Friday, December 31, 2010

Perspective

Greetings good citizen,

It’s that time of year again when we feel compelled to reflect on the past so we may gain some insight into what the future holds…it’s that ancient ‘past as prelude’ thing.

Which is to say the groundwork has to be laid for anything to move forward, even disaster.

That said, some of the, er, ‘preparations’ that have occurred portend for some real dilly’s awaiting on the horizon.

Perhaps the most potent of these are the blatant lies regarding ‘economic recovery’.

We are repeatedly being told that the economy is ‘recovering’ yet the only ‘evidence’ of this alleged recovery is the much manipulated and has nothing to do with nothing Stock Market.

In short, they lie.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, we, as a society, don’t have the luxury of unlimited time for our economy to ‘straighten itself out’.

Let’s call this ‘reality check number one’.

Since there has been no positive forward motion towards the return to economic growth (necessary under capitalism otherwise the system stalls.) there won’t be any.

It’s really that simple. A ‘debt driven’ economy can only expand as long as its members are capable of assuming new debt while successfully discharging their old debt.

Sadly, we have already ‘hit the wall’ because the only variable that can be played with is time…and people are already stretched beyond their productive lifetimes.

Most go to their graves carrying HUGE amounts of debt.

You’d think this would send a signal to the folks managing society that workers needed to be paid more but no! They’re too busy with the global race to the bottom to notice!

More telling is how employers are actually throwing fuel onto this already raging inferno by ‘low-balling’ new hires simple because they can!

Will this be the year we see corporate officers hanging from their own flagpoles?

I’m NOT going to count that as a ‘prediction’, I’m just asking the question.

Did I mention that our society is seriously ‘mismanaged’?

If our myopic ‘betters’ can fuck up this badly, what chance do us ‘lesser beings’ have?

(Understand good citizen that is a ‘rhetorical question’, doing nothing would be a major improvement over the disastrous policies of our so-called ‘leaders’ (which is to say our real leaders ‘sock puppets’.)

Somewhere down the line we lost control of the media (‘de-regulation’ that was intended to prevent the consolidation of media markets is responsible.) and with that, we lost the slender ‘check’ we had on our elected representatives.

This COULD BE turned into a net positive if only because it is not possible to consistently ‘elect’ competent people to public office.

In fact, the current system favors ‘opportunists’ willing to say what the voting public wants to hear then turn around and sell the public’s interest to the highest bidder.

The ‘tried and true’ way to fill a management position is through competition.

But we digress, in many ways ‘A Simple Plan’ is much superior to anything else currently available.

So let’s add reality check number two to the list, we will NOT see A Simple Plan become the law of the land in the next twelve months.

It SHOULD happen tomorrow…but it is HIGHLY unlikely.

If we ignore all of the hand waving the CO media uses to ‘distract’ us, it is easy to see that absolutely nothing has been done to restore vitality to the economy you and I have to live with.

Trillions of, er, ‘our’ tax dollars (basically funny money) has been spent to keep THEIR financial system intact.

And that sums it up Bubba.

The Plan going forward is to let the US drown in its own cesspool while the…er, ‘global investors’ concentrate on opportunities in ‘emerging markets’.

There is nothing to invest in here AND the US market (formerly dumping ground to the world) is no longer ‘important’ to investors and has been, er, ‘abandoned’.

You’d think the weasels would be smart enough to depart these shores before they let the septic system back up but no, it is already well established that money has zero correlation to intelligence.

Which is to belabor the obvious, these people are fucking stupid!
The really sad part is they think you’re even stupider than they are!

It’s time to prove them wrong.

(Which is to say the ones who AREN’T stupider than rocks need to prove the elitists wrong. The rich and vain aren’t 100% wrong, some of them are smarter than some of us.)

So, lets get to the predicting part, shall we?

Since we have gotten this far on ‘stimulus funds’ that are about to dry up, what do you suppose is next on the horizon?

Have we not just witnessed the unplowed streets of New York City as evidence that some municipalities are broke?

Wasn’t there a nationally televised funeral on TV today of a slain police officer and the swirl of controversy over the recently paroled felon who killed him?

And didn’t dipstick just agree to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years?

How hard do you think the Republicans are going to beat him with that stick?

(Regardless of the fact it was they who forced the issue that caused these funding shortages that lead to the early release of dangerous felons!)

Yup, the Corporate Owned media really did us a favor by putting the Republicans back in control of the House!

The resultant ‘gridlock’ will provide the necessary political friction that the oligarchs need to ‘dissolve’ the current government.

That one we just might see in the next twelve months!

The interesting part will be the ‘series’ of changes introduced in an effort to ‘restore’ an effective government to the soon to be defunct nation.

They have no intention of restoring a government that’s first act would be to execute them all for treason. That ain’t gonna happen…although ironically, the ‘collapse’ of the current government will drive ‘some’ of the people responsible for this fiasco into the spotlight.

Oh, as we have all become well aware of, under the doctrine of ‘Disaster Capitalism’, the US will be nuked by some ‘concerned nation’ (probably China or Russia) and there will NOT be a ‘retaliatory strike’.

Yes, good citizen, these assholes ARE INDEED sick enough to murder hundreds of thousands of people to ‘distract us’ from their real crimes.

We need look no further than our own elite for the ‘true’ terrorists.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that these are the same people who are giving our military their marching orders?

There is no greater danger to a nation than ‘entrenched wealth’, this year we shall reap that bitter harvest when the nation we love dies.

Do we have what it takes to restore order and to throw off the yoke of tyranny that money has saddled us with?

This year will be the opening chapter in that epic battle which is to come…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Human Social Contract

Greetings good citizen,

Most ‘major’ posts are setting down their ‘predictions’ for next year. Odd duck that I am, I’m filtering those predictions through the lens of the ‘Human social contract’.

Here, Ilargi provides us with an admittedly purloined top ten list that doesn’t stand up too well under the social contract prism.

I am sure most of you are scratching your head, wondering just what the hell I’m yapping about. There is no such thing as a formal ‘human social contract’ that has the force of law anywhere on the fucking planet. The only thing that comes close are a few religious tenants the might get you ‘ex-communicated’ if your are found guilty of breaking them.

Worse is the general ‘who gives a fuck’ attitude most people have towards this gaping omission from our legal statutes.

It’s like that tune by ‘The Clash’ back in the 80’s titled ‘Know your rights’.

You had precisely 3 of them…and the canny musicians gave each in turn as well as how each could be negated by the elite on a whim…

Which is to point out the frightening obvious. When it comes to ‘rights’ you have precisely zero.

So why don’t you kill the next person who crosses your path on general principles?

Ah ha! Now we’re getting somewhere! We all ‘agree’ not to fuck with (murder, maim, molest) those who don’t threaten us with such undesirable outcomes first.

It’s the ‘I’m okay, You’re okay’ contract that makes civilization itself possible. If you can’t trust people any farther than you can throw them, you can’t form a working society.

Now we get down to the real ‘nitty gritty’, what does this society ‘owe’ you for not attacking it or endangering its safety?

Is the answer ‘nothing’?

There are many who operate on precisely this principle (Fuck’ em all and the dumb ones twice!)

Sadly, ‘society’ has come to protect those who, er, operate under the ‘buyer beware’ system. Mostly because those who would screw you into the woodwork for their own gain have made ‘justifiable homicide’ illegal.

This is an extreme violation of the basic human contract…and it was only voided by ‘promising’ that ‘justice’ would be done, IF the system were allowed to work as intended.

What do you suppose the big flaw in this system has become? The ‘average person’ has, for a very long time, been unable to afford to bring a wrongdoer to court to seek justice.

You see, the (fucking) capitalist turned ‘justice’ into a ‘for profit’ venture. This in turn made it profitable to break the law (as well as the social contract) because the average victim couldn’t afford to seek justice!

This would NOT happen if wrongdoers faced being killed out of hand for their crimes. (But this tends to leave a lot of unanswered questions, as dead people tell no tales.)

What am I saying? A legal system that prevents you from seeking justice is itself unjust.

Perhaps part of the problem lies with the question ‘What is Justice?’

But I digress considerably from the point I’m trying to make.

We need to back up a couple of steps and return to the question of what does civil society ‘owe’ you, the law abiding citizen?

Let’s start with the single most basic question, what’s the point of being a member of society if that membership DOES NOT include THE IMPLICIT PROMISE of participation in that society? If your participation in a society does not GUARANTEE that you will be allowed access to what you need to survive, then membership in that society is USELESS!

What’s the single scariest feature of Libertarianism? The central concept of Libertarianism is that NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING!

And that is flat wrong! If this were true, Libertarians wouldn’t exist, they’d all be DEAD!

We keep returning to the ‘message of the season’ which tells us in no uncertain terms that the ‘business of humanity is NOT BUSINESS, the business of humanity IS HUMANITY!

Yet, somehow, most don’t seem to be able to grasp this simple concept…mostly because it conflicts with their instinct to grab as much as they can, as fast as they can, and screw everybody else!

And THAT’S not nice!

For that matter, neither is this, (it is not the charts but the commentary) that make this link worth following, it’s a dose of Jesse at his finest!

The human social contract, good citizen, it’s the reason we don’t kill one another on sight!

Most of you haven’t thought about it much but we really DO need to have this ‘bargain’ we are all forced to comply with ‘etched in stone’ somewhere.

Otherwise, your right to basic human dignity will continue to be violated by anyone with deeper pockets than your own…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Thought Experiment

Greetings good citizen,

I have finally solved my ‘personal transportation crisis’ and can resume posting. (Yes, the past couple of days have been crazy, made that much crazier by the necessity of borrowing a small sum of money with a tiny personal income. A feat I pulled off, I might add.)

As usual, a couple of day’s silence leads to a backlog of stories I would have liked to bring to your attention. Some of these were too good to pass up so I’m including them in tonight’s offering.

This particular link leads to a thought experiment reminiscent of the homily ‘be careful what you wish for’ (You just might get it!)

And naturally enough, the wish in question here good citizen is nothing less than ‘Conservative Utopia’ where all of the ‘Red States’ to secede from the Union and start their own nation.

The million marble question is how long would it be before ‘Conservative Utopia’ bore a striking resemblance to that other ‘capitalist paradise’…Somalia?

With that as a given good citizen we are left to ponder just how the ‘one in fives’ regained control of the nation’s purse strings…again?

Worse, it’s looking like ‘Bush’s third term’ is conspiring to hand the White House back to the ‘party of no’ in what should be considered record time…

Last time the Republicans screwed up the nation’s economy they lost control of both houses of congress for forty years, this time they were back in charge in two!

Who do we have to ‘thank’ for this impossibility? The ‘corporate owned’ media, who lies through their teeth every time one of them opens their mouth.

But I belabor the obvious…

Moving along we have this Government Report: Rich White Men Are Most Likely to Survive Nuclear Blast well written article.

The ‘frightening’ part about this story is the release date, it was put out by Obama’s people! We’re almost 70 years into the so-called ‘Cold War’ and they are still getting it wrong!

But that should surprise no one, what do you suppose is wrong with this picture? New York Struggles as Blizzard’s Impact Chastens Bloomberg

Okay, the recent ‘blizzard’ was a pretty big storm…but we’ve had bigger and it didn’t tie things up for days on end. Worse, this isn’t pointing to a labor problem as much as it is pointing to a budget problem.

They have the people to do the job but they obviously don’t want to pay them to get the job done in a timely fashion.

Most ‘snow removal’ is done by ‘contractors’…if you can’t pay the contractors, you can’t hire them…and boy are they mad that they spent all of that money getting their fleets ready for winter!

So next year will be a real snafu!

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’? the whole fucking society is mismanaged but that’s kinda besides the point!

And if that’s not disturbing enough, try this on for size… or this one

Naturally this is why I predict that everyone will be, er, ‘shocked’ by both the scale and the intensity of the violence, once it erupts.

As we approach the New Year we see the clock running out for a large portion of our former society.

What remains to be seen is what the weasels who are responsible for this fiasco intend to do about it…and ‘nothing’ will be a non-starter.

They will be unable to ‘ignore’ the social earthquake of massive human suffering brought on by the combination of their arrogance and their deliberate mismanagement.

The links in tonight’s offering are all ‘signposts’ for those with eyes to see and the wisdom to comprehend what these portents foretell.

Once gain, my time has run out.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Liberty deficit?

Greetings good citizen,

Just finished my last minute preparations for the oncoming storm…and there are more than a few things I’m just gonna have to live with.

But enough about me, it’s all about YOU (and the sooner everybody else catches on, the smoother these things will go!)

I trust YOU had a splendid Christmas (for those of you who celebrate such things. Ironically, if you’re a capitalist, Christmas is sort of forced upon you whether you want it or not since the majority of the capitalist world is Christian. [There’s something inherently contradictory about calling the communist Chinese ‘capitalists’ although their leaders seem to wear the label comfortably!])

How much irony is there in the fact that the ‘free world’ is undergoing a decidedly ‘radical transformation’ in the opposite direction?

Thus says this article from Alternet regarding Obama’s Liberty Problem

Constant reader already knows about my belief that the ‘ballot box of freedom’ is useless once it becomes obvious that no matter who ‘wins’ election they take their marching orders from the same inbred clique…

How else do we reconcile the stunning ‘sameness’ of two supposedly polar opposite political parties? One that made no bones about openly declaring the ‘super rich’ as his constituency while the other promised ‘change you could believe in’ and yet he has changed nothing!

The part one marvels at is how both, um, leaders have molded themselves perfectly into the profile of ‘candidate for assassination’ but neither one has had so much as a single failed attempt on their lives!

Is this super efficient security or the realization that there is a whole closet full of puppets standing ready to take either of these clown’s places?

So why bother?

Not for nothing good citizen, what we have here is a perfect illustration of just how ‘precarious’ our position is.

The individuals cease to matter, in deference to the current president, he may not go along with ANY of the bewildering crimes that are being attributed to him, but he’s in NO POSITION to stop what is happening.

HE does not control the media, those who OWN the media control what we all see and hear…and by extension, what we believe.

I am of the rabid belief that there are certain things that NOBODY should ‘own’ and the media is one of them.

There is nothing more crippling to a society than a ‘for profit’ media because the ‘truth’ becomes secondary to solvency.

What good is a ‘watchdog’ that fails to bark because the thief is holding a bowl of food?

This is the sort of thing the rabid capitalist calls ‘nitpicking’ (until his freedom is endangered, then it’s a ‘liberal scandal!’)

Leaving us with what has become an increasingly interesting question, who the fuck are you gonna vote for come 2012?

The Republicans caused this mess and the Demo-rats have twiddled their thumbs idly as the criminals have laughed all the way to the bank!

What about ‘justice’?

It is rapidly becoming apparent that ‘justice’, like freedom and liberty have become just another word, a ‘relative’ term at best.

How does one demand justice when no crime has been committed?

Short answer, you don’t.

Which leaves you where, exactly?

Your guess is as good as mine and I ain’t going there…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, December 24, 2010

It could be worse...

Greetings good citizen,

May you all comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable in as much as it is within your power to do so.

Being an atheist doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the opportunity to gather with loved ones and to be thankful for their company.

‘Tis the Season to take stock and reflect upon the year gone by as we ponder what the future might hold.

Regular readers already know what I think is coming down the pike. I suspect most of you are relieved that some of my more dire predictions have yet to bear fruit…

But I’m not backing down.

The ‘incompetents’ running things have managed to pull a few rabbits out of their backsides, temporarily staving off ‘certain disaster’.

I know it’s Christmas eve and most of us have your hearts set on being with those you love for the holiday…but have you been paying attention to the latest about the idiot Pentagon wanting to invade (nuclear armed) Pakistan to go after the Taliban?

Does somebody want to remind me what ‘victory’ in Afghanistan looks like? I’m pretty sure brilliantly glowing nuclear fireballs weren’t part of that mental image.

So the ‘real’ question is whether or not we will be caught ‘flat footed’ as some, no doubt, ‘renegade’ general orders nukes to be deployed to repel the invasion by NATO forces.

Will we ‘fight fire with fire’ or will we ‘take our lumps’ because our supreme commanders are idiots?

Left to your imagination is how the ‘rest of the world’ will react if we lob a couple of submarine based missiles at Islamabad?

Will the other nuclear-armed nations take the third time (ever) that nuclear weapons have been deployed by the US as ‘acceptable retaliation’ or will it be viewed as a ‘step too far’?

Will the US face sanctions for invading a third sovereign nation without provocation?

Just thinking out loud here good citizen but a ‘distraction’ of this nature could provide a lot of ‘mileage’ for those who are pushing a more ominous agenda.

Once again we go to the CO media for a look at the latest spin

The Upside? Things Could Be Worse


Didn’t we hear these exact same words roughly three years ago? And didn’t things indeed get worse?

There is precious little to be thankful for in Mr. Norris’s musings nor has much of what he offers been, er, ‘mended’.

The trillions in bank bailouts are mere band-aids placed upon wounds that go clean through the victim.

The patient is dying and the doctor is pretending all will be well if we simply close our eyes and wish with all of our might!

“Think happy thoughts”, if you will.

Personally, optimism is over-rated if not downright dangerous.

That said, by now most of you think it is me who doesn’t get it. There are third world hell holes everywhere and the people who live in them just suck it up.

Well Bubba, this ain’t ‘everywhere’, this is the most heavily armed nation on earth. With that many guns in the hands of private citizens something’s gotta give

Which is to say, they’re going to ‘try’ to put us into the Banana Republic slot and there is going to be ‘hell to pay’.

Maybe it is fear of being ‘ridiculed’ by the ‘reality based’ community but anybody who doesn’t see this one coming is hardly ‘reality based’, they’re acting more like an ostrich.

Torches, shotguns and they’ve got to sleep sometime…which is to say the odds are overwhelmingly in our favor.

But, again, this is a bridge to be crossed when we arrive there, which will probably be sooner than you think if the boneheads don’t think better of ‘escalating’ an already senseless position in the Middle East.

Probably no post tomorrow but you expected that,

Hope you all have a safe and pleasant holiday,

Gegner

Thursday, December 23, 2010

A New Hope...

Greetings good citizen,

The quicker people accept the inevitable the quicker we can move on to the next phase of, er, civilization.

How unfortunate is it that the ‘one trick ponies’ currently in charge of this train wreck have no ‘plan B’?

Their solution, such as it is good citizen?

Start over from scratch. The only thing they have to offer is the exact same thing that just failed spectacularly!

Only the next time will be ‘different’.

Let’s paint a picture for you.

How likely do you think it will be for them to even be able to ‘start fresh’?

Which is to ask how much of the old system will be ‘torn down’?

(Even if it is only ‘eyewash’…)

Will we get a ‘new’ electoral system?

NO!

Will we even be ‘represented’ in a new government?

Unlikely (re-establishing monarchy or a monarchy like regime doesn’t leave a lot of room for ‘participation’, ‘fealty’ is a whole different subject. Note: insufficient fealty is often fatal.)

Not that I personally would be around to see such an unseemly, er, ‘return to the past.’

I will opine that ANYONE that even SUGGESTS we’d be ‘better off’ under monarchy should be ‘put to death.’

But I think the same applies to those who support ‘republicanism’ that only provides the ‘illusion of participation’ that so many seem to love (despite having suffered for their foolishness all of their lives.)

But I digress, there is a lot of distance between the collapse of the old and, er, ‘deciding’ what comes next, (which, if you’re not careful, you will lose out on too.)

In fact I can tell you right here and now that the plan, as it stands, is for you to have absolutely zero say in ‘what comes next’. Your choices will be ‘obey or die’.

Kinda like now.

The point Mr. Panzer is trying to make is one I have stated repeatedly.

“There NO WAY we can use the system we have to repair the current system. The necessary tools don’t exist.”

Worse (and it’s always ‘worse’ with me, isn’t it?) The very nature of capitalism and the entire concept of ‘ownership equals freedom’ is so divorced from reality as to be insane!

‘Either you own or you don’t belong here’…well, I hate to tell you bud but your concept is flawed, them that ‘don’t belong’ don’t have anywhere else to be.

Not your problem says you?

Bad news bubba, there’s 10 of ‘them’ for every one of you.

And they’ve got nothing to lose.

Unfortunately, that’s the problem with the ‘indefinite future’, it’s not here yet so there’s nothing concrete to rail against.

Much of my ranting is aimed at ‘probable’ outcomes.

But let us return to what will most likely be billed as a ‘re-boot’.

How much of what currently exists will have to be wiped out to convince the public that the changes are ‘genuine’?

As I mention above, I am not the only ‘whackjob’ pondering this problem. Somebody is already implementing, or should we say ‘paving the way’ for the next ‘generation’ of government.

Which brings us to the question ‘is globalization sufficiently advanced to, er, ‘justify’ a global government?

It’s a debate that is as old as civilization itself. One world government would ‘theoretically’ eliminate war.

The obvious problem is one of ‘responsiveness’, we can’t get local government to ‘respond’ to our needs/actual conditions on the ground, how can we, er, ‘trust’ a global government to manage our affairs?

Worse will be the farce of ‘electing’ representatives to a global government. Who the hell is qualified and if they ‘mis-represent’ the will of the people, then what?

Neither question has a good answer. Imagine what a campaign for global office would cost. Who do you suppose would have the ear of the titular ‘global overseer’?

You don’t suppose it would be the ‘multi-nationals’ who already dominate national politics around the globe?

Let’s return to the initial question of how much of the current set-up would have to be, er, ‘swept away’ in order to convince you that ‘something better’ was in the works (so you would restrain yourself and others from burning the current commerce network to the ground?)

As you can see, moves to ‘muzzle’ the Internet have begun in earnest.

What’s at stake here is precisely what I point out above (a general uprising) caused by someone like myself pointing to the proposed changes and exclaiming ‘Are you fucking shitting me?’

Did I mention your choices would be limited to ‘obey or die’?

Well, there is a third choice good citizen, there always is, especially when the alternative is ‘you’d be better off dead’.

You can (and most likely will) fight.

Doesn’t matter if you can ‘handle a gun’. Most of what needs doing can be accomplished with a simple book of matches.

Consider yourself ‘armed and dangerous!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Theory of Money

Greetings good citizen,

How long do you suppose it will be before the Stock Market is outlawed? You know it isn’t going to happen as long as the imbeciles currently running things remain in charge so perhaps it is better to ask how long do you think it will be before the proverbial ‘other shoe drops’?

As I have long asserted good citizen, plotting the economic future of our civilization is somewhat akin to tap dancing on a land mine as the wise Jesse points out.

There is too much ‘bullshit’ being passed off as economic fact.

Why? Because the fucktards ‘broke’ the economy and don’t know how to fix it (without bankrupting their masters, which would prove fatal for them.)

Sadly for the rest of us good citizen, they broke ‘our’ economy while they were at it.

Um, the future’s not looking too bright from where brother Jesse is sitting and you KNOW I’m not about to gainsay him.

The lesson (one of many) to be taken from this sorry set of circumstances is how ‘prosperity’ is not possible under an ‘unregulated’ environment (That the fucking Republican’s keep championing) Nobody will ‘do the right thing’ if they don’t absolutely have to.

How much stronger does the case for regulation need to be?

More interesting is this article from today’s Alternet newsletter that explores something the public is largely ignorant of, the ‘history’ of money:

Time for a New Theory of Money

The concept of money-as-a-commodity can be traced back to the use of precious metal coins. Gold is widely claimed to be the oldest and most stable currency known, but this is not actually true. Money did not begin with gold coins and evolve into a sophisticated accounting system. It began as an accounting system and evolved into the use of precious metal coins. [snip]


I apologize for the interruption good citizen but here is historic ‘proof’ that the ‘money of account’ system utilized in ‘A Simple Plan’ is ‘tried and true’!

It’s easy to understand how ‘money you can hold on to’ gained widespread acceptance but in doing so, you have gotten fucked royally! (Because the ‘value’ of hard cash remains…’fluid’, and you aren’t the one who gets to decide.) Anyway:

Money as a “unit of account” (a tally of sums paid and owed) predated money as a “store of value” (a commodity or thing) by two millennia; the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted not just hundreds of years (as with some civilizations using gold) but thousands of years. Their bank-like ancient payment systems were public systems—operated by the government the way that courts, libraries, and post offices are operated as public services today.


Wasn’t I just pointing out the other day how what was old is now new again? (In the context of ‘economizing’ by doing more for yourself, thus ‘saving money’ although this plan sucks because it ‘assumes’ you have the resources to do for yourself, and you don’t!)

Shift mental gears back to the current slow motion train wreck that is our civilization.

Maybe I should take a moment to belabor the obvious, that A. is intrinsically tied to B.

The economy ‘croaks’, civilization goes down the tubes with it.

No irony should be lost on the fact that civilization ALWAYS collapses first…

What am I yapping about?

How’s this for a badly broken legal system? Bad enough that MERS (the electronic mortgage registry system) has fouled up the ‘chain of custody’ which proves ownership around the world but the ‘fallout’ of this foul up is people who DON’T EVEN HAVE MORTGAGES are having their houses seized by banks!

This particular article is NOT on that topic but the related subject of people who aren’t delinquent on their mortgage payments having their property foreclosed upon anyway…

Did I mention criminals?

While not all Republicans are criminals, most criminals are Republicans…the ones who aren’t are Pirates, which is to say ‘apolitical’. The only law they recognize comes from the barrel of a gun.

So avast there, Matey! You have Pirates looking to plunder your booty…hell of a time to discover ‘you’re on your own!’

Which is ‘how’ things fall apart, not only is nobody enforcing the rules but nobody is obeying them either.

Which is nothing compared to the ‘whiplash’ everybody experiences when ‘strictly enforced’ (abruptly and sporadically) resumes…

This is the ‘nightmare’ of no government, when the ‘warlord of the moment’ takes it into his/her head to mete out punishment for crimes both real AND imagined.

A nightmare that continues until the warlord becomes a footnote in the history books and a new warlord takes over and a whole new nightmare begins!

We all ‘value’ the rule of law (while it lasts.) No irony should be lost that it is the criminals themselves who miss the rule of law the most once it disappears!

There’s nothing more comforting than knowing with a reasonable degree of certainty precisely where the boundaries are.

Once the rule of law is supplanted by the ‘rule of man’, all bets are off.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Bonus round

Greetings good citizen,

I’m suffering a personal transportation crisis and its eating into my writing time. As we are all aware, it’s much easier to borrow a lot of money than it is to borrow a little.

Worse, try to borrow a little and it will turn into a lot!

I don’t suppose now would be a good time to remind you, good citizen, that the US of A no longer has any kind of anti-usury legislation on the books.

Did I mention ‘mis-management’? Which is to ask who the fuck (besides bankers) thought THAT was a ‘good idea’?

EVEN THE BIBLE IS AGAINST USURY! WTF!

But these guys only hide behind the Bible, I suspect you wouldn’t find one of them who comprehends its teachings…

They wouldn’t be able to call it ‘The Good Book’ if it was filled with nothing but how to corn hole your neighbor, like we see in this story What, no bonus?!


In some ways, a zero bonus should not come as a surprise to many bankers. As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and banks like Citigroup raised base pay substantially in 2009 and 2010. They were seeking to placate regulators who had argued that bonuses based on performance encouraged excessive risk.

At Goldman, for instance, the base salary for managing directors rose to $500,000 from $300,000, while at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse it jumped to $400,000 from $200,000.

Even though employees will receive roughly the same amount of money, the psychological blow of not getting a bonus is substantial, especially in a Wall Street culture that has long equated success and prestige with bonus size. So there are sure to be plenty of long faces on employees across the financial sector who have come to expect a bonus on top of their base pay. Wall Streeters typically find out what their bonuses will be in January, with the payout coming in February. [snip]

Dealing with the Zeros can be complicated. “It’s a real headache,” said another senior banker, who asked not to be identified because the topic is so volatile at his company. There has been so much grousing that in some cases, he said, “we’ll throw $20,000 or $25,000 at each of the Zeros so they’re not discouraged.”

“No matter what we pay people, it is never enough and they always find something to complain about,” this banker said.


Left to your imagination good citizen is the ‘vast majority’ of the working class whose annual salary is LESS THAN $20 to 25,000!

Yes, good citizen, the half-way mark in the salary distribution is approximately $30,000 with half making more and half making less.

Yet the banking industry will pay its managers what someone else works all year for just so they won’t ‘feel bad’.

How do you suppose this makes the poor bastards who have to work all year, usually at thankless, dead-end jobs to get the same amount feel?

(PS. That’s nearly TWICE what I make…as an ‘underemployed’ white guy whose over 50.)

Anyway, other matters are conspiring to rob me of the time to finish this piece and most of this stuff is already a day old.

Such as this from Mr. Krugman:

No matter how many times you whine about something nothing changes.

Let us not forget that State Budgets: The Day of Reckoning is at hand…

I witnessed first hand evidence of this ‘Day of Reckoning’ thing in action last night. There were NO plows or sanders out during the storm. Once the storm ended, the clean up crews got rolling…which was a shame because there were numerous accidents attributed to the untreated roads…

As should be evident to all by now Greed Is Not Good Worse, push come to shove, greed isn’t that ‘good’ even for the greedy as they too are affected by the dangerous situations their greed creates.

So much for a ‘slap-dash’ job but to delay longer would render the material useless.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Grim and Grimmer

Greetings good citizen,

Since all money is funny, the world’s credit system ISN’T about to collapse (although there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t, we are, beyond any reasonable doubt, bankrupt in every possible sense of the word!)

With that as a given we once again come full circle to the deeply perplexing question of just who, precisely, is the ‘opposition’?

Mr. Rich gives us a peek in this weeks editorial that shines a spotlight on a new political party called the ‘no label’ movement.

Neither ‘right’ nor ‘left’, the no labelers describe themselves as ‘centrists’, just like Bill Clinton.

Um, Mr. Rich does not point to Mr. Clinton in his editorial as even being involved with this new ‘alternative’ but if Billy Boy had a ‘claim to fame’, being a ‘centrist’ was it.

The ability to map out the mythical ‘middle ground’ between the left and the right (and it was usually farther to the right than most lefties were comfortable with.) was Clinton’s trademark talent. Through political ‘triangulation’ he’d get a Republican dominated Congress to do his bidding.

Although in all fairness, Billy boy has been called the ‘best Republican president this nation has had in many years.’

And once again, his actions speak considerably louder and truer than his ‘lukewarm apologies’ do (because fuck head has had to apologize for 90% of what he did during his two terms as president…but hey, ‘puppets’ commonly find themselves ‘at odds’ with their ‘legacies’.)

Just as Obama will find himself at odds with the train wreck that occurred on his watch.

At least the ‘betrayals’ of the next two years will by justified by the Republican majority in the House.

And I’m here to tell you that this is just ‘window dressing’ too.

The Republicans didn’t win back the House; the (CO) media handed it to them.

Something the multi-national corporate crowd will keep on doing until all of the corporate owned media outlets spontaneously combust.

Don’t laugh; that day is probably closer than you might think!

So good citizen, just ‘who’ is the ‘enemy’? Who is the opponent that can’t be reasoned with? If we were to listen to the CO media, it is BOTH mainstream political parties.

Although logic tells us that the corporate crowd gutted the Left wing by eviscerating the unions that made up their base.

Not that this happened in a vacuum, there were plenty of ‘opportunists’ that were more than willing to sell the unions down the river for what turned out to be ‘short money’.

Real short money to the crowd that prints as much as it wants!

But this still doesn’t provide us with an answer. Who would decimate our economy AND destroy our way of life just to stretch out their control of the global economy?

Let me give you a hint…our entire way of life is predicated (based) on ‘cheap and abundant energy.’ When energy is neither, our entire socio-economic model collapses.

UNDERSTAND that without energy MOST of you literally couldn’t do what you do and the rest can’t keep doing what they do for very long because the places people live in become uninhabitable after a few days of no energy.

With this as a given we really SHOULD be doing everything in our power to convert to a more sustainable way of life but NO! That’s not happening and do you really have to wonder why?

The cocksuckers that have you by the short hairs don’t want to relinquish their control over the rest of us.

It is, sadly, that ‘serve in heaven or rule in hell’ thing again… and you can guess which direction they decided to pursue.

Yeah, they see no reason to stop ‘ruling’ us (even though millions will die!)

You see, the bastards ‘owe it to their kids’…your kids can go fuck themselves!

As long as you don’t figure out who is putting the screws to you, you can’t fight back…and that’s how they want it!

Um, as grim as this is, it is far preferable to the alternative. An alternative that says we as a species are too immature to manage our own affairs and if left to our own devices, we WILL destroy ourselves.

Understand that the immature few that are currently in charge of things BECAUSE of their ‘nominal ownership’ of our energy supply are indeed too infantile to accept the end of their reign over the rest of us.

Does ANYBODY own this planet’s energy supply good citizen?

Sadly, some people THINK that they do and that’s all it takes.

We are currently playing a (deadly serious) ‘game’ of stick ‘em up!

If we fail to neutralize this threat to our species the whole situation could (needlessly) get out of hand.

Left to your own judgment is whether or not my ‘assessment’ of the situation is overblown of if I’ve underestimated the danger.

As I have mentioned before, our ‘worst case scenario’ is one where the government simply dissolves itself and nothing takes its place, leaving us in an effective ‘Wild, Wild West where the ones with the guns make the rules.

And there will be a lot of people with guns in the first few weeks of the power vacuum, so there will be a lot of new (and mostly temporary) ‘rules’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, December 17, 2010

Home Prosperity

Greetings good citizen,

Amazing how something old can become ‘new’ again. You may recall how I waxed poetic about the ‘marvel’ that is money, that wonderful device that made it possible to not have to do EVERYTHING for yourself!

Well, what do you suppose the ‘new discovery’ is?

You guessed it, doing as much as possible (and then some) for yourself…like most of us have ‘access’ to the resources we would require to pull such a thing off!

We don’t.

Worse, without ‘subsidies’, most people can’t make a living by farming, hell, most people couldn’t make enough to pay the taxes on the farm!

And there is the insidious side of ‘property taxes’. If you don’t ‘own’ property, you CAN’T grow your own food OR raise your own livestock…

That means YOU MUST sell your labor for whatever you can get for it…

Because now that ‘wonderful invention’ (that our ‘rulers’ manipulate at will) is your only hope.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘buck’ you agreed to is NOT the buck you actually get paid!

But hey, a deal is a deal…until its not!

My ‘point’ good citizen is that you ‘have gotten’ a shitty deal that keeps getting shittier with each passing day AND YOU STILL DON’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!

So I ask, if not you, who?

Who cares enough about your welfare that they’re going to intervene in your favor?

Your mom and dad?

Sadly good citizen, their failure to act is why we’re in this mess now!

A situation that continues to go ‘from bad to worse’

Congress Sends $801 Billion Tax Cut Bill to Obama

Yup, our ‘spineless’ elected officials, who can’t describe what ‘victory’ entails in the ‘War on Terra’ DID manage to pass tax cuts for people who already have more money than they know what to do with!

These are, of course, the SAME tax cuts that were in force going into this recession, so what anyone expects to gain by extending them is totally incomprehensible.

How disturbing is it good citizen that the rich don’t need to be ‘practical’, they merely need to be ‘obeyed’?

It’s more disturbing than what I can stomach.

But I’m not the only one who finds the actions of our ‘puppet government’ unfathomable…

When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment.


Naturally, what happened as opposed to what should have happened turned out to be two different things.

Now I will go screaming ‘off the reservation’ because there is (and has been) a very deep and clear line drawn in the sand for all to see.

The infamous ‘they’, the ‘one in fiver’s’, those criminally insane, self-professed ‘conservatives’ who actually ADMIT to voting Republican (despite all that this implies.)

‘They’ are going to do what they want, when they want to and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to stop them!

Look at the November Compromise.

You’d never suspect that 90% of the voting public objects to tax cuts for the super rich (even if it means higher taxes for themselves because they know SOMEBODY has to pay for the government!)

Understand what just happened good citizen, this is the event I was talking about months ago, the one that provides that ‘perfect illustration’ of just what we’re up against.

Tax cuts ‘DON’T WORK’ and we have thirty years of JOB LOSSES to prove it!

You’d think our ‘legislators’ would be up to the task now that there is ample proof of the FAILURE of their past policies…but NO!

It seems our bought and paid for ‘elected representatives’ (traitors one and all) won’t rest until they have made themselves totally useless.

How long do you suppose it will be until these self-serving weasels vote themselves taxpayer funded retirement in some off-shore paradise (that they conveniently arrange a non-extradition treaty with?)

Just how ‘ridiculous’ do things have to get before we do something about it?

Let me assure you of one thing good citizen, long before we begin to do what is necessary to ‘rein in’ our wayward government, things are going to be a lot less than pleasant, in fact, they will become quite grim if we let them.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Blowin' in the wind...

Greetings good citizen,

Markets around the world are ‘mixed’ this morning on ‘stable’ employment data and strong retail numbers…so go fuckin’ figure, eh?

Which you should take as a ‘warning’ good citizen; that things are, just as you suspect, worse than they appear.

Our lead story for today falls under the ‘off-shoring’ category as the NY Times reports on China’s Push Into Wind Worries U.S. Industry

As you might suspect, the story, as far as the corporate owned media is concerned, discusses the ‘inevitability’ of ‘superior’ Chinese technology overtaking ‘inferior’ domestically available products.

Here are those Bush Tax cuts right in your face, up close and personal good citizen! If you want ‘renewable energy’ you’re going to have to buy it from China because that’s where Wall Street investors have plunked down their tax savings!

Is this what Obama and his GOP BFF’s are pushing for?

While it is not ‘too late’ for this nation, it is definitely too late for this, er, ‘system of government!’ Put a fork in it, it’s cooked!

Anyway, we are told by many sources that government data is 100% accurate…which means it is the ‘reporting’ that is suspect!

Thus we have This Horseshit

No. 339: November Inflation, Retail Sales, Production Subscription required December 15th, 2010
• Beware Unstable Economic Reporting!
• Inconsistent Seasonal Factors Depressed CPI
• Bulk of Gain in November Retail Sales Was from Higher Prices


Typical, higher prices while they claim inflation to be ‘non-existent’…

It’s like inflation less food and energy because almost nobody buys energy or eats! It’s not ‘bad data’, it’s the ‘incomplete’ part that is kicking our ass!

Seems we keep coming full circle with the ‘basic dishonesty’ issue.

This means the question becomes ‘what are we going to do about it?’

Speaking of matters we aren’t doing anything about (just another feature of ‘government, in your name only’.) We have this hair-raising tale

Hope and Change: Obama Regime Hiring Mercenaries ‘At a Rate That Would Make Bush Blush’


As I have said previously good citizen, the problem with ‘Soldiers of Fortune’ is that they are only loyal to the people cutting their paycheck, which could be more than a little worrisome because the taxpayer is a few steps removed from this procedure…

Is this just another example of the people elected to run this nation
Moving the Wrong Way?


No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘Wrong Way’ article is really another take down of ‘happy talk’.

No, if you want evidence that things are going poorly have a gander at this article about the pending US sovereign debt crisis that has been percolating on the back burner since 2007.

Keep in mind that the U.S. remains the proverbial elephant in the bathtub in terms of pending effective sovereign bankruptcies. The various European crises remain an intermittent foil for the U.S. dollar, pulling market attention away from the unfolding solvency crisis in the United States and a likely move to massive selling against the U.S. currency.

Accordingly, high risk of the early stages of a hyperinflation beginning to unfold by mid-2011 continues. Rising inflation should become increasingly broad, reflecting an increasingly serious problem in the first-half of 2011.”


Once again I could be justly accused of sending mixed messages so I’ll temper this with the question how much would prices have to rise to put YOU behind the proverbial eight-ball?

The answer, for most of us, would hardly constitute ‘hyper-inflation’. Five-dollar a gallon gasoline and something near that for heating oil would do the job. Throw elevated food costs into the equation and we have the ‘heat or eat’ drama playing out up close and personal across 90% of the households in this nation.

Here it is Christmas and we already have $3.00 a gallon gasoline…we aren’t talking a huge leap to $4.00 a gallon.

And there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it if it does go up.

So there.

Just remember, if your paycheck doesn’t crack your nut, it’s not your employer’s problem…it’s yours!

Which, unsurprisingly, brings us full circle to the question of what’s the point of belonging to a society if that society fails to protect you (and yours.)

It merely adds insult to injury to see society protect your persecutor while doing nothing to help you or to mitigate your plight.

High time we had some genuine ‘change’ around here…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Enlightenment...

Greetings good citizen,

The markets are up but what would you expect considering the Fed continues to fuel the surge in stock prices through ‘quantative easing.’

Which is to point out that this current swelling in the value of capital is actually meaningless if it were put in the perspective of a rotting corpse, which is precisely what this phenomenon is reflective of.

As you might imagine, the recent ‘excitement’ over retail sales figures are precisely the ‘smoke and mirror’ hocus pocus one would expect from a shrinking customer base.

Defunct businesses do not report sales figures, these figures can only come from the surviving outlets which now enjoy a bigger share of the market, causing their sales figures to improve.

Worse, many of the ‘survivors’ have shut ‘under-performing’ locations, driving business to the remaining stores. And reporting the results as an ‘increase’…

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing…and that’s a fact, Jack!

Fewer people working and even less shopping does not equal a net increase in sales! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!

Yet the fucktards expect YOU to swallow it!

Worse good citizen is the ‘basic dishonesty’ these tactics represent.

How can we trust the systems that produce this incredible bullshit?

Short answer, you can’t!

More succinctly, it is this ‘basic dishonesty’ that will lead to the collapse and eventual destruction of our civilization.

Yes good citizen, Debunking Gonzalo Lira and Hyperinflation here we have an argument that is essentially moot. Which is to say pointless because this is not how things will ‘play out’.

As Stoneleigh points out in the beginning of the article (a fact that dovetails nicely with my, er, ‘assertion’ that money is in fact a fantasy, wrapped in an illusion enforced at the point of a gun) that ‘hyper-inflation’ requires isolation. A key separating factor between our current crazed banking system and the economies of Wiemar Germany and that of Zimbabwe.

So no, it won’t be ‘hyper-inflation’ per se that causes our economy to collapse, it will be the sudden necessary shift from fiat currency to ‘in kind’ commodity trading that will cause the financial system to…evaporate.

Once the tax rate reaches zero, the currency becomes ‘illegitimate’ since it is no longer required to pay one’s taxes (talk about a mind fuck!)

However, the basic dishonesty we are witnessing throughout our society will only serve to increase the demand to be paid in ‘items of value’ as the situation continues to disintegrate.


That said, Stoneleigh and I are in perfect accord regarding the ‘ultimate outcome’.

I do not see this as a transitory problem leading back to business as usual, and I mean NEVER returning to what we would now regard as business as usual, let alone doing so in only a couple of years.

Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing. This is a persistent dynamic that should last at least as long as the last depression, and likely longer as every parameter is worse going into depression this time. We have more debt, far more structural dependencies (on cheap energy and cheap credit primarily), looming resource limitations, far higher expectations, a much larger population, a far smaller skill base etc.

I think we are looking at an economic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, not a bump in the road that can be quickly consigned to history, if only we face our problems head on. In my view we are going to have to live through deflationary deleveraging, a long and grinding depression, and then quite possibly hyperinflation once the international debt financing model is broken, and with it the power of the bond market to constrain currency printing.

This could easily take twenty years to play out, and even then the upheaval is very unlikely to be over. The last time a major bubble burst - the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s - the aftermath lasted for several decades and culminated in a series of revolutions. This bubble is much larger, and the aftermath is likely to be proportional to the excesses of the preceding bubble. This is why I call the presentation I travel to deliver A Century of Challenges.

Moreover, I do not see a return to what we consider to be business as usual at any point, because our business as usual scenario is critically dependent on cheap energy, and the energy subsidy inherent in fossil fuels has been a once in a planet's lifetime deal. We are going to be living on an energy income instead of an energy inheritance, and this will mean living a life none of us in the developed world will recognize.


UNDERSTAND GOOD CITIZEN, when she says ‘never’, she doesn’t mean in a couple of years, she means right here and now!
The ‘tipping point’ has already been passed even if the MSM is pretending otherwise because acknowledging this event opens the social contract to be re-written!

We no longer enjoy cheap abundant energy so the conditions we must live under WILL change…considerably.

Allowing them to remain ‘the same’ or even ‘similar’ for the few will make things much worse for the rest!

Funny how a ‘little’ hoarding can screw up an otherwise equitable distribution plan. People with ‘income streams’ will be at a decided advantage to those of us with less, er, ‘flexible’ forms of income.

Those with a paycheck that is negotiated on an annual basis will find themselves facing a crisis for most of the year…because it is not in your employer’s interest to pay you a cent more than they absolutely have to.

Since the FUCKING CONSERVATIVES have fucked up the tax structure of this nation, you now have no one to protect you from being ‘shortchanged’ by your employer.

Worse, if you’re ‘two-steps’ down on the distribution chain, your fucked because your employer ‘lacks the leverage’ to negotiate a better deal for himself.

Do you see how this inter-locking piece of shit can cave in quite suddenly?

If there is a ‘common thread’ on the gloom and doom sites it is this, the speed with which collapse can be upon us will astonish most of you.

Everything can be ‘fine’ when you go to bed tonight only to be unrecognizable by the time you wake up in the morning…IF you wake up in the morning.

Be Prepared (for pretty much anything, including deception!)

The depths of their depravity are unknowable and they’ve done some pretty ‘mad shit’ already!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Happy Talk (again!)

Greetings good citizen,

Are you ready for another peek as to how close we’re getting to the proverbial drain we’ve been circling?

In as much as we can appreciate how ‘employees’ are required to do what the person cutting their paycheck demands of them, at what point do those demands become ‘unreasonable’?

Is this where we should draw the line? Tax Breaks Bring Hope for Hiring

Isn’t this ‘identical’ to the billions of dollars worth of tax cuts implemented by the Bush Administration that resulted in a net loss in the size of the overall workforce?

Talk about ‘Happy Talk’, the article enumerates a grand total of five jobs this ‘tax break’ will allegedly ‘create’ and the word ‘temp’ keeps popping into my consciousness for some ‘déjà vu’ type reason…

Isn’t insanity DEFINED as doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome?

Let’s not pull any punches here as we ask ‘is Barrack Obama insane?’

I’d opine no BUT I’d qualify that with by adding that I fear the people he listens to are a few cards shy of a full deck…if you know what I mean.

‘Tis the Season to contemplate how this ‘rich man, poor man’ bullshit has overtaken the ‘purpose’ of civilization.

The purpose of civilization is not far removed from the (true) purpose of commerce.

Civilization exists not to protect those who lay claim to all that they see but to protect the interests of the species and provide for their well-being, not just for the few but for ALL.

Treason starts with ‘I cut your paycheck so you have to do what I say’.

The moment this kind of thinking enters the civic arena, civilization becomes a ‘Bum Deal’.

It’s the ‘deal changer’ that re-purposes the focus of society from what’s good for all to ‘what’s good for me’.

As you can see, when the focus shifts, things start to fall apart.

What must puzzle some of you greatly is why nobody in a position of power seems to grasp a simple thing like economics.

They protest that it’s ‘complicated’ but that’s what anybody putting the screws to you always says.

You do what needs doing whether you get paid to do it or not, that is ‘fundamental truth’ number one.

Why do you get paid to do some things and not others?

Sadly, the answer here is too straight-forward, because nobody can figure out how to make a buck off of it. (The number of people willing to pay you to do what they can easily do for themselves isn’t large enough to justify the effort.)

This brings us to fundamental truth number two, there aren’t enough hours in the day for everybody to do everything that needs doing personally…this is where money comes in.

This marvelous little invention makes it possible to buy the things you don’t have the time or the talent to do/make for yourself.

This also creates a different problem. How much should you give up doing yourself and how much should you buy?

‘Ideally’ you’d buy everything, it’s what ‘rich’ people do!

Sadly, without a reliable ‘income stream’ it is not possible to buy all that we need…and worse, there aren’t enough income streams out there so everybody can have their own.

You can neither buy (nor sell) from an empty cart.

Here’s a bit of ‘economics 101’ that most of us are left to figure out on our own. It’s better to be the ‘employer’ than the ‘employee’ but this brings us full circle to that other part of the puzzle, the one where there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ to go around.

To make matters worse, who decides how much money is introduced into the economy at any given time?

You’d think the ‘all knowing’ central bank would have a handle on this but the answer is no, the bankers themselves just make this shit up as they go along!

That’s how the global economy got up to a quadrillion dollars and nobody knew it until it started to fall apart!

This, ironically brings us to ‘fundamental truth number 3’ ‘ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL’.

If your local economy isn’t ‘robust’ enough to support the population it WILL collapse!

Why, in this vast economic wasteland, are some areas doing ‘okay’ while others have been decimated?

Again, the answer lies with the ‘moronic’ banking system.

Money (as I have told you countless of times now) is FAKE! IT IS A ‘MARKER’ OF NO REAL VALUE EXCEPT TO REGULATE ACCESS.

So why is there money here and no money there? Because the moronic bankers put the money there!

For some bizarre reason nobody thinks it is peculiar that South Dakota, the ‘usury capital of the US’ (thanks to W.) is thriving while the rest of the nation watches in horror.

Yep, the most ‘under reported’ phenomenon not heard in the media today is precisely when this nation became a bank.

To listen to the pundits tell it, this occurred back when the Bretton Woods treaty was ratified.

Funny how we simultaneously saved the world from fascism by handing over the global economic system to fascists!

And look what they’ve done with the place since!

Ignorance, suffering and poverty abound everywhere you look, even right here in the ‘mighty’ USA…better known as (Yo)U Stupid Ass!

Money isn’t the problem, it’s never been the problem because, as you can now see, they can print up as much as they want, whenever they want to and its value is capable of defying ‘gravity’ (which should give you an idea about both Zimbabwe and Wiemar Germany. Money only goes ‘bad’ when the idiots want it to go bad because the rest of you are fucking clueless!)

It’s a damn dangerous game and when the plug gets pulled, no one wins.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, December 13, 2010

Freefall or Dangling?

Greetings good citizen,

Another day, another step closer to the brink…

Our lead story has to do with something that has crossed all of our minds given the headlines for the past couple of years. Should any irony be lost on how the title attempts to paint this phenomenon as an ‘ongoing’ problem?

And this isn’t ‘misleading’, the homeless have flocked to the nation’s more ‘temperate’ regions since the European invasion created homelessness! No irony at all should be lost on the fact that homelessness didn’t exist before the property owning Europeans arrived on the scene!

Phrased this way it makes the ‘colonization’ of the Western Hemisphere sound like a ‘bad thing’, which would lead to accusations of being ‘ungrateful’ for all of the technical advances that are currently threatening to make our species extinct…all so a few could be rich.

Now tell me again how ‘wonderful’ the advancement of civilization has been (and it has been ‘wonderful’…for a few.)

Naturally, the tendency to dismiss such accusations as ‘sour grapes’ sort of pales in the dim light of FUCKING EXTINCTION!

But I digress.

Having shifted the ‘Overton Window’ a few degrees back from its current ‘My way or the Highway’ setting you should now have the proper mindset to ask why situations like this even exist.

Los Angeles Confronts Homelessness Reputation

The article claims there are 50,000 homeless in the Los Angeles area, a metro district that covers 40 square miles.

The first question that pops into your head should be the ‘accuracy’ of that, er, ‘estimate’ considering how ‘inhospitable’ the climate is across the rest of the nation at this time of the year?

If we temper the fact that not everybody who loses their home ends up on the streets, and counter that with the fact that most ‘shelters’ turn people away because they’re full (and then some.) It leaves us to wonder if anyone has a grip, much less a solid understanding of the homeless situation that has plagued CAPITALIST SOCIETY since its inception!

Does the ‘solution’ to this crisis lie in building permanent housing for a fraction of the homeless. (The article proposes to build 12,000 units for 50,000 people.)

No irony should be lost on the fact that there is at least that much vacant housing stock in the greater LA area alone! (Naturally, killing two birds with one stone would never occur to pillagers of public funds, even in the ‘failed state’ of California.)

Perhaps we should count ourselves as fortunate that Halliburton hasn’t been contracted to solve this, er, ‘problem’…

They’d ‘house the homeless’ right quick and they’d do it on the cheap too…which is not to say cheap to the taxpayer. Nope, the taxpayer would still pay dearly but the voiceless homeless would ‘pay’ too!

Which brings us to tonight’s second offering where Mr. Krugman admonishes us to put things in their proper perspective…

Block Those Metaphors

Assuming you don’t want to read the article yourself, he is telling us that the CO media frequently uses ‘improper metaphors’ to describe our economic situation.

Like a system of commerce that is suffering from a dire shortage of paying customers can be ‘jumpstarted’. It ain’t gonna happen no matter how much ‘happy talk’ you use to describe the situation or how often you point to the meaningless Stock Market.

It will take much more than ‘jaw-boning’ to fix what ails this nation.

The ‘bad news’ is the only thing our self-professed ‘betters’ seem prepared to do is ‘talk’.

The road to recovery starts with the arrest and conviction of the criminals responsible for this disaster! (And these two-faced, self-important morons would be only too happy to prosecute the victims of their own ‘deceptive practices’.)

Herein lies the problem of letting the criminals run the Justice System.

Considering the eventual ‘consequences’ of allowing such a situation to continue, you don’t suppose we should do something about it, do you?

That ‘cliff’ I refer to in the opening? It is the leap that leads to ‘Banana Republicdom’.

Again, no irony should be lost on the fact that the last time humanity found itself in ‘bondage’ to its self-professed ‘betters’ it also happened without A.) a choice or B.) a fight.

People thought they were free until they weren’t.

Then the killing started.

Is history about to ‘repeat’ itself? Picky assholes say no but in the end the ‘difference’ between now and then will be like picking fly shit out of pepper.

Worse is this revelation that “Tax Cuts Are Theft”. [Hat tip: Some Assembly Required]

Understand good citizen that much of what is happening today is a direct violation of the longstanding ‘human social contract’.

Those who don’t abide by the rules will have their membership in society ‘revoked’.

A Simple Plan merely re-enforces long standing initiatives that have kept the peace over the centuries. This too is a key factor of any proposal for building a ‘sustainable’ society.

Those how say such a task is impossible want to cheat you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Truth be told...

Greetings good citizen,

After a day’s respite you should be eager for more…whatever it is that brings you back to this, er, ‘curious’ place.

It seems the ‘theme’ for this weekend is…’Truth be told.’

We kick off our ‘truth-fest’ with this piercing article which belabors what most of us already know all too well.

Under the ‘toeing the line for the sake of credibility’ dictum you will notice that Mr. Galbraith steers clear of the entire ‘puppet’ issue. Perhaps in some distant future historians will contrast the Bush and the Obama administrations to illustrate the difference between a willing puppet and a spineless one…

Moving on to the topic of economic recovery we have this damning commentary regarding what our eyes see as opposed to what the pundits claim is going on:

Cashing Out: Corporate America is sitting on the largest cash hoard it has had in 50 years, because they can see no profit in building more plants or hiring more workers or making more widgets. If a company cannot justify investing its own money back into its own operation, why should I buy stock in it?


That’s right good citizen, those we permit to gouge a living out of our sweat ‘can’t see the point’ in investing in our crumbling nation. A nation that is crumbling BECAUSE the ‘privileged few’ aren’t interested in investing here. Tell me again why extending the (thus far useless) Bush tax breaks are so critical to conservatives? (So critical that they’re willing to shut down the government until they get their way! And the Dinos are likely ‘STUPID’ enough to go along with them!)

Does ANYBODY see this disaster ending well?

It certainly isn’t hiding in this article! that makes a rather elegant argument that the creators of ‘Dollar Hegemony’ have literally ‘painted themselves into a corner’.

These fiscal deficits will eventually lead the U.S., the purveyor of debt-dollar discipline, into a sovereign debt crisis. Attempts to decrease the national debt have been rendered useless by the financial disciplinary system, as it requires private or public credit growth for economic health. Without the underlying private growth, cuts in public spending will most likely make deficits worse and debt servicing costs greater (the current Euro zone crisis is an ongoing example of this dynamic.)

President Obama's laughable plan to double U.S. exports in five years will not even come close to fruition, because debt-dollar discipline has come at the expense of the country's manufacturing sector, and the ability to suppress the dollar's value as explained earlier. The complex disciplinary system has also rendered the political apparatus inflexible, which is why many Democrats, claiming to be against tax cuts for the rich, and Republicans, claiming to be against public deficits, have both agreed to extend Bush's tax cuts (which will cost taxpayers $5T over ten years [2]). It is truly a predicament, an inherent contradiction of the system itself, and can only be resolved by a wholesale simplification of the structures within global disciplinary society [snip]

“advances in electronic communications technology, and have evolved right alongside them. Now, this technology increasingly serves as a means of communicating outside the panoptic gaze of disciplinary society.

WikiLeaks has released numerous electronic documents given to it by informants within the heart of the system, exposing some inconvenient truths about those directing foreign and domestic policies. [8]. These documents are especially threatening to disciplinarians because they are "raw dumps" of data and communications, at least before they are "vetted" and deceptively reported on by the mainstream corporate media. The leaks provide the disciplined public a rare glimpse into the "dark side" of the modern "democratic" state and its complex power structures. [snip]

As the complex structures supporting this financial discipline deteriorate, consumers will have to confront a profound new reality, one that they previously thought to be outside the realm of possibility. They must not only confront the fact that they have been deceptively enslaved, but simultaneously impoverished as well. Part III of this series will discuss the general ways in which financial power structures and disciplined consumers may react to the new realities faced by global society, introducing the insightful thoughts of Gilles Deleuze on what he ominously termed the "control society".


Can you say ‘Off with their freaking heads’?

It is truly no less than they deserve, the question is whether or not we have the ‘stomach’ for such ‘vengeance’. Understand good citizen, the perps are betting we don’t.

But they are also betting that there will be an outpouring of ‘sympathy’ for these predators who were only doing what came ‘naturally’ to them.

This is the identical ‘defense’ the warped and twisted Libertarians use to defend their unbridled ‘selfishness’. The ‘forwent’ their desire for ‘instant gratification’ and now that they ‘own’ whatever it is that you need, you have to pay whatever they ask, even if it is ridiculous!

So I ask you good citizen, is ‘hooray for me, fuck you’ EVER justified?

Not in a ‘just’ society it isn’t!

If you want to live with ‘bloodsuckers’ then be prepared to set aside any claim you may have to ‘justice’. You’ve already chosen to take whatever comes.

Understand it was the same ‘bloodsuckers’ that have perpetrated The Big Shrink upon our nation, making you a ‘captive audience’ in the process!

Remember, their entire ‘philosophy’ (if that’s what you want to call it) is centered on ‘hooray for me and fuck you!

In a telling sidebar we have this story from the world’s number 2 economy…

China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs

Geez Louise, I thought only students in the US were suffering from a chronic ‘lack of opportunity’ that conservatives keep confusing with ‘laziness’. Kids should stand up and take the bull by the horns like these ‘enterprising individuals’ did!

No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own

But, alas! This brings us full circle to the reason ‘capitalist utopia’ CAN’T EXIST!

There just isn’t enough ‘market share’ to go around.

Most telling would be a follow up story about how these ambitious youngsters are doing this time next year. Should we take bets on how many of them will be ‘bankrupt’ by then? (Statistically, this figure already stands at 99 out of 100. an overwhelming majority of 'start-ups' DON'T SURVIVE their first year...for precisely the above stated reason, failure to capture sufficient market share!)

It takes a certain ‘ruthlessness’ (of the variety described in ‘The Godfather’) to ‘succeed’ in business.

This is a situation that can only get worse and has already ‘trickled down’ to the ‘Mom & Pop’ level.

The more ruthless this situation becomes the worse your standard of living gets. The ‘blood’ they suck has to come from somewhere and it’s all about ‘capturing’ markets.

Oh, but wait, I’m being ‘unfair’. Wittle capitalists are only trying to make a profit (if you bleed to death in the process, tough! Maybe you should have gotten a better paying job when you had the chance! Yeah, like that opportunity hung around for more than a nanosecond or was even remotely genuine in the first place!)

Because regardless of how things work out, it is ALL your fault! You shouldn’t have let these greedy pricks get away with ripping you off in the first place!

You should have demanded better pay AND lower prices, there should be no such thing as a ‘rich’ person but that assumes we live in a society that is far better 'managed' than the one we have…

Well, it’s never too late to try again…and I’d opine that the sooner we got cracking, the better!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, December 10, 2010

Obama's Hostages...

Greetings good citizen,

It doesn’t cease to amaze me how some people will continue ‘make excuses’ for the nominal leadership of their political party.

This only serves to re-enforce my belief that the whole ‘party’ thing is wrong, especially when it disintegrates into and US vs. Them ‘pissing contest’ that prevents the common interest from being acted upon.

But as we know, the ‘common interest’ conflicts directly with the interests of our self-professed ‘betters’.

(And you KNOW they are our ‘betters’ because they can tie us up in knots while we still don’t have a clear idea about precisely ‘who’ they are…)

Then again, we can probably ‘attribute’ Mr. Krugman’s tenacious defense of ‘Bush’s third term’ to the ultimatum that many journalists now face, “either you do it or we’ll find somebody who will!”

Better to have a piece of a bully pulpit than to ‘grumble in obscurity’ as I do here.

That said, I tip my hat to you, good citizen. If not for you I’d be completely invisible.

Moving along, one of my other ‘favorite’ sources of economic information has this to report:

No. 338: October Trade Deficit, Tax Games
Subscription required December 10th, 2010
• Narrower October Trade Deficit Is Positive Indication for Fourth-Quarter GDP
• Proposed Tax Deal Would Not Forestall the Double-Dip
• Federal Government's Fiscal Woes Would Be Exacerbated


That’s what I like! No bullshit, no acting or pretending that everything is going to be all right. There’s the ‘straight dope’, no quibbling!

Extend the ‘making it worse’ tax cuts and you’re going to cement this nation into permanent ‘Banana Republicdom’.

It’s what each and every one of us understands. There’s nothing to ‘invest in’ and that moisture you feel on your head? That’s not ‘trickle’, it’s tinkle!

First clue? Money isn’t wet!


The part I keep trying to impress upon you good citizen is it’s impossible to ‘bankrupt’ a nation (because money itself is IMAGINARY…although it is conceivable that a nation’s economic viability can be ‘vaporized’ with nuclear weapons.)

That’s the only kind of ‘bankruptcy’ possible. As long as an area is capable of supporting life, it’s not ‘bankrupt’.

So what we’re really being threatened with is actually a ‘mindfuck’. Your access to sustenance is slowly being cut off via their ‘control’ of the money supply.

As we see evidenced in this article

Next time you pass the kettle, remember that Obama and the GOP are wrapping up bundles of $100 bills for the nation's billionaires while one in seven Americans is trying to stretch his food stamps to the end of the month.


One in seven, one in five…it’s all the same. Evidence of ‘gross mismanagement’, justified by claims that ‘we don’t have the money’…like that has ANYTHING to do with it!

The mind is a funny thing. I just had a ‘flash’ concerning the sudden proliferation of ‘zombie’ movies on the airwaves.

The striking part was the resemblance the zombies have to what a (living, albeit starving) person would look like.

Are the assholes attempting to ‘condition’ people to react (violently) to the victims of their mismanagement?

Sadly, there are a bunch of ‘not too bright’ people among us so it’s only a matter of time until we are confronted with the ‘zombie defense’ being raised in a homicide case.

That aside, one can’t help but ponder the state of US politics (nevermind the ‘validity’ of the recent mid-term elections) considering the public’s general revulsion to the ‘December compromise’.

Didn’t I say a couple of weeks ago we’d witness an event that would ‘open our eyes’ to the truth about our situation?

Nothing says ‘Puppet Government’ quite like this unseemly December Compromise does!

W. is famous for publicly admitting that the ‘super-rich’ were his constituency…what’s up with O, our alleged 'man of the people'?

Is this a case of ‘me too!’ or is it worse than it appears?

I leave that for you to decide good citizen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Posturing

Greetings good citizen,

I know only too well how difficult it is to frame a debate so there is no mistake about the subject at hand.

In tonight’s first offering we have a reiteration of a point of view that I ‘pontificate’ upon frequently…although I don’t try to pass myself off as a ‘reality based, average guy’.

I provide the excerpt below as a ‘quibbling’ point:

It strikes me that the solutions offered by the Federal Reserve-policies of quantitative easing and of corporate bailouts and "printed" monies for food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid, etc.-that these policies are poorly disguised attempts to let the rest of the world devolve into global austerity-driven conflict, while America uses the extra time bought by such policies to eventually pursue "righteous and just" wars; wars fought on foreign soil, to clean up the mess and to once again come to the rescue and to make the world a better and safer place for humanity.


You’ll get no argument from me that war, when it comes, will be dressed up in ‘wolves’ clothing’. That much is a given. Just like the ‘War on Terra’, we will be admonished to make certain ‘sacrifices’ for the war effort. We’ll probably be asked to go shopping (again.)

But war just ain’t what it used to be, is it?

But there’s a little, er, ‘flaw’ in the logic here because the ‘sides’ in upcoming conflicts are definitely not ‘equal’. Which is to point out the ‘N’ factor, which is ignored here.

Then there’s the alleged/assumed ‘altruism’ at play here, that we’re going to gird ourselves for battle in order to preserve and protect ‘The American Way.’

Given the recent ‘death’ of the American Dream, won’t that be a rather ‘hard sell’?

It will be quite difficult to convince people who have their heads being held in a vise by government supported bankers that they should lay down the lives of their children so the bankers can keep on raping the people of this nation with impunity…don’t you think?

Isn’t this what ‘America’ has become?

Makes you want to march down to the polling place and cast a ballot for ‘none of the above’ (as Joe Bageant proposes) or ‘fuck this bullshit!’ as I propose…

Before we commit the lives of our youth to another, er, ‘foreign adventure’ it is high time we asked them to perform some desperately needed ‘police work’ our own backyard. While it’s always dangerous to go shooting up the neighborhood, some things just can’t be helped.

Pay me now or pay me later but pay you will…(or 'freedom ain't free!)

So yes good citizen, there will be ‘war’ (especially if the ‘empty suits’ propose that we invade yet another defenseless nation for the purpose of ‘fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here!’)

Worse, chances are excellent that our own streets will already be ‘running with blood’ long before we are, er, ‘asked’ (by legislators who don’t listen to us) to defend our (alleged/imagined) ‘freedom’.

Perhaps pursuing policies aimed at "extending and pretending" is in fact better than the alternative. Perhaps continuing on the clearly unsustainable, and I would argue eventually disastrous, path of debt monetization in order to extend unemployment benefits to those without jobs and in order to provide food stamp subsidies to those without any other way to feed their children and in order to fund health care benefits for our nation’s elderly and infirm; perhaps that is the better choice-at least for the near term, in the eyes and hearts of our political leaders, as a way to prepare the nation for the inevitability of the great wars to come.


Perhaps you can see now what ‘stuck in my craw’ regarding certain assumptions made by the above article.

Statements such as “I am a nominal man with a pretty good understanding of how things work in the real world.” Tend to raise ‘red flags’ in my suspicious little mind.

Me? I’m a whack job who readily admits that I see things far differently than the ‘average’ person sees them. I’m neither a ‘Lefty’ nor a ‘Righty’ but tread that mythical ‘middle ground’ that all anarchists walk.

Talk about subjects for another post, it tickle me to no end to see veritable Nazi’s being described in the CO media as ‘centrists’.

Let me assure you good citizen, there is NO SUCH THING as a ‘capitalist centrist’ just as there is no such thing as a communist ‘centrist’.

So where is ‘the center’?

Like I said, that is a topic for a post all by itself.

I (once again) find it ‘interesting’ to see ideas that I put forth for your consideration ‘popping up’ in other places.

Maybe now is a good time to reiterate the notion that I don’t see this ‘ending well’ for anybody that ‘admires’ capitalism…

Finally, in yet another Man bites dog story, we have this offering that belabors the obvious.

How does a government that is dependent on collecting taxes for its survival manage when it fails to prosecute its richest citizens for turning the nation into an economic desert?

Looks like the ‘short answer’ (it doesn’t) is the correct answer once again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Time to get busy!

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets are limping along in their usual upward direction (although there is no rational explanation for this!) But we’re talking the fortunes of the rich here so it doesn’t have to make sense! (It just has to happen…)

Um, besides the stock markets some people use the Real Estate market as a barometer of economic health.

(Nobody knows, much less understands what measurement the NBER uses, although rumor has it the decision is tied to how big the bribe is!)

Own it or rent it, we all need someplace to get in out of the rain/cold.

Increasingly, fewer of us will be ‘owning’ our place of residence as we are ‘priced out of the market.’

Understand, the first obstacle will be choking up the ‘down payment’, even if prices fall precipitously, rising food and energy costs will make setting aside large sums next to impossible.

Which brings us to the second part of the equation. Let’s suppose you do come into a ‘windfall’ that allows you to put aside the down payment issue. You’ve still got to heat and light the place as well as put food on the table.

Then there’s ‘property taxes’ (never mind the unending maintenance/replacement of rugs, furniture and appliances!)

You need a substantial income to afford even a modest house!

Well, good citizen, where are you going to find a job that pays YOU more than the minimum wage?

Because in case you haven’t noticed, we (the US) have become the new Mexico, where the minimum wage has become the ‘maximum wage’.

Well, there is the public sector but you need to ‘know’ somebody to get one of those jobs! (The inference here is it is possible to ‘bribe your way in’ but considering the ‘tightness’ of the labor markets, the ‘ante’ will soon become prohibitive, returning the public sector to it’s former [family] ‘members only’ status.)

So, given just some of the ‘factors’ involved, just how ‘optimistic’ do you think people who are (constantly) announcing the ‘turn-around’ of the real estate markets are being?

The ‘problem’, of course, is a dearth of ‘qualified buyers’.

Let’s back up a step and ask a few, er, ‘pertinent’ questions:

Does your employer ‘care’ whether or not you own your house?

Is it in your employer’s interest to pay you enough so that you can afford a house?

Relative to the nature of the work on offer, does your employer even care if you are able to afford shelter at all?

The answer to all of the ‘employer’ questions above is the short one, the two-letter answer as opposed to the three-letter one.

You’re employer doesn’t care if you live under a rock and drink your paycheck so long as you do what you’re paid to do and you don’t annoy (gross out) the customers or the rest of the ‘hired help’.

In that order…

So we arrive at another little ‘disconnect’ brought about by the ‘fuck you, pay me!’ monetary distribution system.

Relying on someone else for a paycheck puts you at a decided disadvantage when it comes to controlling the circumstances that you will live out the rest of your life under.

Less for you is more for them.

And we’ve been over the ‘capitalist utopia’ thing a thousand times! That shit don’t float, specially in ‘tight’ economic times like now!

So, what are you going to do? Sit there and mumble ‘fuck my life’ while the capitalists reply, ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you’?

That’s where you’re sitting, my friend.

Snapping back to the present, it matters little how ‘unjust’ the current system is because it is on the brink of collapsing…and you know the ‘chaos’ that comes afterwards will only make matters worse.

It could conceivably be decades before anything resembling ‘order’ is restored and perhaps centuries before anything resembling ‘freedom’ returns.

All because we couldn’t control the fucking ‘greed heads’…

Hell of a thing to try to explain to your starving children as they watch you die…

WE are the authors of THEIR future, don’t condemn them to misery…or worse, don’t hope/pray that ‘someone else’ will save them. THAT’S YOUR JOB!

Time to ‘get busy’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Sellout

Greetings good citizen,

I heard this on yesterday’s news but held off until today so I could jump on the ‘bandwagon’…although it’s still a pretty lonely parade float, the one that decries the ‘exercise in futility’ the ballot box has become.

If we flip backwards in time I have the, er, ‘comfort’ of knowing I was ‘right’ about the ballot box being ‘manipulated’. The media has convinced us all that ‘dissatisfied’ former Democrats (who are now Independents) are voting Republican in numbers large enough to sway the elections in their favor.

Logic, good citizen.

More or less 60% of voting aged Americans DON’T VOTE and that’s on both sides of the political fence! There are as many ‘disgusted’ old-time conservatives as there are ‘frustrated’ old-school Democrats.

Instead of voting for, well, ‘traitors’ (to their political ideals) they don’t bother to vote at all!

So what of the 40% that do get out and vote?

Are they as ‘evenly split’ as the (constantly lying) CO media would have us believe?

Short answer, no.

Unfortunately (for our nation) we have no way to ‘prove’ that except for measuring the turnout at ‘political events’.

Which is to point out the huge ‘disparity’ between the number of people (estimated at 2,000) who turned up for Glen Beck’s ‘Tea Party’ rally as opposed to the hundred thousand or so who turned out for Jon Stewart’s ‘apolitical’ ‘rally for Sanity’.

Which is to say, there are far more people that are fed up with the, er, ‘non-responsiveness’ of government than the same lying media would have you believe.

What I find, er, ‘interesting’ is that unlike the last election cycle, where the ‘race for the White House’ began right after the Republicans got slaughtered in the mid-terms, this time there is nothing but ‘crickets’. This time there aren’t even candidates sending out ‘test balloons’ to explore their prospects of getting elected. Both sides are, er, ‘unusually quiet’.

The ‘scary’ part is this isn’t as ‘unusual’ as it seems. Those who have ‘captured’ our political process are now ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on their plans to ‘dissolve’ our current (useless) government.

The ‘infamous they’ aren’t fielding any ‘new candidates’ because there won’t be any elections come 2012.

You will, eventually, see some ‘test balloons’ sent out by various politicians but that is only to provide the ‘illusion of normalcy’ for the ‘difficult to delude’ crowd.

Understand good citizen there are already people who are both (happy and convinced) that Sarah Palin is running.

There are also some who are convinced Hillary will make another attempt…

But that isn’t nearly as ‘incredible’ as fools how believe This guy will make a run for re-election.

Under a ‘you heard it here first’ I will once again ‘predict’ that Mr. Obama will follow in LBJ’s shoes and ‘refuse’ to run for a second term.

Especially in light of this latest fiasco:

Obama Caves on Tax Cuts for Wealthy, Capitulating to 'Bush-McCain Philosophy'

If this is how Obama plans to govern in the future, we’re in for a rough next two years.

December 6, 2010

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said over and over that he was running to "put an end to the Bush-McCain philosophy." Campaigning in Colorado just days before the election, Obama clearly stated his opposition to Bush-era economic policies and ridiculed the idea that "we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that it trickles down on everybody else. It’s a philosophy that gives tax breaks to wealthy CEOs and to corporations that ship jobs overseas while hundreds of thousands of jobs are disappearing here at home."

Now Obama, in a blatant reversal, is preparing to do just that, agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which my colleague Chris Hayes accurately calls the "single defining domestic policy of W."

In 2008, Obama presented himself as a clean break from the Bush and Clinton dynasties and a fresh face for the nation and the world. Yet once in office he packed his White House with holdovers from the Bush and Clinton administrations and continued or even accelerated key Bush-era policies, whether in the realm of counterterrorism, Afghanistan or offshore drilling. The latest "compromise" on the Bush tax cuts, extending the upper-income tax cuts for two years in exchange for the continuation of unemployment benefits, is simply the latest in a series of capitulations from the Obama White House.

Obama and Congressional Democrats bungled the tax debate from the start, even though it was clearly a winning issue for the president and his party. Even though everyone knew the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of this year, Democrats failed to develop an overall strategy for this issue last summer or force a vote in the Congress before the election [does anyone think this was an ‘oversight/accident’?]-- at a time when even Republicans like John Boehner said they’d vote to extend only the middle-class tax cuts if that was their only option. Yet Democrats refused to put the GOP on the spot or talk about the tax cuts during the campaign, blurring what should have been a core distinction between the parties; Democrats for the middle class, Republicans for the rich. As former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland said recently: “If we can't win that argument we might as well just fold up.”

Once Democrats finally decided to vote on only the middle-class tax cuts, last week, Republicans had all the momentum and the issue had become mere political theater. Even as Congress was voting on the Democrats’ plan, Obama signaled to Republicans that a more favorable deal was just around the corner, giving the GOP no incentive to side with Democrats. The Obama administration’s posture on the tax cuts is eerily similar to its stance on the public option during healthcare reform -- the president says he wants the policy, but does absolutely nothing to fight for it, either through his own bully pulpit or on Capitol Hill. Last week, Organizing for America asked Obama supporters to phone bank in support of the DREAM Act, repealing "don’t ask, don’t tell," and a pay freeze for federal workers (yet another concession to the GOP), but did nothing on the tax front.


There’s more but you’ll have to follow the link if you want to read it.

How much more ‘evidence’ do you need to convince you that we are now saddled with a government that won’t lift a finger to protect us?

You don’t need me to tell you that a government that doesn’t protect you is more of a threat than a benefit!

Here’s an example of what happens when the government fails to protect you…

[purloined from SAR]

Into The Wilds: One out of four Americans do not pay his bills on time. The actual un/under employment rate is 22%. The inflation rate for people who buy gasoline, eat food and heat their homes is 8%. Average credit card balance is $15,788, penalty fees on credit cards exceed $20 billion a year, and 27% of credit card accounts go into default.


Then we arrive at this example of ‘Downward Mobility’:

[Purloined from: Financial Armageddon]

As USA Today reports in "Economy Has Sent Executives to Jobs Down Corporate Ladder,"

Down is the new up for a great many working Americans.

With the job market growing modestly again this year, Corkett is among many Americans who have taken jobs a rung or more below the ones they lost in the recession. Unlike the unemployed marketing director who's manning the cash register at Walmart or the construction worker who turned to truck driving, these workers are still in their fields, but lower on the career ladder.


This is the same experience many of my peers are currently going through, many for the fifth or sixth time!

If there were a factoid that appears to be consistently omitted, it is the ‘persistence’ of certain phenomenon.

‘Downward Mobility’ is part and parcel with the ‘Global race to the Bottom’. As your ‘field of endeavor’ is off-shored, you become a ‘trainee’ in a brand new field, often competing with much younger workers for these ‘entry level’ positions.

Not for nothing, this is a factor of ‘our government’ failing to protect us…which makes it ‘part of the problem’, doesn’t it? (In case you were under the impression that a ‘captive government’ doesn’t affect the average individual one way or the other…)

So, this leaves us with a badly broken nation and nothing being done about it.

And this good citizen is where I leave you.

I have developed a (sustainable) replacement for the mess we currently suffer. That said, I am open to other ‘ideas’ (but they have to be ‘holistic’, like A Simple Plan is.)

Because there aren’t any ‘half-measures’ that will make/fix the current system, it HAS TO BE REPLACED!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner