Thursday, December 22, 2011

Chumped

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are up this morning in the usual game of ‘hot potato’ the media uses to keep track of the economy.

If you wonder ‘who is buying is this whacko market’ it is most likely YOU.

You are still contributing to your retirement account, aren’t you?

Could it be that only the top 5% is responsible for the erratic action in the stock markets over the past 5 years?

They’re probably the only ones (still) contributing to a retirement plan after everybody else got burned by the fraud that was Enron.

Speaking of fraud, what’s up with this bull shit?

Or more pointedly, what the fuck are these morons smoking?

At stake is about $150 billion, the bulk of which would go to middle-class families and the unemployed. If Congress does not pass the measures, economists say, it would significantly weaken growth from already-damped levels anticipated early in the new year.

“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a slowdown over the course of next year,” Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told reporters last week. “Not only do we have the European crisis spilling over and hurting U.S. trade and confidence,” he said, but the United States economy also faces “homegrown shocks.”

There are two reasons for the renewed pessimism. First, economists say that temporary trends increased growth in the fourth quarter and may not continue into next year. Second, the economy faces significant headwinds in 2012: some from Europe’s long-lingering sovereign debt crisis, and some from domestic cutbacks beyond the control of President Obama, whose campaign would like to point to a brightening economic picture, not a darkening one. Even the Federal Reserve is predicting that the unemployment rate will remain around 8.6 percent by the time voters go to the polls in November.

Hard to say good citizen which ‘variety’ of happy talk I find more offensive, articles like this that admit up front the figures are ‘distorted’ (and therefore useless) or the type that is totally baseless (which is to say ‘an opinion’, at best.)

Just because YOU’RE, er, ‘Happy’ doesn’t mean it will make me happy too!

(This is even less likely if you were ‘paid’ to share your ‘happy thoughts’ and those happy thoughts first had to ‘pass muster’ with a clueless editor!)

We’re all supposed to be, er, ‘relieved’ that new claims for unemployment have finally stopped rising.

And most of us would agree ‘it’s about time!’

But if the last two ‘jobless recoveries’ are any indication it only means we have, for the moment, caught up with an ever descending ‘floor’.

Why do I say ‘ever descending’? Because they are still off-shoring jobs, that’s what happens when you keep writing new free trade agreements.

Which is to ask, ‘Why do YOU think the (so-called) experts believe the recent spate of economic ‘good news’ is a ‘false dawn’?

Little did Japan suspect when it opined the ‘Business is war’ that they’d end up losing to the capitalists (again.)

Once again the Corporate owned media ignores the FACT that the labor force today is smaller than it was in 2000.

But they probably don’t want to have to explain how THAT happened…

Remember, Globalization = Good (for the owners of product manufacturers, not for consumers!) The ‘cost savings’ come entirely from what they DON’T pay the employees!

Trade Protectionism = Bad (Because it frees up an otherwise captive audience!)

Which is to point out heaven help us all if we ever discover another planet capable of supporting our species or how the ‘expense’ of space travel will become trivial compared to the benefits ‘raped’ from a helpless consumer!

How useful is it to our oppressors that our media is subservient and our people are, er, ‘gullible’?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the so-called experts are the ones whose elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top!

Worse, most of them are told what to think/believe.

Which explains why most people’s eyes glaze over the moment they are told they are about to hear ‘expert testimony’.

There is only one ‘expert’ and even he is a work of ‘fiction’.

And the TV just confirmed the above statement, the Dow, as of noon-time, is up 41 points.

Although that certain fictions do have beneficial aspects to them…

So, good citizen…you KNOW this isn’t ‘over’ by a long shot, in that respect, the, er, ‘experts’ are right.

The latest batch of heavily massaged data is meaningless as far as what comes next is concerned.

And what IS coming next, good citizen as we pass the one year mark in the Mayan calendar countdown to destruction?

It’s still a little to ‘muddy’ to tell with any certainty if I’ll still be predicting the end this time next year.

So far the infamous ‘they’ have kept it glued together better than anyone would have thought. (extending unemployment for a record 99 weeks went a long ways towards making this possible!)

But we are approaching the fourth year of an economy almost entirely supported by the ‘public teat’…how much longer will we be able to ‘tread water’?

Ironically the answer is ‘infinitely’ if they can only dig up a justification to keep paying unemployment benefits forever!

(Remember, all money is, in the final analysis, ‘funny’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(Post script: Okay, I can’t leave you hanging with an ‘all money is funny’ but the system is going to collapse anyway without providing a reason.

Ironically, it all comes back to the ‘chump factor’. Why work if you can get the milk for free, right?

BUT, if nobody works there won’t be anything to ‘get’, so how do you, er, ‘justify’ an environment where only a few carry the rest of us?

Do we make ‘work’ the sole domain of criminals [meaning only lawbreakers are required to work?] That isn’t a good idea because most criminals turn outlaw for the reason that it is a lot less ‘work’ for a far greater ‘reward’.

Extending unemployment ‘indefinitely’ would create a logjam of people trying NOT to be ‘chumped’.

If MOST people got there’s for nothing, those who were constrained to putting up with the boss’s useless grief a dozen hours a day would cease putting in the necessary effort, causing production AND quality to fall precipitously.

This is why under A Simple Plan EVERYBODY is guaranteed a job, because we ALL bear the load, ‘equally’. [And if you don’t want to, you will be left ‘on the outside looking in’ which is another way of saying ‘exiled’.]

That said, we are only just beginning to see the effects of ultra-extended unemployment can have on those, er, ‘lucky’ enough to hold onto their jobs…

Or are they the chumps?

Time will tell.

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