if high unemployment persists.

But what can be done? You can't force large [private] corporations to hire people. The reality is that there are a couple of huge factors that have brought us to this point. First of all, advanced technology means that big corporations need fewer people to do the same amount of work now. Secondly, the globalization of our economy means that U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool where they are in direct competition with workers who are more than happy to make less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

This all means that the labor of American workers is less valuable to global corporations than it ever has been before. [Funny how the solution to the problem lies in problem itself…eliminate global corporations and you eliminate the problem!] Advanced technology and computers have enabled corporations to operate leaner and meaner. If they do need some old-fashioned muscle for certain tasks they can always run out and set up a facility in some third world nation where they can pay people close to slave labor wages and where they don't have to worry much about taxes, regulations, unions, health benefits or pension plans. [This, ‘indifference’ to the health of society at large is a crime against humanity and it should be prosecuted as such! This is commerce to enrich the owner at the expense of society. These ‘destroyers’ shall be themselves, destroyed.]

What did you think was going to happen when the United States entered into all of these "free trade" agreements with nations around the world that did not have minimum wage laws? [This is where (very misguided) Libertarians defended globalization for lowering prices to the consumer, ignoring the fact that the bulk of consumers double as ‘producers’. The ONLY winners in the global race to the bottom has been the employer/importer, everybody else loses and our civilization is falling apart because of it!]

U.S. corporations are not in existence to provide the American people with jobs. They are in existence to make money. If they can make more money by shipping jobs overseas, then that is exactly what they are going to do. [This is essentially ‘fucked up’ because all ‘corporations’ are ‘chartered’ by the guardians of the public (the government) to serve ‘the public’. If a company ‘harms’ the society that founded it, it faces the revocation of its charter. How many corporations can you think of that are in violation of their charters? Would it be simpler to throw the blanket over the whole mess because all NYSE listed corporations are ‘guilty’?]

According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies skyrocketed 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

Are you starting to see the picture?

Global corporations based in the U.S. have been creating lots of jobs - just not in the United States.

In fact, things only seem to be accelerating.

In 2008 alone, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations fell by 445,500.

In the old days, you could give tax breaks to U.S. firms and that would spur them to do more business and to hire more workers. But today, if U.S. multinationals decide they wish to expand they will just go hire more third world workers and pocket the rest of the profits for themselves. [And who is behind handing out tax cuts to the already rich?]

The reality is that we are facing a very disturbing long-term trend in the United States. Today, over half of all unemployed workers in the United States have been out of work for over six months. In fact, the duration of unemployment in the United States has spiked up to the highest level it has been at since World War II....[It’s even worse than that good citizen, it is worse than its ever been!]

This has created a growing subclass of people in the United States who feel that the system has failed them. The anger and the frustration in the country is rising every day. You can almost feel it. [It’s a ‘tinderbox’ just waiting for a match.]

In fact, the IMF is warning that we are at risk of "an explosion of social unrest" due to this unemployment crisis. [Unemployment is bad enough, it will be when ‘heat or eat’ becomes an issue for tens of millions that haven’t faced this choice yet.]

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently made the following statement at an Oslo jobs summit with the International Labour Federation....

"The labour market is in dire straits. The Great Recession has left behind a waste land of unemployment." [Geez, you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the local media now would you? Are things really worse than they are letting on? You bet they are!]

So exactly what is going to turn that around?

Are millions of jobs going to suddenly hop up and return home from overseas? [No, the answer lies in a shorter workweek/day and a severely reduced level of expenses across the board…all while letting the useless banks go hang!]

Is the U.S. government going to suddenly eliminate a whole raft of taxes and regulations and are U.S. workers going to suddenly become much cheaper?

Is the U.S. trade deficit crisis suddenly going to reverse and turn into huge trade surpluses for the United States?

Of course none of those things is going to happen.

America is going to continue to bleed jobs, wages inside the United States are going to continue to be forced down and the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to deteriorate. [Just understand that this isn’t ‘infinite freefall’ people won’t obliging starve to death without retaliating…then watch out!]

Plus, if the American people don't have good jobs, they can't buy homes. In fact, a growing number of Americans are finding out that they can't even afford the homes they are in right now. CNBC is reporting that the nation's banks repossessed a record number of homes in August.

But for many Americans, a foreclosure is just the beginning of their problems. People are falling out of the middle class at an alarming rate. Approximately 45 million Americans [households, the number of affected individuals is considerably higher!] were living in poverty during 2009. That is an absolutely astounding figure.

The American people are getting mad and faith in the economy is plummeting. According to Gallup, confidence in the economy is way down compared to the same period last year. [Wait until ‘lack of faith’ in the economy becomes lack of faith in the currency!]

So what is going to happen when (not if) things get even worse?

Well, some investors are already anticipating rough times ahead and are flocking to commodities. The price of gold soared to a record intra-day high of $1,276.50 an ounce on Tuesday, and the price of gold and other commodities will probably continue to climb as economies around the world continue to destabilize. [Some are predicting gold to exceed $5,000 an ounce. Personally, human stupidity being what it is, I expect to see gold hit a million dollars an ounce before the gold market collapses into worthlessness.]

These are very, very difficult times that we are moving into. There are not going to be nearly enough jobs for everyone. People you know are going to be unemployed. People you know are going to lose their homes. People you know might even end up living on the streets. [Already there Amigo…we’re already there.]

Just hope that you don't end up being one of them.


Squatting will temporarily ‘ease’ the homeless situation. What’s going to throw the torch onto the bonfire is when people ‘living free’ are unable to scrape up enough to keep their ‘squat’ heated AND keep bread on the table.

These people are already living ‘illegally’ so they don’t want to attract unwanted attention to themselves by stealing fuel oil too (although some will.)

You can see the two edged sword already starting to drop. ‘Cheated’ fuel oil dealers will be on the police to evict squatters from, er, ‘abandoned’ properties.

The police have no place to house these, er, criminals so they will ask the state for assistance. The state can’t house them either…so ‘fuel assistance’ funds will be tapped.

[Although some families with small children will be ‘made an example of’ (arrested and taken into custody)…and this will turn out VERY BADLY for the law enforcement officials involved.]

But (damn it!) I digress…

I will refrain from making any ‘predictions’ regarding this coming winter, if things go to hell it is unlikely the MSM will draw your attention to it.

(Unless it’s ‘unavoidable’…which is bound to happen. Although, some ‘civil actions’ could be disguised as, er, ‘natural disasters’. I suspect this has already happened on more than a few occasions.)

More digressing…sorry.

Just as it is not possible to spend one’s way out of debt, you can’t solve a labor surplus by increasing imports…yet these are the ‘solutions’ our corporate overlords are giving their pet politicians.

What happens when we ‘lose faith’ in charade we call politics?

Stay tuned.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Madhouse!

Greetings good citizen,

It’s always distressing as well as disturbing to see the threat of war looming on the horizon.

Between Cryptogon on one side and Jesse on the other the ‘rumblings’ (of the ground) are becoming increasingly worrisome.

(And I’m sure by now some of you are of the impression that I love to write like this, I don’t. It is not my intention to give you ulcers. I am trying to prepare you for what is coming.)

Anyway, left on the back burner for quite some time has been the US dollar and behind that, the future of ‘fiat currency’ in general.

So far, nothing has happened; the status quo is still in force. On the other side of the table some players are taking a real soaking because nothing has changed.

No irony should be lost on the fact that these players (like the US civilian workforce) have no ‘leverage’. They have to accept the pounding in silence.

You’d think these victims would take their case to court…but the court is in the pocket of the tyrants, so nobody seeks justice from that quarter because they already know the outcome.

Weird, really, to keep bumping into the same problems every time one casts about for a solution…

Although it is only fair to point out there is more ‘design’ here than ‘accident’ going on.

Things are as they were ‘intended’ to be.

Thus does the ‘what are you gonna do about it crowd’ invite war.

Those who block the pathways towards the peaceful resolution of conflict leave the aggrieved no choice.

Let us proceed with the the evidence Jesse provides for our consideration.

Will Europe Join in Promoting the SDR as the Global Reserve Currency?

[I cut the quote from the play bearing the same name: Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224 to reduce wear and tear on your poor, abused eyeballs. Not to mention the unnecessary bruising of your already tired mind…]

China and Russia and some of the other developing nations have been proposing a reformulated SDR, with less US dollar content, a broader representation of currencies, and the inclusion of gold and silver, as a suitable replacement for the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

The US and UK are opposing the SDR as replacement to the US dollar as the new global reserve currency. They prefer to delay and postpone the discussions, and to maintain the status quo for as long as is possible to support their primacy in the financial markets. Control of the money supply is a huge hand on the levers of financial and political power. [ Here we see the ‘creators’ of the mythical ‘cheaper there’, the real ‘currency manipulators’ trying to keep their ‘Ponzi Scheme’ floating. The really disturbing question here is how far the manipulators will go to maintain ‘dollar hegemony’? Will they go to war?]

It will be most interesting to see where the European Union comes out on this issue, especially in light of the recent drubbing that their banks have taken via dodgy dollar assets and a vicious dollar short squeeze, alleviated by a rescue from the Federal Reserve. It could have gone otherwise, and that provides things to think about. No one wishes to be at the mercy of a small group of unelected financial engineers who are closely aligned with an equally small set of Anglo-American banks operating with a somewhat opaque discretion.

One hears things. A deal being offered to Germany by the financial interests, for example, as a counterbalance to sentiment for greater latitude and independence in the EU. The lines of discussion move, and sometimes blur. Currency wars are the continuation of diplomacy, and possibly a revival of the cold war, by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz. And a chilling fog is rolling over the landscape. [There’s that damn ‘cloak of national security’ again! We really should SHOOT anyone who invokes ‘national security’ to keep their underhandedness secret from a trusting public…]

This is just the latest event in an unfolding macro change I have been calling Currency Wars after the Chinese best seller authored by Song Hongbing in 2007. I viewed it as the definitive spike in the theory of the end of history by Fukuyama. [Original article has links to both references…]

It will continue to proceed slowly, at least for now, but such events tend to accelerate and sometimes dramatically as they progress. However, the longer-term implications for a change to the de facto Bretton Woods arrangement, in place since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, are enormous and yet little remarked by conventional economists. It has all the hallmarks of a classic conflict yet unfolding. [Left unknown here is whether or not the peaceful resolution to this issue will act to ‘correct’ the imbalances in the global economy or if will it make matters worse? There is still a huge ‘surplus population’ out there with no place to go. A Simple Plan puts these people to work, these assholes want to kill them!]

Rather than standing fast on an unsustainable status quo that serves the special interests of a wealthy few, the US might be well served to reform its banks, and balance its economy once again between service and industry, and stand once again for independent freedom and the common good, rather than narrow power and greed of the monied interests and their assistants.


Well, wouldn’t it be ‘nice’ if our corporate overlords wanted to protect and preserve civilization as we have come to know it…as opposed to throwing it into its own cesspool, which has been ‘the plan’ for a number of decades now.

Perhaps Jesse feels honor bound to give the government of the United States the benefit of the doubt…and maybe he just wanted to give us all something to laugh about!

Yes good citizen, if we shift our attention back to the MSM (keeping in mind that they are a pack of, er, paid schills) we see that the ‘has nothing to do with nothing’ stock market is once again defying gravity.

You’d think a, er, device that measures the wealth of society’s richest would have something to do with reality but these days it seems all money is ‘funny’.

The markets opened in negative territory only surge right up to positive ground on damn disappointing reports from the manufacturing sector.

Like I said, it doesn’t have to make sense…all you need to know is the junk in your pocket is being diluted, big time.

It won’t be long before you’ll spend your paycheck as fast as you can, the value of your money will be dropping so quickly.

This, good citizen, is the ‘hyper-inflation’ you’ve been warned about…what libertarian assholes keep telling you is ‘impossible’, they’re wrong!

ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

Being anchored to ‘nothing’ doesn’t help matters…(and if you anchored it to gold it would still be ‘worthless’!)

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was trying to start a stampede and scare the crap out of the peasants!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Freedom is the state of being free...

Greetings good citizen,

One of the quickest ways to get branded a whacko is to start pointing to a conspiracy…and, doubtless, there are a lot of ‘whackos’ out there who see a conspiracy behind pretty much anything and everything.

Society itself is a collection of organizations and what is a conspiracy but an organization that isn’t particularly ‘forthcoming’ about its agenda?

Which is not to say that all conspiracies hide what they are up to…

So what is it that makes a conspiracy a nefarious, underhanded collection of ‘likeminded individuals’?

At the end of the day we could call political parties conspiracies…(even if they merely conspire to defraud their members into believing ‘they’ are being ‘represented’.)

You get my point, life, as well as society, is full of conspiracies.

Everybody has an agenda and not everybody is forthcoming about what that agenda is.

The dividing line between ‘personal wish list’ and a conspiracy is collusion.

Once birds of a feather get together to work toward a mutually beneficial goal you have a full-blown conspiracy on your hands.

Again, not all conspiracies are ‘bad’.

But our experience tells us that most conspiracies don’t bode well for those not in on the, er, ‘secret’…

Yes, it’s the ‘underhanded’ part of a conspiracy, that hooray for me, fuck you aspect that makes us all uneasy when we suspect that others are ‘conspiring against us.’

If you let this sort of shit bother you, you will quickly become neurotic…but just because you’re paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you…

This is why it is astonishing that so many ‘serious minded’ people choose to ignore our obvious ‘social interdependence’ (most of us won’t take a piss alone) and quickly ‘pooh-pooh’ conspiracies.

Which lead us to an arena that is just bursting with mutually beneficial situations (that have long required legislative action to keep ‘in check’…until recently.)


The Marriage of Mercantilism and Corporatism: When Free Trade Is Not 'Free'

Something not commonly acknowledged by history teachers is the constant, er, struggle to prevent society crippling monopolies from strangling the world’s (alleged) democracies in their sleep.

What your teacher didn’t tell you (because nobody told them) is that this battle, democracy almost always loses.

There is only so much ‘market share’ and ‘competition’ is…er, counterproductive.

Repeatedly throughout history, competition has been ‘faked’. Avis may have ‘tried harder’ than Hertz but it didn’t matter because they were both owned by ITT.

Naturally, this is tangential to our current situation, a ‘conspiracy’ to, what’s the PC term for it…‘right size’ the ‘surplus population’ and to shrink the economy down to a ‘more sustainable’ size.

The single largest problem facing society since its inception is the ‘status quo’ who quite literally want to ‘freeze’ both time and progress at some imagined ‘ideal’ level.

Which is to point out that ‘leadership’ is a very misunderstood concept…

It is not leadership if your sole desire is to stay right where you are.

Yet this is ‘conservatism’, leadership that takes you to where you already are.

What these conservative morons don’t tell you is that you are marked for death.

To preserve their ‘perfect world’, you must die.

They don’t see the point in ‘wasting’ perfectly good resources on, er, expendable people.

But if you are part of the ‘reality based’ community, you don’t see this.

Nor will you see it…until it is too late to do anything about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, September 13, 2010

Bowling for Columbine

Greetings good citizen,

I finally got to watch ‘Bowling for Columbine’ last night…naturally, didn’t see the whole thing but I saw enough to get the gist of what Michael Moore was trying to say.

And in the end I was somewhat puzzled why he didn’t arrive at the ‘obvious conclusion’…

Naturally, that conclusion may only be ‘obvious’ to my humble self.

What did you take away from the end of that documentary?

Were you disappointed that Charlton Heston didn’t have any answers as to why our culture is so violent?

Why do you suppose it is that the citizens of the US are so much more likely than the people of other nations to blow your ass away than to look at you?

What makes us Murikans sooo ‘edgy’?

Could it be the ‘fuck you, pay me’ culture?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, 99% of all homicide revolves around money.

A man shoots his cheatin’ spouse, he ain’t even concerned about her ‘giving it up for someone else…he shoots her because he’s the one that’s been paying for it and there she is, giving it away!

It’s all about money and there ain’t a damn thing funny…except the money itself!

Still, this doesn’t explain why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to pick up a gun and go on a rampage against a world they have no use for because that world has no use for them…

More than a little disturbing was ‘commentary’ offered on NPR today about how our ‘educational system’ is failing…I’ll paraphrase since focus of the show was on ‘minorities’ but essentially this is so far off the mark as to be laughable.

The ‘linkage’ between education and employment is so spurious as to be beyond comical.

The only thing you need a college degree for is to prove that you can afford one.

Which is to point out what is already obvious to most of us (and you can ask virtually anyone in the ‘real world’ (who isn’t employed in the ‘Sciences’) just how often they actually ‘use’ what they learned in college.


Most people will answer ‘never’.

Yes good citizen, even engineers will tell you they didn’t learn anything ‘practical’ in college…it is impossible to actually produce parts the way they teach you to design them!

Yet our ‘salvation’ (under capitalism) is for 80% of the population to obtain a college degree.

To do what? God only knows…

Do you ‘need’ a college degree to pick up trash? No, but if you don’t have one in the future it is unlikely you will get the job (because the asshole who ‘screens’ the applicants will toss your resume/application the moment they see you left that part of your history blank.)

Worse good citizen, we don’t have to wait until some highly competitive future to see this kind of idiot behavior, they do it today!

Yeah good citizen, if you want to work in the future (at all) you need that sheepskin (if only to prove you’re ‘motivated enough’.)

In case any of you haven’t noticed, this is just one more aspect of our ‘fuck you, pay me!’ economic system that totally pisses me off.

It is useless bullshit and a ‘convenient excuse’ for clueless politicians and insecure educators.

It would be suicidal to admit that capitalism is incapable of providing jobs for even a fraction of the working aged population.

But that’s the truth.

Retracing our steps back to the question of why are citizens of the US so ‘prone to violence’?

If everything you were taught to believe turned out to be a lie, you’d be pretty pissed off too!

The anger we see manifested in the streets (and occasionally in the nation’s workplaces) is the direct result of the lie that is capitalism.

You will NEVER prosper working for somebody else.

Worse, there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ for everyone to have one (never mind a couple or three of ‘em!)
The ‘New Deal’ was based on the concept that you would do your part and the employer would in turn ‘take care’ of you.

Well good citizen, I think it is fair to say the ‘owners’ have ‘reneged’ on their part of the bargain.

So we, in turn, should renege on ours…we need to ‘do away’ with private property. The greedy can’t be trusted to act in the public interest.

We have hundreds of years of experience that proves this is true.

We don’t have another planet to divvy up so we have to ‘share’ this one.

If you don’t want to share, get the hell off!

There’s no ‘I’ in either ‘us’ or ‘we’ and together is the only way our species will survive…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, September 12, 2010

This land's not your land...

Greetings good citizen,

I used to relish Sundays. Sunday was the day I could read my favorite editorials written by folks who held surprisingly similar worldviews to my own…

We all admire people who agree with us, it’s only natural.

So what can be said when you no longer see ‘eye to eye’ with your favorite commentators?

Even this is not a ‘fair’ indictment. I agree wholeheartedly with today’s piece , it’s just that I think he’s ‘wasting his breath’, ‘flogging a dead horse’ if you will.

This does not diminish my respect for this individual’s talent, it merely perturbs me that he is forced to (by his ‘terms of employment’), er, ‘pretend’ that our political system functions ‘as advertised’.

Ironically, this same issue was the topic of today’s ‘On the Media’ broadcast on NPR, how Hurricane Katrina ushered in the ‘sympatico’ talking head.

I tend to think the RWNM has more to do with this unseemly turn of events because they were the ones who began to openly demonize those who didn’t see things ‘their way’.

Seems to me ‘journalism’ lost its ‘objectivity’ shortly after the Reagan Revolution…pointing to Katrina is just more smoke to obscure an unsettling bit of piracy.

For once again we encounter stories like this which are told in a way that ‘masks’ the seriousness of the problem.

Sure the ‘individual narrative’ lets us ‘feel the victims pain’ but it hides the fact that this particular victim is NOT Alone! There are millions more out there and huge percentages can’t find help period.

The resources available were already operating at maximum capacity BEFORE the crisis. To say they are ‘overwhelmed’ now is to severely understate the problem!

Worse, the article itself seriously understates the scope of the crisis. We once again have the same variety of ‘inference’ at play when the media tells us that 40 million Americans are on ‘food assistance’…people get the impression the media is talking about individuals! 40 million is not individuals; it’s families/households!

There are 117 million households in the US (and nearly 15 million have been foreclosed upon…but I digress) so the number of people receiving foodstamps is much larger than 40 million!

Out of our population of 300 million, we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million. (Not everyone on food assistance is also unemployed/homeless.)

Which is a much larger number than the 40 million the media, er, admits to.

Not to put too fine a point on it good citizen but how much do you ‘love’ the land of the free and the home of the brave now?

And we owe it all (in more ways than one) to the ‘Stupid Capitalists’.

I know I sound like a broken record but sometimes you just can’t repeat your main point often enough.

We live in a ‘broken nation’ that we desperately need to fix.

An monumental task made that much more daunting by the fact that we don’t agree on what needs to be fixed…

Sadly, this is due largely to ‘perception management’ spewed by the fucktards who keep you focused on illegal immigrants and tax cuts for the already rich!

How fucked up is that good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, September 10, 2010

The price of loyalty...

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘double dip’(recession) , like the Koran burning party down in Fla on 9/11, is off, at least for now. (Although preacher Terry is now saying that he’s been duped!)

Talk about your cluster fucks, even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act by trying the uniquely capitalist method of ‘buying’ a peaceful outcome.

What most of us should find, er, amusing is that the Muslims have not threatened to ‘retaliate’ by burning bibles (or maybe they have and nobody cares…)

Would this turn into a competition of sorts? If you burn 20 Korans, we’ll burn forty Bibles!

(Or vice versa, so far the ‘whackjob’ in this overblown media circus appears to be the Florida pastor.)

You all know that somebody, somewhere, probably burns a Koran/Bible EVERY FUCKING DAY just to make themselves feel better. The difference being it isn’t something the media latches on to (although the fucktards would if somebody were stupid enough to admit it, just for the ‘tingle’ it would give their readers! That’s how low we/they have sunk!)

Which belabors the obvious, that three quarters of the asshats sitting at the editors desk across the country should (at the very least) be fired on the spot.

This is probably ‘unfair’ because chances are good that most of these poor slobs are only guilty of being ‘spineless’, which is punishment enough…push come to shove.

Their superiors, on the other hand, should be drawn and quartered!

But exile is fundamentally the same thing, without the mess, so I’d settle for that.

But naturally, I digress…

We were on the subject of ‘double dips’ and how this most recent one has been (for the fourth or fifth time) ‘narrowly avoided’.

I’d tend to agree but for a different rationale entirely.

You have to have a ‘recovery’ BEFORE you can ‘slip back in’ to recession.

Since the current downturn is going into its third year, we aren’t really ‘double dipping’, this is just a continuation of what started three years ago.

Alas, it is time once more to shift mental gears as we join Jesse of Crossroads CafĂ© fame for a look at what passes for economic recovery in the ‘war between the classes’.

Soaring Corporate Profits As US Worker Pay for Productivity Hits Record Lows

Two sets of charts tell the story.

The problem is that when workers are pressed to the wall on pay they lose the ability to consume without taking on debt [as has happened repeatedly over the past twenty years.] And at some point the debt leverage mechanism for consumption breaks down.

Perhaps the problem is related to the one Wall Street is now confronting. How do you continue on in business after having impoverished, alienated, or driven away most of your clientele in the heat of a short term greed enabled by a corrupted political and regulatory system? [Honestly good citizen, we are up to our ears in criminals! Worse, most of them are ‘appointed’!]

Those who were around in the late 1970's will recall the absolute disrepute in which equities were held by the public after the grinding bear market of 1973-74. Pit traders spent the better part of the day practicing their origami skills, for lack of serious 'outside participation.' Skinning each other when you have run out of greater fools is truly a zero sum game.


Sadly good citizen, there are more than ‘tricks’ laying in wait for us on the road ahead.

There will be blood, and lots of it. The name of the game will be minimizing the amount you are forced to contribute…

No one skates, we will all ‘pay the piper’…the wicked right alongside the righteous.

What I find truly disturbing is how the treacherous are playing the ‘what you gonna do about it’ card right to the hilt.

The ‘cops’ are just as ‘dirty’ as the crooks so we will be forced to, er, ‘punish’ them both.

When civilization breaks down and the boys in blue can no longer rely on backup ‘ever’ showing up there is going to be some vicious ‘retribution’ for the ‘just following orders’ crowd.

These folks are never going to set eyes on a judge, they’re gonna have to tell it to the executioner.

Treason is probably the worst crime any human can commit, ‘just following orders’ is no excuse.

Sadly this is yet another failing that can be laid at the feet of ‘fuck you, pay me’ capitalism. [Don’t get the wrong idea, all ‘versions’ of capitalism operate on the ‘fuck you, pay me’ basis so there is no ‘good kind’ of capitalism. Like ‘Capitalist Utopia’, it doesn’t exist!]

The ‘failing’ being the fact that it is quite amazing what you can get somebody to agree to do if you have the power to dangle their paycheck from the chopping block…

This is just plain wrong…and our patriot forefathers knew it…but they weren’t smart enough to solve the problem, although some might say they weren’t ‘strong’ enough. Their greed overcame them.

Many, many things, er, ‘irk’ me to no end, those who ‘idolize’ the founders are just one of them. [Partly because most of them are conservatives!]

I’d like to prattle on longer but other matters press…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner