Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Corporate Media Bias

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while I run into articles such as this one that cause my teeth to set on edge before making my head explode.

The article dutifully explains how, Once upon a time, the US was the global leader in manufacturing and innovation.

Then we get this drivel:

Like the jet aircraft made by Boeing, one of the country’s largest exporters, products like these require sophisticated manufacturing equipment, operated by skilled workers, and benefit from the tight integration of design and production. With goods like these, the United States can reassert an economic advantage. If we can find ways for companies of every size to exploit the possibilities of nanofabrication, advanced materials, robotics and energy efficiency, we can create networks of innovation, joining lab research to new production processes and business models.

The United States remains a top producer of advanced technology products. But our dominance has eroded. Ten years ago, we enjoyed a trade surplus in advanced technology manufactured goods; today, that category accounts for an $81 billion annual trade deficit. Countries that used to make inexpensive goods at low cost have developed the capacity to produce high-value goods, making it ever more tempting for American companies to design at home but manufacture abroad.

This not only destroys manufacturing jobs, but also saps our inventive advantage. Manufacturers conduct 70 percent of private-sector research and development and employ 64 percent of the nation’s scientists and engineers. But factories abroad attract design and engineering talent; over time, manufacturing off shore leads to innovation off shore. To make matters worse, as the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology recently reported, other nations are investing heavily in manufacturing, while our investments lag.

What numbnuts FAILS TO MENTION is that the customer base for these supposedly ‘advanced technology products’ wouldn’t fill a thimble! (especially in a world gone broke!)

Is this kind of, er, ‘stupidity’ (championing MORE automation!) an indication of the failed intellectual capital of this nation?

Sadly, these fools are paid to think in terms that are not sustainable.

No irony should be lost on the fact that true productive workers will lose their job before these idiots get what’s coming to them!

Do these people have a clue?

Apparently not!

Sadly good citizen we will not see anything that makes sense until this old guard is swept away and a new, sustainable social model is implemented.

I apologize for ‘losing it’ but to see such stupidity coming down from on high makes my blood boil!

I’d like to pin this one on the media too but that is not the case, ‘sellouts’ are everywhere, especially in positions of authority!

Like many things I address, I cannot (single-handedly) ‘cure’ the problems confronting society, I can only shine a spotlight on them so people will know it’s not them, things really are ‘fucked up’ .

I started this piece last night so I came across this little bit of corporate propaganda during this morning’s browsing.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 1.1 percent in morning trading. The Dow Jones industrial average traded in positive territory for the year, up 1.0 percent. The Nasdaq composite index gained 1.0 percent percent.

In Europe, shares rose in midday trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 was 2.2 percent higher, and Germany’s DAX gained 2.9 percent. In Paris, the CAC 40 rose 2.7 percent. Asia closed broadly higher.

Economic reports have been largely negative in recent weeks, with consumer and business confidence slumping sharply in developed economies.

Although the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, last week did not signal any new help from the central bank — but rather asked the government to help growth — - he left the door open to more stimulus if needed.

"Economic news continues to head downhill yet markets are taking evidence of slowing growth as a likely trigger for more Fed stimulus ," said Mitul Kotecha, analyst at Credit Agricole.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I am more than a little disturbed by the current ‘fake’ economy the media keeps hawking.

We all know that the elite have their, er, ‘worth’ tied to the stock market (to protect it from inflation, in case you haven’t noticed, when the dollar tanks, stocks rise) so this largely ‘imaginary’ run up in stock prices has nothing to do with economic health and everything to do with FUCKING COUNTERFEITING!

Which is to point out things are a lot worse than you thought they were…

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

BUT, if you’ve got the blazing brass balls of Christ between your legs and a ‘They can only kill me once’ attitude, there is literally no stopping you!

Going it alone is suicide BUT it is safer, you don’t have to worry about your back when the only one who knows what you’re up to is you.

If we take the ‘can only kill me once’ part to heart, the objective would be sufficient planning so your first mission isn’t also your last one although there is little difference between being killed and being captured and, er, ‘rendered’ for committing an act of ‘terror’, in which case you’ll wish you were dead long before it actually happens.

Can I name the biggest purveyors of ‘propaganda’ here in an article discussing, er, civil disobedience ?

No…but I think you’re smart enough to figure that one out for yourself.

It’s no coincidence that the world’s largest NEWS organization gears its presentation to that of the average sixth grader…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Flowers for Algernon

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we have a story that dances all around the elephant in the room.

Is it the punditry that influences the outcome of the elections? NO, it is the freaking corporate owned media that announces the election results their masters dictate!

After eight years of the worst president ever, what do you think the odds are that the party of No swept house elections across the land?

Slim to none? Even if you can’t tell a Democrat from a Republican without a lie detector these days the only logical explanation behind 2010’s Republican sweep is mass hysteria…and you’d think if people had actually gone THAT bonkers, we’d be rioting in the streets!

But no, instead we get this ‘drivel’:

We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity—the 2012 presidential election.

Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama.

It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalist

Sadly, the rest of the article does nothing more than rant senselessly about ‘pundits’ when it should be calling you to arms against a propaganda machine that has stolen the last dozen elections.

The question, good citizen, is how long are we going to ignore the elephant in the room?

Until we ‘liberate’ the 4th estate we can NOT trust the for profit media to tell us the truth!

Thus can we not trust election results, as reported by ‘the media’.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, election of candidates from the party of ‘one in five’ is a mathematical impossibility, so why does such a minority keep getting swept into power?

Understand just because most voters have gone 'independent' and no longer affiliate with a political party does not mean they have gone 'insane' (As the media would have you believe.)

The only logical explanation for this is we live in a land filled with insane people! (And, again, civil society would have come ‘unglued’ a long time ago if this were indeed the case.)

But wait a minute, maybe it is!

Not too terribly long ago there was a hew and cry raised about ‘perception management’ and the associated ‘cognitive dissonance’ it fosters.

Long time readers know this is also one of my pet hobby horses, I used to harp quite frequently on the dangers of inaccurate information.

I’m sure yesterday’s piece opened some eyes to things you were unaware of.

Which brings us back to the central point of today’s post.

You can’t make informed decisions without accurate (and complete) information.

So how long are we going to tolerate the endless lying of the corporate media?

UNDERSTAND that NOTHING is going to change as long as we let the liars get away with their lying.

You know and I know that NOBODY can live in an ’economic desert’ yet the fucking media pretends it doesn’t exist!

This BULLSHIT won’t stop until the privileged few are, er, ’removed’ from power…and I ain’t talking ’elected officials’ here either, it’s the corporate fat cats who need their claws, er, ’yanked out’.

Maybe Alternet needs to ’pedal softly’ so it won’t lose its ’serious people’ credentials but they do us no favors by not being forthright.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, August 29, 2011

Ponderables

Greetings good citizen,

Proving my, er, ‘statement of fact’ that all money is ‘funny’ (Sadly, even funnier than you might be inclined to think) the stock market is currently up more than 200 points due to ‘relief’ that Hurricane Irene didn’t do more damage.

On that note is a more disturbing observation…what if Irene was a ‘practice run’? Some of you might have noticed that, against all odds, Irene managed to ‘bulls-eye’ NYC.

Remember what I said about destroying evidence?

Will they ‘bide their time’ until a sufficiently powerful storm happens along?

(It would look a little TOO suspicious if tropical storm Joe turns into a force 5 hurricane and just happens to bulls-eye NYC too!)

But that is not the topic of today’s rant.

I got an e-mail from a friend yesterday and it is of the ’pass it along’ variety.

Like a lot of ’good ideas’, it simply doesn’t go far enough.

I fail to understand why our op ed columnists have not hammered on this repeatedly. No one has been able to explain to me why young men and women serve in the U.S. Military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50% of their pay. While Politicians hold their political positions in the safe confines of the capital, protected by these same men and women, and receive full pay retirement after serving one term. It just does not make any sense.

Monday we learned that the staffers of Congress family members are exempt from having to pay back student loans. This will get national attention if news networks will broadcast it. When you add this to the below, just where will all of it stop?

This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please pass it on.

This is an idea that we should address.

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform... in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop.

If each person that receives this will forward it on to 20 people, in three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message.. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States ."

Naturally, a ‘28th amendment’ would be unnecessary if we had the much broader Human Anti-Exploitation Law in force. It automatically forbids any legislation that favors any individual or group over any other.

If we fail to level the playing field (and keep it that way) then peace will forever be a temporary/elusive thing.

But you know that, and so do the criminals but the bad news is they don’t give a shit.

No, the criminals are far more interested in fostering situations like this:

The Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed... until now.

A few weeks ago, in a conversation with U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye, Nick Turse - one of the great investigative reporters on military power and national security - learned something truly shocking. He found out that, on any given day, American commandos are carrying out secret missions in 70 countries. And here is some startling news -- by the end of the year, that number is likely to reach 120.

That’s right. You read that correctly. America’s secret commandos are carrying out operations in 120 countries around the world. What Nick learned provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite, waging a secret war in about 60% of the world’s nations -- a far larger number than was previously acknowledged. This represents a huge expansion by the Obama administration over that of George W. Bush, who deployed "Special Ops" troops in 60 countries.

As Turse points out: Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret unit within the U.S. military -- U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) -- has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and shadowy missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
This is the kind of reporting that is necessary if we are to challenge the Obama version of the expansion of military intrusions all over the globe. Investigative journalism is essential. Will you help support it?

Nick Turse, the guy who broke this story, is a key part of AlterNet's editorial team, overseeing our new strategic coverage area: Empire. Nick is an award-winning investigative reporter, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Nick has written a batch of stories for AlterNet over the years and worked closely with the groundbreaking Tom Dispatch. And now we will have him, with your help, aiming his laser focus, uncovering dirt and details on the relentless expansion of U.S. military operations all around the world, even as the country suffers from huge jobless rates, unrelenting hunger, persistent poverty, and a truly distorted sense of priorities.

I don't have to tell you how important this work is. Needless to say, keeping an eye on our secret military takes time and isn't cheap. Can you help fund Nick's research and writing with a contribution right now? 

In return, we promise you that we will have superb reporting and inside information on the growth of the president's super-secret "private army" that can be sent to assassinate targets around the world, with just a signature from Barack Obama. 

Okay, if we discount the not so subtle begging what remains is a government that is out of control.

I know I’m not alone in being puzzled by just what determines ‘national security’ (because they’re doing a damn piss poor job of it! Especially when it comes to protecting the jobs of US workers.)

How ironic is it that we arrive full circle at the skyrocketing stock markets…is it ‘military might’ pushing stock prices upwards?

Don’t discount it good citizen, military might is precisely the factor that lets us retain the world’s ‘reserve currency’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that it is this same ‘global financial dominance’ that has cost us our government.

These two stories illustrate how your needs come, er, pretty far down on the totem pole from the ‘wishes and desires’ of those who have more power than they should.

Which is to point out how ironic it will be to see our self-professed betters complaining loudly about people who don’t appreciate their lowly place in life (just as they would if the situation were reversed.)

Good to my word, it is not my place to tell you what to think, my job is to provide you with something to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Huricane Irene, accident or tool?

Greetings good citizen,

Aren’t ‘bandwagons’ fun? The last true hurricane that made it north of Carolina was in 1938 yet our flip out over anything media is warning the public to take cover…again.

But wasn’t this how Katrina started out? A hurricane had never bulls-eyed New Orleans before so why was Katrina different?

Could it be because before 2005 the technology to both enhance and steer a major force of nature didn’t exist?

And what of the aftermath that shone a spotlight on the US’s new ‘third world’ status?

Is it me who is missing the significance of ‘warnings about the flooding of the ‘Swindle City’?

Many of New York’s largest investment banks have their headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, and thus fall outside the city’s designated flood zones. Citigroup’s 399 Park Avenue building, Morgan Stanley’s 1585 Broadway bureau, and JPMorgan Chase’s 270 Park Avenue offices are all outside the zones. Credit Suisse’s tower, located a little further south at 11 Madison Avenue, also carries a “no zone” designation.

But the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, located at 200 West Street in Battery Park City, is located in Zone A, the low-lying area that the mayor has ordered to be evacuated. So is American Express’s office in the World Financial Center. Deutsche Bank’s 60 Wall Street headquarters, several blocks away from Goldman, is in Zone B.
A Goldman spokesman declined to detail the bank’s hurricane preparations, but said that the bank had “plans in place to ensure the safety of our people and the ongoing operation of our business.”

A Deutsche Bank spokesman said in a statement: “We are monitoring the storm closely and keeping employees informed with regular updates. We have already taken steps to ensure that we can conduct business as usual while maintaining the safety of all our employees, which is of utmost importance.”

Will we all be scratching our heads come Monday morning wondering why all of these calamities seem to occur on the last weekend in August?

Will we be cursing our foul luck when all of the ‘evidence’ of financial mismanagement ‘accidentally Greetings good citizen,


Talk about your ‘windfalls’, how much ‘luckier’ could you get?

Even more stupefying will be how all of the corroborating evidence will also miraculously disappear!

Should we be thanking our lucky stars it wasn’t a tsunami, considering the recent earthquake that shook the seismically quiet East Coast?

Because the same technology that can steer storms can also trigger earthquakes…

Naturally, this begs a different question: How far will the guilty go to avoid prosecution?

One thing is certain, when the global financial system collapses, ‘the executions’ will begin.

How high up the ladder will you have to be to earn ‘protection’ from your misdeeds?

Many of the ‘rabbits’ know there is no escape, they went along with it purely for the ‘short-term’ gains. What of those for whom the gains were ‘too brief’?

Will they trade what they know in exchange for their lives?

And who would accept a deal like that?

Wouldn’t an act like that set us back down the same path we are trying to escape from?

Of course it would, meaning some of the ‘executioners’ will find the tables turned upon themselves after they wrongly execute the innocent on the word of the guilty.

Then there will be those who will be, er, tempted to ‘help themselves’ to some of the newly ‘liberated’ assets.

They too will find the harsh judgment of society upon them.

But enough of this grim talk.

It should come as little comfort to you that this ‘talk’ of retribution is trivial compared to the crimes that have already been committed and the body counts yet to come.

I suspect it is no coincidence that the ruthless capitalists have been ‘scheduling’ disasters to coincide with the ‘Labor Day’ weekend.

Now that they are moving to wipe Labor Day from the calendar…

It will be interesting to see how that works out considering the only ‘unions’ left are in the public sector.

It’s going to be nightmarish to see just how far the elite will go to ‘starve the beast’.

And perhaps that’s a good place to end today’s speculative piece…imagining what a world without unions would look like.

I suspect it would look very much like what Capitalist Utopia would…only without the buildings.

It’s the no cops and no firefighters thing…or how many hats will the Mercs be willing to wear?

Or would YOU be willing to fight off the world for a spot in the barracks and a plate full (or not) of unidentified mush?

How’s that for ‘short and brutish’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, August 26, 2011

Hurricane storm track info

Greetings good citizen,

It seems the much anticipated Jackson hole ‘retreat’ was briefer than anticipated, conversely, how long does it take to tell people what they already know?

That you’ve done all that could be done and the ‘problem’ is beyond your help.

Elephant in the room time good citizen.

What, precisely, is ‘wrong’ with the global economy?

Short answer: most of the money is ‘stuck’ at the top of the ladder.

With nothing to invest in the money just sits there while ‘cost containment’ measures squeeze the consumer into ‘death by’ decisions. Freeze to death or starve to death…pick one.

Sadly, even our Nobel prize winning economists fail to acknowledge the pachyderm that matters rather than the ‘elephant’ that is in our face.

As I write this, investors around the world are anxiously awaiting Ben Bernanke’s speech at the annual Fed gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyo. They want to know whether Mr. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, will unveil new policies that might lift the U.S. economy out of what is looking more and more like a quasi-permanent state of depressed demand and high unemployment.

But I’ll be shocked if Mr. Bernanke proposes anything significant — that is, anything likely to make any serious dent in unemployment or offer any serious boost to growth.

Why don’t I expect much from Mr. Bernanke? In two words: Rick Perry.

O.K., I don’t mean that Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, is personally standing in the way of effective monetary policy. Not yet, anyway. Instead, I’m using Mr. Perry — who has famously threatened Mr. Bernanke with dire personal consequences if he pursues expansionary monetary policy before the 2012 election — as a symbol of the political intimidation that is killing our last remaining hope for economic recovery.

Understand good citizen there is ZERO hope of an economic recovery if we fail to resolve the ‘liquidity crisis’ that is strangling the ‘non-essential and therefore non-existent’ lower classes’.

Mr. Krugman goes on to draw parallels between the US and Japan but fails to point to the ’true’ problem of why Japan’s economy remains ‘stalled’ after more than twenty years.

This post Jackson Hole article speaks to the flipside of ‘the Bernank’s’ address:

Mr. Bernanke was careful to note that the nation faces significant challenges, including high unemployment and an unsustainable federal debt. But the speech, delivered at a policy conference held each August in Grand Teton National Park, marked a return to the Fed’s position earlier this year that the Fed has done most of what it can, and that the rest of the government must do more.

Indeed, Mr. Bernanke devoted much of his speech to fiscal policy, rather than the monetary policy that is the Fed’s primary responsibility. And he offered an unusual critique of the government’s handling of those issues.

“The country would be well-served by a better process for making fiscal decisions,” he said, noting that the political battle over raising the debt-ceiling had disrupted the financial markets “and probably the economy as well.”

Mr. Bernanke suggested a different process, involving “clear and transparent budget goals, together with budget mechanisms to establish the credibility of these goals.”

Given the facts, is Mr. Krugman’s Princeton alumni correct in exonerating himself?

“It’s not my fault, Congress needs to get its act together!”

Let’s combine that with the White House running interference for the get out of jail free card for the banks and what do you get?

Naturally good citizen, we need to take a couple of giant steps backwards to get a look at the whole picture because it isn’t just the US economy that is in dire peril, it is the global economy!

Now what does that tell you?

It tells me that the ‘conspiracy’ is global although it is impossible to determine from this vantage point precisely who is going along with it and who has a gun to their heads…

But we can speculate…

I’d say, speaking in general terms, that NATO is ‘going along’ with this global coup, it is probably being sold to them as a ‘logical conclusion’ in their decades long battle against the forces of ‘Communism’.

(Considering how things have worked out, communism never really was a genuine threat. Scratch a communist and you’ll find an aristocrat underneath! Scratch a capitalist and you‘ll find a monarch, take your pick!)

So if we have the original NATO nations cooperating we could speculate the ‘emerging economies' are ‘going along to get along’ which is to say they are the ones with the gun to their heads.

They rely on the ‘approval’ of the global banking community to be able to participate in the global economy…rock the boat and you’ll find yourself standing next to Zimbabwe!

And make no mistake about it, the entire Zimbabwe debacle is merely the global banking system flexing its muscles!

No need to threaten military action, just cut off their credit and laugh as they twist in the wind!

The trick here good citizen is to recognize we have the exact same noose hanging around our collective necks…

And there is only one way to remove it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hurricane storm track info

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Hurricane Irene

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s top headline is Mr. Jobs is stepping down from the helm of Apple…and it appears the stock market is, er, ‘tanking’ in his honor.

Like all things stock market related, the gesture is purely symbolic.

Listening to the broadcast news, it seem the progress of hurricane Irene is dominating center stage and we can only wonder why?

Could it be because the vast majority of you are ‘ignorant’ regarding what money is and how it works? (Although those who get to say what money is at any given moment have fucked it up hopelessly, so now there’s nothing anyone can do!)

Which is a truly sorry state of affairs considering money is a ‘simple’ legal construct that has morphed into an incredibly ‘elastic’ substance that defies both logic and reason.

What am I getting at?

The headlines SHOULD read (in any rational civilization) that the ‘faith based’ medium of exchange that we ‘used to use’ has lost all public support so we will be reverting to the back-up system of ‘barter’ for tangibles.

Of course, that would go over like the proverbial ‘lead balloon’.

So we arrive at yet another ‘conundrum’ for those who profess to ‘hate’ government. If you don’t have a government to issue/back your currency, what do you use?

But Rope-a-dope is ready for us, they’ll reply (without thinking) gold!

Why is it every yahoo that desires to rid us of government thinks gold is worth ANYTHING?

It really is a ‘useless’ metal. The only thing it has going for is it’s fairly rare, which with 7 BILLION people to divvy it up between, is sort of a net negative.

Gold stopped working as money once the population got too large.

Funny how the ’Goldbugs’ are all excited about $5,000 an ounce gold but it will really need to hit a half MILLION dollars an ounce to cover the hundred trillion dollar ’global economy’. (Understand this figure does NOT include the Quadrillion dollar ‘derivatives’ market.)

And for those of you who are ‘uncertain’ a quadrillion = one thousand trillion.

Oh wait, we can ‘revalue’….oh no we can’t, not without returning to where we are right now.

A Simple Plan works because many things are ‘devalued’ and money itself is totally ‘reformed’ in both substance and function.

Accumulating ‘tons’ of money will not reap you an advantage as most of what you need to function as a member of society is yours by right.

Starving yourself to accumulate a pile of cash will be an exercise in futility because you can’t ‘trade’ cash between individuals. Lose a bet you had better of bet something other than money because your counter-party has no way to make good, there is no cash! (and no way to transfer funds between individuals.)

I really shouldn’t get too carried away with the ‘your money is for you’ concept as most of you have enough on your hands pretending the scrip we use now is worth something!

Most of you reject ‘cashless’ society out of hand. The idea is too foreign to you. Like Plato trying to wrap his head around a society without slaves…

Weirder still is how most of you don’t have a problem with slavery as long as it ain’t YOU in shackles!

Right now most of you would, er, ‘rebel’ if they tried to put shackles on anybody…and the slavers among us know that…so they’d make their victims ‘criminals’ first.

What ‘crime’ do you suppose would earn you a set of shackles? Chances are the crime of being ‘poor’ will be enough to deprive you of your freedom.

But they’ll start with murderers (not a particularly ‘safe’ choice but you need to get the ball rolling somehow.) We aren’t talking serial killers or other class ‘A’ psychos, we’re talking the bulk of murderers, the ones who commit ‘crimes of passion’.

Then it will be thieves…from there it is only a short hop to ’debtors’ and our brave new third world hell hole will be complete!

So, as you see, there is another ‘up’ side to altering the form/functionality of money, under A Simple Plan the poor/debtor class vanishes!

Unemployment becomes a relic of the past, thrown on the scrap heap of history.

In fact it behooves us to observe that unemployment was CREATED BY capitalism!

Before capitalism, unemployment didn’t exist!

I’m quietly chuckling to myself as this particular post has taken some mighty bizarre turns over a few scant pages!

I’ve ’hopped’ from global bankruptcy to the ‘impossibility’ of returning to the gold standard (which by no means is to say that they won’t TRY it, I’m just pointing out it is doomed to fail because getting THAT many people to AGREE on anything is highly improbable.)

Conversely, I anticipate universal adoption of A Simple Plan partly because of its leveling effect on society and mostly due to the ‘embargo’ feature built into it.

(If you want to trade with Division Society you have to adopt A Simple Plan!)

Returning to my ‘summary’, from the gold standard we jumped to ‘cashless society’ which lead us to slavery and how the infamous ‘they’ would go about re-instituting it.

So I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the destruction of our current civilization is proceeding apace.

I’m just trying to avoid mentioning it in EVERY post.

Maybe I’ll title today’s piece as Hurricane Irene! (that should generate some traffic!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Anything Goes!

Greetings good citizen,

Perhaps the ‘I don’t know whether to shit or go blind’ stock market is typical of what happens just before the entire (and I’m being kind here) ‘financial system’ implodes.

And I do mean ‘entire’; the coming train wreck will be more than just a local phenomenon…and this too is no ‘accident’.

Naturally, I keep bringing this up because I fully expect these people (and their sympathizers) to be hunted down and brought to justice. (I, sadly, believe this is a task that will mimic the hunt for Nazi war criminals that was both global in its scope and decades in duration. However, even if it takes decades to bring the criminals to trial, justice itself will be swift due to the instantaneous stripping of their ill gotten gains.)

But I once again digress…

Let us ponder, just for a moment, what things might look like right before the wheels come flying off, shall we?

We already know the ‘Justice Department’ is filled with thugs so this story should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying even a tiny bit of attention to the deplorable state of our republic.

The domestic ship owners say that 46 times the administration has waived the Jones Act, a 90-year-old law requiring purely domestic cargo to move on United States-flagged ships except under extraordinary circumstances. Only once this summer has oil from the reserve moved on American barges.

Even as unemployment hovered over 9 percent, the administration approved dozens of applications to transport nearly 30 million barrels of domestic crude oil within the borders of the United States on tankers employing foreign crews and flying the flags of the Marshall Islands, Panama and other countries.

The move, which saved time and money for the oil companies that bought the oil , took potential work from more than 30 American cargo vessels and as many as 400 sailors, American ship owners said in recent days.

Laws? We don’t need no stinking laws!

How ironic is it that this sort of laissez-faire attitude is the exact same concept that is embraced by Tea Party Republicans (a.k.a. Libertarians) while being universally reviled when the anarchists (as defined by capitalists!) express it.

And I’m not trying to have it both ways…there are two types of Anarchy, one is a ‘propagandized’ version that preaches ’total freedom’ which appeals to the young and the stupid while the other is the ‘true’ anarchy of ‘rules without rulers’ (the variety that I subscribe to, A Simple Plan is nothing if not a set of ‘rules’!)

As we can see from ‘Republican grandstanding’, ‘total freedom’ is incompatible with ‘civil society’.

Rules optional cannot co-exist with a sustainable civilization. It is the widespread unwillingness to follow the rules that has caused the current civilization to be brought to the verge of collapse!

So tell me, good citizen Do you see the ‘red flag’ here?

I have to credit the influence of the thoughtful blog of a well-to-do American entrepreneur and military strategist, and especially this particular posting. Central Planning and the Fall of US Empire

Capitalism's path back from the self-perpetuating central planning will require a more equitable, or at least a less inequitable, distribution of wealth and power, by which to rebuild the middle class and promote decision making based on individual choice and a more widely based entrepreneurial meritocracy. Which is what Roubini was complaining about, in saying that too much wealth was being redistributed from labour to capital.

It would be a terrible irony if Marx was proven correct, and unchecked capitalism destroyed itself by evolving the self-crippling features of a centrally planned communist economy.  One can only hope that we can reform our current market systems before things get worse.

Worse (at least to me) is the Libertarian thinking behind this accusation of ‘central planning’.

Understand that these nitwits believe in Capitalist Utopia (which cannot exist without reverting to a pre-colonial lifestyle and killing off billions, but they don‘t give a fuck!)

I hate to be the one to break it to slinky-dink but in this one thing, Marx was indeed correct, what he’s missing is it is NOT ‘central planning’ that is fucking up the markets, but the very unnatural enforcement of monopoly.

You see, Libbies aren’t very good at spotting contradictions in their philosophy just as they fail to see the contradictions that make capitalist utopia impossible.

Thus do they fail to differentiate captive markets from ‘central planning.’

Which is to say there’s a plan all right but it don’t have nothing to do Communism!

Finally, we have this succinct piece from Demetrius of Cynical Tendency fame:


The US site Money and Markets is talking happily about the Ultimate Financial Catastrophe and suggests what it might be best to do. This is puzzling, since in a real catastrophe everybody goes down. It is one thing to be rich in a working society; it is another to hold paper wealth in a collapsed society.

Roubini is saying that Marx might have been right about some things. The problem is all the things he was wrong about. The Oil Drum takes issue with the US Presidential hopeful, Ms. Bachmann who is promising that “gas”, petrol to us, can go back to less that $2 a gallon. Here in the UK it is around $9 a gallon.

With inflation beginning, the Bank of America in free fall, disruptions of one thing or another pending, Banks putting their dud paper into pension funds and the issues over the Euro now much greater together with the perils of some major states supplying oil, the only certainty is uncertainty.

Um, did I mention that when she blows, she’s gonna take out the whole deal?

UNDERSTAND that the ass-bandits responsible for this want YOU to support the return of a Christian Monarchy, where it will be a CRIME to ‘complain’ about your ‘god given’ lot in life.

It didn’t fly the first time, why they think this time is different remains baffling.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

'Free' Trade?

Greetings good citizen,

The markets continue to ‘hover’ (temporarily preserving the wealth of the soon to be destitute.) It will be the day that the markets drop 3000 points in a single session (and you know that isn’t supposed to be possible but give the crooked bastards a chance!) that the ‘journey to collapse’ will be complete.

Let’s suppose the ‘safeguards’ are, er, respected. A blow out is still possible (if not inevitable, considering financial innovation has become indistinguishable from counterfeiting.) and dropping 3,000 in consecutive sessions, even over multiple sessions would still result in the same net effect.

Supply chains around the globe would collapse…

While hundreds of thousands of ‘millionaires on paper’ would be pauperized.

Ironically, sparking a revolt.

You won’t fight to save your own children but you will fight to save some asshole’s divine privilege to screw the rest of us by paying sub-sustenance wages!

I guess we shouldn’t be to concerned where the ‘spark’ comes from, in the end it will be the actions of the greedy that will spur the righteous to action…

Then you won’t find anyone preaching nonsense like this moron!

US Trade Representative Ron Kirk was in San Francisco Wednesday promoting pending Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, a key aspect of the president's "jobs plan." I managed to catch up to him in the spacious lobby of a downtown high tech firm and he was nice enough to engage in a brief interview with no advance notice. My disagreement with many of his trade goals was clear from my opening question, yet he stuck around long enough for a few follow-ups, a full five minutes until his staff pulled him away.

In that time, he managed to spit out just about every pro-free trade boilerplate talking point ever spoken, but displayed an alarming disregard for some of the consequences to American workers if the FTAs were to pass.

Kirk doesn't believe that many middle-class manufacturing jobs will be a part of America's future. Like many free trade proponents, he views the loss of these jobs as inevitable, and he opined that Americans don't want them anyway, despite the 16% of Americans looking for full-time work right now. With unemployment what it is, and ever-widening income inequality, some of Kirk's remarks were shocking. If Kirk is truly representing the Obama jobs plan, we're in for a long, ugly ride.

We are not going to ‘fix’ the economy if we fail to stop the idiots from directing trade policy.

The ‘nothing go up top’ crowd thinks it is perfectly acceptable to ship jobs (and the related infrastructure) overseas, ‘Americans didn’t want those jobs anyway!’

But only a nitwit continues to miss the connection, your workers are also your customers!

People who don’t work can’t buy your products…so why is comrade stupid our ‘trade representative?’

Could it be because ‘puppet-boy’ isn’t smart enough to fire him? Or would his ‘handlers give him a spanking for so much as rebuking Mr. Kirk for ‘doing his job/playing his part?

It is precisely this sort of nonsense that provokes outrage against Washington…but for some unknown reason it doesn’t ‘hammer home’ the futility of trying to use the ballot box to correct this issue.

It will be exactly this that is cited as evidence that our government ‘doesn’t work’ while most of the nation remains ignorant of the ‘purpose of government’, just as they remain ignorant of the purpose of commerce!

Understand good citizen ignorance can be downright dangerous, A world full of stupid people is a world full of slaves…whether you’re stupid or not.

I just checked the markets and they are UP (allegedly in anticipation of more ‘government intervention’ in the markets.

I guess it is like being tied to the railroad tracks out in the middle of the ocean, even if somebody does cut you loose, there’s no place to go!

Which is to say it is incomprehensible that anyone would be ‘happy’ about an economic system that is being propped up with public money.

It is, like the illustration above, a ‘no win’ situation.

If we are going to turn this train wreck around we must first jump off and return to ‘solid ground’.

Ironically, this situation will ‘resolve itself’ even if we do nothing. The only factor we have any control over is how much bloodshed there will be.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, August 21, 2011

The Creative Mind

Greetings good citizen,

Certain thought experiments are fun and others are just disturbing. I’d opine that most often there is a ‘mis-match’ between the concept and who gets to play as we can observe in this peculiar piece

It’s a rather curious collection of responses with half of the respondents staying ‘in character’ Their response was heavily influenced by their ‘claim to fame’, which is to point out that there is zero ‘outside the box’ thinking on display, even from the one respondent known for his ‘innovation’.

And understand good citizen, if it were proposed that we assemble ‘a panel of experts’ and set them to the task of solving the United States problems, the idea would enjoy HUGE support.

Nothing succeeds like success and humans have disturbing tendency to ‘transfer’…‘If Moe is so terrific at doing this, just imagine what he could do with that!’

Even when the ‘skill sets’ required to succeed between ‘this and that’ are apples and oranges! On occasion, a well rounded individual does indeed ‘rise to the challenge’ (but that’s more the exception than the rule…and ‘success’ is often measured as ‘unfailure’ rather than exceptional performance.)

But I digress…

One of the respondents at least took a practical approach, he (a scientist) stated right up front that making him ‘president’ would change little.

The engineered ‘three way power split’ prevents anyone (who isn’t already ‘entrenched’) from walking in and upsetting the applecart.

Which says something pretty disturbing about who plays ‘puppet master’ in our political theater but there it is.

Which is to ask that even if we were able to assemble a ‘panel of experts’ and set them to the task of solving the republic’s problems, who would we ‘tap’?

As today’s ‘thought experiment’ displays, most people ‘are what they do’…

IF we selected people who are already ‘successful and prosperous’ would they change anything?

Probably not.
If a person is prospering under the current environment, why alter it?

So we’d need to utilize other selection criterion to avoid adverse selection.

In A Simple Plan, I ‘use’ expertise to its maximum advantage, the individual leverages their expertise into the top position…but the closer you get to the top, the broader your skill set must become.

Which is to say that in order to succeed one must truly be proficient at ‘problem solving’… just as the ‘cannibals’ among us have become.

If they can’t figure out what to do they either outsource it or they eat it.

Actually, these days the most popular choice is to ‘compartmentalize’ trouble, then you ignore it, making it into your successor’s problem.

Which is to say many of today’s ‘success stories’ are centered not on solving problems but ignoring them!

Look at the environment and peak energy…

Hell, it’s Sunday morning and Sporky Dorky is chatting up his latest ‘jobs’ bill.

The ‘solution’ to the unemployment situation is easy (and it always has been.) You simply need to re-adjust the work week while reducing the ‘expense picture’ for the typical worker.

Make housing free while chopping the work week down to twenty hours, unemployment instantly ‘disappears’. (Banks and the stock markets will ‘vaporize’ along with this step but fuck ‘em, they've outlived their usefulness anyway!)

And anyone who thinks the problem WON’T be solved by re-adjusting the work week is yanking your chain…or they’re an idiot, pick one.

How unfortunate is it (for roughly half of us) that the 'infamous they' appear to have opted for plan 'B', which gets you to the same place as reducing the work week gets you only backwards.

If you reduce the number of workers it becomes unnecessary to reduce the work week.

When they finally DO take the obvious steps to solve the crisis they will marvel over why ‘no-one thought of it sooner’!

Unless they attempt ‘half a loaf’ which will absolutely FUCK too many people. You can’t cut the workweek without FIRST cutting the expense picture.

And YOU (you lucky dog) will have known the solution all along!

You will also know what will happen if they try to cut the workweek without reducing the expense picture, so you’ll be prepared.

Mine is the kind of expertise that is seldom brought to bear in situations like this, largely due to ignorance. People can’t support what they don’t know exists.

Which is to ask, good citizen, that you be willing to expose my ‘madness’ to a broader circle of your acquaintances, even if you introduce them to my writings for their ‘comedic value’.

Because nothing is going to change if we don’t start talking about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Eat the Rich!

Greetings good citizen,

Most of you already know the global economy is ‘fried’. With that as a given, the only thing remaining to be revealed is when the idiots who got us here are going to ‘pull the plug?

If we were to be honest with ourselves, the only reason we keep a keen eye to the otherwise worthless media is to hopefully get a ‘heads up’ when the bottom drops out.

Well, if you haven’t been paying attention, that bottom is dropping as we wait.

Yes, good citizen, the eminent collapse of the Euro zone will drag the ‘rest of the West’ into the abyss with it.

Which is probably a bit misleading. There remains a possibility that the ’agents of the status quo’ will simply refuse to stand down (even after their ‘enablers’ bid them adios!)

Understand good citizen these crackers are some kind of crazy as we can see from these videos…

While it is generally understood that Mr. Stewart deals in political satire, sometimes it’s just not ‘ha-ha’ funny, but funny in the sense that makes you wonder what is WRONG with these media types?

Does anyone else think that 50% of the population that DOESN’T pay Federal Income taxes isn’t INTENTIONAL? (Think ‘starve the beast’, then remember it is government’s PRIMARY PURPOSE to protect US from the very people who have hijacked the government! )

And isn’t that a kick in the head?

Actually, this is a kick in the head made that much worse by the kitschy tone of this creepy piece that attempts to make light of the fact that the alleged ‘uptick’ in business for these ‘rock bottom retailers’ is the fact that they accept food stamps and not the sudden surge in ‘crafters’ from the top 20% of the income distribution.

We are awakening to a dollar-store economy. For years the dollar store has not only made a market out of the detritus of a hyper productive [read: poorly managed and highly wasteful] global manufacturing system, but it has also made it appealing — by making it amazingly cheap. [the other ’downside’ of taxes, the ability to turn waste into profits!] Before the market meltdown of 2008 and the stagnant, jobless recovery that followed, the conventional wisdom about dollar stores — whether one of the three big corporate chains (Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree) or any of the smaller chains (like “99 Cents Only Stores”) or the world of independents — was that they appeal to only poor people. And while it’s true that low-wage earners still make up the core of dollar-store customers (42 percent earn $30,000 or less), what has turned this sector into a nearly recession-proof corner of the economy is a new customer base. “What’s driving the growth,” says James Russo, a vice president with the Nielsen Company, a consumer survey firm, “is affluent households.”

The affluent are not just quirky D.I.Y. types. These new customers are people who, though they have money, feel as if they don’t, or soon won’t. This anxiety — sure to be restoked by the recent stock-market gyrations and generally abysmal predictions for the economy — creates a kind of fear-induced pleasure in selective bargain-hunting. Rick Dreiling, the chief executive of Dollar General, the largest chain, with more than 9,500 stores, calls this idea the New Consumerism. “Savings is fashionable again,” Dreiling told me. “A gallon of Clorox bleach, say, is $1.44 at a drugstore or $1.24 at a grocery store, and you pay a buck for it at the Dollar General. When the neighbors come over, they can’t tell where you bought it, and you save anywhere from 20 to 40 cents, right?”

So instead of telling how many families are eating dollar store food to get by, instead we have a tale of how those who can afford more are driving up the profitability of these discounters.

Gee, I make that sound like a ‘bad thing’ when what I’m really trying to say is ‘who gives a fuck’? (about the bargain hunting rich as well as the purposefully blind/opaque reporting of the corporate owned media?)

But didn’t Alternet run a story this morning about TV shows that conservatives say are ‘destroying’ our society when we all know the true culprit is ‘hooray for me and fuck you Libertarianism!’ the ‘gospel’ of the GOP.

In fact, it is a little bizarre how the ‘minority’ political party got ‘co-opted’ by a fringe group and how those fringe groups’ outlandish beliefs became the ‘law of the land’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the Chicago School was established by the original ‘monopolist’ J.D. Rockefeller…and that there isn’t so much as a sliver of daylight to be found between Libertarian (Chicago School) philosophy and the philosophy of the monopolists.

But that smacks of a ‘conspiracy’ and we can’t have that!

There are no such things as conspiracies! The media destroys conspiracy theories every time they pop up (although they seem unable to completely crush the one that speculates they all ‘collude’ on national news.)

Nor do they have any explanation for why we are supposedly so divided all of a sudden?

If we’re all in this together, why (as well as how) do so many ‘contrary’ politicians win office?

Are these people chameleons, skilled at hiding their true ambitions like president Obama?

I tend to seriously doubt that, there are too many ‘gatekeepers’ for this to be an accident.

I’d even bet good money that ‘they’ (the upper echelons in the media) already know who will be victorious in the next election…if there is another one…if Washington DC isn’t under siege by then.

Why do these pieces always end up darkly?

Is it me or is it the times?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, August 19, 2011

Back to the starting point

Greetings good citizen,

The airwaves were alive with news of the global ‘sell-off’ in stocks with pundits fretting over a spread of the contagion that caused down days in both the Asian and European markets.

Considering the devastation these fuckwits have inflicted upon the global customer base (the source of all sales) I wouldn’t buy stock on a bet…although I might be tempted to buy shares in a company that produced nice strong rope…

As it turns out, the ‘fears’ of the pundits have yet to bear fruit…but the day is far from over. That said, we encounter another deeply disturbing article which suggests the ‘global race to the bottom' has returned to its point of origin.

Just over a quarter of the 11.7 million workers in manufacturing are women. But Gadget Camp, a workshop for girls in this suburb west of Chicago, is part of an effort to change that.

Although the economy is wobbling and nearly 14 million people are looking for work, some employers are still having a hard time finding skilled workers for certain positions. Manufacturers in particular complain that few applicants can operate computerized equipment, read blueprints and solve production problems. And with the baby boomers starting to retire, these and other employers worry there will be few young workers willing or able to replace them.

Gadget Camp, sponsored in part by a foundation affiliated with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, which provided financing to nine other camps this summer, is intended to help over the long haul by exposing girls to an occupation they might previously have considered unappealing, if they considered it at all.

Small parts (in particular the solvents used to clean them) aren’t, er, ‘healthy’ for your reproductive system, but that’s not the employer’s problem, is it?

The ‘mis-information’ on this particular article is gigantic! Talk about ‘spin’, the perspective of this article is 180 degrees off!

Kids (male kids in particular) stopped entering the ‘trades’ when rampant off shoring took their father’s jobs.

Movies at the time like ‘Rocky’ urged young males to be ‘thinkers’ and not ‘stinkers’.

Like reeking of fry grease is a big improvement over the stench of cutting oil!

Because once those shop jobs dried up, flipping burgers became ‘as good as it gets’ for most kids stranded in the ‘rustbelt’ a.k.a. ‘economic desert’.

Worse is the ‘insinuation’ that these jobs A.) go begging B.) have a future and finally C.) pay well.

Manufacturing always paid better than burger flipping but ‘at a price’…you were expected to work sun up to sundown and then some. Your ‘good paycheck’ was based on heavy duty overtime and when the overtime dried up, you were shit out of luck!

I’d also question the wisdom of touting this as an effort to ‘open doors for women’ during this ‘man-cession’.

Pay equity still hasn’t been achieved so this reporter isn’t doing ‘women’ any favors…

But pointing this out only puts the corporate owned media in a negative light, doesn’t it?

Anyway, here’s the story that has already disappeared from the business section line-up.

The losses reflected an accumulation of bad news, including feeble economic data in the United States and Europe and signs that some banks were having trouble borrowing on the interbank market. Tension on money markets, which some analysts said was overblown, awoke unpleasant memories of the seizure in interbank lending that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

The global rout “seemed to have its roots in free-floating anxiety about euroland’s economic and financial stability,” Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y., said in a note Friday.

Laurent Fransolet, head of European Fixed Income Strategy at Barclays Capital, said, “There’s a lot to worry about,” attributing market losses to fears that slowing growth means “we may be at a very bad turning point globally.”

Maybe they’ll ‘repeat’ this warning over the weekend (although the trading day is still young and the opening rally might still fizzle…)

Funny, 'Flipper' eventually ‘smartened up’ to the fact that the Real Estate market wasn’t ‘coming back’, why doesn’t the investor wake up to the difference between a ‘bargain’ and a White Elephant?

Oh yeah, ‘eyewash’…

Investors CAN’T ‘give up’ on the economy, investing is a ‘herd game’ and it only takes one animal to spook the rest.

Thus is it a good thing for the criminals among us that all ‘money’ is funny!

As the ‘illusion’ starts to ‘fade’ it takes more and more money to prop it up (thus the need for an ‘endless’ supply.)

Unfortunately, when financial engineering becomes indistinguishable from counterfeiting, the supply chain breaks down.

And we are ‘oh so dangerously close’ to that fateful event.

Ask yourself good citizen, just who is stupid enough to be buying stocks in a global market place full of insolvent consumers?

Who is THAT damn DUMB?

Yet we keep buying it!

The fact we are perilously close to insolvency is the part that is slowly being dragged into the sunlight.

When the ‘ruse’ is exposed a vast majority of you will still refuse to believe it! (Which will frustrated the engineers of our demise to no end. As I have stated repeatedly in the past, this IS NOT an accident! It is and was totally foreseeable!

Can we fix the damage? Yes we can BUT the ‘lag’ is going to be horrendous and shortages will be the rule rather than the exception for a real long time.

How long?

A year IF they don’t sabotage us…longer if they throw wrenches…

Worse, it will be a year STARTING from the adoption of A Simple Plan as nothing will move forward without a generally accepted organizational plan.

Understand, the capitalists will promise you they can fix things overnight (which you KNOW is bullshit!) Worse, when things continue to go downhill, YOU will be blamed for it!

Understand, these are the same people who got filthy rich by outsourcing YOUR job to the cheaper there and justified their doing so based on YOUR greed!

A house divided against itself cannot stand…

Before long the criminals will reap their comeuppance!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Dippity-do!

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s top story is how the Department of Justice has been ‘investigating’ S & P for fraud while studiously avoiding using the actual word!

It’s actually somewhat comical to see the lengths they put the poor reporter through to avoid a libel suit (although it ain’t libel if it’s true!)

But that aside the stock market is sinking like a rock!

Stocks on Wall Street fell sharply on Thursday, following the trend set in Asia and Europe as more disappointing economic data emerged and concerns again focused on the financial sector.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down more than 4 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average was down about 450 points, or 4 percent, and the Nasdaq was down nearly 5 percent. Major indexes in Europe were down 3 to 5 percent.The yield on the Treasury’s 10-year note fell to a record low as investors turned to fixed-income securities.

Economic reports issued after the markets opened in New York accelerated the decline. A monthly survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed that factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region plummeted in August, indicating contraction and falling to the lowest level since March 2009.

Odd that the market can drop 450 points in the first hour of trading and nobody has jumped out of a window on Wall Street so far…

Weird to contrast these market fluctuations in comparison with 1929, when the Dow was 400 points…total (and we actually made shit back then!!!)

I think one of the most telling factors about the Crash of 2007 was how our GDP growth fell from 4.5% to .4% in a single quarter due to the market for ‘Specialized Financial Products’ seizing up!

How fucking pathetic is it that 90% of our fucking economy proved to be (worthless) financial products?

Worse, absolutely NOTHING has been done about this!

Nobody was prosecuted, nothing was declared illegal and nobody got sued for what is clearly ‘fraud’.

Which is to ask, good citizen, should every sitting judge in this country be sent to prison?

The answer to this not so rhetorical question is a resounding YES [but people in hell are more likely to be served tumblers of pure, clean ice water first!]

Which is more the pity, I’m sure these judges would greatly prefer being imprisoned to being hanged!

But when you get hung without a trial they call it something else…they call it lynching.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘final destination’ remains identical…dead is dead.

I don’t suppose it is particularly helpful to point out that they MAY not bother to hang you if you’re already dead…but killing you isn’t the point, it’s about extracting revenge and humiliating your corpse…not that the corpse cares.

It’s like punching a brick wall, it doesn’t do any harm to the wall but you feel better afterwards!

It’s bad to let that ‘frustration’ build up inside of you…

And few things are more frustrating than ‘justice denied’.

Speaking of frustrating, how long do you think they are going to keep pretending our economy is even remotely viable?

If they announced the Dow had dropped to zero tomorrow, more than a few people would respond with ‘it’s about time!’

The only people to be shocked by this development are the ones who have remarkably short attention spans or are too self-absorbed to notice anything else around them.

As it stands, a measly 400 point drop is nothing these days, the markets regularly shrug off larger during the course of a trading day.

Conversely, as I pointed out yesterday, the ‘illusion’ is pretty much kaput! Nobody is buying the non-existent ‘economic recovery’ that occurred mainly inside the bank accounts of the criminal class.

So, how long will they try to bullshit us before the cries for a ‘New Deal’ can no longer be ignored?

Sadly, nobody us even whispering about a New Deal…and I believe this is because almost nobody believes the current system can be ‘fixed’…(even with a jubilee!)

And there is no consensus on what direction to head in, not yet anyway.

Scratch a Commie and you’ll find an Aristocrat underneath, scratch a capitalist and you’ll find a Tyrant.

How do you choose a direction without succumbing to either extreme?

A Simple Plan IS the ‘third way’.

Rules without rulers, an idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Is Democracy Obsolete?

Greetings good citizen,

The efforts to, er, ‘undermine’ the democratic processes we currently employ proceed apace as this article asks the question: is our democracy ‘obsolete’?

 Is Western democracy coming apart at the seams? A decade ago, only paranoid alarmists would have posed that question.

Today, it may be an expression of cold, brutal realism.

On both sides of the Atlantic -- from the fires that raged in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in early August -- the institutional framework that came to define modern democracy in the 19th century is in deep trouble. 

The principal organs of financial oversight and management are in tatters. Ferociously xenophobic political movements, an entire constellation of Tea Parties, now play important roles in nearly every European nation, as well as the United States. 

Verily, good citizen, ‘democracy as we know it’ is under attack around the globe…and for damn good reason.

The ‘illusion of participation’ has become all too apparent!

The ‘election’ of either party changes nothing. Regardless of who you vote for only the corporate agenda moves forward!

YOUR rights dwindle (not that you had a lot of them in the first place) along with your ‘opportunities’ (which you had even fewer of!)

Thus is the ‘illusion of participation’ perhaps the most effective means of maintaining control…until things get too far out of kilter, then the illusion shatters.

Today even the pundits don’t believe they can effect change via the ballot box (not that this stops them from urging YOU to keep believing! [Mostly because the ‘alternatives’ are too horrible to contemplate.])

Yes, good citizen, how horrific is it that a majority of us would rather remain saddled with an ineffective system than take a chance on true ‘self-rule’?

At the heart of A Simple Plan lies precisely that, rules without rulers.

It should come as a surprise to no one that our (repeated) financial crises stem from the (purposefully) vague and misleading/shifting definition of what constitutes ’money’.

How does this happen?

Like everything else that ’fucks up’ in our society, we have no say! Our ’right to disagree’ is stripped from us by an unjust (for profit) legal system.

Our (for profit) media lies to us constantly and there isn’t a thing we can do about it!

Why?

Because the people who sit in judgment are ’for sale’!

Worse, those who take it upon themselves to determine what is or is not ’valuable’ ALWAYS favor themselves the most!

Under A Simple Plan NONE of those things CAN occur…(and not for a lack of trying either!)

First, the ‘legal system’ gets totally overhauled (no more lawyers and no more judges)

The new way is ‘cops and magistrates’ who do not sit in judgment as much as they are ‘referees’ insuring that procedures are followed.

Cops decide if the law has been breached and juries decide guilt or innocence. Does everybody get a jury? Unless you waive one, hell yeah!

Sounds like we’d all be on perpetual jury duty but that’s not the case because many things that are crimes today will not be crimes in the future!

And a few things that are currently ’perfectly legal’ today will get you exiled in a heartbeat!

And that starts with even ’suggesting’ that somebody ‘owes’ you anything…

When we convert from a debtor society to a debt free one, the act of making someone a debtor will become a crime!

Which is to point out that many of the things you currently pay for under the ’fuck you, pay me’ system will be ’free’ (as in no charge!)

But I digress!

A bit ’presumptive’ of me to jump right into one of the less terrible alternatives without first passing judgment on the demise of the current system.

Understand, good citizen, even A Simple Plan is NOT a proverbial ’bed of roses’. It will be ’difficult’ managing true supply and demand against an abbreviated workweek/day.

With ’equity’ will come crowding but as they like to say, getting there is half the fun!

New venues will be built and new social norms developed as old, outdated social models are replaced with more sustainable practices.

Not only will these new lifestyles be more practical, they will also be ’better’.

So in answer to the question “Is democracy as we have come to know it dead?” I’d say not really but we’d be better off if it were!

The ‘underlying intent’ of the current system was to keep as many people ‘out of the loop’ as possible, which really sucks because we all have to live ‘under the law’.

If you are forced to live ‘under the law’ you should be allowed your say and, perhaps most importantly, enjoy true ‘equal treatment’ under those laws.

That’s what sucks about today, the laws don’t apply to the elite, they only apply to us ‘peasants’.

Of course, this is where revolutions come from!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

This is News? (700th post!)

Greetings good citizen,

After three straight days of (totally illogical) gains the ‘stupidity markets’ are falling once again.

Why, you might ask?

Economic uncertainty, of course!

Now, if I stated that money is funny ‘ALL OF THE TIME’, some of you would still scratch your head and wonder what I mean by that?

But most of you would ‘get it’, you’d know I was eluding to the fact that ‘economic uncertainty’ is CONSTANT, there is no such thing as ‘economic certainty’ precisely due to the, er, ‘fuzziness’ surrounding money.

Thus is the title of today’s post This is News?

FRANKFURT — Economic growth in the euro area fell more than expected in the three months through June, according to official figures released Tuesday, as growth in Germany came almost to a standstill.

All of Europe’s main stock indexes lost ground after the data confirmed fears that government austerity programs are taking their toll on the European economy, undercutting efforts to contain the sovereign debt crisis.

Gross domestic product in the 17-nation euro area rose 0.2 percent in the second quarter of 2011 compared with the previous quarter, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency. Euro area growth was down from 0.8 percent in the first quarter.

G.D.P. growth in Germany, which has been the region’s economic locomotive, fell to 0.1 percent compared with the previous quarter, when the economy expanded 1.3 percent, the German Federal Statistical Office said. Analysts had expected growth of 0.5 percent.

Why do you suppose analysts ‘expected’ any growth at all? Absolutely NOTHING has been done to repair the customer base! Where do they expect this ‘growth’ to come from (besides their own fevered imagination?)

Like yesterday, I have little patience with ‘idiocy’ and I suspect most of you have little tolerance for being taken for fools as well.

How unfortunate is it that when you’re trying to play the public for stupid, you have to pretend you’re stupid too!

Which makes an excellent segue for our second offering of the day

Does it ultimately benefit American business if the country gets back on its feet again? It seems to me that you can make a pretty strong case for that. If enough companies started hiring — while wrapping their actions in the mantle of patriotism — even Carl Icahn might have trouble complaining about it.

There is, of course, another reason corporate executives might be reluctant to sacrifice short-term profits by putting people to work. What if their competitors didn’t go along? Then they would find themselves at a disadvantage. Useem would tackle that by having a credible group like the Business Roundtable leading the charge, rounding up companies that would agree to start hiring.

But Marc Groz, a financial risk expert I’ve gotten to know, has what I think is a more intriguing approach, which he calls a “contingent commitment facility.” “Everyone is waiting for someone else to go first,” he told me the other day. Using his facility, a company would agree to hire X number of new workers. But the commitment would only become binding if certain conditions were met — such as having other companies in the same industry agree to do likewise. Once that happened, all the companies would have to do what they’d promised.

There’s an old saying that goes ‘Better to keep your mouth shut and have people THINK you’re an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it!

Overlooked here is that the quantity X needs to be in the tens of millions to be even marginally effective.

If we back the ‘energy crisis’ out of the equation we’d still be faced with the ‘automation dilemma’ that our current economic system doesn’t make allowances for.

Who (precisely) is going to hire tens of millions of people and what will they be put to work doing?

Top answer is ‘I don’t know’, second answer is ‘clueless’ (and the third answer is just what you’d expect…‘can you repeat the question?’)

Not that there is any lack of things that need doing, the ‘lack’ (at the moment) comes from the lack of willingness to invest in what amounts to ‘redundant infrastructure’ in what is slated to become the next third world hell hole.

The real irony lies in how this will be turned into ‘our’ failing, we failed to vote for the ‘right’ legislators who would have provided an alternate outcome to the one the ‘status quo’ chose…

Yep, it’s the same old story over and over again, ‘they can’t help it if you’re stupid’ (and if you get played for stupid there really isn’t anything (legal) you can do about it without taking the law into your own hands…

And that’s the ‘choice’ we’ve been left to make good citizen.

If there is to be ‘justice’ it is up to us to make it happen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, August 15, 2011

Perception Management

Greetings good citizen,

It is small comfort to me to see my dire predictions starting to ‘bear fruit’. That said I have yet to be accused of being ‘Chicken Little’ either.

It is obvious to even the most obtuse among us that all is NOT well.

However, things are much worse than they appear to be on the surface…

No. 384: Markets, July Retail Sales, June Trade Balance August 12th, 2011

Financial Circumstances Remain Unstable and Threatening

U.S. Dollar Is in Serious Trouble

Retail Sales Gain Was Statistically Meaningless and Largely Reflected Inflation

Trade Data Suggest Downside Pressure on Upcoming GDP Revision

You all know that the above bullet points are true; you are also aware that NONE of them made headlines…

Such trivial matters are beneath your notice.

The sad truth here is they are beyond your ability to change/compensate for them…

Which will prove tragic in the end.

Like this article which pretty much proves the old axiom ‘ignorance is bliss’

[Considering the second factor,] people do not understand how much wealth has been withheld from them. The average person has never personally experienced or seen the excessive wealth and luxury that the mega-rich live in. Wealth inequality has grown so extreme and the wealthy have become so far removed from average society, it is as if the rich exist in some outer stratosphere beyond the comprehension of the average person.

As the Guardian report states:

“… having little daily contact with the rich and little knowledge of how they lived, they simply didn’t think about inequality much, or regard the wealthy as direct competitors for resources. As the sociologist Garry Runciman observed: ‘Envy is a difficult emotion to sustain across a broad social distance.’… Even now most underestimate the rewards of bankers and executives. Top pay has reached such levels that, rather like interstellar distances, what the figures mean is hard to grasp.”

In fact, the average American vastly underestimates our nation's severe wealth disparity. This survey, featured in the NY Times, reveals that Americans think our society is far more equal than it actually is:

“In a recent survey of Americans, my colleague Dan Ariely and I found that Americans drastically underestimated the level of wealth inequality in the United States. While recent data indicates that the richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth, people estimated that this group owned just 59 percent – believing that total wealth in this country is far more evenly divided among poorer Americans.

It is true that most of us ‘satisfy’ ourselves with our lot in life, it is our ‘ignorance’ of how badly we are being ‘ripped off’ that keeps our collective outrage in check.

I have repeatedly pointed at the, er, ‘injustice’ of what makes the wealthy, wealthy but most of you could care less, you’ve got yours so you don’t begrudge them theirs…

And this is because you turn a blind eye to what this ‘indiscriminate robbery’ results in for the stratums below your ‘okay place’ on the proverbial ‘totem pole’.

In fact, it is these ‘unfortunates’ that make you ‘grateful’ your circumstances aren’t worse than they are…(how sad is THAT?)

In this respect YOU are responsible for THEIR suffering! YOU are condoning being ripped off by blindly accepting the ‘excuse’ that the ‘unfortunate’ brought their circumstances upon themselves…

Weird little circle there, isn’t it?

I hope it leaves a mark, a permanent one on your soul! (Leave aside the debate of whether or not atheists believe in immortal souls, the jury is still out on that one…)

Understand good citizen, there is and always has been only one solution to the crisis of ‘inequity’ and that is intolerance!

But no, it seems the grasping and the greedy have deluded themselves into thinking they can hide it from the rest of us or perhaps more laughably, fight us all off!

If you’re going to start shooting to ‘protect’ what you think is yours, you’d better have enough ammo to kill all of us!

You know, this blog was originally titled ‘it’s all in how you look at it’, well, once again we see that your entire perspective changes depending on your ‘point of view’.

It is even more ironic to note what we ‘tolerate’…

Worse, it is positively chilling to contemplate what we willfully ignore.

Go along to get along has had some very tragic consequences especially if we look at it from the perspective of our children’s future.

I am NOT wagging my finger in your face and this definitely isn’t a ‘holier than thou’ speech.

It IS a ‘I can’t do it alone’ rant…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

2 years after…yes, it was 2 years ago today.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Only Human

Greetings good citizen,

Curious how the increased probability of one ticking time bomb exploding shifts the media’s attention to other, long ignored ‘landmines’.

The ‘centerpiece’ (the eminent collapse of the EU) has drawn renewed interest in the consequences of such an event.

But as more details of the crimes emerge, the picture has become infinitely more complicated, and confusing. In some of the more shocking cases, the crimes seemed to be rooted in nothing more than split-second decisions made by normally orderly people seduced by the disorder around them.

An aspiring social worker, Natasha Reid, 24, turned herself in after stealing a $500 television. Nicolas Robinson, a young engineering student who had never been in trouble with the law, grabbed bottles of water because, his lawyer said, he was thirsty.

The 11-year-old, the youngest looter arrested, stole a trash can.

At several of the riots last week, those perpetrating the violence had no ready explanation for their behavior. One young man, kicking trash cans into the street, shrugged when asked why. And the atmosphere in Hackney’s Pembury Road low-income housing projects was sometimes one of adrenaline-driven glee. Looters whooped as they stripped a convenience store bare, yards from the police.

Even some Londoners who had initially condemned the riotous behavior joined in.

Bystanders had watched in shock as rioters lined up against police officers on Tottenham’s main street last weekend, setting fires and looting. The mood shifted dramatically, though, after officers moved in, dogs barking and horses charging. One man, suddenly emboldened, grabbed a box of pears from outside a convenience store. A woman carried off an armful of coconuts. Another man, seemingly conflicted, sprinted, then turned back briefly to snatch a crate of bottled water.

Funny how the murder of a young man by police (the original ‘trigger event’) has ‘disappeared’ from the media’s search for scapegoats.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the violence has been ‘centered’ in Tottenham, where the incident took place (and police continue to ‘stonewall’.)

Here we get the opportunity to ‘peek in the mirror’ because the same pent up frustrations driving UK unrest have been building up here in the US as well.

Humans are notorious ‘opportunists’, the ‘inexplicable’ behavior that ‘baffles’ the so called ‘experts’ is in fact perfectly ‘normal’!

Upon reflection, our entire legal system is designed to deal with precisely this animalistic trait.

Which explains why we don’t have a sustainable social model.

Our legal system is more concerned with ferreting out who got where first rather than what is best for the majority.

After all, it IS a game of survival and the more that survive, the better our collective chances are.

But no, ‘competition’ has been enshrined as such an ‘universal good’ that the ‘consequences’ of Social Darwinism have been completely, er, ‘dismissed’.

And when you ignore social Darwinism, riots like the ones in London are the ‘net result‘…and perfectly ‘foreseeable’.

So it is with stupendous irony that one of the world’s leading cheerleaders for Globalization has blessed us this day with the “Theory of Everything”

What’s going on here?

There are multiple and different reasons for these explosions, but to the extent they might have a common denominator I think it can be found in one of the slogans of Israel’s middle-class uprising: “We are fighting for an accessible future.” Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it.

Why now? It starts with the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.

This is the single most important trend in the world today. And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.

Once again we see an astonishing ‘failure to think this through’ mentality being displayed here.

‘Fallacy number one’ is the cheaper there, in reality, CANNOT EXIST, it is the result of currency manipulation that has unbalanced the entire global economy.

So how is ‘studying harder’ going to help you compete for a job that will only exist in limited/select geo-political region?

What of the losers in this competition?

I detest idiocy and I truly detest pseudo intellectuals who don’t have a fucking clue!

Being a noted ’conservative’ certainly doesn’t help in either department…

Is the ‘chaff’ left in these man-made ’economic deserts’ just supposed to wither and die?

Can you say ’high hopes’ (or good fucking luck with that!)

No, ‘London’s Burning’ is much more likely to be the ‘rule’ rather than the exception…but this was totally foreseeable too

Buckle up good citizen, we’re in for a hell of a ride…and considering what’s waiting on the other end, it’s going to be one hell of a fight.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, August 12, 2011

Widespread and rampant corruption

Greetings good citizen,

Those whose wealth relies on stock prices seem to have gained the upper hand for the moment (I say ‘for the moment’ because the Dow looks like it is dropping like a rock, which will cause the other indexes to turn negative.)

Given the givens, I can no longer say if ‘plausibility’ is a factor any longer.

In an authoritarian world ‘reasonable’ is counterbalanced by ‘whatcha gonna do about it?’

If the answer is ‘nothing’ then ‘reasonable’ is whatever they tell you it is.

Our economy doesn’t make sense so it stands to reason that the markets are bound by the same constraints…or lack thereof, take your pick!

The ‘systemic flaw’ in our system of government is identical to the systemic flaw in our system of commerce, both are totally dependent on ‘Men, both good and true’.

Slip a single ‘bad actor’ into the mix and all bets are off!

To put a finer point on that statement, what do you suppose the odds are that more than 50% of the founders themselves failed the ‘good and true’ test?

Even those odds are ‘wildly optimistic’ (considering how many were ‘ruined’ by land swindles after they left public office…)

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are unfit to decide what comes next (and believe me when I tell ya, there are a lot of people who learned the wrong lessons from history that continue to make the decisions around here!)

Speaking of ‘history lessons’ here’s one the voting public would do well to commit to memory

So for example, a nation such as China can devalue its currency substantially in the 1990's against the world's reserve currency, and thereby set up a set of artificial import barriers and export subsidies, simply by manipulating their currency.

By the way, this is basic math. There are plenty of people who were denying it, and most of them stood to benefit from this charade. But it is true. Anyone who travels internationally and changes money understands it.

The underlying basis of the currency wars is the ability to artificially manipulate one's currency, or even establish a pseudo-monopoly, for the advantage of one to the disadvantage of the others.

There are other methods to accomplish this and they are usually lumped under the title of industrial policy or mercantilism. A country has a set of laws and regulations that foster a certain stance towards issues such as worker's rights, environmentalism, savings and consumption, wealth distribution and even human rights.

The more trade becomes independent of public policy and regulation, the greater the movement of all countries to the least common denominator of the broader policy stances of the mercantilist nations.

In a very real sense, if you control the issuance and terms of money, you care not who makes the laws locally. And the exchange of trade mechanism is a subset of the control of a medium of exchange, which is the trade system, both international and domestic, the who and how people can buy or sell.

Now take the lesson here and add the fact that the only thing keeping this from turning into a huge screw job WAS ‘men, both good and true’.

The ‘theory’ was that you couldn’t corrupt that many men…but if you restrict the men so they ALL come from the ‘privileged class’ then the task is considerably less daunting.

These are men raised with the keen awareness that life ISN’T fair (and it is that unfairness that has ‘benefited’ them.)

But let us not get carried away with the ‘details’. The mess that is the global economy is in fact a ‘conspiracy’ and the conspirators need to be ferreted out and dealt with.

Understand good citizen that it is safe to say we can confine our search to the ‘upper stratum’ of society, those born with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’ hanging out of their mewling maws.

Look at how widespread the corruption is and marvel that NO ONE has been prosecuted!

A malaise that persists unto this very day!

Worse is the disappearance of anything resembling Justice and the return (as well as the defense of) torture!

Why would a government need to torture , good citizen?

Would it be to strike fear into the populous?

Seems to be doing the trick, don’t you think?

This, naturally, brings us back to the issue of mercenaries, something that was made obsolete by the advent of the ‘free republic’…where armies served to protect their collective ‘freedoms’ and not the privileges of the elite.

Yes, good citizen, today’s Merc exists mainly to protect those who put themselves ‘above the law’ from being prosecuted.

Which leads to the question the last three posts have been leading up to…

What are we gonna do about this corrupt mess?

The current system can’t be ‘fixed’, the system itself is too vulnerable!

Better to start over with a totally new deal!

A Simple Plan is ‘airtight’ as well as ‘bullet-proof’ (the only ‘weak links’ are in administration, it COULD potentially suffer from the same ‘failure to prosecute’ problem that plagues the existing system.)

There isn’t a proposal out there that doesn’t have ‘the human factor’ as its weakest link, it is therefore best to go with the strongest integrated system!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Follow the yellow brick road...

Greetings good citizen,

The stupidity markets (and you’d have to be stupid to believe they have anything to do with measuring economic performance) are rallying (for NO discernable reason, as usual) just to keep the ‘Roller Coaster Ride from Hell’ on track.

How’s it go, oh yeah, ‘one step up and two steps back!’

As annoying as some of you might find this, I’m going to dredge up the past to remind you of one of my predictions.

What will cause the world’s supply chain to collapse?

‘Doubt’ regarding the value of currency/money.

We don’t realize how lucky we are that S&P had its credibility destroyed by the ‘cash for trash’ debacle (selling AAA ratings for mortgage backed securities, TAARP was merely ‘cash for trash, part two’.)

Because of this many observers were inclined to pass off S & P’s ‘one step’ downgrade as an ‘uninformed opinion’. What does S & P know? The answer came back as ‘nuthin’ considering their participation (and non-prosecution) in aforementioned securities fraud.

But wait, isn’t this the tip of the dreaded iceberg I have warned about?

If we can’t/refuse to believe the ratings agencies, then just who do we believe?

All hell is gonna break loose when that answer shrivels down to ‘nobody’.

The Gold-nuts are convinced gold is money but the ding-dongs have driven the price of gold over $1,700 an OUNCE (let that one sink in for a minute.) What insane number will it be when they decide nothing else is ‘trustworthy’?

Do we roll it back to $20 an ounce or do we kick it up to $5,000?

How sad is it that there just isn’t a good answer to this puzzle?

Let’s have a look at just how far this insanity is spreading

There is no provision in European Union law for a member to be ejected, according to legal experts. Greece would have to withdraw voluntarily. But if the other countries cut off aid, it may have little choice.

Among European economists outside Germany, the idea that a country should be put under pressure to leave the euro zone is regarded generally as reckless and cruel. Greek banks would fail, the country would default on its debt and would lack a credible currency with which to buy essential imported goods like oil or food. The whole euro area, their thinking goes, would suffer as investors feared the disintegration of the currency union and perhaps the European Union itself.

“It’s very risky,” said Silvio Peruzzo, an economist in London for Royal Bank of Scotland. “It would set a precedent for other countries leaving the region. And the market would start to flirt with the idea that the euro as a whole doesn’t make sense.” But in Germany, with its embedded fear of inflation and insistence that individuals should suffer the consequences of their actions, the idea that Greece should just leave is gaining wider currency, even in elite circles.

It defies logic (but is perfectly understandable from a ‘what else are you going to do?’ perspective) to abandon US equities and invest in US treasuries. The CAN’T invest in China, it will spread the ‘contagion’! Something they are studiously trying to avoid!

Unsurprisingly, the corporate owned media has turned a ‘blind eye’ to this ‘avoidance’ of the only other viable alternative while they also ignore the decay that is sweeping the land.

But hey, didn’t you get the memo? The ‘world’ has ‘moved on’.

You can’t stand in the way of ‘progress’…but progress for a few at the expense of the many has another name and that name is Treason…

But I digress!

The topic at hand is ‘faith’ in human constructs…and money is a decidedly human construct. (Even if the quibbling quibblers insist that money is a LEGAL construct FABRICATED by humans…)

Although one should be careful of coming across as ‘intentionally obtuse’ because it is the pretense essential to committing fraud, and people will have little tolerance for it in the ‘I don’t think it’s funny no more’ future.

If I may, I will revert to what is, by now, a true ‘moldy oldie’.

If a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck, why isn’t a buck a buck?

Does the answer lie in the fact that money is a ‘legal construct’ and so is ‘the cheaper there’.

If you’re digging the lower prices don’t bitch about the fucked up exchange rate!

If only it stopped there.

With a full HALF of the working aged population unemployed (and a big swath of them due to retire) don’t you think the ‘cheaper there’ carries a rather insidious price?

The ‘cheap shit’ is fo Massa, nuthin’ fo YOU!’

And in the infamous words of Goldfinger, they don’t expect you to talk (they honestly don’t give a shit what you have to say) they expect you to DIE!

So I respectfully submit for your consideration that the first ‘shot’ in ‘the unraveling of the world’s currency markets’ has been fired.

Once the Euro ‘collapses’, the remaining Western currencies will fall right behind it.

An important part of this discussion is just how ‘ingrained’ money is in our everyday lives. Money itself is worthless, we’d be far better off and in a lot less trouble stealing precisely what we needed (but most thieves are too stupid to realize that.)

When money stops ‘behaving’ the way we have been trained that it should, there’s gonna be hell to pay…

And the ‘weasels’ will skulk off to join their billions in the ‘cheaper there’.

The wild card here is preventing ‘the cheaper there’ from being turned into a radioactive crater. I don’t think they’ve cracked that nut yet but you can bet they’re working on it.

They already effectively control the military but they can’t figure out how to eliminate the danger without taking the nukes with them…the only other solution lies in rendering them useless, screwing up the guidance systems so they go wide of the target.

Left to our imagination is how long the Chinese can ‘hold back’ their people once the West collapses?

That’s a wildcard I doubt the sneaky bastards have accounted for, much less prepared.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner