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