Friday, September 30, 2011

Lack of Empathy...

Greetings good citizen,

If only they’d announce the exact date they plan on, er, ‘dismantling’ civilization we’d all be better prepared…but I suspect that would defeat the purpose of driving us into our own cesspool, wouldn’t it?

Today’s Gems come to us courtesy of the ever so eloquent site Some Assembly Required (my favorite ‘aggregator’.)

When the web goes dark, CKM will be the person/website I miss most.

But I digress, let us examine some excerpts to illustrate my point:

A More Perfect Union: A plethora of financial commentators are finally catching on to the fact that Europe's problem is not debt or fiscal irresponsibility, or even those lazy Greeks, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Italians... The problem is the trade balances, or rather the trade imbalances among the member nations. If a nation runs a negative trade balance (negative current account) it must borrow the difference in order to pay the bills. If the Eurozone was one big happy fiscal nation, like these United States, then the 'states' wouldn't have this problem. Sure, the US runs a deficit with the world at large, but nobody gets excited that Pennsylvania has an imbalance with Iowa. Either they gotta fuse, or dismember the euro.

Since ‘trade balances’ are directly proportional to the ‘quality of life’ in a given , er, ‘place’, can exporting jobs while importing goods that used to be made locally be ‘economically sound?’

Short answer, no.

So the sudden ‘realization’ that globalization plays a much larger role in economic inequality is really only ‘half’ of the battle, isn’t it?

Or perhaps it is more accurate to point out that now that they know what the problem is, it SHOULD point them in the direction of the solution…right?

Maybe that’s where the ‘assembly’ part comes in…(or at least that’s how I assembled it.)

And since I’m always preaching about the dangers of ‘cascading systemic collapse’, articles such as this one really hit home:

Women and Children First: The order in which your city is likely to cut things in order to balance the budget without any of those horrid increased taxes is: Fire/lay off the people who provide the services. Cancel infrastructure repairs and improvements. Close the parks, pools, libraries, animal shelters, rec centers. Collect the garbage less often. “Modify” the health care benefits of city employees. Reduce public safety spending, close fire stations, cut police patrols. “Modify” pension benefits. Cut public health services. Cut spending on schools.

Left to our imagination is what will happen when energy becomes too expensive/scarce to heat public buildings?

Worse, good citizen…what will happen to prices when it comes time to ‘offset’ rising energy costs in the ‘private sector’?

Homeowners will be faced with ‘Heat or Eat’ AND how much will you kick in to keep Johnny in the classroom (in the dead of winter?)

Hell, some parents are already being tapped for a share of the bus ride!

How long will it be before you are asked to ‘stay on the line’ so the 911 operator can get your credit card information?

Locally, good citizen, in the course of the last seven days we have had the convenience store around the corner robbed, A local restaurant owner was murdered (again suspected robbery) and last night my wife got pulled over because she was driving the same color vehicle that was reported fleeing the scene of a liquor store robbery in a neighboring town!

These are all ‘signs’ of social desperation AND this is usually a ‘sleepy’ part of nowhere…most of the time the local rag has zero as far as local crime/police activity reports.

When something DOES happen, usually it is something mundane such as an expired registration or the occasional DWI, not murder and robbery…and never three in the same week!

Worse, in places where such events ARE everyday occurrences, they are also ‘non-news’, sure they all make the paper (often buried pretty deep) because people who live in ‘high crime’ areas don’t like being reminded of it.

Finally in a related story we have:

Annual Checkup: Health insurance went up 9% last year. A family of four now pays $15,073 a year for insurance that pays only some of the costs of being sick. Try that on WalMart minimum wage. Explain to me again why we don't have, don't want, single payer national healthcare.

Yes, good citizen…places that have ‘single payer’ health care spend significantly less (per capita) on health care while enjoying somewhat better outcomes from that health care…but Reagan didn’t ‘privatize’ health care to make it ‘more efficient’.

He did in to provide investors an alternative to investing in the infrastructure of what is soon to become a Banana Republic…

Sadly, investors quickly ran out of ‘alternative investments’ and have since dedicated themselves to destroying our civilization so they could ‘enrich’ themselves…and they ‘justify’ this by branding us as ‘sheep’.

Some of them are even clueless enough to say these things to our faces…it is only a matter of time until one of these incautious dolts is DISMEMBERED for their (social) ‘insensitivity’.

Which is to add that ‘lack of empathy’ can manifest itself in many ways…sometimes fatally.

Watch yourselves out there!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Goodbye Ballot Box!

Greetings good citizen,

Finally we are confronted with the issue that has plagued the Western World, that of the ‘broken’ ballot box.

As we can see it is the youth of Western Civilization that HAS BEEN ‘abandoned’ by the now almost universally reviled ‘trade neo-liberalism’…which is, ironically, chiefly championed by conservatives…

Now the people left high and dry by globalization are frustrated by, you guessed it, the ballot box!

Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow. “Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said the British left-wing author Owen Jones.

Protests in Britain exploded into lawlessness last month. Rampaging youths smashed store windows and set fires in London and beyond, using communication systems like BlackBerry Messenger to evade the police. They had savvy and technology, Mr. Jones said, but lacked a belief that the political system represented their interests. They also lacked hope.

“The young people who took part in the riots didn’t feel they had a future to risk,” he said.

In Spain, walloped by the developed world’s highest official rate of unemployment, at 21 percent, many have lost the confidence that politicians of any party can find a solution. Their demands are vague, but their cry for help is plaintive and determined. Known as indignados or the outraged, they block traffic, occupy squares and gather for teach-ins.

Contrary to the opinion of the British author, there are indeed ‘alternatives’, the problem is there isn’t an alternative that 'more for me' capitalists would find ‘acceptable’.

In fact good citizen, the ‘more for me' crowd won’t get behind ANY ‘viable alternative’ until the choice is put to them in much the same manner capitalism was, er, ‘sold’ to the majority of us, “this is how it is and if you don’t like it, tough!”

Although it would probably be worded a little stronger

Just a touch, ya know…

Naturally this by itself requires that whatever we come up with has to be bullet-proof.

But, as usual, you aren’t likely to be involved in the decision-making process.

Worse, as you can see, this form of protest is opening the door for some mighty scary, er, ‘alternatives’.

Which is to point out that the fucking capitalists have applied their typical ‘pat answer’ to the plight of the ‘futureless’

It’s not their problem, it’s the kids!

Remember, under capitalism it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to ‘make yourself useful’, which, considering our increasing population, has become a mighty tall order.

What does it say about our social model that they have been complaining about the ‘surplus population’ for over a hundred years?

Which is to point out that you can’t have it both ways…

But that is precisely what conservatives want, anything but to admit that their warped and twisted values are worthless, never mind hypocritical!

But I digress, the ‘danger’ presented by this variety of political dissent is that of embracing a more ‘streamlined’ decision-making process, one that excludes the public.

Imagine if you will a ‘technological’ solution our crisis of capitalism?

Suppose the infamous ‘they’ decided we’d be better off with computers telling us what to do…yet actually holding one of these computer printouts would be a crime!

Or worse, questioning where the printout originated from…

What better job to have than he who speaks for the computer?

It would be like being a priest and, er, ‘pretending’ to speak for god…

I mean, take your garden variety computer, rig up a remote display so nobody could see you typing in what ’the boys’ agreed to in the back room and you could get away with whatever you wanted!

But, naturally, the ’real money’ would be in selling the computer’s pronouncements!

Naturally, in order to ’sell’ this idea they’d have to come out with a computer that was ’smarter’ than the average individual.

But it would still leave us with the problem of a computer, like a psychopath, has absolutely zero ’empathy’, it is impossible for a computer to ’feel’ any particular way about anything.

And once you’ve thought about this for more than a few seconds you would agree it doesn’t work out to be a net positive, quite the contrary in fact…

But that said, we are in little danger of being dominated by a heartless box, the heartless psychopaths wouldn’t stand the competition!

No, we are in danger of precisely what the English Author denies…that of a despot seizing the day…and naming themselves king!

Pretty funny until he uses his ’royal authority’ to nuke his detractors!

But there are ten thousand comedians out of work and here I am, wasting your time with comedy…or am I?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Disaster(ous) Capitalism

Greetings good citizen,

As I have stated repeatedly, the alarm bells are deafening and the red lights are blinding, our civilization and the ‘peace’ that we have all taken for granted for so long will soon be a dim memory.

Why do I (once again) risk embarrassment by sticking my neck out much further than a ‘prudent individual’ would?

Like all of the prior times, I will eventually be proven correct!

I will once again state for the record it never has been a question of ‘if’, it has always been a question of ‘when’…

Even the most ardent capitalist can see for themselves that this is no accident, the powers that be have been pushing our civilization over the edge for a long time…and we are (sadly) powerless to stop them.

Today’s first offering is this, er, ‘investment of last resort’ that will remove the staples of life itself beyond the reach of the average citizen.

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter recently released a "Briefing Note" titled, "Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises."

As he sees it, "Beginning at the end of 2001, food commodities derivatives markets, and commodities indexes in particular began to see an influx of non-traditional investors, such as pension funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and large banks. The reason for this was simply because other markets dried up one by one: the dotcoms vanished at the end of 2001, the stock market soon after, and the U.S. housing market in August 2007. As each bubble burst, these large institutional investors moved into other markets, each traditionally considered more stable than the last."

In those years, the market value of agriculture commodities derivatives grew from three quarters of a trillion in 2002 to more than $7.5 trillion in 2007, while the percentage of speculators among agriculture commodities traders grew from 15 to 60 percent. The total number of commodities derivatives traded globally increased more than five-fold between 2002 and 2008.

While this, er, ‘insane’ practice could be considered a ‘natural outcome’ of the evisceration of investment opportunities caused by the global race to the bottom, it is also the ‘last straw’, good citizen.

Civilization is only 9 meals deep, after that the laws of the jungle kick in…

Understand it is our (captive) government’s ‘commitment’ to ‘free market capitalism’ that prevents them from intervening in a market which is vital to social stability.

That said good citizen, once the smoke starts to settle, having previously been an ‘elected official’ will be enough to sentence you to death…

For our second offering we revisit the house that Saint Ronnie built It was none other than President Ronald Reagan who ‘privatized’ the entire US healthcare market…and this, good citizen, is the result:

Major health insurance companies have been charging sharply higher premiums this year, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and creating more uncertainty for the Obama administration and employers who are struggling to drive down an unrelenting rise in medical costs.

A study released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group, showed that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011 — 9 percent higher than in the previous year. And even higher premiums could be on the way, particularly in New York, where some companies are asking for double-digit increases for about 1.3 million New Yorkers in individual or small-group plans, setting up a battle with state regulators.

The higher premiums are particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is sputtering and unemployment is hovering at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. The cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages.

Hard to say what’s worse, good citizen, the fact that most of us are paying hundreds of dollars in monthly premiums or the huge deductibles we face when we need medical attention?

Making things ‘Oh so much better’ is the trend of selling their collectibles to collection agencies…which obtain judgments and arrest warrants against you if the police just ‘happen to pull you over…’

Hard to say what the average citizen despises more, ‘free markets’ or bat-shit crazy ‘compassionate conservatism’?

Speaking of ‘free markets’ who do you think is behind this effort to cash in on the multi-billion dollar food stamp market?

How does that phrase go, “At long last sir, have you no decency?”

Nearly 50 million Americans rely on food stamps -- now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- and the federal costs are spiking accordingly. While the rising rolls can be linked to increasing joblessness, many low-wage workers also rely on the benefits. Some anti-hunger advocates would like to make it easier for them to use food stamps, by relaxing rules forbidding their use to buy fast food.

What would be wrong with giving people the right to use their food stamps at fast-food places? What do we know about the nutritional habits of the program's recipients?

Um, doesn’t JP Morgan ‘administer’ the debit card portion of the food stamp program?

In keeping with the ‘collusion’ theme, isn’t Jeff Immelt, the chairman of JP Morgan’s largest subsidiary, one of President Obama’s economic advisors?

I used to refer to our plight as the ‘death spiral’ but after the ground comes up and hits you, the rapid descent stops…

It’s not the fall that kills you, it is that sudden stop at the end.

We’re almost there…brace yourself.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Systems Failure

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while one of the ‘symptoms’ of cascading systemic failure rears its ugly head, confirming the destruction of our civilization is proceeding ‘as planned’.

Now, with the concentration of the highest unemployment rates in the South and the West, some economists wonder if it is an anomaly of the uneven recovery or a harbinger of things to come.

“Because the recovery is so painfully slow, people may begin to think of the trends established during the recovery as normal,” said Howard Wial, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program who recently co-wrote an economic analysis of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. “Will people think of Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona as more or less permanently depressed? Think of the Great Lakes as being a renaissance region? I don’t know. It’s possible.”

The West has the highest unemployment in the nation. The collapse of the housing bubble left Nevada with the highest jobless rate, 13.4 percent, followed by California with 12.1 percent. Michigan has the third-highest rate, 11.2 percent, as a result of the longstanding woes of the American auto industry.

How bizarre is it that people, the vast bulk of them anyway, believe whatever they’re told to think by ‘authority’ (regardless of how sketchy that ‘authority’ may be…)

Heard it on the TV or read it online and never for a moment did they think to ‘question the source’.

Because when push come to shove, good citizen, the Corporate owned media has no more ‘credibility’ than I do…truth be told, considerably less.

Do you really give a flying fuck what a fellow from the (Libertarian sponsored) ‘Brookings Institute’ says?

Remember, the whacko Tea Partiers are Libertarians too!

It is perhaps more interesting to note that the Libbies also subscribe to the ‘Free Market Capitalism’ that is responsible for destroying the global economy!

So what do you think of this ‘renaissance region’ now, it’s still an ‘economic desert’, isn’t it?

This isn’t about Libertarianism, it’s about people who will accept lame excuses from ignorant people who SHOULD HAVE BEEN laughed out of power by the cold light of reason.

But no, SOMEBODY kept that light from shining on their ‘stupidity’…not that this prevented anything.

The survivors will write books about the enormity of the failures perpetrated by the self interested…some day.

If there are any…

Yes, good citizen, if we keep following our so-called leaders down the rabbit hole, we may lose what civilization we had.

They’re already ‘dumbing us down’ to the point where we may well not be able to recover…and some would opine that was a good thing…

And they’d be mistaken.

Which is not to say there isn’t a goodly number of things we need to ‘unlearn’.

The so-called ‘adults’ in the room were ‘bought off’, leaving the rest of us exposed to untold danger.

We now need to regain control of the situation before things get too far out of hand.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Lunacy

Greetings good citizen,

It must be one of those ‘what’s wrong with these people’ weekends, yesterday I ragged on the so-called progressives, today it is the capitalist’s turn!

If any of you were wondering how we find ourselves today in the exact same spot our grandparents stood in 80 years ago, have a gander at this:


It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying. It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.

The next move you saw (the above speech is from 1933) was the raising of the (top) tax rate to 90%…is this what Ms. Yves is cheering about?

Understand good citizen, it is from this very same polluted well that the Military-Industrial complex sprang from!

Causing that much money to ‘accumulate’ anywhere will create more trouble than its worth!

Which is to point out that it is easy to see why we lurch from disaster to disaster…nobody, much less our so-called leaders, can think beyond the next step!

Worse, much of the ‘funds/tax dollars’ collected were, er, ‘mis-appropriated’, which is to say stolen outright or squandered on boondoggles that paid kickbacks to politicians.

We should have been living in utopia (or at least a lot better off than we are) but we didn’t have the right ‘monetary controls’…and we still don’t!

So is it a wise idea to ‘save’ predatory capitalism after our grandparents saved it 80 years ago?

Isn’t it time we establish a system of commerce that serves the need of society rather than the greed of its owners?

Perhaps a more interesting question might be how might we go about saving capitalism?

As Ilargi point out, pull the rug from under the finance system will cause it to collapse…

Short version: by issuing trillions more in debt, governments and central banks -apparently- hope they can turn around financial markets, and have them recover to heights that would turn today's losses into tomorrow’ profits (or at least more bearable losses).

There are lots of voices that will tell you that we didn't need to be where we are, that things could have been done: (If Leadership Fails, Prepare for Recession!). They all mean more or less the same things: capital injections into the financial industry. A financial industry that is by and large broke and now depends on money from governments and their taxpayers all of whom are by and large broke.

Amidst all the fear and panic and selling, let me repeat what I've said a thousand times by now: there is no way out of this crisis that does not involve defaults on debt, restructuring of debt and bankruptcies caused by debt. Nothing else will achieve anything other than window dressing. In other words: all we've seen so far has been window dressing, and of a very expensive kind.

All of which is to ask, good citizen, if we stick our necks out and subject ourselves to more of the same, we will get precisely that; we’ll be back where we started in no time!

But not to worry good citizen, there is little chance we will even be asked to make a choice. Hell, I suspect there won’t even be a ‘public service announcement’ until after the fact! (Which is to say after the panic is quelled…)

Those ‘in the know’ can’t help but act upon their knowledge, even if they know they’ll be punished for doing so.

This is the same factor at play when ‘grabbing/accumulating’ huge sums for the (alleged) public good…it is the ‘god helps those who help themselves’ factor.

And nobody (except those in a position to scoop from the till) wants that.

If we are to ‘right’ our civilization and put our species on a sustainable track then we must eliminate ‘income streams’ wherever they are found!

A part of the puzzle that has worked for thousands of years is the concept of 'you work for money.’

The ‘catch’ has been that it wasn’t universal, not everybody had to work for their supper…and that, for some bizarre reason, was never viewed as a failing of the system…but neither has the ‘fuck you, stick ‘em up! aspect of capitalism been viewed that way either.

Will, since we’re here, I’m telling you that both are glaring systemic failures that doom society itself to a path of failure…like the one we tread this very day!(and you won't see anybody nominating Me for a Nobel prize...or a Pulitzer for that matter!)

We can fix this good citizen but capitalism IS NOT the way. It IS NOT the ‘best’ or THE ONLY way to get the job of creating a self sustaining civilization done.

And it ain’t been for lack of trying either.

Which is to belabor the obvious, the only ones interested in ‘resurrecting’ capitalism are the same people it gives a ‘free ride’ to today.

The rest of us need to make them get off their dead asses and DO something for their billions!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Who are these people?

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘new kids in town‘, (wearing the shoes of the now defunct Democrats) are a weird bunch.

It’s no secret that the feckless Libertarians hijacked what used to be the Republican Party, but who are these idiots ‘masquerading’ as ‘liberals’ that call themselves progressives?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the last political, er, 'movement' to call itself ‘progressive’ was the Nazis…

Take a look at this disturbing contradiction and ask yourself if we aren’t dealing with two sides of the same sociopathic coin?

Long won in a landslide and now represents Joplin, Mo., where he fired up a Tea Party crowd in April pretending to auction off the national debt.

Five weeks later, Long was back in Joplin, this time in the dark and rain, surveying the aftermath of an apocalyptic tornado. And this time, the federal government was his friend.
"FEMA called as soon as I got there and said, 'Congressman Long, we're on the way.

We'll have boots on the ground in an hour or two,' " he says. "And I said, 'No you won't; they're already here.' "

What followed, Long says, has been a superb relief effort. (This, from a don’t tread on [or tax] me Tea Party conservative!)

"The president came in, he was great. [Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano came in, she's been great," he says. "[House Minority] Leader Pelosi came up to me on the floor, hugged me and said, 'Billy, anything the people of Joplin need they'll have.' "

And that's just what they've gotten: FEMA has spent close to $100 million on the cleanup, and an additional $19 million plus on rent and home repairs. Napolitano was back in Joplin on Thursday, praising Joplin's "can-do attitude" and Long.

Is this a simple case of schizophrenia or are we witnessing how members of the same team interact?

BY their deeds shall they be known. A quick examination of what the Obama administration has (failed) to accomplish puts their goals on an identical path with the hijackers of the Republican Party.

While I routinely report that the destruction of our civilization is proceeding perhaps a bit too smoothly, I have been remiss in failing to point out the glaring omission, that which is conspicuous by its absence…

WHERE THE FUCK IS THE ‘OPPOSITION’?

True, it’s difficult to work up much sympathy for a cruel, exploitative system that has put us all behind the eight-ball but we are indeed throwing out the baby with the rancid bathwater!

Being a ‘concern troll’ is not by any stretch of the imagination equal being compassionate. It has a lot more to do with perception management than it does free will or the free exchange of ideas.

And if something is missing from this picture it is precisely that, there is no middle ground, something proven repeatedly by the now famous ‘triangulators’!

There idea of the middle is everybody else’s far right field!

It is like being sucked in by the reasonable sounding phrase “I’m socially liberal but I’m a fiscal conservative…”

Neither ‘label’ is particularly well-defined; hell a Nazi could claim to be both and you’d have a hard time disagreeing with them.

And Bubba, there ain’t a nickel’s worth of difference between a Libertarian and a Nazi.

I do not share this observation to be ‘contrary’ despite long being of the opinion that there is today no ’real’ difference between the two political parties.

Nor do I say this because political parties would be outlawed under A Simple Plan…we’re either all in this together or we’re not…and if you’re not part of Team Humanity, first and foremost, you’re ‘on your own’…literally.

Election cycle after election cycle we cast our ballots hoping to see at least some small change but we only witness changes for the worse.

And now they’re telling us not to get our hopes up, you’re either one of the ‘fortunate few’ or you’re out of luck…and soon to be out of options as well.

Well good citizen, soon you’re going to be forced to ‘pick a side’…

Choose wisely, which is to point out that the current two, er, ‘entities’ that supposedly represent the two main political parties are NOT the, er, ‘opposing forces’ of the past.

Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that we are entering yet another presidential election cycle and the largest segment of our society is still M.I.A. from the rhetoric of either side…and you have to wonder about that!

Once again we hear 'middle class this and middle class that' when the vast majority of us are WORKING CLASS! We weren’t all raised by school teachers and DPW workers!

The undiscussed difference between ‘working class and ‘middle class’ is members of the middle class make their living from their college degrees…working class people learned what they do the only way they could, on the damn job!

Ever wonder why the very root of all of our troubles remains outside the public forum? Your average ‘middle class’ employee was unaffected by globalization until recently…

By supporting the progressive movement you are asking for ‘more of the same’…

Is THAT what YOU want?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Social Suicide

Greetings good citizen,

I have long championed the idea that what separates conservatives from liberals is the liberal’s appreciation (or the conservatives lack thereof) for the efforts of others.

This is such a basic instinct that it is disturbing when we encounter ‘ingrates’. the only thing more disturbing than their lack of gratitude is their belligerent ‘I did it all on my own’ attitude!

Why these people aren’t routinely dressed down (publicly) for their anti-social behavior is usually due to these ingrate’s ‘social status’.

But this isn’t about having social graces, it is about a dangerous mental defect. Lack of empathy is the most obvious trait of a psychopath!

Thus do we have today’s offering which points directly to this glaring myopia that most of us, er, politely ignore.

On the other side, we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.
Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.

Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”

Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.

Who would commit ‘social suicide’ good citizen?

How about people who are too ‘self-absorbed’ to even consider the ‘consequences of their actions’?

You see, that’s the other problem with being an ingrate, your very self-absorption warps your worldview!

That said, I am still of the opinion that those responsible for the collapse of our civilization know full well what they do. It is no accident.

The ‘rose colored glasses’ at work here are that the consequences of their actions won’t touch them.

Some of them are well-prepared…what they aren’t prepared for is the ones who plan to, er, ‘help themselves’ to their preparedness.

That is where their shortsightedness is going to bite then square in the ass!

When you live in a tank dominated by Piranha, it’s best not to lose sight of who your neighbors are!

Which is to point out that there is no ‘honor’ among thieves, especially psychotic ones!

Who is to say what depths people that would sacrifice our entire civilization (principally to escape prosecution) are capable of?

Perhaps there is a ‘god complex’ that accompanies the narcissism, blinding them to their vulnerability?

Either way, the pending collapse of the FIRE economy will be the ‘next step’ in hitting the reset button.

Sadly, shortly after capitalism fails, the war to establish ‘what comes next’ begins.

And out of ignorance, most of them will be fighting to restore capitalism…because they don’t know what else to do.

Sadly, they’ll reason, ‘all of our debts are dead’ (or at least the people we owed them to are…(not hardly, they are just waiting off-shore for the dust to settle!) so why not just ‘start over’.

Well, the, er, psychopaths who put us in this position will have all of the old records and they’re going to want to collect!

It will be surreal beyond belief to watch the very people who pushed our civilization into its own cesspool trying to restore the legal system that they themselves destroyed to escape prosecution!

It will, good citizen, redefine chutzpah!

Not that this will stop them…hell, it won’t even slow them down!

See what happens when you try to be ‘too clever’?

Anyway, it will be a damn miracle if we DON’T end up right back where we started, such is the curse of ‘failure of the imagination’!

In reality (and although few realize it, capitalism has only been around for…well, it became ‘popular’ right around the same time the American Revolution took place.

Yet another thing few people realize is that the US is the OLDEST established government ON EARTH!

Ask yourself good citizen, isn’t it time we do something different?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Dunderheaded...but you knew that!

Greetings good citizen,

Nobody, at this late stage of the game, should be roped in by the Fed’s latest attempt to ‘cook the books’ and manufacture demand where there is none. Even conservatives aren’t that stupid.

(Most of ‘em anyway.)

How sad is it that the the corporate owned media has to make hay with whatever they’re given?

The only thing sadder is the drivel we get fed as a result…

The Fed’s policy-making committee said in a statement that it was acting because it saw little prospect that the economy would expand fast enough and soon enough to help the 25 million Americans unable to find full-time work. It also said there was a significant risk that “strains in global financial markets” could further damage prospects for recovery.

“Growth remains slow. Recent indicators point to continuing weakness in overall labor market conditions and the unemployment rate remains elevated,” the Fed said in the statement, which listed its reasons for worrying about the anemic condition of the American economy. “Household spending has been increasing at only a modest pace in recent months.”

The markets responded with mixed signals. Bond investors already had driven down interest rates in expectation of the Fed’s announcement, but rates fell further on Wednesday, reflecting a measure of surprise about the size of the plan. Investors in the stock markets appeared more concerned about the bleak outlook for the economy and Europe’s, as the major domestic indexes fell sharply.

How STUPID do you have to be?

Business, the big, interconnected players with income streams from across the commercial spectrum are sitting on tons of cash that they don’t know what to do with

There’s no need to expand capacity nor is there any need to develop new products, the customer base is flat broke so why would business ‘borrow and expand’ (much less hire?)

And THAT good citizen is the ‘economic disconnect’ we are expected to swallow.

Which is to say they really do think we’re stupid.

Why is the average consumer broke? Could this be related to the slashing of our purchasing power, our suddenly revealed ‘Lost Decade’ like the Japanese have suffered since 1990?

And there’s the rub, good citizen, we followed the (badly broken) Japanese economy with the stolen 2000 election.

But let’s not go there, when you start pointing fingers you tend to lose credibility…and I need all the credibility I can muster!

Time is drawing short.

I will once again admonish you to ‘prepare’ for the , er, ‘long emergency’.

As already proven by the media, the current ‘disconnect’ (from reality) will only become, er, ‘bigger’ (along with making less sense.) What you WON’T BE able to argue with is the ‘men with guns’ who ‘have orders’ to…well, use your imagination, it’s an ‘unidentified emergency’ after all!

If they start pulling people out of line and shooting them, what are you going to say…especially after you see the first three guys to object being the next three who get shot!

Welcome to the ‘reign of fear’ good citizen. We aren’t there yet but we’re most certainly on our way!

You see, most of you THINK you will be ‘informed’ when things turn ugly…but what if you’re not?

The most powerful tool the criminals have is ignorance…you don’t know and that’s how they want it to stay.

When you finally figure out they aren’t playing by the rules we were all raised to follow it will be too late!

So my next ‘admonition’ is to use your head and stay out of harm’s way!

Third admonition is the ever so logical tactic of it is always easier to attack than defend; if you love your freedom, force them to protect their resources!

If they’re tied up protecting their supply chain, they are too busy/wary to attack you.

But I belabor the obvious, don’t I?

The ‘game’ is about to get far more ‘diabolical’ than you ever imagined it would…and the bad news is that’s exactly how the ‘perps’ think about this bullshit, to them it is a game…but in your typical capitalist bloodlust, it is a game they intend to ‘win’…

What you need to understand is that unlike your average board game, you aren’t expected to survive in the end.

What is coming is your worst ‘B’ horror movie made real…

Because those behind this little train wreck really are ‘socio-paths/psychopaths!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Blind Faith

Greetings good citizen,

I was out of pocket for most of the day, then homework sidelined my computer access…oh well.

So I was somewhat puzzled when I checked today’s markets, the ticker showing the markets enjoyed an ‘up’ day for the most part but it closed ‘mixed’ with only the Dow finishing in positive territory.

Perhaps more disturbing is why the markets enjoyed a semi-up day.


On Wall Street, the major indexes were about 1 percent higher for most of the day, but closed mixed. The Dow Jones industrial average was up 7.65 points, or 0.1 percent, at 11,408.66, and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 2 points, or 0.2 percent, at 1,202.09. The Nasdaq composite index was down 22.59 points, or 0.9 percent, at 2,590.24. The Euro Stoxx 50 index was up 2.1 percent and the FTSE 100 in London rose 2 percent.

Analysts said investors could have reacted to discussions about aiding Greece, where talks with foreign creditors — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — described as productive on Monday continued on Tuesday. That buoyed some of the sentiment during the day, although uncertainty over the meeting seemed to take hold in the last hour of trading in the United States, said Stephen J. Carl, head equity trader at the Williams Capital Group.
After the market closed, the Greek Finance Ministry said the talks yielded “satisfactory progress.”

In addition, many investors have concluded that the Federal Reserve will announce new steps to promote economic growth after a two-day meeting of its policy-making group ends on Wednesday.

Um, I’m no economist but I’m pretty sure the economy shouldn’t be reliant on the government/central bank ’bailing it out’.

And naturally good citizen, what passes for our global economy is broken beyond all repair.

There is no ‘fix’ for all of the money in our society being permanently stuck in the bank accounts of the people who have more money than they can spend!

That is ‘malfeasance’ in the extreme!

Worse, it is malfeasance born of mismanagement and treasonous self-interest!

But hey, who’s keeping score?

As many of the other progressive pundits are repeating, four years later, they still don’t believe we can borrow our way to prosperity!

Why do our simple-minded political opponents think this is possible?

The bad news is, if the corporate owned media is to be believed, the vast majority of us agree with these simpletons!

Worse, the party of one in five still insists that the conservative/liberal divide remains at 50-50. (Probably because assholes like Breitbart think they are in the majority! Nuthin goes up top, this whacko bunch!)

True or not, we only have it on faith that MOST OF US are STUPID BEYOND BELIEF!

I tend to disagree with this conclusion and believe it is a fabrication of the manipulative corporate owned media.

You see, as long as you think it is ‘possible’ that 50% of us are ‘demented’ then you won’t question mathematically impossible election results.

But hey, you also don’t question the endless bailouts…

If we don’t hold their feet to the fire there is no, er, ‘incentive’ for the criminals to admit to the truth.

As CK Michaelson points out, the world is getting poorer and so are you, right along with it.

This won’t stop until YOU put a stop to it…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, September 19, 2011

Crash and Burn time!

Greetings good citizen,

Another Monday, another stock market, er, ‘slide’…although the markets closed up more than 500 points for the week last Friday…for no discernable reason.

So this morning’s 200 point decline could be viewed as a ‘correction.’

Investors shed risky assets in the United States and Europe on Monday in a sign of increasing pessimism over the lack of a resolution to the Greek debt crisis.

In Europe, market indexes fell 3 percent, the euro declined and the price of safe assets like German bonds rose as investors continued to fret about the possibility of a Greek default.

It is pointless to mention that trading, pretty much since 2007, has been A.) largely automated and B.) on ‘light’ volume.

I would also belabor the obvious by pointing out that these two tools combined to ‘manufacture’ what has been called an ‘economic recovery’ when there wasn’t one anywhere to be found.

Anyway, the ‘scuttlebutt’ is that Greece is going to default (some say it already has) ‘any day now’.

Attesting to the omnipotent power of the corporate owned media, we won’t know anything for sure until they ‘confirm’ such an event.

Why did the economy decide to hold off until ‘harvest time’ here in the northern hemisphere to collapse is as mystery…

But anyway here we are, on the cusp of winter and the global financial system is about to rain a world of hurt upon those of us who don’t happen to be already wealthy.

And WHY is this going to happen?

One word, good citizen and I think most of you know what that word is.

MISMANAGEMENT!

Of course, we can’t hang anybody for making an error in judgment…but behind that tangled pile of mismanagement is a goodly amount of treason and a heaping helping of fraud, both of which are highly prosecutable…

Naturally, the guilty are going to claim they were the ‘victims’ of bad information (but that didn’t stop them from lining their own pockets when the opportunity presented itself…)

But that isn’t the half of it good citizen, the part that is really going to suck is waiting for these bastards to get their fingers out of their ass to repair the damage they’ve done when they had no problem at all figuring out what to do when it came time to screw the rest of us!

Which is to say we ‘shouldn’t’ wait. The solutions they offer (at least initially) will be prohibitively expensive (on top of being unworkable.)

Don’t be taken in by the sudden appearance of something that looks suspiciously like A Simple Plan (without the reforms to money or the legal system.)

These two features, combined with the Human Anti-Exploitation Law are the crucial elements necessary to meet the fundamental requirements of equality, justice and peace.

Given the current ‘political climate’ it is likely we will see all manner of ‘crazy proposals’ flying around out there…with most of them advocating the total elimination of taxes.

It is interesting to note that A Simple Plan ‘eliminates’ taxes, but it does so eliminating the reason taxes were, er, ‘necessary’.

It returns the resources purchased with taxes to their natural ‘free’ state.

Beware proposals that do not CLEARLY IDENTIFY the mechanics of how the elimination of taxation will be dealt with.

I use the more than a little unpopular ‘elimination of ownership’ method but you, in reality, don’t need to ‘own’ jack, you just need to use it while you’re here.

And if you’re only ‘borrowing it’ there’s no need to pay for it.

Central to A Simple Plan is the elimination of ‘income streams’ across the spectrum.

Funny I seem to be bringing up the topic of alternatives to the current broken model quite frequently lately…and it is no coincidence either as the collapse of the current system is at hand.

It will be on us before the snow flies…how the winter goes will be governed by how, er, ‘humanely’ we handle the crisis.

In the beginning the unthinking minions of conservatism will be ‘actively preventing’ crisis relief.

This ‘active prevention’ will be short-lived as it will be met with some serious and extremely violent ‘backlash’, especially when it becomes apparent how few the ‘dissenters’ are in number.

For all of their press coverage there are only 30,000 ‘official’ Tea Partiers.

There may be as many ‘sympathizers’ but it doesn’t go much beyond that.

Now, if we figure in the psychopath/dementia factor, it isn’t going to be easy, the demented are incapable of recognizing defeat…nor are they inclined to surrender or listen to reason.

So, what am I saying?

Well, the MSM continues to send mixed signals, one day everything is peachy and the next it’s game over…but the blogosphere, even the ‘serious people’ are, er, ‘visibly worried’.

Understand, I count myself as a member of the truly ‘serious people’ which means I don’t shy away from socially unpopular ideas…like our financial system is going to collapse before winter.

In reality good citizen, IT ALREADY HAS COLLAPSED! What we’re seeing now is the world’s ‘safety nets’ being stretched to the breaking point.

Left to your imagination is whether or not they’ll admit there’s no way to repair the old system using that system’s tools.

As I said before, even a ‘jubilee’ won’t work when all of the cash is, er, ‘trapped’ in the upper stratums of the economy.

Where does this leave you, good citizen?

In my opinion, doing your best imitation of an ostrich…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Who he callin' Slacker?

Greetings good citizen,

I’m somewhat delighted to get away from the dreary track of reporting the inevitable demise of our social model, even if only by means of examining another aspect of it…

Since the next presidential election cycle is getting underway it was only a matter of time before someone regurgitated this old chestnut…

Steve King (R-IA) took to the House floor yesterday to give a diatribe against large swaths of the social safety net, from food stamps to heating fuel subsidies, but reserved particular disdain for unemployment insurance, which he dismissed as “welfare for people that won’t work.” Via Political Correction:

KING: The United States of America borrows money and hands it to people and tells them, you don’t have to work for this. You don’t have to produce anything for this. We just want you to spend it. [...]

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery. [...] The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee listening to them argue that there’s work that Americans won’t do, so we have to import people to do the work that Americans won’t do, and borrow money to pay the welfare for people that won’t work. That is a foolish thing for a nation to do. We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

Zipperhead pretty much says in the video what is written here.

Is this simply more evidence of how much the right wing enjoys doing a hatchet job on those who disagree with them? (One needs to subscribe to the notion that all business owners are, by default, conservative.)

The people they can’t use (in any given day) are SLACKERS who should be punished for their…well, that doesn’t matter.

Which is to lament the fact that the superfluous don’t literally ‘die’ when they are ‘terminated’…(much to the chagrin of those who can no longer ‘profitably’ employ them.)

Is Bozo so empty headed that he doesn’t understand the ‘true purpose’ of ‘social insurance’?

Why did the ‘wise men’ of the past grant remuneration to those they could no longer employ?

Well, initially, it was a shitload cheaper than rebuilding the factory…

Man, if nothing else, is a vengeful creature.

But that is not the ‘wisdom’ behind social insurance…the ‘wisdom’ lies in the fact of where these funds ultimately end up!

Why the fuck do you think they let people collect for 99 weeks these days?

Think of it as ‘fire insurance’.

But besides that the funds go where all funds go in our fucked up, lopsided economy, they go ‘up’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that many of today’s ‘truly wealthy’ are, er, ‘foregoing’ interest on their accumulated wealth. Hell, they’re PAYING banks to hold their rapidly eroding funds!

(Mostly because it is unsafe to keep that much cash hanging around…worse, the cost of protecting that much cash would only cause it to lose value that much quicker!)

Which brings us to another puzzle piece. How do you ‘stabilize’ the value of money?

You eliminate interest!

(Once you erase the power of money to make more money simply by existing, the value of money actually returns to its ‘intended function’ of becoming a ‘storehouse of value!’

Pretty magical, don’t you think?

But, once again, I digress.

Prices would still ‘fluctuate’ with supply and demand but they would tend to ‘hover’ around their ‘historical mean’ (assuming a stable money supply relative to population size.)

But enough of basic economics! Back to stupid conservatism!

So who is a representative of the conservative party calling ‘slackers’?

Why it is the working (and voting) poor…when the term originally meant the ‘idle class’, the rich who don’t need to labor.

But hey, you adapt what you can and ignore the rest.

SO, to clarify, your social insurance isn’t a ‘gift’ to you, you don’t get to keep it.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the people who DO get to keep it were the same people who voted to give it to you!

Which is to point out that much of what we were taught was ‘altruism’ in fact has ‘strings attached’.

The ‘original intent’ was to keep the payments flowing…isn’t that what predatory capitalism is all about?

Thanks for letting me inside your head…

Gegner

PS. Don’t even get me started on $10,000 an OUNCE gold or the fact that millionaires no longer matter, the bar is now set to BILLIONAIRE!

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Let's talk about DEATH...

Greetings good citizen,

In an effort to divert attention from their bloodthirsty (and obviously mindless) sycophants, the corporate owned media has engaged in a campaign to, er, ‘clarify’ who precisely ‘deserves to die’.

What quickly bit Libertarian leaning politicians in the backside is the ‘lack of choice’ that often accompanies these self-imposed death sentences…

When asked if an ‘otherwise healthy’ individual who ‘elected’ to forego the expense of health insurance and then suddenly learns he needs ‘extensive (and expensive) medical treatment’.

The crowd ‘cheered’ the Republican candidate’s spirited defense of the individual’s ‘right to choose’ (even when he chooses poorly, because that’s what ‘freedom’ is all about boys and girls!)

Well, Bubba, the politician was telling the audience that our ‘liberty-minded’ young man should be made to live with the consequences of his decision. If he dies as a result then that’s his tough titty!

Besides being awkwardly insensitive, the response opened the door to issue of the tens of millions of US citizens who have no health insurance through no fault of their own.

These people didn’t get to ‘elect death’, that choice was made for them by a predatory economic system that has no use for them.

Where’s the ‘freedom’ in that?

How bizarre that we find ourselves once again faced with the question none of us ask…

Do you wonder what that question is?

Naturally, I’m going to tell you…and depending on which way you’re ‘bent’ will govern your reaction.

The question is ‘what is the purpose of society?’

According to our Libertarian friends (an oxymoron if there ever was one, rugged individuals don’t need ‘friends’!) society is an accident of proximity. People ‘band together’ for the simple reason of being close to stuff.

Under the ‘fuck you, pay me system’, people congregate where the jobs are because that’s where the money is.

But why did people band together BEFORE there was any money?

Here the ‘rugged individual’ likes to pretend there wasn’t a time when people needed one another…because originally forming ‘tribes’ was a survival tactic.

And, ironically, what was true then is still true today. We live ‘better’ together than we do on our own.

So how does an entire political movement spring up around the concept of ‘rugged individualism?

Ask yourself just where all of those ‘rugged individuals’ would be without their customers?

Verily, it is the utmost of conceit for anyone to boast they have succeeded on their own.

NOBODY does it alone…which is a bit of a misstatement, there are many things we do alone, it’s just that few of those things are worthwhile…and almost all of them are improved by sharing.

So where do we get this cheering for what boils down to be utter heartlessness?

Wasn’t the ‘purpose of civilization’ to improve our chances at survival? And now in our modern times only those who can ‘afford it’ are worthy of surviving?

I ask, what kind of beasts are these animals? First they block raising taxes on people with more money than they can spend and then they advocate letting the destitute die because adequate healthcare is beyond their means?

Worse, it is these same animals who are responsible for the poor’s sorry state!

But this is not ‘new’ by any stretch of the imagination. The privileged have always resented their obligation toward helping the less fortunate…and sometimes this resentment appears in public disguised as a political movement!

Which brings us full circle to another concept that has fallen by the wayside and that is the concept of ‘membership’ in a society.

Most of us take it for granted we are members of society at large.

Many of us are active in local affairs, this is, in a sense, ‘citizenship’.

So how is it that your citizenship can be unilaterally revoked for not sharing the same political viewpoint as…well, the powerful?

Are the powerful also the majority?

Not by a long shot…so why should THEY dictate who is and who isn’t ‘worthwhile’?

WHO among us has the ‘right’ to decide who lives and who dies?

And before you say it is up to the individual I tell you assuredly IT IS NOT!

Let me remind you that if you can’t live on your paycheck it’s not your employer’s problem, it’s YOURS!

Worse good citizen, your problems often become someone else’s profits!

Thus do they have no stake in lessening YOUR burden.

Ironically, you don’t NEED to become ‘thy brother’s keeper’, you merely need to let him up off the mat and he will care for himself!

The human anti-exploitation law, an idea whose time is long overdue!

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, September 16, 2011

Where's the compassion?

Greetings good citizen,

There are those who believe that this life is rough and if a man is going to make it he’s gotta be tough…

And those assholes would be WRONG.

Why do these fools harbor such ‘silly’ ideas? It is probably a ‘manliness’ issue combined with a decided disdain for admitting that we need to be grateful for the efforts of others…

No, these misguided ingrates would rather ‘pretend’ they did it all themselves.

Needless to say this is NOT a solid foundation upon which to build a society

From the conclusion of Mr. Krugman’s piece:

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.

I think a trip down memory lane would be appropriate, do you remember when the Libertarians ran Lyndon LaRouche for president?

Probably not, they didn’t poll well mostly because of their radical fringe beliefs…

What beliefs are those? Ironically we need look no further than the Tea Party (or Mr. Krugman’s post) for some solid examples.

You see, the Libertarians didn’t ‘fade away’, they, er, ‘infected’ the minority ‘one in five’ party, which is to say they ‘co-opted’ the Republicans.

Worse, they weren’t beyond ‘adopting’ whatever label it took to win election. (Left to our imagination is what those who ran as Democrats pretended what the D stood for!)

So, twenty years later, our government is literally ‘overrun’ with what boils down to anti-social Randites.

So I ask you, good citizen, what do people who don’t believe in/hate ‘society’ know about government?

All these self-centered assholes know is ‘government’ interferes with ‘individual liberty’.

The point Bobo is missing is; government is the primary reason why we don’t kill one another on sight!

Because whacko Libertarians subscribe first and foremost to the ‘Law of the Jungle’.

Therefore only an idiot wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

You couldn’t afford to take the chance.

Although, ironically, they also subscribe to the idea that most of us are as soft-hearted as we are soft-headed.

And this is where the danger lies…in the ease with which we can be manipulated.

I have already pointed to the ‘mechanism’ these manipulators will use to overthrow the current corrupt system. In fact this ’paralysis’ strategy is already in play.

Worse, they have sufficient numbers wearing the letters of both teams to pull this ‘scam’ off.

What will make 2012, er, interesting is how the public is already wary that Democrats aren’t acting like Democrats and Republicans are now unrecognizable!

The question on every voter’s mind is just who the hell am I voting for?

The ‘do nothing’ incumbent is, amazingly enough, running ‘unopposed’ by his own party and his Republican challengers aren’t telling us anything about what they will do to correct the disastrous course the nation is on…they are all running on the caveat that they are NOT Barrack Obama.

This ‘out of touch’ phenomenon is disturbing enough, the fact that it is so pervasive on both sides of the political, er, canyon (it is far more than a ‘fence’, you can talk over a fence, these assholes are so far apart they can’t even see one another!)

But, ironically, they’re playing for the same team!

Is the public clever enough to figure this out?

If we were to ‘follow the money’ the answer would be clear enough.

Naturally, certain ‘old assumptions’ need to be thrown out the window, first among these is the ‘your employees are also your customers’. That old saw was replaced with your customers are the people who have no choice but to buy from you (either directly or indirectly.)

So your job headed overseas but you are still buying what you need from the same shithead that forced you to take a massive pay cut!

You see, the piece of the puzzle that has been dancing in the background is the utter destruction of our ‘way of life’. Once energy is no longer cheap or abundant all bets are off!

Our entire way of life becomes…unsustainable.

Left to your imagination, good citizen, is when, if ever, we are going to have a conversation about this?

If you have surmised ‘never’ then you are correct. Those who ‘win’ under the current system have no interest in ending their ride on the gravy train a moment before they are forced to…then it’s ‘adios sucker’ time!

I have also pointed to how the ‘Real Estate’ market is going to become ‘obsolete’ everywhere but in the most temperate of zones.

Which is to say the next big ‘grab’ is about to take place good citizen and like the last one, you’ll be left to fight over the crumbs…if you survive.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Good vs. Evil

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes you have to ‘pick your poison’ when it comes to the day’s headlines, this was yesterday’s headline.

I didn’t pick this to expound upon yesterday because, quite frankly, my eyes sort of bounced right off this ‘statement of known fact’.

Seriously good citizen this is the very definition of ‘belaboring the obvious’. It practically has ‘No shit Sherlock!’ written all over it.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

Which brings us to a more pressing question, what makes a Banana Republic the criminal backwaters that they are?

What is a Banana Republic if not a failed monarchy?

The ‘justice system‘, such as it is, exists solely to protect and preserve the status quo.

Which is to point out that we’re not quite there yet, the men with guns don’t yet live behind garrison walls…but that day is coming.

But, ironically, I digress…

What does the climbing poverty rate mean to you (and by extension, yours?)

Mistah Kat(z) states that ’Merikans expect their kids to do ’better’ than they did…but we all know that is just Hollywood talking, real modern parents expect their kids to do ’as well’…but, as Mistah Kat(z) points out, that is looking more and more like ’irrational exuberance’.

Why is that, good citizen?

Why isn’t it reasonable to expect that there is a ’sustainable plateau’ that most of us can co-exist on?

Could it be yet another ‘by-product’ of hooray for me and fuck you capitalism?

Understand good citizen, we aren’t the only ones ‘breeding’…and keeping a single privileged cocksucker in ‘private jets and chauffeured limos’ can only result in less for you and yours!

In fact, your share continues to diminish as the ranks of inherited wealth grow exponentially!

Which is to point out that things aren’t yet as bad as they’re going to get. The question in the back of your mind might be ‘at least they aren’t trying to charge me for shade, yet.’

Until we re-establish the ‘rule of law’ and use the scale of equality to mete out justice we will not be worthy of advancing as a species.

And you know I have a lot of faith in my fellow man. We CAN do this!

But wishing it to be so is far removed from doing what is necessary to bring about genuine change.

You’ve gotta want to!

There is a sad and sober amount of truth to the idea if you are unwilling to stand up for what is right then you deserve what happens to you.

Right now (and on the surface) the world seems so corrupt that the very idea of trying to clean it up (hell, did you EVER think you’d see the day when our politicians REFUSED to raise taxes?)seems daunting beyond belief.

Um, that’s one corrupt system we’ve got .

Nobody (except the politicians) is denying that.

But all is not lost…and no, things really were ‘better’ (relatively speaking) in the not too distant past.

That metaphorical ‘pendulum’ they keep talking about, that pendulum of justice that keeps swinging from one extreme to the other…

Well, it’s about to start swinging back towards the ‘law and order’ side. The corruption of today is recalibrating the public’s ‘moral compass’ and it won’t be a good time to be a politician (or an employer) I’ll promise you that!

If we fail to embrace the future we will be cursed to repeat the past.

There are those among us who are more than willing to enslave the ‘unworthy’ (and those people should have their membership in society revoked!)

Which is to opine that we are not faced with the ‘final confrontation’ between ‘good and evil’ but it certainly will be an ‘Epic’ battle!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Critical Thinking Skills...

Greetings good citizen,

I sometimes despair that there are so few ‘viable’ alternatives to the failed system we are currently saddled with.

It is only in retrospect that we have learned that capitalism has NEVER worked and only thrived due to the collusion of the few it benefited.

(As we are witnessing, the only thing holding it together was avoidance of the massive train wreck switching to another system would cause.)

Perhaps the most distressing of all of these proposed ‘alternatives’ is the plethora of ‘half measures’ that don’t take into account the true nature of the problem.

Take this tripe for example.

Rushkoff also raises points worth considering, particularly for those of us trying to articulate, in the wake of massive failures of the economic system we've lived our whole lives with, some sort of alternative to the cycle of boom, bust, bailout.

He argues that perhaps we're going about it backward when we call for jobs, that maybe it's not a bad thing that technology is replacing workers, and points out that actually, we do produce enough food and “stuff” to support the country and even the world—that, in fact, we produce too much “stuff.”

He alternately harkens back to a past before jobs, when many people worked for themselves on a subsistence level, and forward to a future where we are all busy making games and books and communicating with one another from behind computer screens, with the hours we have to work dwindling.

Like most ‘half-measures’ Bobo leaves the details to ‘take care of themselves’. Worse, this half-wit doesn’t possess the presence of mind to focus on the crux of the problem, which is where a solution can be found.

Constant Reader knows where I place that crux (we don’t have a money problem, we have a legal problem, big time!)

It is the laws that need to be changed…and until they do, nothing will change!

Your kids starving to death? Sorry, nothing we can do, helping you (or you helping yourself to what you need) is against the law!

Yes good citizen, fuck you, pay me capitalism is ‘centered’ on property rights NOT the ‘common good’ (which empty -headed Libertarians routinely dismiss as being exploitive.)

So what the fuck is the thinking behind a future where only some people contribute?

Where’s the justice in that?

Which is to ask ’who the fuck thinks THAT is a ’good idea’?’

While A Simple Plan mandates 100% employment as ‘the price of citizenship’, detractors would question the sanity behind essentially quadrupling the commute.

Well, as we build a more sustainable future, working where you live will become the rule rather than the exception it has become today.

If you commute at all you will use your feet as the preferred mode of transportation.

Going anywhere else you’ll probably take the choo-choo (or a dirigible.) If your travel plans take you across one of the world’s oceans it is more likely safer to take a sailing ship.

Yes, we will ‘sacrifice’ supersonic speed for ‘fuel efficiency’.

Hopefully, slowing things down a couple of notches will give us all more time to think things over.

Everybody (even the ‘handicapped’) will be provided with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in society…and that means ‘jobs for everyone!’.

You WILL do your part, even if it is only for a couple of hours a day or a couple of days per week.

Which is to point out there’s no lack of things that need doing, it is capitalism which prevents them from being done!

People are already aware that they can no longer ‘breed like minks’ and that is the true danger of building ‘utopia’.

Which is to say that there are still ‘hard choices’ to be faced, that part doesn’t go away.

I strongly suspect only a ’hooray for me and fuck everyone else Libertarian’ is capable of conceiving of a future where not working (and thereby not participating in society) is an option.

It is uncertain which disturbs me more, the lack of critical think on display here or the fact that THIS ASSHOLE gets a national forum to air his nonsense in!

Oh fucking well…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Why we are in trouble

Greetings good citizen,

We’ll leave the ‘stupidity markets’ alone today as it has long since been proven that market performance has no relationship to economic reality. A fact that will only get more disturbing as time goes on.

Instead we will start with two very different tales about the ‘be-all, end-all’

As Bank of America executives prepared last week to announce the first phase of their turnaround plan, a group of consultants hurried to complete their recommendations for the overhaul, called Project New BAC.

The 44 senior bank managers and roughly two dozen consultants assigned to the initiative worked through lunch, barely pausing to enjoy the pepperoni, sausage and vegetarian pies that had been ordered from a pizzeria.

On Monday, the bank’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, announced the broad strokes of their five-month effort, announcing plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs and cut annual costs by $5 billion over the next three years.

“We don’t have to be the biggest company out there. We have to be the best,” Mr. Moynihan said.

The consulting firms enlisted to help with Project New BAC — EHS Partners and the Promontory Financial Group — are what are known in the industry as bank doctors. Financial firms often turn to these specialists in periods of crisis, seeking out their recommendations on deep and wide-ranging cuts to bolster revenue and eliminate unnecessary expenses.

Bad enough BOA, er, ‘allowed’ Countrywide to be palmed off on them but then they kept it…what the hell were they thinking?

Okay, let’s suppose there is still tons of ‘counter-party risk’ hidden under the Countrywide umbrella so scuttling it isn’t an option, is scuttling the economy the answer?

Left to our imagination is precisely what BOA is trying to be the best at, are they trying to be the best ‘smoking hole in the ground’? (Because that’s where they’re headed!)

Now wait a minute…if all money is ‘funny’ then why don’t the banks just print their way out of this? (which, on the surface, appears to be my solution, it isn’t!)

It may also puzzle some of you, considering my steadfastness in insisting all money is funny, that I also insist there is no possible solution to the current quandary (short of absolute Jubilee, the infamous ‘re-set button‘)

You might also be puzzled as to why I insist that a jubilee without altering the current set-up is nothing more than a temporary fix, in a matter of months we will be right back where we started…if all money is funny.

Upon reflection this is probably only going to muddy the waters worse than they already are.

Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing”

a. Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

b. Similarly, the number of documented marketplaces where people regularly appear to swap goods directly without any reference to a money of account is also zero. If any sociological prediction has ever been empirically refuted, this is it.

Forgive me good citizen, adding to the mystery of ‘where did money come from?’ does nothing to clarify our current dire predicament.

It’s not how much money there is, it is money’s failure to circulate that has doomed our (current) civilization/social model!

Here is the problem there’s no way out of, short of cutting everybody a big fat check. When all/most of the money in an economy is ‘stuck’ at the top, printing more does you zero good.

Thus do I reiterate, there is NO WAY OUT (via ‘fuck you, pay me’ capitalism.)

The ‘mystery’ of money is actually solved by the leisure class who needed a way to pick the public’s pocket, an answer that should be obvious by the inevitable linkage between money and government.

Oh let us not forget that oxymoron ‘poor politician’, there’s no such thing.

In fact, Adam Smith was also ‘wrong’ in asserting that commerce/free trade produced the ‘wealth of nations’, the true wealth of nations flows from the public teat!

The biggest fortunes in the world were created at ‘the public’s expense’.

Even Bill Gates owes the bulk of his wealth to government contracts.

So with the recent statistic of the top 5% accounting for 40% of consumer spending should provide you with all of the evidence you need to understand what is wrong with our economy…

Ironically, it also contains the answer to what we need to do about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, September 12, 2011

Why is that?

Greetings good citizen,

The world is a losing investment for those of us who don’t ‘own’ pricing power.

The few write the ticket and the rest of us pay for it…not in monetary terms but by sacrificing what we otherwise would have been entitled to.

So it should come as a surprise to no one that volatility in the markets is now the ‘new normal’ just as 9% unemployment has become the ‘new normal’ as globalization continues to rip our civilization apart.

“The best thing people could have done last month is nothing,” said Alec Young, an equity strategist at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. “We don’t think that it’s a smart way to manage to be taking the temperature every day because you’ll be trading your portfolio till the cows come home.”

And volatility may not herald dips in prices — a study by Sam Stovall, a strategist at S.& P. Equity Research, found that markets since 1950 have typically been calm just before the highest consecutive price declines. But, he found, volatility goes up after prices start going down and the markets can remain nervous while prices recover.

Some longtime market observers attribute the skittishness to aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis.

“When there is uncertainty in the world, there is uncertainty in the market,” said James J. Angel, a professor of finance at Georgetown University. “After a big shock, it takes years for the markets to settle down.”

As of this morning the financial world was once again bleeding from the eye-sockets. There has already been one rally that ‘almost’ pushed the Dow into positive territory but it gave out and markets dropped to roughly half of their former lows.

Why? Nobody knows.

In sales we call this phenomenon ‘running out of stupid people’ but this shouldn’t happen to the stock markets because they have that foremost of market makers working for them, they are ‘the only game in town’.

They either play the game or the play makers ruin them…it’s that simple.

But that’s the ‘free markets’ for you, my way or the highway, right?

What do you mean no?

What planet did you say you were from again?

Never mind…like the theme of this piece, we’re going to take a little time to explore ’why is that?’ (across a multitude of topics so be prepared to shift mental gears…although it is, tangentially, all related.)

What do stock markets tell us in a world with a bankrupt financial system?

Short answer, nothing.

Just as I stumbled upon a video posted at Financial Armageddon this morning where some clueless fool blamed the latest ’recession’ on sub-prime lending. It’s like blaming fire on wood.

Why did the banks engage in all of that ’crazy’ lending? Because without it the Real Estate market would have collapsed and WHY would the real estate market have collapsed? Because payrolls have been completely stagnant for far too long! THERE WERE NO (too few) QUALIFIED BUYERS!

Which, ironically, is precisely where we find ourselves this very moment. NOTHING has changed.

Why have payrolls been stagnant for decades? Because ‘globalization’ removed what little ‘leverage’ workers had to demand higher pay for increases in productivity.

BOSS: “In lieu of raises this year I’m closing the plant an moving operations to China, you can all come…IF you can get a visa!

Bad news amigos, the land of a billion people don’t want you!

Make you wonder what kind of cat starves itself to death so the other cat can live high off the hog?

Is it a pragmatic cat or just a stupid one?

In my opinion the latter but time will tell, this race isn’t over yet by a long shot (and I think the ‘communist on the outside and capitalist on the inside‘ bastards have bitten off much more than they can chew.)

So, in a world on the verge of collapse, what other questions should we be asking?

How about the ‘War on Terra’? It most certainly is a bit too late start questioning the validity of the actions taken by a few crazed politicians but it will never be too late to correct them.

Um no irony should be lost on the fact that Israel ’pioneered’ the use of military force in police work. We have merely copied their example…and the civilian casualties are written off as collateral damage in the cause to keep the world safe from terrorists.

Oh and our politicians have to avoid all shiny, reflective things or they would find themselves face to face with the biggest, meanest, ugliest terrorists on the planet.

Talk about your viscous circle! If it weren’t for the bribes we pay for the ‘safe conduct’ of our convoys through Afghanistan the fucking Taliban would have gone bankrupt years ago!

Never mind what passes for Al Quida these days costs us a billion dollars a head to kill!

And every other week we kill their number two or number three operative at somebody’s wedding/funeral/birthday party.

Which is either a testament to their (much more robust than ours) chain of command or to the need to justify the murder of innocent civilians in the cause of ‘freedom’.

For our final ‘why is that’ question we return to the issue of crime and what principally constitutes ‘criminal activity’ in this bankrupt society of ours?

Isn’t the primary cause of all crime ‘adverse possession?’

In a world were everything is free from Mother Nature (not what we’re taught but indeed it is a fact) how can anybody be in possession of something that doesn’t belong to them?

Well, people don’t ‘belong’ to anyone but our fucked up government regularly deprives people of their freedom (instead of denying them membership in society, which is how it should be handled!)

What is the fundamental issue in a case of ‘adverse possession’? That the so-called ‘owner’ hasn’t been ‘paid’ for his/her property.

Why are so many people in prison if all money is (ultimately) ‘funny’?

The prison population would be EVENTUALLY reduced to zero while membership in civil society would also ‘diminish’.

Just not necessarily ‘proportionately’.

Not all crimes justify the withdrawal of membership in society.

As you can see, good citizen, it is more than just our system of government that needs replacing.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Gone but not forgotten

Greetings good citizen,

It is disturbing to me that ten years after we were attacked by our alleged allies that we are still at war with people who had nothing to do with attack and the corporate owned media continues to, er, ‘rub our noses’ in the ‘circus of mismanagement’ the event and the aftermath have become monuments to.

It is perhaps more disturbing that 10 years after and we still aren’t asking why?

The ‘pat’ answer is that Bin Laden was a psycho that did what he did because he could.

Ironically, this is the, er, ‘determination’ of those foolish enough to believe that history is a series of accidents that occur for no particular reason.

Worse, these are the same people who go around calling themselves the ‘reality based community’.

“Stuff happens, get over it…” but, curiously, they don’t.

[grind mental gears] In a world where there is too much going on for your average mortal to keep track of, here’s a story that gets almost zero press.

Here’s the tail end of it:

That sally into industrial policy, some economists say, is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped — the horse in this case being America’s possession of the world’s biggest mass market. That ended in the late 20th century with the rise of millions of consumers in Asia and Europe with ample disposable income or access to credit.

The upshot is that governments in these markets pile on subsidies to gain or keep as much production as possible. Whirlpool, for example, makes most of its microwave ovens in southeastern China, with help from local subsidies.

When companies engaged in this kind of strategy in the 1980s, there was often much more criticism than today.

“The reason you no longer get much of an outcry over this exodus has to do mainly with jobs,” says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. “Less than 12 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing today, down from 30 percent in the 1970s. So there isn’t the same level of public concern.”

Is the problem really that of ‘vanishing dead-end jobs’?

Because once again we would be demonstrating how myopic we are. These jobs that ‘Mericans’ refuse to do (actually no sane person would surrender their labor for wages that don’t crack their nut.) didn’t vanish, they moved off-shore seeking the lowest possible labor pool.

And guess what? The price DIDN’T drop, it just didn’t go up as fast as others did!

And why do prices continue to rise when the inputs for EVERY PRODUCT are FREE from Mother Nature?

But that’s another of those questions you aren’t supposed to ask because the real answer isn’t, er, ‘rational’.

Now we return to the value of the dollar/zlotny/peso issue, they’re worth whatever Puddin’ Head says they are on any given day.

So our collective mission, good citizen is to get Puddin’ Head!

Although once compromised, Puddin’ Head’s authority to set global currency values would be over ridden by the people he/she works for.

But guess what would happen until a new chain of command was established?

Prices would remain ‘static’.

But I digress, back to the ‘vanishing jobs’ crisis.

Yes good citizen, it is not just manufacturing jobs that are ‘bleeding’ out of our economy, creating an ever larger ‘economic desert’, our decimated tax base is causing lay-offs through our infrastructure base!

Which is to ask, how stupid are you?

Bad enough your employer thinks you’re dumber than a box of hammers but are you really?

Is it too hard to imagine (or too harsh an indictment) to say that the lower 50% of the payroll distribution couldn’t even spell ‘economic theory’ much less grasp the basics?

Let’s shift our aim a little higher, shall we?

The upper 50%, due to the level of ‘because I said so’ involved in actual economic practices, has no clue either!
Which leaves us where, good citizen?

It leaves us at the beginning of the economics puzzle with that mind blowing question ‘what is the purpose of commerce?’

Does it exist to enrich the (lucky) owners or does it exist to provide goods and services to ‘society’ at large (something it has always failed miserably at…in case you hadn‘t noticed.)

Yes, even as we sink below other ‘third world’ economies we stand here befuddled because our government doesn’t work (because it was overrun by criminals and no one knows how to clean it out.)

Is there hope for our species or should we merely hope that we like our new boss better?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS, don’t buy the ‘propaganda’, 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ designed to tear down our government…and it worked like a charm!

Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Ultimate Solution

Greetings good citizen,

I love it when I stumble on independent corroberation of ideas that I developed.

What, me? Is Gegner a closet egomaniac, claiming credit for an idea that has surely been around for…decades at best.

No, good citizen, I wasn’t the ‘first’ to champion a reduced workweek, the ‘futurists’ who enthused that automation would ‘liberate the common man from drudgery’ were the first to, er, ‘envision’ a time where automation would eliminate the need for labor and the reduction of the workday would be a ‘natural outcome’.

Unfortunately, modern workday/week advocates only provide us with a ‘half a loaf’:

 a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis— while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident. [is this idiot on drugs?]

Today, driven both by necessity and the deliberate choice to live simply, more Americans are shifting toward fewer work hours. It’s a trend that, if done correctly, could get us out of our current economic crisis and away from unsustainable economic growth.

It’s tripe like this that makes me suspect the loyalties of the so-called ‘progressive movement’.

For a ‘reality based’ community, they sure don’t have much courage.

Nor a lot of ‘outside the box' thinking.

A reduced workday-week ISN’T POSSIBLE without significant DEBT REDUCTION.

The ‘worse’ behind this one is a real doozy, capitalism itself cannot survive the necessary reductions/offsets. As I have explained before, A Simple Plan is ‘holistic’, not only money changes, life itself starts afresh with a whole new set of rules (and NO RULERS!)

I will digress for a moment and explain that there will be ‘leaders’ but leaders will be unable to make/alter the ‘rules’.

Back to the ONLY (humane) solution to the unemployment crisis (again I will digress again for a moment to point out that there is an inhumane solution to what some call the ‘surplus labor problem’ and that solution is the one we appear headed toward, a ‘kill-off’.)

Understand that the goal of a reduced work day/week is 100% employment.

Notice how the authors of this article leave the solution as ‘voluntary’, employers would hire replacement workers at their ‘OPTION’ (if they decided to keep operations local at all after sufficient ‘attrition’ had taken place.)

Here we have with yet another ‘jobs Americans don’t want’ situation in the making.

Or another rousing jeer of ‘Americans don’t want to work’…

Which is another way of pointing out that the only way ‘work-sharing’ is EVER going to enjoy widespread acceptance is after (more for me) capitalism chokes to death on its own ashes.

BUT, if we ‘assume’ capitalism has died and a ‘new regime’ has taken its place then yes, a radically reduced workday (without the need to ‘make up the difference’ via increased self-sufficiency, hell, we have hundreds of millions of willing and able workers to keep busy!

But there is a flipside to this ideal arrangement, that is the impact of a severely reduced energy picture. Alternative energy can take up the slack here but the conversion period will be a bit, er, ‘ticklish’.

Oh, and don’t for a moment think that the abandonment of capitalism will be an ‘isolated event’. It will be abandoned ‘en-masse’ and, believe it or not, a new age of global cooperation will be born, especially after the Human anti-exploitation law achieves universal acceptance!

There’s a lot to look forward to once the ‘I own it’ crowd swings from the gallows. (Not how it’s going to happen, it won’t be ‘quick and clean’, it will be ‘lingering and educational.’

Although if this article is accurate the education part will probably be lost on the ‘perps’.

Estimated levels of social psychosis vary but even Jesse speculates that most of the mainstream ones are too low.

Conservatism is one such ’yardstick’ that tells us there could be as much as 20% of the population that is, er, ‘wired differently’.

And again, by degrees.

Like the ’fair days wages’ issue, it is nearly impossible to gauge with any accuracy how much psychosis is, er, ‘harmless.’

Does society itself provide the answer?

Just look at the ‘top 1%’ More money than they can possibly spend and they still relentlessly pursue ’more’.

If that isn’t sick I don’t know what is…except that we let them get away with it.

That, good citizen, is ‘sicker’…but you can’t really go by me, I think of all sorts of weird stuff.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner