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

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