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
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