Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The King is NAKED!

Greetings good citizen,

Remember that ‘mulligan’ I was talking about yesterday? Well, for some unknown reason it is getting even bigger this morning.

Many of you saw the stories of how ‘The Fed’ (a private corporation that ‘manages’ the monetary system of the US) er, ‘loaned’ 7 plus TRILLION to banks around the world ON TOP OF the 700 Billion dollar bail out of Wall Street banks AND the nearly hundred billion dollar bailout of the auto industry.

Since ‘The Fed’ is NOT a Federal agency and because it is ‘privately held’ it need not show its books to anyone.

The fact that the Fed has been doing whatever it wanted to, pretty much since its 1913 inception only came to light AFTER they were threatened with a Congressional Audit.

UNDERSTAND, good citizen, the information floating around now is the result of a ‘voluntary self-audit’. It should NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, be construed as ‘full disclosure’.

With that fact firmly in mind, I would like you to compare and contrast this story with the one that follows it:

The central banks announced that they would slash by roughly half the cost of an existing program under which banks in foreign countries can borrow dollars from their own central banks, which in turn get those dollars from the Fed. The banks also said that loans will be available until February 2013, extending a previous endpoint of August 2012.

“The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity,” the banks said in a statement. The participants in addition to the Fed are the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank.

(Comment: Markets are UP more than 300 points on this news this morning.)

Now try to make sense of this hellacious development

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

From today’s top headline on the NY Times to the top story in the business section to the latest post (at the time I wrote this) from Jesse of Crossroads CafĂ© fame

I had also suggested after the bell that there would be an effort to blow off the downgrade of the big money center banks. I suspected there would be a more singular effort to pump up the SP futures from the Fed's house banks, but it appears the Central Banks, led by the Fed, decided to hit the markets with a major sugar rush of cheap dollars. That is US dollars.

"I will be surprised if they do not try and rally stocks in the face of this to put the brave face on and whistle past the graveyard once again. This is what traders like to do when they have been caught offsides by the news. But they may not be able to sustain it without official help from the strong trading desks of the financial sector."

This is just a big serving of a quick energy drink to ease the short term liquidity problem, and dull the news impact of the bank downgrades. When the rush wears off, and it will because this is doing little to help the average person in the real economy, we will see how the markets react to the growing piles of paper covering the landscape of a mismanaged and ruined economy.

The Eurozone problems have not been solved by this. It has only bought them some time, and further addicted the Western world to US dollars.

Um, there’s another outcome that I think Jesse sees but he isn’t mentioning because people don’t like to associate themselves with ‘crazy talk’.

But, a few trillion here and a few trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking ‘serious money’.

Um, (crazy talk time!) How far are 'we' (the US) from dropping into the same 'rabbit hole' that Zimbabwe slid down?

The entire US GDP is only a shade over 14 Trillion (and there’s more than a little ‘shaky accounting’ behind that number!) and we are, for the moment, the world’s largest economy.

So what does it say about ‘conditions on the ground’ inside the ‘world’s largest economy’ that MILIONS of FAMILIES are on government poverty relief programs?

How the fuck is the US supposed to bail out the Euro-zone when it’s own tax base is so decimated that the bulk of its citizens qualify for food stamps?

What does this ‘prove’ good citizen?

Two things, first that ALL money us FUNNY and secondly, we are the victims of gross fraud and mismanagement.

When, good citizen are you going to stop falling for that old gag that only stupid people cannot see the King’s splendid new clothes?

The idiot king is buck naked and we can all see it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Anytime, Anywhere and for any reason (or none at all!)

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds on schedule. Markets opened UP in New York despite news that the Euro-zone was ‘tightening credit’ causing a global credit contraction.

Which is actually something of an oxymoron, considering how ‘credit’ works…

But there are two other factors in play, one is the ‘fuck it’ factor from yesterday’s post and the other is the growing ‘chump factor’ a contributor to the growing ‘fuck it’ factor.

Monkey see, monkey do…and what do you suppose the monkeys are seeing right now?

There is absolutely zero ‘downside’ to defaulting on their mortgage!

Better, it is unlikely the banks will evict them anytime in the foreseeable future because the economy is NEVER going to ‘recover’.

Which is to say they will NEVER sell the backlog of foreclosed properties already on the books.

There’s nobody to sell them to, thanks to the ‘global race to the bottom’.

FULL STOP good citizen!

Now ask yourself if what you have just read is ‘true’?

Then consider the level of ‘mismanagement’ it took for things to get this far out of whack…

Now consider what it will take to restore ‘economic sanity’.

How appropriate is it that our first offering of today is the latest example of inside the beltway ‘insanity’?

How bad is it good citizen? Have a look for yourself.

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.

The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

The disturbing ‘straight to a vote without any debate’ sort of tells you something, that the criminal 1% WANT this, er, ‘type’ of legislation…

Could this explain why McCain ISN’T making a presidential bid in 2012?

Worse, there’s ‘bipartisanship’ in action for ya!

Seems both sides of the political fence felt the need to protect themselves from prosecution for their criminal acts!

Which is to posit that this could be construed as a ‘defensive measure’, a tool our criminal legislators could use to ’disappear’ anyone attempting to hold them accountable for their multiple misdeeds.

Why else would anyone desire to arrest and detain someone indefinitely without leveling any ‘formal charges’?

Um, in case you can’t see it, the ‘most attractive’ part of this proposal is the ‘because I said so’ part.

Talk about turning back the social clock a thousand years!

They may as well take the final step and declare themselves ‘royalty’!

Prepare to shift mental gears good citizen because we are about to embark on a (to me) extremely disturbing journey.

Welcome to the Libertarian nightmare

Before we dive into the excerpt you need to understand that ‘Code Name Cain’ is making a similar ‘leap’, jumping into the deeply disturbing ‘middle’ of libertarian philosophy, taking it for granted that the reader already knows the ‘ground rules’ (even the interviewer is ‘upbraided’ for his ‘ignorance’.)

ANDREW: So they’ll have to do forced labor for the security GLO?

CNC: How can you possibly think this could be worse than our current system? Where instead of compensating the victims of crimes it did not prevent, the government forces victims to pay again as taxpayers for the cost of the apprehension, imprisonment, rehabilitation and/or entertainment of their aggressors [259]?

ANDREW: Still, as a libertarian, aren’t you against coercion?

CNC: Coercion? Obviously you don’t understand what you’re talking about. Coercion is only when someone interferes with rights someone else actually holds. Criminals can forfeit their rights through their own choices. When that happens, requiring them to make restitution for their actions doesn’t violate their rights.

As you can see, question Libertarian philosophy and you are belittled for your ignorance!

At the foundation of this nightmare is ‘privatization’ of most government functions.

There is no such thing as ‘public schools’, hell, even the police force is nothing more than hired guns, accountable to no one!

Why is this good citizen (and you wouldn’t be a citizen under Libertarian rule, there is NO Government to protect you!)

You see, Libertarians want to abolish government because they believe ‘taxes = coercion’.

Try, if you can, to imagine our current circumstances WITHOUT any kind of ‘social safety net’…no unemployment, no nothing!

To better understand Libertarianism you have to envision ‘capitalist utopia’ where nobody works for nobody and if your customers can’t pay then that’s your tough luck!

It wouldn’t be very long before Libertarian (capitalist) utopia burned to the ground.

Under A Simple Plan, the playing field is first ‘leveled’ then EVERYBODY is given a clean slate (except for the mentally instable, they will remain, er, ‘institutionalized’ for their own safety.)

EVERYBODY is GUARANTEED a job that pays A LIVING WAGE (and then some in most cases) along with the other requirements of modern society, a warm, dry place to call home and the means to get to and from their job- FREE!

Hell, you’d even enjoy free healthcare as needed and for life!

But let’s suppose ‘rules’ aren’t your thing…the ‘it’s easier to take it than to make it is just how you roll’ and you don’t see a compelling reason to, er, ‘conform’.

Well, under A Simple Plan, the job of Policeman still exists (and it doesn’t cost you a dime! As there are zero taxes under A Simple Plan.)

People who ‘take’ what they aren’t entitled to are invited to ‘exit’ civil society.

Not that ‘stealing’ makes sense because there is no cash, selling what you can’t personally consume is an exercise in futility!

But there will still be ‘crime’. You can’t outlaw ‘passion’.

And there will be ‘work arounds’ to the cash prohibition, which will be considered criminal.

Forfeit your citizenship and you forfeit your membership in society.

Unlike the greedy Libertarians there are no ‘work camps’ where ‘criminals’ can pay their debt to society.

Work is one of the ‘privileges of citizenship’ and it is guaranteed!

There is a very clear line here. Under Libertarian, er, ‘rule’ you can buy your way back into their good graces (as many times as necessary!)

Under ASP, being shown the door is a ‘one-way’ trip.

Oddly, Code Name Cain starts off touting ‘exile like’ punishment then backtracks into a bizarre prison/work camp set up for some unknown reason.

Perhaps it is tied to the notion that there can be no unemployment in ‘capitalist utopia’ where the onus is still on the individual to make themselves ‘useful’, HOPEFULLY at a profit!

Under A Simple Plan you are guaranteed employment, simply pick a field of endeavor that interests you and you’re on your way!

Note: Medical school, like all others, will be FREE (mostly because you will be trained ‘on the job’, thereby ‘earning’ your education.)

In contrast there won’t be Medical schools under Libertarian ‘you now pay for everything’ rule because of the lack of paying customers.

Worse, under total ‘privatization’, large scale endeavors become unworkable.

Who could afford to work on a production line if it didn’t pay enough to feed you?

I guess that’s the ‘bottom line’ good citizen.

What kind of world would it be if you had to pay for EVERYTHING?

And I do mean everything!

Pay Toilets would be the road to riches in a world without government!

Think about it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Better Dead than Libby!

Monday, November 28, 2011

Illusion or Delusion?

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are (again inexplicably) up today on ‘rumors’ (I shit you not) that troubled Euro-zone nations ‘are getting their act together’ and addressing the Euro crisis…

Which is total bullshit but the surge in today’s markets will be wiped out by tomorrow’s plummet so it’s sort of like providing investors with a ‘mulligan’.

Which is to belabor the obvious, the further this monkey business goes, the queerer it gets.

Some Assembly Required is loaded with keen insights today, do take a moment to visit.

I even found the link to today’s offering there, saving me one of my two remaining freebies!

Yessiree good citizen, the word is out and whodathunk, Black Friday was a ‘smashing success!’

For retailers.

As usual, a closer examination of the numbers reveals the reason for this and I’m going to throw in one of my own…the ‘fuck it!’ factor is finally in play.

What’s the ‘fuck it’ factor?

It’s a state of mind brought on by a belief that the situation is beyond saving.

A hefty percentage of the consuming public hasn’t paid their mortgage in YEARS, allowing them to ‘live the good life’ while the rest of us struggle with our ‘honorable’ (but wretched) Hand-to-Mouth existence.

Economic Insecurity
By MOTOKO RICH

With the Census Bureau fine-tuning its definition of poverty, a group of “near poor” has emerged — those who are not officially poor but are perilously close to it. Another way of putting that is to look at “economic security,” the amount of income necessary to cover basic expenses without relying on public subsidies. [snip]

“What does it take for households in this country to get by and be able to plan for their own futures based on the work that they do?” said Donna Addkison, president and chief executive of Wider Opportunities for Women. “We’re really looking at not just the lowest of the lowest income households but that slice of households that live somewhere above the poverty line but are constantly in danger of being thrown into financial catastrophe, and that’s a much larger slice of the American public than we are currently talking about.”

No irony should be lost on the fact that those who aren’t paying their bills are responsible for this ‘faux prosperity’.

Equally as bizarre, not paying your mortgage allows you to pay your credit cards promptly.

Which explains the uptick in online sales…

As the article suggests, the overall economy is a lot worse off that it appears ‘at first glance.’

So good citizen, how far in arrears are your neighbors on their mortgages?

Worse, are you a ‘chump’ for continuing to pay yours?

I’d love to interpret this as a ‘vote of confidence’ for A Simple Plan (No one will have a mortgage/own property upon conversion.) But that is not the case.

Wipe that foolish grin off of your puss, chances are good ‘personal property’ (for non-royals) will be outlawed by the coming monarchy and rent will be indistinguishable from taxes!

And, of course, they’re no fools! Rents will start off as being ridiculously cheap (in the beginning) but will rise exponentially to finance the endless wars the nobles will engage in.

Wars you’ll only hear about in rumors and vague headlines. The media has already ‘conditioned’ us not to expect any detailed war coverage, it damages the government’s ‘public image’!

Which begs the question ‘is it still torture if nobody reports it?’

I keep introducing these, er, ‘fantastic outcomes’ but a mere thirty years ago nobody would have even suggested much less believed that the ballot box could be broken.

Now voter apathy has reached it’s final stage, the fix has become so obvious that there’s no point in continuing the charade…you already know the worst possible candidate is going to win.

(Disclosure: I have not and will NEVER run for public office…I will however, compete when/if the time comes. More disclosure: no one is more qualified to administer ASP than its creator.)

And on that note I’d like to propose something akin to OWS, let's use our ‘ballots’ to tell them how we really feel about being consistently deprived of choices.

It’s been proposed before but until now, a majority of ‘the voting public’ believed they really were performing their ‘civic duty’.

The time has come to, er, ‘send a message’ to the people that have hijacked our government.

It’s time to vote FOR a NEW DEAL!

And that’s precisely what you need to ‘write in’ on your ballot.

(We still use paper ballots out here in the hinterlands, they HAVE TO provide you with a way to ‘write in’ your own choice, that’s what ‘voting’ is all about!)

Naturally, this requires a degree of intestinal fortitude. You have to insist on your right to vote for what you want even if it is not on the ballot!

I want a new deal and I’m pretty sure most of you do too.

If there’s nothing else on the ballot, maybe they’ll take notice.

Which is to admonish you that marking your ballot ‘new deal’ may be used by the political manipulators to ‘invalidate’ your vote [think 'hanging chads' used to invalidate thousands of votes for Al Gore in FL]. If you want to vote for one of the ‘sellouts’ then don’t ‘deface’ your ballot.

I’d also advise against looking in the mirror for a few days too…just saying, ya know?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, November 27, 2011

A Fire Bell in the Night...

Greetings good citizen,

After yesterday’s, er, ‘delays’ I will endeavor to be more timely with today’s post.

I’d like to begin today’s offering by being abundantly clear that there is NO VERSION, however benign, (which is, naturally, an oxymoron) of capitalism that is capable of repairing our badly broken social model.

As I have stated before (repeatedly), the ‘unemployment problem’ is a mechanical one that can be fixed, partly by adjusting the workweek and partly by restructuring the payroll process.

In fact the biggest ‘fix’ to overall ‘social inequity’ lies in the Human Anti-exploitation Law.

How many of you believe we successfully ended slavery in 1863, here in the US?

You would be dead wrong.

Outlawing the ‘bill of sale’ merely made ‘Massa’ no longer responsible for the welfare of the, er, ‘named property.’

It is now up to the property to maintain itself…and if he/she is incapable of doing that on what Massa pays that is NOT Massa’s problem, it is and remains to this day the PROPERTY’S PROBLEM!

Some of you will object to the ‘broad brush’ being used here and you’d be correct, not ALL employers are penny-pinching skinflints. I’ll even take that one step further and ‘opine’ that most employers would relish the idea of being able to brag about how well they treat their people…but Wall Street won’t let them!

Most of you are unaware of this, er, ‘historic event’ but nearly thirty years ago there was a Supreme Court decision handed down on that controversial subject of ‘the purpose of commerce’.

Worse, most of you remain ignorant of what the Supreme Court decided.

Ironically, this goes back to the days (presidency) of Ronnie Reagan and a supposedly ‘liberal leaning’ Supreme Court…although I believe Ronnie had just succeeded in putting an end to that liberal bias due to the death of a noted liberal jurist that King Ronnie got to replace.

But enough suspense…in fact you SHOULD KNOW this.

For reasons unknown the issue of the ‘purpose of commerce’ had again been dragged before the Supreme Court…and this time the court found for the plaintiff!

By declaring unequivocally that the ‘sole responsibility’ of a corporation was to earn ‘profits for the shareowners’.

So a CEO who, er, ‘lavished’ pay and benefits upon their employees could be SUED (by, er, ‘activist shareowners’) for fiscal irresponsibility!

Keep that in mind as we delve into the subtext of this article that was written by a man smart enough to know better but apparently not interested enough in finding a solution to care…

We begin with the first paragraph of ‘tripe’:

The American Jobs Act proposed by President Obama in September includes subsidies in the form of re-employment services, wage insurance, work-sharing benefits and self-employment assistance. Stephen A. Wandner of the Urban Institute and the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research testified before the Senate Finance Committee this month and offered a number of other ideas that have been successful on an experimental basis. Among them are comprehensive job search assistance and re-employment bonuses.

IF the above named programs comprise the ’central platform’ of the Obama jobs program then I, for one, am pleased that they have been blocked!

‘Re-employment services’ do not and CAN NOT ‘create’ jobs that don’t exist…so what are these services being ‘paid’ to do? They are being paid to fit square pegs into round holes.

How will they accomplish this ‘temporary at best’ measure? With ‘Wage Insurance, of course! Naturally nobody is asking what happens when the ‘wage insurance’ fund runs dry. If the worker would have starved to death on the wages the job paid before wage insurance, how is he/she supposed to survive on it once ‘wage insurance’ is no longer available?

Next on the list is an aspect of one of my own proposed solutions…but with a key ingredient missing!

Work Sharing is the only way the unemployment crisis will be solved…but I may be speaking too soon as there are plans in the works to significantly reduce the, er, ‘surplus population’ (via famine.)

It is an ancient curse but effective…and it plays directly to the huge inequity that currently exists…and YOU thought it was all ‘accidental’!

But I digress, back to ‘work-sharing’.

You can, er, ‘subsidize’ workers who ‘share’ a job…the job may pay ‘good money’ but no so good that you could live on half a week’s pay…and therein is the main difference between my proposal and the idea of, er, ‘subsidizing’ people who will ultimately be forced to ‘share’ work.

Work sharing doesn’t float if there isn’t a proportionate reduction in the expense picture!

If you intend to ‘halve’ someone’s pay you had best halve their expenses as well!

Mr. Schiller continues:

The stakes are very high here, and they are not just economic. As anger rises in today’s economy, I’m reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s words about the danger of “angry passions” arising between the North and South over the question of extending slavery to the Missouri territory. In an 1820 letter, he wrote that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” He went on to predict, from his observations of such rancor, the secession of the South that was to come 40 years later.

Our country is a much more stable and just society now than it was in 1820. Still, we should regard the current economic dispute as another fire bell in the night. It is important to recreate the sense of a just society, without anger — and an important step in that direction is to ensure that there are enough jobs.

What proof does Mr. Schiller offer that this nation is either ‘more just or more stable’? Just his own opinion, which he is perfectly entitled to.

But I quibble, let us move on.

How many of you have already discerned the reason I chose these two particular paragraphs to close with?

Pretty bright crowd around here! Most of you got it.

Naturally, the ‘tie-in’ comes from my earlier query regarding the ‘alleged abolition’ of slavery.

Just because nobody has a bill of sale with your name on it is insufficient proof that you aren’t a slave.

How fortuitous is it that we currently have the potential to end once and for all vast social inequity (a certain degree is unavoidable but those differences should always be restricted to qualitative rather than quantitative ones.)

The human anti-exploitation law facilitates work sharing by greatly reducing the worker’s expense picture, thereby guaranteeing them a ‘living wage’.

Simply put, the anti-exploitation law prohibits anyone from making their living off of someone else’s labor.

Free a last good citizen! No more landlords, no more utility bills, hell, if it’s a service, it’s free to you (just like it used to be free to the owner!)

And prices will finally ‘stabilize’ because commerce IS NOT AND NEVER SHOULD BE a ‘for profit’ venture.

See good citizen, there IS a sustainable/workable social model available…and we still get to ram it up the 1%’s ass too!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where are the reporters?

Greetings good citizen,

The “abuse’ of police powers is neither new or unique to the US. Left to our imagination is the ‘bad apple’ factor that gets rolled out every time cops, obviously ‘under orders’ from an overzealous superior, find themselves under the magnifying glass for doing what they were told to do.

Not that any of us has a hard time with the idea of a ‘frustrated’ officer ‘losing it’ under decidedly ‘tense’ circumstances…shit, does indeed, ‘happen’.

Conversely, there exists more than a few people who should never have been given a badge to hide behind and these sort of situations brings out the worst of their ‘zero tolerance’ mindsets/personalities.

Is anyone surprised to see this headline?
Police and the Press
The N.Y.P.D.'s guidelines prohibit interfering with news-gathering activity. The department seems to have forgotten that during Occupy Wall Street protests.

Here’s a little puzzle for you. It is not uncommon to read about some ‘cub’ reporter running afoul of police, er, ‘overzealousness’…but you NEVER see a seasoned reporter getting their heads caved in…and you have to wonder ‘why’?

One would suspect it is their seniority itself that ‘protects’ them from such dangerous assignments…yet they’re all ‘front and center’ whenever a ‘natural disaster’ strikes.

You’d think the ‘easily recognizable’ face of a major network news anchor would be all the protection one of these personalities would need but for some bizarre reason you never see one reporting from the front lines of a protest.

Maybe these ‘big name’ reporters don’t want these assignments.

Ironically it appears that no members of the corporate owned media are synonymous with the OWS movement.

They all dutifully ‘report’ (copy that is gathered and written by others) but none of them have actively ‘covered’ the two month old event.

Not to kick the shins of those who DO report from the frontlines, they are providing a valuable service…but why isn’t the corporate owned media, er, ‘interested’?

Which, naturally, begs another question…

Do these ‘big name’ reporters ‘know better’?

It would seem the obvious reason we never hear of a big name reporter getting their asses kicked by some OOC (Out Of Control) cop is because senior reporters already KNOW they’ll never get a word of their story past the damn editor!

No irony should be lost a the fact that has apparently ‘slipped out’ of the OWS movement…and that is the fact that they (OWS) are neither Republican or Democrat, something the ‘progressives’ aren’t particularly happy about…

In fact, it is a subject that is almost universally ignored!

We can only hope that people are finally getting sick and tired of these artificial divisions being used to screw the rest of us out of our livelihoods.

The thing that’s worrisome is the ‘One Percent’s’ henchmen, the people that comprise the upper two to twenty percent, have next to nothing ‘in common’ with the bottom 80 percent.

Why do you think we always find ourselves in that vicious circle of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss?’

Understand good citizen, the 1% COULD NOT pull off the bullshit they routinely pull on the rest of us without the assistance of the (guilty as sin) top 20%!

So it’s more than a little disturbing to see the people with the most blood on their hands feigning innocence, pretending they are tools, victims like the rest of us.

Which begs the question, ‘is all management, er, untrustworthy?’

And the answer is a squeaky little ‘no’…but 99% of them ARE! Some bosses are fair minded individuals who stand up for their people and don’t tolerate the bullshit most employers regularly pull to ‘save their bottom line’.

You KNOW who the ‘good bosses’ are, just as you KNOW which ones should be frog marched down to the gallows right alongside the shiftless owners.

Don’t get the wrong idea, managers aren’t the only culprits that zealously protect the ‘status quo’, right behind the Bad Boss are the typical suck up wannabes.

These are the ‘tattle-tales’ who run and tell the (bad) boss of every little suspected infraction of company policy they witness.

Some of these people merely drank too much Kool-Aid while others are janother manifestation of what is wrong with our civilization.

Change the rules and you can/will alter the outcome.

And I think most of us would agree it’s high time we made some much needed changes, across the board.

That is perhaps another ‘realization’ that has entered the public consciousness.

Saving ourselves is no longer enough. If we fail to stomp out this pervasive corruption around the globe our species is doomed to be destroyed by our own kind…and that’s just not right.

Well good citizen, I have once again opened up a seemingly ‘unsolvable’ can of worms.

But it CAN be dealt with…we merely need a industrial strength dose of that quality the founders put so much faith in before they sabotaged themselves irreparably…

We need to trust people both ‘good and true’. Then we need to hand them the tools they need to protect the rest of us from the predators among us…

A tall order but eliminating a physical medium of exchange goes a long way towards realizing that goal…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, November 25, 2011

Public consumption

Greetings good citizen,

It seems I’m close to using up my allotment of ‘free’ articles I can view on the NY Times so I’ll have to comment without providing links to the whole article in question…

You SHOULD be able to find the story yourself if you’re that interested but I seldom use a news item itself as my whole argument.

I can, however, copy the article ‘headers’ without taking a hit to number of ‘free’ articles I can peruse…

Like so:
With Economy Slowing, Indian Rupee Falls
By VIKAS BAJAJ 45 minutes ago
The rupee, which has fallen nearly 14 percent against the dollar since August, rose only slightly after the Cabinet voted Thursday to allow foreign retailers to invest in stores in the country.

DO you NEED to read the rest of the article?

The ‘teaser’ we see here raises several excellent question that I am willing to bet the article itself leaves to the reader’s imagination…which is why I seldom do more than ‘excerpt’ a given news item.

Accept it as a given that you will (almost) never get useful information out of a media that is paid to protect our underhanded commerce system and those who run it.

Often the real story lies not what you’re being told but what the article itself intimates!

The world’s second largest population group is seeing it’s market share drop most due to the mismanagement/short-sightedness of Western Capitalists…(but you can bet the article WILL NOT pursue that line of questioning.)

Do you see another potential line of inquiry raised by the way the headline is phrased?

Why did giving Western capitalists access to the world’s second largest retail market ‘help’ the rupee (at least temporarily)?

Understand, the ‘average’ Indian is the poster child for overworked and underpaid!

India may have almost billion people but the vast majority of them are BROKE!

Add them to the rest of the ‘tapped out’ global civilian population and ask yourself if somebody (really short-sighted) has something (really stupid) up his/her sleeve?

I think so…but you already know I’m a few fries shy of a Happy Meal!

Or am I?

Time will tell good citizen and we may not have to wait to long for the answer.

Our second, er, ‘headline’ for today tells us something that when you think about it, doesn’t quite make sense:

Off the Charts
For Companies, the Good Old Days are Now
By FLOYD NORRIS 38 minutes ago
Workers’ wages continue dropping, but corporate profits soared to a record high in the third quarter.

It is generally acknowledged that we live in a world that has become defined by ‘creative accounting’ that has no basis in reality.

But let’s look at what this article ‘suggests’.

Workers wages are ‘falling’…well, you know employers have their people ‘by the short-hairs’ but I have yet to hear about anyone being asked to accept a pay cut, so that’s probably not what Floyd is talking about.

Is he talking about the falling payroll, again from an ‘accountants’ point of view?

If employers are, er, ‘trimming’ their payrolls while they are simultaneously ‘passing along’ the rising cost of inputs to the consumer, are they selling less but making more?

There is something to be mindful of here and that is the need to ‘offset’ the existence of the growing global economic desert.

Remember, ‘globalization’ continues to be sold as a ‘net positive’ and our very false economic reporting proves the ‘good’ globalization has provided (for a very select group of individuals.)

So, are these ‘the good old days’? If they are then what does this tell us about the not too distant future?

I have one more ‘kick in the shins’ to hand out but I will (as I have in the past) defend the messenger:

We Are the 99.9%
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The 99 percent slogan is great, but it actually aims too low. A big chunk of the top 1 percent's gains have gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent.

He’s 100% correct as far as a how things have shaken out perspective but he is letting too many, er, ‘facilitators’ off the hook by raising the bar that high.

And you can’t blame him, he easily finds himself in the top ten percent (if not higher with his 'one time' Nobel Prize.)

So lowering the bar to the top 20% as I do puts the spotlight a little too close for comfort not just for Mr. Krugman but for the families of many of the OWS kids!

Let us not forget just WHO these kids are, they’re the kids whose parents can afford to send them to Ivy League schools. Many of the protesters are recent grads that got screwed by the effects of the latest developments in globalization.

While these kids claim to speak for the 99%, they actually are the children of the top 20 percent.

Beyond the scion of the top twenty percent the number of kids able to afford higher education drops precipitously.

But these aren’t figures that are available for public consumption.

You have to have drunk deeply of the patriotic Kool-Aid to believe the children of the bottom 20 percent are struggling college graduates…

Remember, our ‘betters’ still ‘can’t conceive’ of a society without slavery.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Thankful...ly

Greetings good citizen,

Does the list of things you’re thankful for read like a list of (narrowly averted) disasters rather than a bounty of blessings?

Truth be told good citizen , the 99 (actually 80 percent) doesn’t have much to be ‘thankful’ for (Which really steams the self-professed ‘job creators’, big-time!)

Being thankful that we weren’t beat up worse than we have been is sort of, er, counterproductive…

What does it say when the idea of fighting back sounds like something that you’d like to be thankful for?

Well, you know what they say, ‘shit in one hand and wish in the other, see which one fills up first!’

Which is to point out that you should be doing more than merely ‘wishing’ you could stand up for yourself.

Maybe NEXT Thanksgiving…

On this Thanksgiving day we’re going to kick off with a ’double shot’ of Shadow Stats

No. 402: GDP Revision, October Durable Goods and Existing Home Sales
November 23rd, 2011

Headline Gross Domestic Income (GDP Equivalent) Growth Collapsed with Suggestion of 0.8% Contraction for Third-Quarter

Slowing Annual Growth in Durable Goods Orders

Existing Home Sales Bottom-Bounce Once Again, U.S. Government Signals Lack of Fiscal Concerns

No. 401: Underlying Economic Reality, October Housing Starts November 17th, 2011

Housing Starts Continued Three-Year Pattern of Bottom-Bouncing

Economic Recovery Never Happened

Hyped Gains Were Based on Gimmicked Inflation Adjustments

Current Downturn Already Exceeds Duration of Great Depression’s First Down-Leg

Um, there isn’t really much I can elaborate on here. Mr. Williams (once again) pretty much nails it.

Nailed what, you might ask?

That the facts have been distorted to fit the desired outcome.

Which is something to ponder while you’re sitting there contemplating whether or not it’s a bad thing that you can’t think of anything to be genuinely thankful for (or, more succinctly, anyone to be grateful to, a common conundrum experienced by fellow atheists.)

Perhaps, while your pondering the imponderable you can puzzle for a while about how this whole lack of gratitude thing plays right into the hands of the disgustingly ungrateful few!

Yes, they never miss an opportunity to accuse the rest of us of being ‘ungrateful’, the only thing more puzzling is why we should show gratitude for what basically amounts to fucking ourselves?

Be happy you’ve got a job, millions of people would kill to be as ‘lucky’ as you are!

Which promptly causes you to wonder if you missed the day when the teacher explained that ‘lucky’ is a synonym for ‘stupid’ because nobody would feel lucky to have a job working for an asshole like him!

How ironic is it that your ‘reward’ for not screwing up is the opportunity to come back the next day for another bite of the everlasting shit sandwich?

Seriously good citizen, we have little to be (genuinely) thankful for…worse, it’s only a paid day off for some of us…the rest (and I’d say for a majority) it’s just another bite of the incredible everlasting shit sandwich.

Which is to point out, things won’t get better until we make it happen!

Happy Thanksgiving (to my US readers) and a Happy November 24 to the rest!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

[Time to eat the turkey!]

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

More conservative rhetoric

Greetings good citizen,

Markets in Asia and Europe are both bleeding from the eye sockets this morning…US markets opened 15 minutes ago and they’re already down 125 points, good thing the first 12,000 points don’t count, eh?

(I naturally, jest… the markets are plunging towards the 11,000 mark as I watch. But for the average citizen this is a meaningless event…unless it is used as an excuse for our lawmakers to pass something stupid.

And speaking of stupid, we have this offering Millions Caught by the Social Safety Net By CASEY B. MULLIGAN

from the house that J.D. Rockefeller built. Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Another interpretation is that the safety net has taken away incentives and serves as a penalty for earning incomes above the poverty line. For every seven persons who let their market income fall below the poverty line, only one of them will have to bear the consequence of a poverty living standard. The other six will have a living standard above poverty.

The safety net was not as effective before the recession began. As I explained in my last two posts, government assistance programs have not only supported more people but become more generous, thanks to changes in benefit rules since 2007.

Of course, most people work hard despite a generous safety net, and 140 million people are still working today. But in a labor force as big as ours, it takes only a small fraction of people who react to a generous safety net by working less to create millions of unemployed. I suspect that employment cannot return to pre-recession levels until safety-net generosity does, too.

Let’s take a look at that last paragraph a little more closely.

What do you suppose Chumly here has ‘glossed over’? Does he mention that the total working aged population is over 211 million?

Does he mention that 40 percent of his 140 million strong workforce only works part- time?

Does he mention that the ONLY new jobs being created here in the US alternate between senior genetic engineer and minimum wage toilet custodian?

No…

Notice the ‘sly’ way he slips his condemnation of benefit increases in at the end?

“Things won’t get ‘better’ until these increased benefits return to their prior levels”

Skippy must be smoking some bad ass shit man…and he ain’t sharing!

How pissed does it make you knowing this idiot makes his living TEACHING economics?

Here’s an asshole who wakes up every day believing two impossible things, one that society CANNOT exist without slavery and two, there really is such a thing as a ‘surplus population’.

WTF good citizen?

I’ll tell you what good citizen, it pisses me off that somebody actually pays this idiot to teach the lies he’s been taught…but there’s a lot of that going on.

If you were to be angry about EVERY injustice your soul would never find rest…or joy or happiness.

Besides, ‘stupidity’ is ‘incurable’.

And, sadly, there are no limits to depravity driven by greed that is fueled by entitlement.

And make no mistake about it good citizen, those who scream the loudest about the basic dignity provided by social insurance feel completely entitled to the trust funds they did absolutely nothing to deserve.

Worse, these are the same assholes who claim they made their own way in this world!

Like stupidity, it is senseless to get worked up over things that can’t currently be dealt with.

Which is not to say the situation is ‘uncorrectable’, it can be…just not as matters currently stand.

In this respect I can’t help but find relief in the knowledge that the old guard’s days are short in number…another year, tops.

But there will be sacrifices. For a long time there will be no Internet…and that will drive some of the, er, weaker minded ‘around the bend’ (although there is some speculation that it would be a fairly short trip…just saying, ya know?)

Naturally, no internet will be the least of your problems. Unemployment will also instantly evaporate as the struggle to survive trumps the existing wage slavery.

Got nothing to do, Mother Nature will fix that problem pronto!

People don’t appreciate the ‘true value’ of money…especially fucktarded ‘economists’.

Money ‘frees’ you from having to do EVERYTHING yourself!

THAT is ‘economics 101’ good citizen.

And until money is relegated to its ‘one useful purpose’ NOTHING will work as it should.

How do we restore ‘sanity’ to a world gone mad?

Remove the 1% (and their ‘minions’ which means the other 19%) from power.

Ironically, only the 1% (and their minions) believes that the world would come to a screeching halt without them, the rest of us knows better. The only time things go ‘smoothly’ is when the 1% are out of the picture!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

How much is too much?

Greetings good citizen,

Alternet provided an interesting story this morning about Wall Street’s other (maybe only) useful purpose, that of political ‘whip’ used to beat its bought and paid for politicians with.

Which is, as you might suspect, something of a contradiction. It only makes sense when taken in the context of providing ‘cover’ for those politicians, who can use the market’s performance in defense of the indefensible…

Otherwise the only thing the NYSE tells us is how rich the already wealthy are making themselves.

Which, bizarrely, leads to this sort of behavior:

When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money.

In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond.

The moves, announced on the same day, might seem at odds with each other, but they represent an increasingly common pattern among American corporations, which are sitting on record amounts of cash but insist that growth opportunities are hard to find.

There are not one but two interesting stories here.

The first is in the already mentioned ‘usefulness’ of the stock markets as an instrument of blackmail and the second is the rather fuzzy notion that there’s no way to ‘expand’ the economy (profitably.)

If we remove the ‘puts a buck in my pocket’ qualifier, there is suddenly a whole galaxy of things that need doing, isn’t there?

Yet fucktarded ‘for (personal) profit’ enterprise dictates you can’t do anything that doesn’t put a buck in your pocket…and the more that goes in your pocket, the better…for you…‘the job creator.’

Believe me good citizen, there is NO SHORTAGE of things that ‘need doing’.

But 'for profit' enterprises ROUTINELY dismiss productive workers (usually replaced [later] with less costly workers elsewhere) during the cost reduction phase of production enhancement operations.

What the 1% likes to pretend is that this ’cost reducing’ ISN’T constant.

It is both constant and unrelenting and soon to stop dead in its tracks…because almost ALL cost savings are ‘energy intensive’.

Humans replaced by machines require energy…oftentimes more energy than their human counterpart required. (The payback was strictly in terms of salary, not energy savings.)

Understand, ‘cutting’ the labor force and using the ‘savings’ to buy back shares is tied directly to executive compensation plans which are often tied directly to share prices.

No irony should be lost on the fact that SOME CEO’s spent MORE THAN the company earned buying back their own stock because of this seriously misguided incentive.

So why do personnel departments around the world regularly commit genocide so a few can be rich?

Just the way the dirty rotten game is played I suppose.

I mean, throwing someone out on the streets these day’s is akin to sentencing them (and their families) to death, so vast has the economic wasteland become!

But no, all is well in 1% land! (and as I have stated before, this gives the other 19% a free pass they don’t deserve!)

More damning is how the 1% possess 40% of ALL the wealth out there AND NOT ONE OF THEM DESERVES IT!

WHY do these people (foolishly) pay themselves more than they can spend?

The sad answer is solely SO YOU WON’T GET IT! FORCING you to comply with onerous working conditions while increasing THEIR wealth!

In this respect the 1% are ‘DERANGED’ and need to be, er, ‘removed’ from positions of economic responsibility.

Seriously good citizen, the flaw lies in an education system that teaches ignorance.

One can’t help but see it in the advertisements of ‘for profit’ education!

How misguided are the incentives in our civilization?
Sadly, they are deeply skewed…and Wall Street is the poster child for these disturbing excesses.

How did we get here? Mis-information, disseminated by a for profit education system.

You see, good citizen, most of you forget that most institutions of ‘higher education’ are ‘for profit’ institutions, which ‘taints’ their point of view…as exemplified by the current Penn State controversy.

Monstrous child abuse ‘covered-up’ to protect the all important ‘reputation’ of the school.

Is this the kind of world YOU want to live in good citizen?

Just something else to think about as the ‘Season of Peace’ begins…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, November 21, 2011

Finger Pointing...

Greetings good citizen,

Everywhere you look there are reports of violence being committed BY POLICE against the OWS protesters.

Sadly if not for bad news it appears the media has already ‘tired’ of reporting the activities of OWS.

Will the coming bad economic news suck OWS back onto center stage?

Hard to say. The corporate owned media is opportunistic if nothing else.

Anyway, one hour after the open and the Dow is down more than 200 points, but considering the first 12,000 are all ‘fluff/eyewash’, being down 200 is an insignificant drop in the bucket.

Naturally, the corporate owned media is blaming government gridlock for the massive losses.

Barring an unexpected turnaround before Monday’s deadline, the failure of the special Congressional deficit committee will be the third high-profile effort to fall short of a deal in the last 12 months, including a bipartisan deficit commission and talks last summer between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner.

By law, the special Congressional committee’s inability to reach an agreement will trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to the military and domestic programs, to start in 2013.

As time wound down to a Monday night deadline for an agreement, Capitol Hill lacked the frenzied negotiation typical of a Congressional race to beat the clock. Instead, many members — well aware that Congressional approval ratings are near historic lows in polls — seemed resigned to the fact that Democrats and Republicans remained far apart on major budget issues, especially tax increases on the affluent, which Democrats insist must be part of any deficit solution and which Republicans oppose.

There are all kinds of corporate welfare and military cuts that could be made to our budget but the republican’s oppose that, favoring cuts to social programs instead.

Then a lot of this pain is avoidable simply by raising taxes on those who have more than they can spend…but the party of ‘NO’ will have no part of that (and the Democrats in name only refuse to fight for it, so where does that leave you?)

Who is this 99% and why are they so ineffective?

Could the answer be as simple as ’faux democracy’?

So terrifying was the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that the system has been rendered useless by the favored few?

But nobody questions this…once they’re old enough to be on their own that is.

If nothing else the one rule you can’t escape is ‘go along to get along.’

They can’t make you do it, they can only make you wish the fuck you had!

Why can’t you use the ballot box to make a better life?

You might take it into your head to vote a better life for yourself…hell, you might even vote for anti-usury legislation and then where would capitalists be?

Guess which nation is the only (advanced economy) on the planet that DOES NOT have anti-usury legislation?

We USED to have laws against usury but Bush Jr. did away with them.

Which ONCE AGAIN calls into question the essential SANITY of anyone who ADMITS they vote or are a member of the Republican Party.

Not that there’s a nickel’s worth of difference between a Republican and a sell-out Democrat (regardless of how ‘progressive’ they paint themselves.)

I’d jump on my favorite hobby horse and call them all out as Libertarians but you already know that.

But I seriously digress…

It’s disturbing how the lack of political control can spill over into so many other areas!

We’re twelve months away from the next presidential election cycle and there’s still nobody to vote ‘for’…which is actually typical.

Most of the time your vote is cast between the lesser of two evils; so you inevitably pick the wrong one.

Returning to the issue at hand we have the OWS/ I am the 99% ‘movement’ and they’ve got…‘nothing’…which leaves us where?

Right where we started. Nothing to do, no place to go and no way to get there if we did.

So we should all just sit on our thumbs, right?

[Which is the, er, polite way of telling you to go fuck yourself! Which is precisely what those who have hijacked our political system have done, especially if you don‘t like it!]

Which is to ask, is there any excuse for the political/economic gridlock gripping the world today?

Short answer, no.

What really sucks is that change is so tantalizingly close but, once again, we’ve come up short in the intestinal fortitude department!

BE the change good citizen!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Global Rumblings

Greetings good citizen,

Left to our imaginations is what the actual difference between the reported ‘Arab Spring’ (which the West erroneously reported as a ‘cry for democracy’) and the, er, counterproductive ‘replacement’ of a dictator with another type of fascist rule.

Predictably the people of Egypt are back in the streets and once again the West is pointing to this as a repeated ‘cry for democracy’.

State media reported that more than 650 people had been injured, including 40 riot police officers, and at least one civilian was killed.

Coming a day after a huge Islamist demonstration and just more than a week before the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, the outpouring of anger was the strongest rebuke yet with the military’s attempts to grant itself permanent governmental powers. And it was a reuniting of Islamist and liberal protest movements that had drifted apart since the early days of the uprising.

This time, instead of chanting for the fall of Mr. Mubarak, the demonstrators were chanting for the fall of the ruling military council that initially presented itself as the revolution’s savior.

Are these people just ‘malcontents’ who will keep complaining until their demands for free ice cream and million dollar, no show jobs are met?

Because, eventually, that’s how the media will start to portray them.

Because the global corporate owned media can’t deliver what the protesters want.

My readers remember what was behind the, er, ‘original’ Arab Spring, right?

Of course they do! It was about ‘economic opportunity/justice’…and under a dictator the so-called government has a lot to do with how the local economy operates.

(So how unfortunate is it that most tin pot despots are also economic know nothings?)

Naturally, the military doesn’t ‘specialize’ in economics either so having the military take over did little to improve the crumbling global situation.

And THAT’S the stone that can legitimately be thrown at the Egyptian protestors, this early failure to recognize that the problem wasn’t a ‘uniquely Arab’ one.

But, as they like to say, that was then and this is now.

One suspects their ‘main issue’ is the gross mismanagement of their economy and by extension, their society.

This time (at least as far as the media is concerned) there are no economy related complaints/demands. The protests seem centered on the heavy handed tactics of the military regime.

A government that ‘crushes’ dissent (like our government is responding to OWS) is worse than incompetent, its criminal!

But this leaves no ‘simple solution’ to the Egyptian’s problems…especially when they are ruled by a military ‘puppet government’ that criminals here in the West are pulling the strings on.

It should also be apparent to any rational reader that I am refraining from pointing exclusively at any individual Western government because they are all ‘in on the scam’ (which is why all of Western civilization is crumbling!)

How sad is it for our species that we are all effectively living under the influence (if not the rule) of Western civilization?

Nominally ‘Communist’ China is a perfect example, it’s people are communists but their leaders are capitalists, worse, they’re ‘Chicago School capitalists’ who believe in privatized gains and socialized losses!

(Yet the Media continues to have the chutzpah to ‘wonder out loud’ about why our economy is rotting from the top down…)

That line from the old Barry Mc Guire song keeps running through my head, ‘When that button is pushed there’s no running away.’ (Eve of Destruction, for those of you too young to remember.)

Which holds equally true if/when the bottom falls out.

Once the last thread snaps, there is no where to turn, you’ll be on your own…which, ironically, is exactly how they want it…until they actually get it.

THEN it will be a bad idea!

I’m ‘snowballing’ a little here but I was reading the local rag last night and in the opinion section was a weekly piece put out by an, er, ‘locally famous’ female ‘tax crusader’…who also happens to share Gegner’s rather common (real) surname…

Anyway, what was ditzy bitching about just before Thanksgiving?

She was cranking out that now ancient conservative backstop of how Grover Norquist is a fucking comedian!

Ergo, liberals don’t know how to take a joke!

Grover was ‘making a funny’ when he claimed he wanted to shrink government until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub!

Perhaps ditzy didn’t listen to the actual speech because the second place winner of the ‘funny Republican’ contest sure sounds mighty angry for a guy who was supposedly telling a joke…

Maybe he just needs to work on his ‘delivery’.

Which leads us to another ‘ironic’ situation, most people think Republicans are ‘funny’… just not ‘ha-ha’ funny.

Funny like weird is closer to the mark.

But hey, what am I gonna say?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, November 19, 2011

To Whom?

Greetings good citizen,

With the understanding that the current NYSE is, er, ‘off’ by12,000 points, the markets dropped nearly 400 points on the eminent failure of the Euro-zone.

Which begs a rather obvious question, precisely WHO is ‘idiot enough’ to buy European bonds in the first place?

Financial institutions are dumping their vast holdings of European government debt and spurning new bond issues by countries like Spain and Italy. And many have decided not to renew short-term loans to European banks, which are needed to finance day-to-day operations.

If this trend continues, it risks creating a vicious cycle of rising borrowing costs, deeper spending cuts and slowing growth, which is hard to get out of, especially as some European banks are having trouble meeting their financing needs.

“It’s a pretty terrible spiral,” said Peter R. Fisher, vice chairman of the asset manager BlackRock and a former senior Treasury official in the Clinton administration.

Same thing with stocks good citizen. There is absolutely ZERO chance of any capitalist corporation remaining profitable so who is STUPID enough to buy stocks?

Just another ‘reality check’ here good citizen but WHO (in their right mind) is going to ‘buy’ your house from you for MORE than YOU paid for it?

Sadly, the only positive outcome here will be your children, IF they can swing the onerous financing (and chances are good they won’t.)

(And if you’re any kind of caring parent you won’t let them!)

In case you don’t comprehend my question, it can be phrased more clearly as asking who, (besides banks that owe their charters to the country they were established in) would buy government ‘funny money’?

There is a common ‘misconception’ that countries CAN’T go bankrupt…which you know is a bunch of crap!

Ironically, the name of the game becomes the rebuff made by the fool that goes, ‘I can’t be broke, I still have checks!’

Or that’s the ‘theory’ anyway…

Worse good citizen, this whole ‘confidence game’ has been going on since the beginning (of money itself.)

And until you get sick of having the best things in life being perpetually priced out of your reach it won’t change and it won’t stop.

The misery that surrounds you each and every day is the direct result of the ‘mismanagement’ cause by the, er, ‘misuse’ of the world’s resources.

‘Money is the MOST misused substance in our civilization, it is even more misused than ‘love’ (and that‘s saying something.)

How sad is it good citizen that we could, until just recently, turn a blind eye to this abuse?

But with the ground ‘rushing up to meet us’, we can no longer ignore the ‘excesses’ of those who use their control over the money supply to manipulate events.

Ironically, after ripping the rest of us off for thousands of years, NOW they’re trying to kill us!

Lest we find ourselves in that terrible situation of ‘when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail’…

Well, their only tool is money and they certainly know how to use it to kill.

Like many ‘one trick ponies’ they probably don’t know how to turn the situation around much less set it back on the ‘right’ path.

This is the danger I keep warning of, they KNOW their way of doing things ‘breaks down’ once the ‘customer pool’ gets too large.

The thing that has them desperate is the thing they can do nothing about.

Once energy is no longer cheap or abundant our ENTIRE social model breaks down IRREVOCABLY!

Beyond the occasional anecdote in the corporate owned media, you’d think ‘Peak Oil’ was decades away rather than a point that is ALREADY BEHIND US!

I have described, in gruesome detail, how our civilization will collapse.

We CAN save our species but only by finally removing the self-interested from their cozy perches.

This is where your typical conservative invokes the ‘jealousy’ card but stops short of flat out denial.

Because they know the charge is true.

Worse, it appears the top 20% MAY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ‘in on the ruse’ perpetrated on the other 80%…

Well, the really ironic part of all of this is having only 20% of the population ‘on your side’ isn’t enough.

And somehow I don’t think the 80% are in a particularly forgiving mood right about now.

Yeah, we all know the 99% figure OWS settled on was letting the other 19% off easy, at least 20 percent of the population consists of conceited suck-ups. People who KNOW they are ‘more deserving’ than the rest of us…

And won’t they howl when we give ‘em what they deserve!

The lies are getting gargantuan good citizen, look to your conscience and govern yourself accordingly.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, November 18, 2011

Markets are up (but we don't know why?)

Greetings good citizen,

I suspect Wall Street already knows it has no credibility left which explains why stock markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets UNTIL the sun rises over Manhattan, then, inexplicably, they rise into positive territory once more.

The sad news, good citizen is this is not ‘American Exceptionalism’ on display, most citizens know the incredible rising markets have no basis in reality nor is it related to America’s puckish sense of humor (because there’s nothing even remotely ‘funny’ about it.)

No good citizen what we’re seeing is criminal hubris writ large!

Stocks were mixed on Wall Street and in Europe on Friday after the new head of the European Central Bank dashed hopes that he would act to ease the euro debt crisis.

Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, told a gathering of bankers in Frankfurt that European leaders — who, with the notable exception of Germany, have been calling for the bank to use its printing press to help embattled governments — are themselves the problem, taking too long to implement crisis measures they agreed to months or even years earlier.

“Where is the implementation of these long-standing decisions?” he said. “National economic policies are equally responsible for restoring and maintaining financial stability.”

What do you suppose Mario’s talking about? Is he referring to 99 weeks of unemployment pay or is he talking about slashing the social safety net, thereby ‘freeing up’ more funds with which bankers can use to pay bonuses with?

YOUR IRA/401k isn’t worth spit but that didn’t stop the fund that manages it from paying out bonuses fit for Crosius himself…

You ask yourself if the bozo responsible for blowing most of your savings on worthless mortgage backed securities really deserves a ‘bonus’?

More perplexing is WHY those bonus dollars weren’t clawed back to make YOU whole? Why is YOUR pocket being picked to make THEM whole for THEIR mistakes?

Sort of redefines the term ‘double-fucked’, doesn’t it?

Incredibly, the world hasn’t exploded in a frenzied rage because we’ve got, er, ‘bigger problems…

Like the collapse of our civilization.

What use is it to incarcerate these criminals if we will soon be unable to financially support our prisons?

You’d almost think this outcome was part of their plan…

Should Plan ‘A’ (avoiding prosecution altogether) fail for any reason…

Which is to point out that the only way these criminals are going to ‘get what’s coming to them’ is AFTER we prosecute ALL of the assholes who turned a blind eye to this bullshit!

Ironically, they KNOW we will eventually come for them and they don’t care…they THINK their families will ESCAPE!

And they will never know how WRONG that notion really is.

Under the new order, the sins of the parents will be visited upon the children. The ‘unfair advantages’ reaped by the parents for selling out the rest of us will be extracted ten-fold from their children!

Why they think the reformed Justice system will be modeled after the failed one is, like the stock markets themselves, ‘inexplicable’.

But I (and it wouldn’t be one of my rants if it didn’t) digress…

My favorite aggregator ran a rant by Barry Ritholtz that sounded very similar to something I might have written.

Here’s a link in case you’re curious what one of the ‘serious people’ and my humble self could have ‘in common’.

More curious perhaps is how Mr. Ritholtz self identifies as both a capitalist AND a Republican, yet he routinely expresses very, er, ‘liberal’ points of view.

[Lending credence to my theory that most people ‘mis-identify’ themselves both politically as well as socially.]

By way of example, there are people living out of their cars who still identify themselves as ‘middle-class’. (Naturally, this is done out of the ‘expectation’ that they will, er, ‘eventually’ regain their former status…and some of them will, albeit by nefarious means.)

On an important and unrelated note I’d like to thank YOU, my readers for taking the time to read my often puzzling posts.

I take comfort seeing the copy of A Simple Plan on the list of ‘most read posts’. It also tells me that some of you are paying attention and have copied it so you can hold the forked tongued devil’s feet to the fire when they try to skew the plan in ways not intended.

Ironically, the plan is holistic, it will only work ‘properly’ if ALL OF IT is implemented.

Simple variations like adding a ‘tangible medium of exchange’ will fuck up the works royally!

Same thing with stock markets or insurance for that matter, none of them are permitted because they violate the Human Anti-Exploitation Law.

Er, in retrospect the foolish site traffic meter is basically useless, the numbers are all over the pace and don’t jive with one another so what I just reported may be in error…but there’s no way for me to know that…so, as always,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The return of $100 oil

Greetings good citizen,

In case you didn’t notice, Oil has passed the $100 a barrel mark again (You may have no place to go but it’s dark most of the day this time of year and unless you’re part polar bear, the furnace is calling for heat at regular intervals as well.

Stumbling around in the dark and the biting cold is not only dangerous; it’s also unhealthy…but those who profit from this situation consider this to be YOUR problem.

Front page story in the local rag yesterday: the local food bank is tap city! They’re making an emergency appeal to area residents for donations NO MATTER HOW SMALL!

But wait! What’s that up on the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? it’s an economic recovery! (so long as you don’t scrutinize the numbers too closely…)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. claims for jobless benefits hit a seven-month low last week, while permits for future home construction rebounded strongly last month, bolstering views the economy was gaining traction.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday, from 393,000 the prior week. Economists had forecast claims rising to 395,000.

Separately, permits for residential construction rose 10.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 653,000 last month, the Commerce Department said. However, new home construction fell 0.3 percent to annual rate of 628,000 units.

U.S. stock index futures edged higher on the claims data, while prices for Treasury debt fell. The dollar fell against the euro.

Um, for the non homeowners out there I feel compelled to point out that some communities make you pull a building permit if plan to do more than just repaint your residence.

You don’t need a permit to erect a new mailbox but you do need one to place/replace a tool shed!

So before you think there are a bunch of construction crews out there, consider the financial state of the US consumer and think again.

Chances are good a majority of those permits are for replacement roofs.

There’s probably a figure that tells us what ‘percentage’ of permits are for repair of existing structures and what percentage is for new construction.

Considering the housing market, I suspect most permits are for needed repairs to existing buildings.

How about the ‘other’ good news that new claims for unemployment are down?

Need I remind you that the size of the current workforce is still smaller than it was before the dot.gone bust of 2001?

You want to talk about ‘grasping at straws’?

How sad is it good citizen that even the good news seems desperate when examined ‘in context’.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The media isn’t presenting the facts ‘in context’.

Is this a problem, good citizen?

Apparently it isn’t as long as the money is good…

But we are rapidly approaching the day when the money won’t be any good at all…

And if you haven’t spent any time considering what you’d do when realize you don’t have enough in your pocket and none of your plastic is acceptable…what will be your next move, panic?

And if the guy standing between you and what you need makes two of you it is likely that you’ll decide to ‘punt’.

Which is usually the correct instinct.

He who laughs and runs away lives to fight another day…if he’s fast enough.

What should ‘concern’ you is your, er, opponent’s brain is squirming just like yours is.

He doesn’t want to kill you (today) but he KNOWS if he doesn’t do something to ward you off that you’re inclined to grab what you want and damn the consequences.

Then he’ll have to kill you (because he’s already called the cops on the last three guys who ran off with shit and they haven’t shown up yet…so he KNOWS it’s up to him!)

Worse, the asshole boss has a policy of docking the cost of whatever goes missing from the paycheck of the guy working when the loss occurs.

And if he can’t figure out on what shift the loss occurred he docks all three!

How’s that for an unwritten ‘condition of employment’?

So he’s already worried about what’s gonna happen when the boss finds out he got ripped off…you threatening to make off with whatever is only the icing on a shit cupcake for this poor bastard!

So, after you’ve turned and ran away (hopefully still mobile, you don’t want to be walking around when this happens.) [You’ve also faced your antagonist until you were out of reach, even if this meant walking backwards to your vehicle.] you’ve survived one battle, what remains to be seen is if you’ll make it home and how long you’ll survive after that?

Yup, when civilization ‘collapses’ it will quite literally drop out from under your feet. A Safety net you’ve grown accustomed to will ‘vanish’ as it is prone to doing when you find yourself out in the wild and on your own…

What’s ‘Happy talk’ gonna do for you then?

Are you curious to see what ‘big action’ OWS has planned?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Statistically skewed...

Greetings good citizen,

The next couple of days will tell us whether OWS is dead or just re-grouping.

This has the POTENTIAL to be the spark that ignites a long overdue conflagration…but I don’t get the sense that the 99% understands what’s at stake.

While we wait to see how things will play out in Peoria, er, (Zurcotti Park) we get this evidence that the gulf grows ever wider

Whether their consumers are feeling pressured or flush now, the retail executives indicated they did not expect things to change soon.

“In the U.S., we still do not see, and do not expect to see in the near term, any meaningful tailwind from the housing market,” said Frank Blake, Home Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

“I feel good about the luxury consumer,” Mr. Sadove of Saks said. [He would, wouldn’t he?]

Referring to the Wal-Mart shopper’s dependence on paychecks and government-assistance payments rather than savings, Mr. Davis said that “going forward we really would not expect anything different.”

Understand that the ‘initial report’ SAYS retail sales are ‘up’…but a fraction of a single percent could be nothing more than inflation.

Now a ‘gain’ in the upper end of the retail sector does, by no stretch of the imagination, mean the economy is recovering in ANY meaningful terms.

As an ‘indicator’ this data is totally worthless.

While it is possible to base a business on a particular class of consumer, you had better not configure your economy on the same basis if you don’t want a huge criminal class on your hands.

One of the advantages of ‘civil society’ is a reasonable degree of security and freedom from being victimized by the desperate (who generally wouldn’t exist under a ’well-managed’ social system.)

But nobody is calling the current predatory system we suffer with today ‘well-managed’.

And perhaps that’s what is ‘holding us back’, the common belief that what we’ve got is as good as it gets.

While the criminals couldn’t hope for better, the rest of us can easily imagine significant improvements across the board (without entertaining ‘la-la land’ extremes!)

Hell, A Simple Plan instantly elevates prospects for all ‘non-criminals’ considerably (at, ironically, the criminals’ expense.) It also involves absolutely NO ‘magic or magical thinking’ whatsoever!

Left to our imagination is whether or not the coordinated, multi-city ‘take-down’ of the OWS movement will be the last we hear of the desperate kids who correctly identified themselves as members of the ‘silent majority’, silent because they have had their voices stolen from them by a political system that ignores them completely (and with impunity no less!)

Which may be the least of our problems if Europe erupts into civil war…

Considering the potential outcomes, better there than here.

Because if Europe falls, the US is right behind it.

Oh, and guess what will happen once the banking system collapses? The government will be, ‘dismissed’ and a military junta established to ‘protect’ the guilty from being prosecuted.

The curious part is who will be ‘fed to the wolves’ to placate the angry public?

At the moment it looks like the cops are being served up on a silver platter…(along with the rest of the corrupt justice system.)

Is OWS really protesting Wall Street or are they protesting the Justice System’s utter failure to prosecute ‘White Collar’ criminals?

Few of us delude ourselves, we KNOW our leadership as well as our political system are corrupt beyond repair. What we don’t know is what to do about it…and even that’s a ‘cop-out’, we know what needs doing but we lack the necessary ‘unity’ to actually do it.

Until some brave people martyr themselves for the cause (25,000 died for the 40 hour work week, just as an example) the lack of positive motion will unbroken…and that’s all ‘evil’ needs to thrive.

Ironically, it is the worthless corporate owned media this is preventing people from martyring themselves. Why let yourself be murdered for a cause if no one will ever know?

That is why the initial target should be the worthless media itself.

As Alternet comments, the ‘social media’ pulled off a complete ‘black-out’ of the police action to, er, eradicate the OWS encampments.

So is the ‘status quo’ strangling the baby while it still fits in a bathtub?

Sure looks that way.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are living in a defacto ‘dictatorship of the privileged, the criminally privileged but privileged none the less.

The problem with the criminally privileged is they refuse to recognize law of any kind so they are, by default, ‘out of control’.

Worse, they are ‘in charge’ of this nation’s military-industrial complex (which is how they got away with dismantling it right under our noses!)

But it’s one thing to own something and quite another to bend that thing to your will.

Mercenaries aside, I don’t believe they have cracked the problem of ordering civilian soldiers to fire on their own people…yet.

That’s why the ‘propaganda machine’ has to go first!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Running for cover?

Greetings good citizen,

As usual, stock markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets…until you arrive at the NYSE, which, naturally, is up slightly.

The part that should baffle your ass is how a nation that imports pretty much everything manages to be the only country on the planet with a rising stock market value?

I know, like faith in ‘God’, the answer remains a mystery (which is shorthand for the question of ‘how much bullshit are you willing to swallow?’)

Anyway, our lead story for today is a ‘two-edged sword’ because it can be interpreted two ways.

At ‘face value’ it spells a shrinking economy, underneath it intimates that some rats are deserting the sinking ship…which one is it is for you to decide:

Adding to the pressure on the partnership is the fact Goldman itself is shrinking. Over the last year the firm has laid off more than 1,000 employees as part of the cost-cutting drive and its total head count at the end of September was down 1,200 from the year-ago period.

Goldman has 34,000 staff members, according to regulatory filings. But this number includes several thousand consultants and temporary workers. The firm does not release how many actual employees it has, but the number is closer to 28,000, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The committee that oversees the partnership process tries to keep the percentage of partners to employees at 1.8 percent, according to people with knowledge of the process. So as Goldman shrinks, it is likely to shrink the size of the partnership pool.

Not that I have much faith in the prevailing Mayan Calendar thing, there is a very good chance that our civilization WILL NOT SURVIVE 2012!

From where we are today it seems unlikely that we will make it to 12/21 either.

The End will arrive sooner and perhaps more violently as the guilty have proven they will risk/dare anything to escape prosecution.

Which is to point out that the nuclear strike survivability calculator is making the rounds again.

Sadly, we are ‘more likely’ to be nuked by the criminals in charge of this nation than by a foreign power that will have their hands full with their own ‘dissidents’…

And, as I am fond of doing we have this story where Ilargi agrees that the solution to our problems is as simple as facing the truth.

In fact, the problems won’t end until the truth prevails…

It's high time to come clean, to stop the incessant lying. To stop pretending things are a bit hard right now, but otherwise just fine. They're not. Extend and pretend works only so long. Then it snaps back in your face with a vengeance. That's why the bond markets are so successful in bringing down Italy and Greece. Not because the ECB doesn't step in, since that would only serve to cover up reality for a little bit longer, but because they've both lied for so long about their real predicaments.

No, just stop lying. The consequences and challenges will be formidable, but they’ll be that anyway. You can't cover up the debt and the losses forever. And the chances of growing your economies out of the cesspit are zero, if not below.

One thing no more lying will achieve is this: it will re-establish confidence in the markets -or what'll be left of them-. And isn't that what you guys always say you want to accomplish? Well, I can assure you, it's the only way to do it: cut the fairy tales. Take a breath of fresh air and get to work. Do something real and rewarding for a change, and for a living.

Instead of ‘truth’ from our so-called leaders we are getting a nationwide ‘crackdown’ on the 99% as state governments send cops in body armor after its own citizens…who are protesting ‘government inaction’.

How ‘ironic’ is that?

Confrontations like this force people to choose sides.

The criminals in government are taking a HUGE risk by forcing this situation now.

But stupid is as stupid does and we’ve got no shortage of stupid hanging around.

Still, I suspect there aren’t enough people willing to sacrifice their current level of comfort for an uncertain prospect of justice.

You’d think even a tiny victory would be enough to demonstrate what can be done but no, the current group of protestors aren’t equipped to go toe to toe with the criminal’s protectors…and that’s a shame.

Because the odds are NEVER going to get better, nor will the situation become more even.

We have NUMBERS on our side while they have ‘firepower’.

Using that firepower to protect criminals will NOT bode well for the defenseless relatives of the people responsible.

Which brings us to the same question faced by people confronted with marauding hoards face; do you have enough ammunition to kill them all?

If the answer is ‘no’ then don’t shoot, HIDE!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, November 14, 2011

Know your rights!

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace as OWS drifts quietly into anonymity and the stock market(s) gyrate meaninglessly.

I suspect there will be a ‘lull’ as the 99% celebrates the holiday season…so when they return to active duty in the New Year the media will ‘act’ surprised.

In fact, everyone will be astonished. Having dropped off radar the 99% will have ‘forgotten’ they exist…but the ‘warning shot’ has already been fired. OWS ‘stage two’ will be more about our second amendment rights than our rights under the first…

Um, once again I make use of this (basically who gives a fuck) article to (once again) demonstrate that while the world is riding the razors edge of collapse and all the useless corporate owned media feels is ‘newsworthy’ are the tales of felons ‘regaining’ their second amendment rights.

What about YOUR second amendment rights?

Which is to ask do you have any rights if you can’t defend them?

Short answer good citizen…no.

While it may be ‘interesting’ that criminals are having their, er, ‘right’ to be armed restored with relative ease…is it REALLY worthy of being the number one headline?

It’s not like the Euro-zone fraud isn’t threatening to bring down the global finance system…but, those who mismanage our society for their own benefit DON’T want to draw your attention in that direction, do they?

No, in a day when the likelihood that you’ll be ‘detained on suspicion’ is increasing exponentially, it seems disarming YOU is taking priority.

Oh, resist arrest and you WILL be gunned down…even if no ‘probable cause’ exists.

Sadly, being armed only provides the ‘armed thugs’ with an ‘excuse’…not that being unable to defend yourself provides any safeguard/protection.

It merely becomes ‘less likely’ that you’ll be shot by some trigger happy yahoo with a ‘get out of jail free’ badge pinned to his/her chest.

Funny how the second amendment brings to the fore the issue of whether or not you even HAVE rights.

In the absence of the ability to defend your rights, do you have ANY?

Sorry to keep repeating that question but this is the flip side of the ‘What are YOU going to do about it’ attitude our politicians keep giving us (from behind the relative safety of the thin blue line.)

The continued ‘pretense’ that the interests of the 1% are the interests of the majority of the population is a slap in the face to the voting aged citizen.

Things have gone horribly wrong and the 1% is blocking efforts to restore balance…to their own detriment.

Is this the ‘definition of hubris’ or, as many suspect, are we headed for a catastrophe that will make the predations of the ultra-rich seem minor?

Some ‘idiots’ think the coming ‘tribulation’ will be ‘Biblical’ in nature…but how handy is it that the Bible does not definitively tell us exactly ‘how’ the end will come, leaving it wide open to ‘interpretation’. (The missing pieces will be conveniently filled in as having occurred ‘elsewhere’. The fact that most of the world will remain ignorant of these events will be chalked up to the usual catch all/fall back position of ‘it’s a mystery’.)

And have no doubt about it, when the shit hit’s the fan there are plenty of (stupid) people who will BELIEVE ‘God’ is responsible.

Leaving that ‘void’ in their knowledge conveniently ‘unfilled’.

I’m leaning towards a ‘great convergence’, a combination of the collapse of global supply lines ‘compounded’ by a collapse of the global energy supply…and you won’t be able to tell which is causing what due to the ‘chicken/egg’ factor.

Have we exhausted ALL of our oil reserves? Definitely NOT…BUT we have no way to ‘prove’ that.

Peak Oil in reality means that we have exhausted the ‘low hanging fruit’, the easy to reach/refine oil. What remains will be harder to extract as well as refine.

Do you think we’d be bothering with ‘tar sands’ if there was still ‘plenty’ of light sweet crude to be had?

Flipping that rock over, I find it worrisome that we haven’t gone further in implementing ‘alternative energy’ than we have…there’s a ‘clue’ here whose implications are chilling indeed.

But naturally, no ‘serious person’ thinks any of this is a ‘conspiracy’.

Only the ‘fringe’ (like myself) sees the motivation of these knuckle draggers.

Because, ironically, ‘creative’ they are not.

Sadly the ‘more for me’ crowd is a one trick pony who (like the ancient Greeks) ‘can’t imagine’ a society without slaves.

And this, perhaps is the single greatest failure of what passes for ‘modern civilization’.

As difficult as it will be, we are being granted an extremely rare opportunity, IF we have the courage to grasp it!

Fail and we will condemn our children to the same hopeless future we now face.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Seriously?

Greetings good citizen,

Sunday’s topic wasn’t provided directly by a story that’s in the headlines but rather it was suggested by those headlines.

If my ‘off the reservation’ pieces disturb you then save yourself the trouble and move on now.

Today’s musings about the ‘quality of leadership’ will only bore you.

For that, good citizen is what caught my eye as I browsed the front page of the online edition of the NY Times (free version; Gegner is too poor to pay.)

I’d like to add that the, er, ‘inspiration’ to tackle this topic hit me even before I read today’s headlines, Herman Cain’s claim that God, er, ‘told him’ to run (apparently god loves Republicans so much he tells them all to run! Yet another reason why I am a devout atheist. I have no use for a god that would inflict Republican/Libertarian principles on anyone!)

If we were to back up even a quarter of a step right here we would be wondering precisely what kind of circus the governing of our civilization has become?

I mean the only legitimate employer of clowns are circuses, right?

(I mean no disrespect to those who study to be ‘real’ clowns, it is both a noble and honorable profession: it is the ‘clowns’ who run for political office that are besmirching your profession.)

How sad is it that the general public can readily grasp such an analogy?

Seriously good citizen, how disturbing is it that there ISN’T a single democratic challenger to the incumbent?

More disturbing is the very notion that this individual even thinks he deserves a second term!

At least Mr. ‘I elected myself a half a dozen times’ Berlusconi (it is no secret he owns the Italian media, HE can make anyone he wants Prime Minister…and the people will buy it!) has ‘stepped down’ from politics, once again begging the question of who (in their right mind) would want to take the reins of ANY of the badly broken nations on the planet?

Which, naturally, is a damning indictment of capitalist media in general…although communist media proved just as useless.

Only Anarchist media would be the type of watch dog the people could rely on.

Um, yeah…probably a deal killer for some of you but A Simple Plan was designed using the principles of Anarchy…and I count myself as an Anarchist.

WITH THE DISCLAIMER that I AM NOT ‘affiliated’ with the multiple bizarre manifestations that claim to be anarchist in nature but totally ignore ‘true’ anarchist principles such as rules without rulers, rather than the empty credo of ‘I will not obey’, (the angry retort of a belligerent child!)

Just as there are Marxists, Leninists and Maoists (to name a few) anarchists are similarly, er, divided.

Another of the feature of A Simple Plan is that our ‘leaders’ will NOT BE ‘legislators’; only the people can alter or, through the courts, interpret the laws.

The laws will be few and simple…conversely, the penalty for breaking them will be severe if not extreme…exile is a one-way proposition.

Um, while we’re talking about insuring ‘effective’ leadership (our leaders will compete for the job using their experience and skills, which is to say the ‘test’ will have a ‘practical’ aspect as well as a written evaluation.

More interestingly, it is likely this practical portion of the test will be televised!

Which is another way of insuring our leadership won’t get away with operating ‘behind closed doors’.

To that end the media cannot be denied access to ANY aspect of government, as a kicker, the media will be the ‘sole arbiter’ of what is or isn’t ‘fit to distribute’.

A society of secrets will soon consume itself and cannot be permitted.

If the more you read, the less you like gnaws at you, consider the alternatives…

The Who said it best; ‘there’s no easy way to be free!’

Now, if I can design this system to ensure we are not lead by a troupe of simpering sycophants, why do we persist in inflicting that exercise in futility upon ourselves?

Probably because the only thing I’m in charge of is the garbage…

Actually it’s not about doing the ’right’ thing, it’s all about PRETENDING to do the right thing!

And being clubbed like a baby fur seal for our ’poor decision making’ when the media’s picks turn out disastrously!

And in fairness to the ‘we write for a paycheck’ brigade, they only publish what they’re told to publish…information that comes from a deeply corrupt election commission.

Ironically, we have arrived at a time when even the general public has become ‘disenchanted’ with our seriously defective electoral system.

More frustratingly, we seem to have as much chance of repairing that as we have of ’reforming’ our obviously corrupt government.

Which is to say ’no chance’.

Can you say ’viva la revolution’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner