Gulp!

Greetings good citizen,

What a day, my ‘homepage’ is crowing about how stocks are experiencing their best January ever…but apparently they aren’t talking about today, specifically.

Because today stocks are where they were yesterday, in the dumper.

But that’s not the half of it according to Mr. Williams:

No. 414: Hyperinflation Special Report 2012 January 25th, 2012

U.S. Hyperinflationary Great Depression Moves Ever Closer

U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve Effectively Have Destroyed Global Confidence in the U.S. Dollar

Systemic-Solvency and Economic Crises Have Not Abated

Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place;

2014 Remains the Outside Timing for Same MORE… 

Makes you want to subscribe, don’t it?

Isn’t that paragraph dire enough? What is Mr. Williams suggesting by adding ‘more’ to the end of that?

With every (Libertarian Idiot) out there screaming about ‘deflation’ why is the righteous Mr. Williams still calling for ‘hyper-inflation’?

The answer to that question rests with the question of how do you ‘keep the peace’ after you’ve irreparably broken the economy?

And that answer is ‘print baby, print!’

And not just greenbacks! We’re talking the whole shebang here, food stamps, unemployment checks and operating expenses for the national educational system.

‘Drop’ any one of those balls and the very next day you will have BLOOD IN THE STREETS!

You’ll KNOW things have gone to hell when there’s a tank idling in your driveway…but not to worry, Punky won’t be there long once he figures out nobody is protecting HIS wife and kids and she’s panicking because there’s a riot going on in front of their house! (and the cops aren’t responding…because their paychecks bounced, you know the rest.)

Punky already knows what his ‘weekend warrior’ CO will tell him if he requests permission to go home and save his wife and kids…so he has to make an ‘executive decision’ on his own…and what the hell, they gave him a tank to baby sit…come in right handy during a riot, wouldn’t it?

Of course, no self-respecting commander would permit his troops to have personal cell phones in their possession during such a critical deployment, that’s why you know what’s going on, Punky used YOUR phone to call home!

He may or may not have hung up when he found out what was going on ‘back at the ranch’…

Probably not, just beat feet out the door, gunned the engine on the tank and tore up your front lawn as he headed down your street towards his house (in another part of the state!)

If not another state altogether, opinions vary as to how ‘smart’ the people leading such an event would be…the consensus is ‘not particularly’.

Unless they laid it out ahead of time, starving certain states while ‘feeding others’ so the local guard could be called up to assist a neighboring state before that state was flushed down the toilet.

Least that’s how I’d do it if I was presented with the task…After half of the states were secure under martial law you could seize the rest without too much force/fight.

California and, ironically (Super Bowl host) Illinois are both riding the razor’s edge of insolvency, both having had their tax bases gutted by thirty years of Republican/ Libertarian rule.

(Which would be to suggest that both states have already been ‘targeted’ for what my be best described as a ‘controlled collapse’.)

But, I digress…

The critical thing Mr. Williams points out is “Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place” which is to say the ‘groundwork has already been laid’.

If that doesn’t spell ‘deliberate’ then I don’t know what does!

Have I mentioned that our society is/has been extremely ‘mismanaged’?

Only once or twice, eh? I think you need to catch up on your reading!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Horse-pucky!

Greetings good citizen,

There must be something to Ilargi’s latest post where he warns of “The report that will Blow up the Euro-zone.”

Because this morning markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets (again)

But the article outlining today’s troubled markets seems to be suffering from schizophrenia:

Wall Street stock indexes opened weakly Monday ahead of a European Union summit as Greece and Germany sparred over budget measures for Athens. [I guess you could call down a 120 ‘weakly’; although eighty years ago this would have been cause to jump out of your 7th story window!]

E.U. leaders were to sign off on a permanent rescue fund for the euro zone and to agree on a balanced budget rule in national legislation. But traders sensed some hesitation.

"Resolution for Greece is now up in the air, and that's causing some concern," said Alan Lancz, president of investment advisory firm Alan B. Lancz & Associates Inc. in Toledo, Ohio. "We could give up the gains we've seen so far this month if there ends up being no progress." [snip (the blogosphere has warned repeatedly that the ‘cure’ for Grecian situation wasn’t large enough, their eviscerated economy simply can‘t afford to pay back what it supposedly owes, it’s as ‘simple’ as that!) this is also where the article dives across the median into the realm of ‘happy talk!]

Consumer spending in the United States was flat in December as households took advantage of the largest rise in income in nine months [a fucking half a percent!] to boost their savings, setting the tone for a slowdown in demand early in 2012. [That’s not the song they were singing in December! Last month they were proclaiming ‘the consumer is back!’, like Christmas had nothing to do with it, idiots!]

Wall Street ended little changed on Friday as investors saw dips in the market as an opportunity to buy into what has been a strong first month of 2012.

Omitted from this report was the additional disclaimer that the Doctors think the insanity may be ‘temporary’…(but what do they know?)

Current market conditions make insanity a ‘prerequisite’ for being an ‘investor’…

Which really doesn’t tell us anything since we long ago determined that the stock markets are and have been, totally divorced from reality.

Which brings us to another disturbing phenomenon…that bar that keeps getting elevated, the bar of ‘shock and awe’.

Markets dropped 700 points (when TARP didn’t go the way they wanted it to) only to recover, ‘within a few hours’.

With the bar ‘set’ at 700, where would they have to go to ‘shock’ the average (which is to say clueless) consumer?

We’d probably say double that would shock most of the clueless (although a repeat of the 700 point drop would likely send most into mental ‘vapor-lock’ [I’m trying to think but nothing happens!] over the ‘real world implications’ of such a dramatic event. (Even though the market is 11,000 points ‘over valued’ and the current 12,000 [+] point valuation is more a reflection of the weakness of our currency than of the strength of our economy!)

Which is why all of this is so disturbing, good citizen. They yank our chains mightily and we still fail to recognize that the ‘joke’ is on us!

Oh how they must howl with laughter over our collective stupidity!

Still, it is a phyrric victory at best…who wants to spend their entire life surrounded by clueless dolts?

Yet this doesn’t stop them from regularly playing the rest of us for stooges!

Even after it stops being, er, ‘amusing‘.

Which is to point out how cathartic calling bullshit on someone can be! If you want to stop the relentless barrage of horse-pucky our politicians keep flinging it’s as simple as crying bull shit when you hear it!

Don’t be shy, speak up! If the bull-shitter (and your typical winger) CAN’T back up what they claim, your charge of Bull Shit stands! (And we ALL win for a change!)

If enough of us stand up to the few (who must privately laugh themselves silly over their claiming the mantle of ‘seriousness’ for themselves) then, maybe, we can turn this disaster around!

He who claims to ‘never joke’, IS a joke! Which is to call them what they are, ‘jokers’.

What the one percenters must find absolutely hilarious is how the rising market (which pays off their politicians) is being touted as an indicator of the ‘return of prosperity’ (albeit, a prosperity no one can see) when the only ones getting fat are our sell-out politicians!

Are these assholes the ‘Masters of Smoke and Mirrors’ or are the rest of us simply ‘too polite’ to shut these grifters down?

Few are ‘fooled’, our standard of living is NOT reflected in the lofty stock market, which has become cause for ‘civil unrest’.

Criminals are a curse on every society but criminals at the helm of a society are intolerable!

And I’d be doing you all a grave disservice if I didn’t point out that this isn’t the first time our society suffered from a rotten and corrupt head.

What you should all marvel over is how rapidly it returned, only fifty years after it ‘pretended’ to go to sleep…although the guilty party themselves reckon it was only forty years…

Which is to say this time ‘we won’t be fooled again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

OWS smear?

Greetings good citizen,

The OWS movement has dropped out of sight despite (locally) one of the mildest winters in memory, (and I’m pretty old!)

Yet we have this snippet from today’s NY Times:

Police spokesman Jeff Thomason says most of the arrests came around 8 p.m. That's when police took about 100 protesters into custody as they marched through the city's downtown, with some entering a YMCA building.

About 20 demonstrators were arrested earlier in the afternoon, after police say they threw rocks, bottles and other objects at officers and tore down fencing.

Police say three officers were injured. Officers used tear gas and "flash" grenades on the protesters after they refused to leave.

Um, seriously good citizen, you don’t need to follow the link there are only a couple of more sentences than you see above…but it is worth the trip to see the single photograph that accompanies the article.

And what is ‘prominent’ in this photo of a makeshift barricade?

The ‘circle A’ flag of Anarchists! (Usually Black and Red but this one is Black and White.)

Anarchists come in a kaleidoscope of flavors and the corporate media has yet to accurately report which, er, ‘clic/subgroup’ is causing trouble.

Today’s bunch is a prime example as they have been ‘lumped in’ with the OWS movement!

If there’s one thing we know about the ‘99 percent’ it is that they have remained ‘apolitical’.

Anarchy, as a political movement, has a different problem. It has an ‘image problem’ created by people with more in common with Libertarians than with ‘true’ anarchists.

You see, this subgroup that erroneously believes in ‘no rules’ (A libertarian doctrine) has no relationship to true anarchists, who believe in ’rules without RULERS…BIG fucking difference!

It may puzzle an, er, ‘ignorant’ reader to learn that I am an Anarchist and have composed a list of rules to replace predatory capitalism with.

The public is largely ignorant of what ‘true Anarchy’ is about because it goes against the ’do as I say and not as I do’ style the capitalist favors.

In fact, so, er, ‘threatening’ is this idea of (true) Anarchy that capitalists have spend centuries doing unspeakable acts and laying them at the feet of ‘anarchists’!

Case in point, WWI was laid at the feet of a ‘bomb tossing anarchist’.

Which may have been true, in a political affiliation sense…but ever since and repeatedly the corporate owned media has not missed an opportunity to ‘demonize’ so-called anarchists and Anarchy along with it.

It is disturbing to see supposedly ‘educated individuals’ misuse the term ‘anarchy’ as a synonym for the term ‘chaos’.

Their meanings couldn’t be further apart! (Unless you want to give the gullible public the impression that they mean the same thing…)

Like money, alternative politics receives seriously short shift in our education system…

Ironically, Anarchists will not make the same ‘mistake’. They will insure children are taught all about the evils of ‘more for me’ capitalism and its wicked hand maiden, ‘representative democracy’ which robs you of your choices!

But YOU’VE been ‘raised to believe’ that there is NOTHING superior to our (madly dysfunctional) style of (if they don’t like it we’ll just ram it up their ass) ‘democracy’…a variety our leaders are so fond of that they have even started ‘exporting’ it!

We should all learn to love ‘democracy dispensed from the barrel of a gun’…

Or else!

How about the Arab Spring that has been widely advertised in Western Papers as a ‘cry for democratic freedom!’

I think the people of the world have seen for themselves PRECISELY the kind of results ‘Western Democracy’ produces, so it is highly ‘counter-intuitive’ to posit that they desire to, er, ‘imitate’ it.

How unfortunate is it the we keep butting up against the central premise of (limited) ‘participatory democracy’?

Perhaps a better question would be if you know what, precisely, that central premise is?

That premise is ‘They ( the people in charge) BELIEVE (with all of their hearts) that YOU are STUPID (beyond belief/words)!

That is the ‘central premise’ of (limited participation) ‘representative democracy’.

Because the resulting ‘mess’ is (ever and always) the Representatives fault!

And YOU, (idiot) keep voting for new representatives (HOPING something is going to change (besides the drapes in their office…)

You know what the definition of insanity is, don’t you?

It is doing the same thing, over and over again, each time expecting a different result!

So the REAL question you’ll be faced with this November is…

ARE YOU INSANE?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pardon Me?

Greetings good citizen,

As old as judges themselves, today’s topic will be the slippery slope of ‘pardons’…which may or may not be made public…at the discretion of the, er, ‘co-conspirators’.

Which is to wonder aloud, how much would you be willing to bet W. hasn’t been prosecuted for ‘war crimes’ BECAUSE he already has a ‘pardon’ in his pocket, issued by the sitting ‘jellyfish-in-chief’?

I mean his Dad (H.W.) ‘pardoned’ Reagan for his crimes against the state, so pardoning your predecessor is probably something that comes with the turf…done ’automatically’ on an ‘as needed’ basis.

But it begs the question, what does this say about our justice system?

One beneficiary, Burton Waldon, killed an 8-month-old boy in an alcohol-induced crash in 2001. Mr. Waldon, a high school senior at the time, pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence. He is a member of the prominent Hill Brothers Construction Company family, big-money political donors who give mostly to Republicans, including Mr. Barbour. An uncle of Mr. Waldon, Kenneth W. Hill Sr., sought and received a pardon from President George W. Bush in 2006, erasing a federal income tax conviction.

It is in this paragraph that we see the, er, ‘rationale’ behind the very existence of the, er, ‘executive pardon’…bad things sometimes happen to RICH/well-connected people.

(The understanding is seldom do you find a rich individual who IS NOT also ‘well-connected’…although the ‘soon to be bankrupt’ lottery winner is the only possible exception that comes to mind.)

Thus is it well-known THROUGHOUT HISTORY, that a ‘rich man’ will never see the inside of a jail cell…and, thanks to the rich man’s ‘connections’, he can also have the public record of his, er, ‘misfortune’ sponged clean…

To which I ask, Is THIS ‘Justice’?

You KNOW it’s not…but you can’t argue with (worthless) money, can you?

(This is one of the principal reasons why there will be no way to transfer funds between individuals under A Simple Plan.)

Equally as disturbing to some of you is that you will be judged ‘on your record’ your whole life through. If you’re a ‘miserable bastard’, difficult to get along with and do the absolute minimum required of you, don’t be surprised if you ‘reap what you sow’ come promotion time.

But I digress, we were discussing our badly broken justice system (and I get sidetracked when the opportunity to point out changes presents itself!)

I treat this subject delicately because people have an unfortunate tendency to ‘transfer’, they put themselves in the position of, er, ‘being able’ to buy justice…and it makes them more tolerant of the practice!

A pardon doesn’t make you a ‘better person’ it merely enables you to ‘pass yourself off’ as one.

How ironic is it that people (often the only ones) who venture into the public spotlight (not as ‘pop stars’ but as politicians) have the, er, ‘connections’ to, er, ‘sugar-coat’ their public images.

As we have witnessed, often these people’s private lives are, er, ‘exposed’ by those privy to the existence of such skeletons.

What we don’t know is how susceptible to ‘blackmail’ these people are. Who or what would they betray to keep their secrets, secret?

Because that’s where this sort of bullshit leads to.

It is also not the kind of thing you want ‘hidden’ in a decision maker’s closet.

(This is why this power will no longer rest with ‘select individuals’. Those who must live under the law will vote directly on the law!)

Legislators are TOTALLY UNNECESSARY! (In fact they are an impediment to Liberty!)

YOU cannot be ‘free’ if you are denied your ability to choose!

But again I digress! (Sort of a ‘hobby’ [although others may consider it a ‘fault’] of mine it seems.)

The very first ‘pillar of civilization’ is ‘equality’, the second pillar is Justice…to the point that we expect NOTHING LESS than ‘EQUAL JUSTICE under the law…and this ‘pardon bullshit’ makes a mockery of that!

I admit, it’s ‘nice’ to think that were we prosperous enough, we’d have the ability to ‘sanitize’ our pasts but I’d rather know about somebody’s skeletons than find out about them ‘after the fact’…(usually AFTER you’ve been sold down the river!)

Yet another ‘grievous flaw’ of our current political system.

But let’s back up a step or two and return to the ‘did he or didn’t he’ question of if Mr. Obama pardoned Mr. Bush?

Does the idea itself piss you off?

It should.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Oh, and if you want to alter the course of the current clusterfuck then your ongoing support for ASP would be appreciated.

Step one is to ‘spread the word!’

Debating Capitalism

Greetings good citizen,

While the Dow approaches the 13,000 mark (for absolutely no discernable reason besides ‘inflation’) oil remains over a hundred dollars a barrel and gold just returned to the $1,700 (+) an ounce range.

All pretty good for a busted financial system, wouldn’t you say? Um, actually it is the same badly broken financial system, complete with its propensity for ‘creative accounting’, that has delivered us to the very doorstep of economic collapse.

Combine that with spineless, clueless leadership and you have a perfect recipe for disaster! The (stupid) bastards have no freaking idea which parts to trim and which ones to beef up…so they do NOTHING, pushing us ever closer to the brink.

Yup, that’s right good citizen, they can’t even ‘slow us down’ (without risking a total meltdown…)

So what do you suppose will be the ‘end result’ of this unseemly debate?

If we learned anything from the 1930s, it was that governments cannot shrug their shoulders and watch as their own people are consigned to unemployment. I find it tragic and astonishing that some governments need to learn this lesson again.

Nor should we forget the causes of the current growth and debt crisis as we seek to put our economies on a more sustainable footing. 

Both the United States and Britain suffered because their economies were overly reliant on the financial sector’s artificial profits; living standards for the many worsened while the economic rewards skewed to the top 1 percent; a capitalist model encouraged short-term decision-making oriented toward quarterly profits rather than long-term health; and vested interests — from giant banks to media moguls —were deemed too big to fail or too powerful to challenge.

We need to recognize that the trickle-down promise of conservative theorists has turned into a gravity-defying reality in which wealth has flowed upward disproportionately and, too often, undeservedly. To address properly the squeeze in middle-class incomes on both sides of the Atlantic requires fresh thinking from governments about how people train for their working lives and what a living wage should be.

Um, without going into specifics it is pretty obvious Mr. Milliband is totally fucking clueless…although he did nail the main target.

How sad is it good citizen that Ol’ Ed probably thinks all we need to do is hit some imaginary ‘reset switch’ and the system will straighten itself out.

The time to attempt that was BEFORE they allowed their core industries to be off-shored (and the remainder were forced out of business by (artificially) cheap imports.)

Which is to opine that this whole globalization thing really wasn’t given a lot of thought after the up front profitability of cut rate labor was sold.

Now huge economic deserts threaten to swallow Western civilization whole and the only reset button capable of reversing this deadly trend is the ‘dreaded’ (by the corporate media) Trade Protectionism.

A domestic population that is denied the opportunity to participate in the local economy WILL REVOLT…

And THAT’S what the idiots at Davos are shaking in their shoes talking about.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, NONE of these fools are discussing how to fix the current disaster. At best there may be some discussion of how to best ‘effectively suppress’ civil uprisings…along with some strategizing over what to do afterwards.

(How many peasants should you hang to ‘pacify’ the rest? How ironic is it that the answer is NONE?)

How unfortunate is it that all they need do is lift a page from the history books…and repeat the mistakes they find there.

NONE of them are willing to give up their monopolies in exchange for their lives, which is as sad as it is stupid…but once again I will remind you that there is ZERO correlation between wealth and intelligence/wisdom.

I’d take that a step further and opine that you have to be more than a little bit stupid/foolish to pursue enormous wealth at the expense of everyone else…

Think about that one for a while…although a Libertarian will never get it.

(You need be missing a couple of screws to embrace Libertarianism in the first place!)

Which may explain much when taken in the context of our totally mismanaged and utterly screwed up economic situation!

Yes, good citizen, from a ‘screwed up’ point of view there’s probably nobody more pleased that the wheels are about to fly off than those responsible for it happening!

(The broken economy/justice system jeopardizes what they’ve already stolen! The ‘trick’ is to be ‘the owner of record’ when order is restored… )

IF the new system even permits ‘private property’ (and NO sustainable model will.)

But our Davos attendees aren’t seeking ‘workable’ solutions, they are seeking ways to extend their rule (and they’re convinced the answer to this puzzle lies in significantly reducing the, er, ‘surplus population’.)

Which is to belabor the obvious, good citizen, don’t let ANYONE confuse you with a statistic (that they are bent on ‘erasing’!)

Truth be told, good citizen, the one percent is the MOST USELESS segment of our society, in EVERY imaginable way.

Now that it’s ‘game on’ we must do our utmost to ‘eradicate them’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Facts not in evidence...

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though the stock markets are being ‘juiced’ again for the upcoming elections…left to our imagination is whether or not the artificial high is being created so it can collapse dramatically a month or so before the election…

Although how that will help any of the specific bozo’s running against the incumbent remains a mystery.

Perhaps it isn’t intended to aid a particular candidate but intended to foster an ‘Anybody but him’ environment…

With that lens in our trusty kaleidoscope, let us have a gander at today’s offering

Another Day of Surreality on Wall Street

OK, let's try and put this into terms that a fifth-grader (or even a Wall Street MBA) might understand.

If the economy is recovering -- or even close to doing so -- why is the Federal Reserve maintaining that short-term interest rates will remain "exceptionally low" until late-2014 -- that is, below the levels that prevailed at the beginning (or even the middle) of every single recovery in the post-war era, as well as below their multi-decade median of five percent?

Why are investors piling into stocks and growing increasingly bullish at a time when the Fed has essentially confirmed that their optimistic assumptions about the economy are not in synch with reality?

If, as Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke says, there is still "enormous" negative equity in U.S. housing and, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner says, "housing finance is still a mess," why did homebuilding stocks today rally more than twice as much as the overall market, and why have they gained nearly 90 percent since October?

I can repeat ‘our financial system is completely broken’ a billion times but if nobody listens…oh fucking well!

Which begs the opposite question, good citizen…what the (F) would you do if the corporate owned media did announce, without elaboration, that our financial system had ‘collapsed’?

Let’s suppose we went a teensy bit further and added that our money (the US dollar) had been stripped of its ‘reserve currency’ status and had been ‘devalued’ by a factor of a thousand (making every existing dollar worth a tenth of a single cent.)

How ‘fucked’ would you be then?

Which is to ask what would your bank balance look like if you shifted the decimal point four places to the left?

Don’t shake your head in disbelief, they knocked 13 zeroes out of Argentina’s monetary base…and we’re only talking four here!

The part that will gnaw on your ass is you didn’t see any four decimal place jump in your standard of living…how the fuck did they settle on four?

Look no further than the (good for nothing) stock markets!

Or would it be more accurate to say the ‘delusionally priced’ stock market?

It is not a ‘coincidence’ that the nations that are in the deepest financial difficulty also have stock valuations that are totally out of whack with reality.

But this is a ‘contrived’ situation, we’re all being ‘gamed’…(although no one is going to find the end result the least bit amusing. I’m sticking to my guns, the bastards are trying to get the herd to thin itself!)

But repeating “the bastards are trying to kill ‘you’” won’t register any better than belaboring the obvious and reminding you constantly that ‘we’re broke’ does…(or doesn’t as the case may be.)

Um, it is also useless to point out that security at Davos is ‘insane’, reflecting how paranoid the ‘silver spoon toting class’ has become…

Not that this actually matters, I strongly suspect the people responsible for the current ‘brink of collapse’ situation have seldom, if ever, ‘bothered’ with Davos (such pandering is beneath them.)

They’d no sooner ‘beg for their lives’ than they’d spare yours!

Which is to say they will not ask for mercy because they will not show any.

Winner take all, straight up!

The word ‘compromise’ (or ‘surrender’ or ‘lose’ for that matter!) isn’t in their dictionary…how sad is it good citizen that these people also ‘believe’ ‘the law’ is whatever they say it is, at the moment they say it.

Their law is for you, not for them!

But I digress (as usual.)

What I hope to impress upon you is that you are being ‘deceived’ (not that there is much you can actually do about it…legally) and to be/remain ‘on guard’.

While the current ‘uncertainty’ is nerve-wracking, your future survival depends on your ability to ‘shrug’ this sort of nonsense off.

It is also important to stress that those of you who are NOT killed outright in the initial chaos (of collapse) will be enslaved (and die under inhumane conditions imposed on you by your so called ‘protectors’.)

You are better off banding together with your neighbors and pooling your meager resources than reporting to an official ‘Aid Station’.

They will become known as the ‘concentration camps’ of the 21st century.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Stated

Greetings good citizen,

You don’t suppose there was any reason for the opening of the Davos conference yesterday ‘coinciding’ with last night’s performance of ‘Barack in Wonderland’ , do you?

Okay, it’s an election year but the fact remains he would have scored a lot more points with the electorate by telling it like it is than he did by simply regurgitating the bullshit the oligarchs have the corporate owned media spew!

But naturally, I expect too much! Reality dictates that the only ‘truth’ discussed last night was the ‘official’ truth, as it is handed down to us by our lords and masters.

Even the ‘Progressive’ take on last night’s speech is more than a little disturbing:

In the final State of the Union message President Barack Obama will deliver this term, he came out swinging against the obstructionism of Republicans in Congress, and spoke to the growing gap between America's rich and poor.

With a delivery that often sounded like he was imploring America to believe in itself again, Obama gave an address that may not have been his most inspirational, but got the job done. He laid out a strong case for his programs and his administration’s efforts to revive the economy, and made the GOP look small and petty at the expense of everyday people.

As any of you who watched last night know, there were two ‘shows’ in progress, one of words and the other of actions…along with many ‘curious’ (as well as telling) facial expressions.

If the Republicans were ‘embarrassed’ by any of the president’s accusations they did a mighty good job of covering it up!

They also demonstrated for the nation their ‘hive mentality’ by rising and (most conspicuously) NOT rising ‘in lock step’ throughout last night’s speech. They did this with such ‘perfect precision’ that they had to have been told ahead of time which individual they were to mimic! (I’m guessing it was Beaner-Boy!)

I mean seriously good citizen, it was exactly like watching the Borg in action!

Okay, we covered the ‘robotic action’ but did you ever see such a collection of people that ALL looked like ‘deer in the headlights’?

And I’m sure we’d all like to know what was going on in Hillary’s head, given her sour puss through most of last night’s speech!

Moving on:

Hearing the Base
The president, it seems, has heard the hew and cry from his base, coming out strong against the banks, and laying the economic devastation he inherited at the feet of his predecessor.

Now how ironic is it, good citizen, that the very same publication this came from announced yesterday that the President was a Democrat with ‘conservative values’?

That his base was not ‘liberal democrats’ but ‘conservative independents’!

Which brings us full circle to the question of just who the fuck are these ‘progressives’ and what, specifically, are they selling?

(Because it is suddenly obvious that there is no such thing as a [genuine] Democrat OR a ‘liberal’ in politics these days!)

The Democrats of FDR era are history good citizen…and they were forced out of politics entirely by the same ‘big money’ that brought us Citizens United!

The broom of the (capitalist) ‘Reagan Revolution’ has swept very clean indeed!

And THIS is what it left behind:

Republicans Bearish on America

It is customary for any president, in delivering this annual speech to a joint session of Congress, to say, somewhere near the top, "the state of our union is strong." Obama held a variation of that line until the end, starting instead with the more tentative, "the state of our union is getting stronger." However, when compared with the GOP response, delivered by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, that was outright cheerleading. Daniels called the state of the union "grave." Not even Herman Cain (you thought he was gone?) went that far in his Tea Party Express response to the state of the union. (Cain simply said the state of the union was "not good.")

How disturbing is it good citizen that these virtual robots have been, er, ‘handed’ the high ground of stating the truth about the economy that THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTROYING?

Well, that was the, er, ‘Progressive’ take on last night’s SOTU address, here’s what the so-called ‘liberal media’ had to say:

Declaring that “we’ve come too far to turn back now,” the president used his final State of the Union address before he faces the voters to showcase the extent to which he will try to contrast his core economic principles with those of his Republican rivals in a time of deep economic uncertainty. While many Americans remain disappointed with the state of the economy and the president’s handling of it, Mr. Obama nonetheless tried to bring into relief the difference between where the country was when he took over and where it is now.

“The state of our union is getting stronger,” he declared in time-honored tradition. “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.” He pointed to renewed hiring by American manufacturers and — borrowing the “built to last” phrase from the auto industry he helped save — he sketched out, albeit vaguely, what he called a blueprint for economic growth in which the wealthy play by the same rules as ordinary Americans.

Republicans challenged Mr. Obama’s assessment of the economy, and asserted that his policies had made the situation worse. But with their own poll numbers diving, Congressional Republicans were subdued in their response to the speech, careful not to boo or seem disrespectful. And the president disputed their claim that he was practicing the politics of division.

You mean last night’s performance could have been worse?

It’s one thing to have yahoo partisans disrupting public events but everyone at last night’s event was there by invitation…and simple logic dictates you wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself or your party on NATIONAL television with childish behavior!

Although it is hard to say which would be more disturbing, their unnatural ‘acting in unison ’ routine or booing and cat-calling ‘on cue’?

I, personally, was freaked out by the robot act, it’s one thing to be bat-shit crazy and quite another be bat-shit crazy AND a mindless robot!

It really makes you wonder just who is on the other end of the remote controls?

Looks like we’re headed into ‘overtime’ good citizen, please accept my apology in advance.

I’d like to begin by pointing out the obvious, that these sons of bitches are purposefully ‘tap dancing on a land mine’.

The global banking system is broken beyond repair…which is why NOTHING has been done about it for almost five years.

This is a ‘ticklish’ issue for someone like me who preaches that money is essentially meaningless.

How can the global banking system be ‘broken’ if all money is ‘funny’?

Here’s a topic I seldom touch upon as it is the ’lynch pin’ of all monetary theory, it is a given that everyone ‘understands’ this…

All money is ‘faith based’, it is your ‘belief’ that it is worth something that gives money its value!

This is why ‘counterfeiting’ is illegal.

If everybody could just ’print what they needed, when they needed it‘, nobody would do squat beyond whatever effort it took to print more money…and in jig time, there wouldn’t be anything left to buy!

Nobody calls these ‘synthetic forms of credit’ money because to admit they were money would be to admit they were counterfeit…and void the whole pile of em at once!

Instead of ‘voiding’ the whole mess (like they should have back in 2008) they let the banks, er, ‘unload’ them on the public via the multiple ‘rescue mechanisms’ establish by the world’s central banks to ‘rescue’ the banks/insurance companies/retirement funds of millions of workers.

And yes, good citizen, this was/is fraud on a massive scale.

There ‘should have been’ (and likely will be) hangings over this…but the ‘rot’ goes all the way up to the top…(how sad is it good citizen that none of us knows where that ‘top’ is anymore?)

So to ‘say’ the economy is recovering is, as we all know, a boldface lie!

Even more fantastic (given the whole OWS movement) was the claim that ‘more education’ could turn an already bankrupt dynamic around!

They have been preaching that exact same LIE since I WAS A KID!

If education was the solution they’ve had more than fifty years to prove it works…and today we’re witnessing the ‘end result’.

Worse, they cried last night because kids these days aren’t pursuing careers in engineering (and they haven’t been for years…because there ARE NO JOBS!)

Why the fuck would you waste your time and accumulate debt you can’t possibly repay (doing the minimum wage job you will eventually sell your soul to get?)

Because some clueless politician told you it was the ‘right thing to do’?

You will do your children a far greater service good citizen if you teach them how to lay traps and more importantly, how to spot them!

The future belongs to the prepared…and increasingly it is looking like the future will belong to the ‘scavenger’ who can outwit the technically advanced but otherwise dim- witted robot.

Which is to say that I found last night’s speech to be ‘disturbing’ on oh so many levels.

We aren’t out of the woods yet good citizen…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Davos!

Greetings good citizen,

Did you get your invite to the Davos conference? It should surprise no one that I was passed over again this year…of course, I’d be double screwed if I had to get there on my own…it’s one hell of a swim/walk!

After two consecutive post on the rapaciousness of Employers, we have today’s offering on that annual, global gathering of the ‘one percent’ and they’re lackeys Davos.

What is difficult to determine, good citizen is if the following snippet comes from this year’s conference (which presumably begins today) or if it is from last year:

Others say, however, that this self-flagellation is misguided. Raising taxes on high earners or restricting their pay will do nothing to increase economic growth or to create jobs, said Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel Lucent.

To stimulate sluggish Western economies, he said, policy makers will have to make the tough fiscal choices needed to bring budget deficits into line, increasing business confidence. And in Europe, he said, restrictive employment rules should be loosened to encourage companies to hire.

“If you are standing outside the job market today and you think inequality is the problem, you have an ugly surprise coming,” Mr. Verwaayen said. “If you want to kick the cat, kick the cat. If it makes you feel better, fine. But if the pie is not growing, we’re not going to create jobs.”

Maurice Lévy, chief executive of the advertising company Publicis Groupe, based in Paris, agreed that measures to promote growth were crucial. But Mr. Lévy, one of the signatories of an open letter to the French government calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, said it was only fair, at a time when governments were cutting welfare spending to bring budget deficits into line, that the rich should share the burden.

“When you have this situation of fear, and little hope of getting out of the dark, there is also anger,” Mr. Lévy said. “People see that there is a minority of people who are well-off. This anger should be taken into account by the people who are, if not their target, their preoccupation. We should all be conscious of the money we are receiving for the services we render. We have to be reasonable.”

So, we have the ‘production line slaver’ stuck in the old rut of there’s no increase in the workforce without proportionate ‘growth’ in market activity. (The unsustainable ‘pie’ has to get larger axiom.)

This ignores two ‘truths’, the pie IS getting larger. We humans are multiplying at a record pace! BUT! As I mentioned yesterday, robots don’t need the products they produce.

Let us ignore this ‘hand waving’ that CEO’s perform for public consumption. They KNOW this as well as you do (if you stopped for a moment and thought about it…but you haven’t, have you?)

The second truth is less obvious, IF these mismanaging fucktards DID, er, double their workforce by halving the workday/week, it would cost them in benefits (There IS a way to dial this back to zero, but not under capitalism!)

Because the halving of the workday without an equal reduction in expense would put the remainder of the ‘housing market’ underwater…and there’s the answer to the second problem…but again, it won’t happen under ‘more for me’ capitalism.

In fact, we won’t see hiring on a scale we need to see it until AFTER capitalism is abandoned! CEO’s reap huge bonuses for ‘eliminating’ the ‘expense’ of employees.

They aren’t about to hire them back (unless they think firing them again will generate more bonuses for themselves!)

Which is weird because ‘hire them back’ is exactly what society needs them to do!

We won’t even visit the topic of ‘Are corporate boards that stupid?’ As the answer lies in our own current circumstances!

[Lord yes!]

As long as we live under an ‘extractive’ social model like capitalism, participation will always be predicated upon ‘infinite growth’.

Since we do not have an ‘infinite pie’, infinite growth is ‘impossible’.

Worse, we have probably already exceeded ‘sustainable’ population levels.

Which brings us back to these highly secretive Davos conferences…what do you suppose the ‘Masters of the Universe’ discuss when they have each other’s ear?

Conversely, it would be naïve in the extreme to think they need conferences such as this one to commune with one another!

The reason the public isn’t allowed to see the goings on for themselves is they don’t want you to know just who is in whose pocket!

Most of the proclaimed ‘Masters’ are really just someone else’s ‘sock puppet’.

Firings are rare and exterminations rarer still…but

There’s one wall the press doesn’t dare to knock down…and so it will remain until we establish a ‘not-for profit’ media! (And even such a body would require an ever vigilant watch dog to keep it honest!)

Not that there wouldn’t be those who would go to any length to keep their goals a secret!

Which is to remind you all that even A Simple Plan is neither ‘fool-proof’ nor is it ‘maintenance free’.

As The Who admonishes us in their tune ‘Slip Kick’, there’s no easy way to be free!

Thanks for letting me inside your head…

Don’t you wish those Davos dudes were as forthcoming?

Gegner

Rope or Light Poles?

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes the tune is ‘the beat goes on’ (Sonny & Cher, remember?) and so it is, good citizen, that we are offered an unvarnished look at today’s economy

No. 413: December CPI, PPI, Production, Housing Starts, Real Retail Sales 
January 19th, 2012

Patterns of Slowing Growth Have Re-Emerged
Inflation from High Oil Prices Still Impacting Broad Economy
2011 Average Annual Consumer Inflation: 3.2% (CPI-U), 3.6% (CPI-W), 10.7% (SGS) 2011 Average Annual Wholesale Inflation: 6.1% (PPI)
Perils of Poor-Quality Inflation Data and Bad Assumptions

Followed by an an encore of yesterday’s disturbing ‘what employers want’ debacle

Many employers, though, say they have little choice. Robert Batterman, a labor lawyer who represents employers, said whether it was the N.F.L. or Sotheby’s, which locked out 43 art handlers in Manhattan last July, “the pendulum has swung too far toward the employees, [says the man who makes his living advising employers how to ‘legally’ break their contracts] and the employers are looking in these tight economic times to get givebacks.” [Which is, make no mistake about it, how the rich get richer! None of them ‘need’ these givebacks, it’s just taking advantage of the economy! Every raise they DON‘T give multiplies their, er, ‘personal bonus!’]

“Employers,” he continued, “are using lockouts because unions are reluctant to do what the employers consider reasonable in terms of compromising. Employers are looking to reset their collective bargaining relations.” [And in many cases they’re doing whatever it takes to ‘bust’ the unions! The assholes cited here have even hired ’replacement workers…something that would have gotten you killed in the old days! Think about that while you enjoy your forty-hour work week!]

After being out of work since Aug. 1, Paul Woinarowicz, a warehouse foreman employed at American Crystal Sugar for 34 years, sees another rationale for lockouts. “It’s just another way of trying to break the union,” said Mr. Woinarowicz, a member of the bakery and confectionery workers union. “People here in the Red River Valley are really mad at American Crystal. It was just like a knife stuck in your heart.”

Because we all KNOW what the next step will be, the plant will close and all of the sugar beets processed here will be shipped to China! And a big ‘fuck you’ to the workers still capable of ‘bargaining’ for a living wage…such as it is these days.

Which brings us to the larger question of ‘are ‘free markets’ really the best way to regulate commerce?

The short answer is no because the free market is ‘incapable’ of justly determining what constitutes a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. There are simply too many variables.

Under A Simple Plan, pay is determined on a needs basis where everyone is provided with a guaranteed ‘living wage’. Not necessarily enough to live like a Rockefeller but you won’t have to dumpster dive or skip two meals a day either. Nor would you have to sit in the dark, shivering in the freezing cold, contemplating your navel until sunrise either…

But if that’s what you like, it could be arranged.

Just don’t try to martyr yourself afterwards on the cross of ‘lost opportunity’, it’s one of the quickest ways there is to get yourself exiled!

(Assuming our descendants are as ‘vigilant’ as we will become…)

Because the exploiter will always be ready to insist that the ‘old ways’ weren’t as bad as the ‘old folks’ make them out to be.

And it only takes one ‘exception’ to completely reverse the process.

Once they gain the ‘right’ to buy and sell again, it’s all ‘downhill’ from there.

We’re back to ‘stick ‘em up’ and ‘fuck you, pay me!’

We are in this clusterfuck we find ourselves in today BECAUSE we belong/tolerate a justice system that is centered NOT on the well-being of the individual but on the ‘sanctity’ of property rights!

It USED TO include the ‘inviolability’ of a contract (this is where old time union organizers thought they had the capitalist cornered but the fucking weasel capitalists can’t be trusted!)

Which leads us back to the current ‘employer/employee’ contract…can the capitalist be trusted?

I think we all know the answer to that one, the answer is a resounding NO!

Property rights do NOTHING to build or preserve a society, much less a civilization. (Which is to point out we may have been doing this for millennia but that only means we’ve been DOING IT WRONG for millennia!)

Which is to say it takes hundreds of thousands of workers/customers to make a single billionaire, and we have a few thousand of them, world wide.

Well, good citizen, automation cuts out the ’customer’ side of the equation, putting more ‘purchasing power’ in the pockets of the owner…BUT this additional or ‘surplus’ income comes at the cost of lost demand!

Robots don’t get paychecks and neither do the people the robots replace…in fact, there are myriad things that the people replaced by robots don’t/can’t do…like pay taxes. (which is PART OF THE REASON our ‘infrastructure’ is falling apart…but not to worry, the don’t intend to replace it in Hong Kong either, they’ll just build new in Africa!)

Which brings us full circle to the president’s ‘jobs program’. The government has a proverbial ’bottomless well’ of cash…but if you print money with abandon, it makes the existing money (in whatever form) worth-less…in both senses of the term.

Which is to point out that we must throw these ‘short-sighted weasels’ out of power (preferably) before there’s nothing left to salvage!

So, yeah, here we are, 4 years after the collapse of the banking system and we have these shit weasel, one percenters locking down domestic factories to extract ‘give backs’ from beleaguered and besieged workers!

Which brings us full circle to the question of ‘What will we run out of first, rope or light poles?’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Caged

Greetings good citizen,

Some articles have the effect of waving a red cape at a Bull, it infuriates the animal just as articles like this infuriate me! (although there is some debate as the whether it is the waving motion alone or the color red, since Bulls are supposedly color blind, that incites their ire.)

When this sorry excuse for a human being passed away a few months ago the corporate owned media reacted as though the USA had lost one of its ‘leading lights’ as opposed to one of its greediest psychopaths.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"They could hire 3,000 people overnight. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?"

JENNIFER RIGONI, Apple's worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, on the advantages of using foreign plants.

The suicide rate at Foxconn is an international scandal…is THIS what ‘employers’ want?

Seriously good citizen, this is what the ‘us vs. them’ mindset is leading to! Animals who live on ‘production farms’ working 16 hour shifts for peanuts…and that may well be precisely what/all they get, peanut butter!

The question has disintegrated from ‘what’s fair’ to ‘who’s worth it’…and I’d hate to be the one without a large caliber, high rate of fire weapon in my hands when that question is being decided…

The human anti-exploitation law does what is necessary. It voids the employer/employee contract out of hand (and believe me, it will be tantamount to killing them!)

Nobody can ‘sell’ their labor just as nobody can buy it (for personal gain.)

But (naturally) this isn’t going to happen on its own.

Um, as the ‘Overton Window’ keeps shifting rightward (towards absolute control) the issue of ‘fairness’ is, er, modified into ‘who deserves fairness’?

Increasingly, good citizen, you are not included in these ‘calculations’.

When your humanity is no longer enough to earn you ‘just consideration’ it is time set the forces of revolution into motion.

For verily you and yours will be slaughtered like animals and with just as much ‘consideration’.

You may consider yourself a ‘child of god’ but those who would exterminate you like vermin don’t count you as a child of THEIR god! (Which is why the whole ‘god thing’ sucks…but that’s another can of worms!)

And God is certainly in the ‘drivers seat’ of the Republican nomination process!

What most of you don’t realize is ‘that god’ is the ‘righteous and angry’ god of capitalism!

Here is a god with few children, a ‘chosen few’ as a matter of fact! So few it is ludicrous to think they could win election (which is why we were switched from the one person/one vote method to the one dollar (share)/one vote system like the one used in the corporate boardroom.)

Speaking of ‘buying’ elections, what do you make of Newt’s come from behind victory in South Carolina yesterday?

Again, while we’re on the subject I’d like to remind you that only ‘one in five’ eligible voters self-identify as Republican, it is the alleged ‘independents’ that keeps swinging them over the top. (Read: allows the corporate media to keep ‘stealing’ elections!)

Um, there is no ‘delicate’ way to phrase this because the disturbingly lopsided coverage of this election process tells us something frightening.

What’s ‘up for grabs’ this coming election cycle is who ‘does’ and who ‘does not’ count as human.

The fucktard from Apple says it straight out, would American workers ‘agree’ to live in a ‘dorm’ (pen/cage) and work around the clock for (virtually) nothing?

Just an opinion here but I think everybody who has an Apple product should discard it immediately…and shun all things Apple (especially their stock!)

Why are we suffering from staggering unemployment? Because Rapacious Employers would rather work a few people 16 hours a day, 7 days a week than spread those jobs around for all who need them!

Did I mention our civilization is EXTREMELY mismanaged? (Funny thing about society, you have to 'participate' to be a member!)

Well, this is not an ‘accident’. This is what happens when ‘hooray for me and fuck everybody else capitalists take over!

They don’t give a shit if it sucks for you! That’s your problem…until YOU make it THEIRS!

And I can’t say it any plainer than that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Stand Up

Greetings good citizen,

There are not one but two articles in today’s NY Times insisting Wall Street compensation has ‘fallen’ (for the underlings.)

It seems the top executives are ‘unaffected’ by the, er, ‘laconic performance’ of the world’s stock markets.

The top is getting what they gave themselves last year…whether they deserved it or not.

If you want to call it ‘a show of restraint’, it appears the pool of bonus recipients has been culled, somewhat.

Or at least that’s what they’re telling us. Not that their ‘credibility’ is above reproach or anything…if you know what I’m saying.

As we have all learned, ‘Honesty’ in the financial sector is an extremely ‘relative’ thing.

Because, truth be told good citizen, the global banking system went bankrupt three years ago, and nobody’s figured out how to rebalance the books again.

Because your average billionaire is actually so far in hock they’d make the homeless look wealthy!

It all circles back to ‘what is an asset and who decides how much that asset is worth?’

Right about now bubba it’s all worth squat!

How problematic is it that you won’t ‘doubt’ the value of your money until it takes a wheelbarrow full to buy a loaf of bread.

Of course when your whole paycheck won’t fill your gas tank…that just might convince you that you’re being ‘played’.

Because now we circle back to another factor that is spiraling out of control, what constitutes ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work?’

Is anyone (besides me) asking why bankers are getting bonuses instead of stiff prison terms?

Theft is theft and treason is treason…and the only ones who don’t want to raise the subject are guilty of both!

But this is where you find yourself when the game turns into ‘us against them’.

It is apparent there is a great deal of confusion about what side represents who.

Adding to that confusion is the ‘purposeful vagueness’ surround who is and who is NOT ‘middle class’.

The ‘yardstick’ the corporate owned media uses (but keeps to itself) is a college degree.

Not the possession of one, but if your employment relies on your having a degree.

Thanks to unions, a large swath of the working class ‘mis-identifies’ itself as ‘middle class’.

If your job does NOT require a college degree then you are NOT ‘middle class’ regardless of how much money you make!

Yet if we listen to our (decidedly demented) politicians there are only the poor, the middle class and the rich/‘one percent’.

Which could be regarded as ‘generally true both here in the US and across the rest of what has classically been known as ‘Western Civilization’ (although this is also true of newly capitalistic countries like the former Soviet Union.)

There is no longer a ‘working class’ of any consequence. IF you have a job at all, it is most likely part time (regardless of how many hours you work) and pays something in the neighborhood of minimum wage!

What’s that? Only thirty something? You’d best start socking it away while you’ve still got a ‘regular job’.

The current ‘dynamic’ is that (like China) once you hit thirty you’re too old to keep up with the kids!

So by the time you hit forty you’ll be (whether you want to or not) starting your ‘second career’ (in straight commission sales!)

Worse, it will probably be MLM to boot!

How disturbing will it be to learn that your ‘down line pearl’ is a foreign national?

Just saying, ya know?

Creepy enough that everybody above you is taking a piece of what you bring in, but in order for YOU to make any loot you have to get a bunch of suckers to work for YOU (in an increasingly saturated market!)

Er, did I mention that this ‘Banana Republic’ thing has a life of its own? The only thing you have to do to land you and yours in a Banana Republic is let the fucking criminals keep ripping YOU off.

They don’t care, they’ve got theirs!

It’s not their problem if you’re TOO STUPID to stand up for yourself!

If you won’t lift a finger to save those you love, don’t expect anyone else to do it for you.

Just something to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Left Justified

Greetings good citizen,

The right demonizes the government as the entity that, er, ‘prevents’ profitable commerce…the thought being we’d really make a lot more money if we didn’t have to obey all of those ‘intrusive’ governmental regulations…

While the left despises the government for being the ‘play-thing’ of the privileged…

And neither of them are ‘wrong’ (although only the left is ‘justified’ in its disdain…the right’s ire is ‘pretend’ at best and an act at worst.)

Which is to ask how sick is it that the right keeps proposing legislation intended to steal the few rights you have while they simultaneously ‘fail to prosecute’ crimes against society?

Who REALLY gives a fuck about ‘gay marriage’? It’s not even a particularly ‘good deal’ for the gay when it’s all said and done. But the right lead the charge in the ‘defense of marriage’ baloney that followed…after a Massachusetts judge issued a ‘surprise decision’ during the 2004 presidential election cycle…when, ‘coincidentally’ a Massachusetts Senator was in the race for the oval office, running against an extremely unpopular Republican incumbent.

And for the third time in as many elections we ended up with a ‘photo finish’ that was decided by the ‘electoral college’.

Ironically, one thing is currently crystal clear, that we ARE NOT as ‘equally divided’ as the corporate owned media wants us to believe, thanks to the widespread support received by the OWS movement.

What has become increasingly apparent is that our entire ‘political process’ is no longer under our control. The people who pay for the message get to dictate what that message is…

And lately it has become disturbingly clear that we have been lied to and those lies have cost us dearly.

Globalization was supposedly done ‘for us’ but now it is apparent it was done ‘to us’. It was NEVER about ‘lower prices for you’, it was always about higher profits for them!

Higher profits reaped from the benefits they didn’t have to pay their ‘new’ employees!

Wednesday the Internets went dark to protest ‘Chinese Style’ censorship under Republican sponsored legislation. (Ironically, it was the same Republicans who suddenly opposed their own bill, making the Democrats look ‘stupid’…but if we accept that there are no Democrats then the ‘sock puppets’ representing the Democrats are, by definition, er, ‘stupid’.

Today we are being urged to call our State Attorney General’s office to voice our opposition to the OBAMA administration’s latest attempt to railroad a ‘uniform settlement’ through congress that will, literally, legalize theft…if you’re a banker or an investor.

Um, who ARE these, er, ‘morons’ that CALL THEMSELVES ‘democrats’ and who, precisely, do they represent?

What does this sort of nonsense portend for the upcoming presidential election cycle?

Why is this bootlicking coward running ‘unopposed’? (Which is to ignore the fact that his ‘opponents’ from the opposite political party are all ‘bad cartoon characters’!)

Left is right and down is up, right?

This is NOT the state you want your politics to fall into…

YOU are being MANIPULATED, good citizen…and this is NEVER a ‘good thing’.

How do we ‘free’ ourselves from this trap?

How do we ‘sort out’ the truth from the convenient lies?

Sadly, it is not as simple as automatically rejecting the ‘near truth’ of the corporate owned media and accepting, even generally, the assertions of the, er, ‘free internet’. (Which is to point out that there are more than a few ‘sell-outs’ on the ‘net’!)

Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one (and that doesn’t make them right!)

Worse, there is no shortage of ‘dis-information’ out there…and only a little ‘mis-direction’ goes a long way.

We all tend to be prone to making ‘snap judgments’. (The old making up our minds before all of the facts are in.)

It’s staggering to consider all of the mayhem this trait is responsible for, doubly staggering is the amount of regret this has caused.

But that’s ‘the strength’ of the right, you end up fighting yourself so they don’t have to!

It’s like the STUPID ‘fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here’ excuse, how the fuck are all of those dirt poor Muslims supposed to get here, row?

It’s one thing to urge you to action and quite another to keep you from blowing your own foot off!

The fog of war is a terrible thing good citizen and a little ‘mis-direction’ can go a mighty long way!

Which brings us to another of today’s headlines

What do you suppose is up with that? Somehow, I suspect you know what the answer is…

Which brings us back to our original argument, if you take my meaning, along with my assertion that only the left is justified…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bottoming out...

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s rant ended with the ‘unemployment crisis’ and today the focus remains on the number one problem facing our deteriorating civilization.

Before we delve into today’s collectively mind-blowing offerings I’d like to take a moment to explore what little is being done to address this civilization destroying phenomenon.

Let’s start where we left off, with clueless Newt and his feigned ‘ignorance’. Newt likes to pretend there are plenty of jobs…all you need to do is ‘ask’ for one.

While this mindset is in keeping with capitalism and capitalistic views, especially the extremely misguided notion that it is up to YOU to make yourself ‘useful’ to the capitalist…

What do you suppose these people did to piss off their capitalist?

WICHITA, Kan. — The crowd gathered at the local headquarters for Boeing was euphoric. The company had just won one of the largest military contracts in history. Thousands of the resulting jobs, Boeing had promised, would be headed here, to the sprawling manufacturing complex where residents have been building airplanes for generations.

“It’s good for Kansas, it’s good for Wichita and it’s a great day to be alive here and to profess victory,” said Senator Pat Roberts, part of the political team that spent a decade battling on behalf of the company. “Every once in a while the good guys win.”

That celebration last February was supposed to confirm this city’s enduring status as the “Air Capital of the World.” But less than a year later, on Jan. 4, Boeing executives solemnly gathered here for another announcement. The jobs would not be arriving after all, they said. Instead, they would shut down all of the company’s local operations by the end of 2013.

Let’s see, we lost 8 MILLION jobs in the six months after the last down turn 3 and a half YEARS AGO. Despite claims to the contrary, NONE of those jobs came back.

In fact, the labor force today is still smaller than it was in 2000! (Never mind that the labor force ‘participation rate’ is at an all time low…)

What you need to understand, good citizen, is our infinitely screwed up economy has been kept ‘afloat’ largely on the back of orders for new aircraft.

While this ‘spin-off’ will (briefly) keep the plant from going dark, the, er, ‘smash and grab’ tactics of, ‘private equity’ (like what recently happened to Twinkie the Kid) pretty much insures that this new kid on the block will choke to death on the debt it has been saddled with.

But wait! There’s even more carnage Newt appears ignorant of!

The Chapter 11 filing was made in United States bankruptcy court in lower Manhattan. Kodak said that its non-American subsidiaries are not part of the filing. [snip]

“Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation,” said Antonio M. Perez, the company’s chief executive, said in a news release. “At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core I.P. assets.” [snip]

Besides potentially aiding in the patent sale, bankruptcy protection could also allow Kodak to shed hundreds of millions of dollars in pension obligations. Kodak said in a filing that it contributed about $245 million to its U.S. pension obligations last year, and that it has been unable to shrink those liabilities to a more manageable level. [WTF!]

I especially dislike that last paragraph which rubs in what a chump these people have been for being ‘loyal employees of the company’.

But that is the culture which is destroying our civilization!

Profits for the investors while we throw the employees (and potential customers) under the bus!

Somehow this is written off as the need to ‘crack a few eggs’ if one desires to make an omelet…

So we have not one but TWO major US employers that are shuttering their US operations (almost 4 years after the start of the Greater Depression…) and then we have gasbags like Gingrich who are going to ‘teach the poor “how to ask for jobs.”; bringing us full circle with the inescapable fact, ‘what jobs’?

Well, maybe they mean these jobs!

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits for the first time plummeted last week to 352,000, the fewest since April 2008, the Labor Department said Thursday. The decline added to evidence that the job market is strengthening.

Weekly applications fell by 50,000, the biggest drop in the seasonally adjusted figure in more than six years. The four-week average, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped to 379,000. That was the second-lowest such figure in more than three years.

When weekly applications fall consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to push down the unemployment rate. A department spokesman cautioned, however, that volatility at this time of year is common.

So, as the ‘private sector’ continues to ship jobs off-shore (to enrich their capitalist owners…AT YOUR EXPENSE!) The public sector (current administration) is running on a ticket of ‘job creation at the public’s expense’.

Rebuilding our nation’s ‘infrastructure’ is to be the ticket to future prosperity…for the few. The rest of us had best get used to speaking another language or figure out a way to survive on a steady diet of rocks.

Like everything else, Banana Republics don’t need much in the way of ‘infrastructure’.

The overlords have plumbing and electricity, the peasants don’t!

You’d have thought we’d seen the end of these stories like Kodak and Boeing with the current ‘hostility’ being pointed at the, er, one percent (which, as I pointed out yesterday, is totally misleading!) and I’d opine that this final ‘bailing out’ of capitalists from the American labor pool will be ‘the end’ of the multi-nationals departing the sinking ship.

The rest have already gone.

So what will our 'uni-party' rulers do for revenue now?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Less than Zero

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the stock markets ‘slow start’ this morning (it was doing, er, ‘irrationally well’ by today’s close) was attributed to, er, smaller bank earnings…but, amazingly enough, earnings that still managed to ‘beat expectations’.

Now, how the fuck do you make sense out of that?

The same way you’re supposed to make sense out of this drivel!

Below is a chart showing the majors most likely to get into the 1 percent (excluding majors held by fewer than 50,000 people in 2010 census data). The third column shows the percentage of degree holders with that major who make it into the 1 percent. The fourth column shows the percent of the 1 percent (among college grads) that hold that major. In other words, more than one in 10 people with a pre-med degree make it into the 1 percent, and about 1 in 100 of the 1 percenters with degrees majored in pre-med.

Of course, choice of major is not the only way to increase your chances of reaching the 1 percent, if that is your goal. There is also the sector you choose.

A separate analysis of census data on occupations showed that one in eight lawyers, for example, are in the 1 percent — unless they work for a Wall Street firm, when their chances increase to one in three. Among chief executives, fewer than one in five rank among the 1 percent, but their chances increase if the company produces medical supplies (one in four) or drugs (two in five). Hollywood writers? One in nine are 1 percenters. Television or radio writers? One in 14. Newspaper writers and editors? One in 62.

Is there enough smoke for ya?

What bonehead is trying to point out is that the ‘super rich’ actually comprise considerably less than ‘one percent’ of the population.

So much so that some people who qualify for the top percentage are actually ‘working stiffs.’

Which is to say (shamefully) that the gulf between the very rich and the rest of us is wider than the current 99% vs. the one percent the OWS movement has popularized.

Sadly, the bottom of the top dectile (top 20%) scrapes the upper edge of the federal poverty guidelines!

Just to give you an idea of how badly ‘out of whack’ things have become.

More disturbingly, we remain in no position to do anything about it…so we must watch in horror as our civilization is subjected to the mindless repetition of the ‘smash and grab’ tactics that passes for commerce these days.

Understand, good citizen, this will continue until YOU get up off the sidelines and put a stop to it.

I think I have provided a plethora of information regarding what COULD happen if you continue to ‘sit on your hands’.

You don’t need me to tell you that every day of inaction brings us that much closer to Banana Republicdom.

A place where if you don’t work you don’t eat and there are no jobs…so you will have to steal your food or attempt to kill it on your own…and those rodents are tougher to kill than your Kitty cat makes it look…

But you might also notice that Fluffy doesn’t eat what she/he kills…and it’s probably not a good idea for you to do it either.

But you won’t have a choice if you let this continue, and your ‘elected representatives’ aren’t about to put a stop to it if you fail to force their hand!

It’s easier for them to take the money and look the other way.

More interestingly, we only ‘used to’ have laws against such things…now we don’t.

It will take some getting used to the idea that we DON’T have a legal system anymore.

We have made the inevitable leap from the rule of law to its polar opposite, the rule of man.

And has been proven repeatedly in the past, an unjust society cannot stand. No one is eager to defend injustice.

Those who benefit from injustice feign to draw attention to what they do because they fear retribution. Injustice is acceptable only as long as it remains hidden. Once the victims start to mount up, suddenly, nobody knows nothing.

Well, good citizen, we have us a whole pile of victims due to the injustice of ‘globalization’.

Here the ‘owners of commerce’ steal your job while simultaneously turning you into a ‘captive customer’ for products you used to produce for yourself!

But this is what happens when you allow an individual to ‘own’ (for their own personal profit that which we all need to live.)

We are left with a stark choice, good citizen. Either we put an end to ‘personal income streams’ or kill off the surplus population.

Solution A is outlined in A Simple Plan…and solution B is ‘unthinkable’ (unless you’re some sort of conservative douche bag!)

Did you hear what that Gasbag Gingrich said in South Carolina?

He’s gonna ‘teach the poor to ask for jobs!’

How clueless is this idiot? What jobs is he talking about? How fucked up is it that he doesn’t know the answer himself…like most politicians he has NO FUCKING CLUE how to go about solving the unemployment crisis (without setting off an international incident/world war!)

Because you KNOW if this butt-fucker is thrust upon us (by the corporate owned media) he’s gonna pretend there are ‘plenty of jobs’…(which will IMPLY the unemployed are simply ‘too lazy’ to ask for them.)

I am going to ask you, non-rhetorically, just how ‘angry’ that set of circumstances will make you?

Because it is, as matters currently stand, extremely unlikely that ANYONE will be elected come November…because we won’t be holding elections for some goofy reason or the other…

Elevated terrorist threat…pick one!

But that doesn’t mean Newt (or someone just like him) won’t emerge as our new, er, ‘appointed leader’.

What about it good citizen, if they suddenly announced an ‘emergency change of government’ what they fuck would you ‘do’ about it?

Same thing you always do, eh?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Crunch Time

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace, just in case you were wondering.

Not that you’d be able to tell this from the ‘reflective of nothing’ stock markets…which, most bizarrely, are ‘up’. Must have something to do with that ‘fatal myopia’ that nobody’s doing anything about.

Not only are they freakishly short-sighted but they have a nasty case of ‘tunnel vision’ to boot!

(If the lying corporate owned media is to be believed…but that’s a whole other can of worms, isn’t it.)

Under the category of read this one very carefully Mr. Panzer offers us this mind-bender.

The chief market strategist at U.S. Trust Bank of America Private Wealth Management warned against concluding that the relative outperformance of U.S. stocks last year and recent string of strong U.S. economic data mean the country’s equity markets are “decoupling” from the rest of the world.
 
The U.S. economy may be in decent shape — with strong manufacturing and record exports of more than US$2-trillion in 2011 — but the country is not isolated from what happens in Europe or the rest of the world, Mr. Quinlan said in a note to clients Friday.

“In our view, the ‘decoupling’ chatter is dangerous and misguided, since there are plenty of problems and challenges brewing overseas that will be directly or indirectly channeled back into U.S. financial markets,” he said.

You have to read the whole article to get the gist of it.

Perhaps I should have included the last paragraph of the article to show Mr. Panzer’s point…

But that’s ’fair use’ for you.

Which brings us to another, er, ‘interesting subject’ that I saw floating around the web today.

Apparently some nitwit thought it would be a good idea to submit legislation that essentially revokes our collective ‘freedom of speech’ by imposing Chinese style censorship on the Internet.

One can foresee the double whammy of a Constitutional challenge being slapped down by the Roberts court.

Worse, what do you suppose the odds are that the jellyfish currently in office will refuse to sign it?

Because you can easily see this the same way we in Massachusetts see the seatbelt law, it was voted down four times by a margin of greater than two to one…and we still ended up with a seatbelt law (and no definitive reduction in highway fatalities.)

And let’s not get started on the number of people killed or maimed by fucking ‘airbags’!

Did I mention our society is grossly mismanaged or that the nitwits in charge regularly use the Constitution for toilet paper?

So what are YOU gonna do about it?

Same thing you always do…nothing!

Because YOU’RE not supposed to ‘do’ anything about it…that’s someone else’s job!

And if those people aren’t doing their job then it’s someone else’s job to take care of that…and so on and so forth…until nothing gets done because that person is ‘too high up’ to be touched.

It’s not supposed to work that way but what are you gonna do?

The part that has me scratching my head is where do they keep digging up stooges and chumps to do their bidding? Surely these people must realize they are painting a huge bull’s-eye on themselves (and by extension, their families!)

When the hammer falls, it is going to crush the stooge of the moment flat…and then they’re gonna start hunting down the ones who went before, that should have had the hammer dropped on them…like the nitwit who drafted the legislation that nullifies the rule of law! (AND EVERYONE WHO VOTED IN FAVOR OF IT!)

Which is to opine that it is already ‘too late’ to start worrying if something you say or do is going to get you branded as an ‘Enemy of the State’.

Worse, good citizen, I’d say it’s worse to ‘walk on eggshells’. If somebody tries to stop you from speaking your mind, you should let that son of a bitch have it, right then and there!

This is the real issue good citizen, the stuff revolutions are made of; ‘Are you going to live on your knees or die on your feet?’

It’s crunch time my friends, tomorrow will be too late so you better make up your mind right now just whose side you’re on.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bunk

Greetings good citizen,

Monday holidays provide us with back to back Sundays, the markets are closed (here in the US.) The markets that are open elsewhere aren’t doing so well…which should surprise no one.

Considering our globalized form of capitalism is based on the ‘consumer society’, much was made recently in the corporate owned media over the ’strength’ of consumer sales over the holiday period.

Most of us scratched our heads, wondering what planet this impressive news was coming from. Most of us knew the ’year over year’ improvements cited by the media were the result of a significantly smaller field of retailers who captured more ’market share’ because their competitors had perished.

As evidenced in the following report:

No. 412: December Retail Sales, November Trade Balance January 13th, 2012
Make-or-Break Month for Retailers Was Flat-to-Minus,
Both Before and Likely After Adjustment for Inflation

Worse-Than-Expected Retail Sales and Trade Data Should Dampen 4th-Quarter GDP Growth Outlook 

What Mr. Williams reports is more in line with the average individual’s everyday experiences. Nobody’s ’bullshit alarm’ goes off when he tells us what we already know, taken as a whole, retail is down because people don’t have the money.

The boss decided to pay himself instead of paying the help, and the world is falling into its own cesspool because of it.

But for some bizarre reason, the corporate owned media doesn’t think you’re interested in learning this…

Or, shall we say, they report this all right but they don’t explain the implications in a way that the average individual will understand what is going on.

How ‘bad’ is this pay yourself first situation becoming?

Ilargi: Obviously, the two groups, those that take out loanshark payday loans to keep a roof over their head, and those that live paycheck to paycheck, overlap each other to a large extent.

Still, what makes it striking is the sheer number of people affected. One million people need emergency loans to keep their families in their homes, while six million households have nothing whatsoever saved for a rainy day.

If we put the average household size at 2.5 people, that means that, out of 60 million living in Britain, 2.5 million are on the verge of losing their homes, and 15 million, or 25% of the population, risk having to cut on their basic needs, food and heating, if they hit even the slightest speedbump.

My head spins somewhat when I try to reconcile this sort of loutish behavior and the admonishment that we must begin to make more concerted efforts in ‘good citizenship’ if we are to turn around the ‘moral decay’ that is destroying our civilization.

Does bonehead think they will stop if we ‘ask then nicely?’ (not Ilargi, some gemoke over on Jesse’s Café American!)

It staggers the mind to see someone accurately zero in on precisely what is wrong, then propose something totally impractical as a solution!

Nothing is going to change until some necks start getting stretched…and if they start stretching the wrong necks, it will be war.

Which is not to even remotely suggest that the guilty will go ‘quietly’.

But if the public perceives that, er, ‘underlings’ are being thrown under the bus in order to placate them…nobody is going to sit still for an obviously ‘superficial fix’.

Especially when nothing changes after the bloodbath.

And that’s the big danger, good citizen. They make a big production out of rounding up the ‘enemies of the state’, execute them and then claim it’s all over!

Which is to point out that it is a two part process, and the first step is to throw out the old process/system…completely.

Then you hunt down the guilty and bring them to Justice…

It is already obvious to us all that there can be no Justice under the old corrupt system.

So if they decide the round up comes first, watch out!

It’s just the criminals trying to cover their tracks.

And no good can come out of that.

I’m going to guess the Brit’s are not able to ‘live free’ like we Americans do and property laws vary considerably from place to place…because the last thing I’d do is take out a ‘payday loan’ to make the mortgage!

I have heard that throughout the Eurozone, property ownership isn’t as widespread as it is here in the US…so the dynamics of a society of renters would be considerably different than they would be for a society of owners…

Even foggier, it appears the global banking system got in trouble buying ‘collateralized’ US mortgage debt.

The ‘re-fi/heloc’ bonanza was, er, ‘restricted’ to the US housing markets.

Because…as I heard it, real estate is too expensive in Europe. Only a handful of people ‘own’, the rest ‘rent’…

Which would create an entirely different dynamic than we have here in the US.

Although the ‘big picture’ doesn’t change, the collapse of either will lead to the collapse of the whole shebang!

Because money is first and foremost…an ‘idea’.

An idea that most of us DON’T agree about…making the whole situation more than a little tenuous…

That said, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Pay!

Greetings good citizen,

I apologize for ‘slouching’ yesterday but it’s not like I charge for this, it’s a labor of love.

And speaking of love, yesterday was my wife’s twin, ‘twins’ birthday so I was out of pocket for their party.

Yes my wife is an identical twin and her twin had twins…but so did her baby sister…and the one thing my wife and I have in common is we both have twin sisters!

(So the answer to the question of “is her twin married to your twin?” is an emphatic no! despite such unions recently becoming legal here in Massachusetts, the issues of time travel and bigamy would still arise. Both of our twins were married to other people before my wife and I ever met.)

This can quickly get downright confusing so let’s abandon ‘Gegner trivia’ right here.

Um, let’s begin with Europe’s credit downgrades that happened late on Friday. Left to our already fried logic circuits is whether or not Mr. Market will interpret this as good news or bad?

The downgrades have already elicited the desired effect of renewed pledges of ‘austerity’ from the, er, ‘victims’…

But the question without answer here good citizen is How low can you go?

And we aren’t talking about the Limbo here, good citizen.

Strangle the government hard enough and, er, ‘essential services’ start falling off the table.

The title of this article is “Incredible teachers agree to keep teaching without pay.”

Naturally, it is the ‘bottom line’ that counts:

Not giving these students stability? Massive cuts in education funding by the state. Poverty—"More than 70 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches." Crumbling school buildings. And with teachers facing their own economic struggles, it's unclear how long they will be able to keep showing up every day having lost their already below-average paychecks, no matter how dedicated to their students they are. When the state abandons students, there's only so much individuals can do to mitigate the damage.

As we can see here, the bottom line tells us that this effort is probably ‘doomed from the start.

Again, good citizen, this article stops short of even speculating as to what will become of these products of a bankrupt school system?

What do you suppose the job prospects will be for kids who couldn’t complete their elementary school education thanks to the off-shoring ‘tax rebels’?

THIS is the ‘bottom line’ of globalization!

THIS is the ugly face of the growing ‘economic desert’ that NO ONE can survive in!

All so A FEW can be ‘rich’.

You have been cheated out of your civilization…so a few could be rich.

And now you will be forced to accept abject destitution for the fleeting ‘benefit’ of low ‘falling prices’.

You know as well as I that prices (as well as wages) CAN’T drop indefinitely…but that’s not what our overpaid CEO's tell us!

Yes good citizen, we find ourselves in a perilous time were too few are paid way too much for what they have no right to…because they ‘bought’ our courts…(fair and square, or so they’ll insist!)

May they keep insisting right up until we open the trap door beneath their feet…because treason is still treason.

And enriching yourself at the public’s expense is nothing but pure treason!

Government, like commerce, is badly broken good citizen…and the people who broke it see no reason to reverse the damage they’ve done.

They are also, er, ‘disinclined’ to stand trial for their crimes (unless they can do so in courts THEY control.)

Of course there would always be the ‘fear’ that their innocence might be reversed by another, er, ‘less biased’ court.

Thus is it my, er, ‘opinion’ that the mission objective would be to make it so that possibility never happens.

Although it is unclear how they intend to ‘protect’ themselves after civilization has been replaced with widespread barbarism?

Perhaps they think they’re ‘up to the job’…

But we digress and there’s a bigger issue at stake here good citizen.

Today it’s some out of they way county in Pennsylvania, tomorrow it WILL BE YOUR local school district!

During the, er, ‘Great Depression’ there were school systems that ‘cancelled’ entire school years because the funds to pay for the schools weren’t there.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that this problem isn’t confined to Pennsylvania or Jefferson county, Alabama!

Not only have ‘fees’ risen steadily over the past 16 years of ‘Republican rule’…(only those who can afford to pay will ‘get’) but ‘fund raisers’ for every conceivable contingency have become the rule rather than the exception!

What are you gonna do when this sort of thing happens to the school district your kids attend?

Move?

Who are you gonna sell your house to…and how long will it be before the town you move to finds itself in the exact same pickle?

I keep screaming ‘mismanagement’ but nobody is paying attention.

I will say again that NONE of this ‘needs to happen’.

The whole crisis is ‘contrived’ intended to ‘loot’ the banking system while killing off as much of the ‘surplus population’ as possible.

I suspect those responsible for setting this juggernaut in motion will live just long enough to regret it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Raising to De-Bait...

Greetings good citizen,

While Asian markets closed up considerably for the week, Europe and the ‘Western Hemisphere’ bled from the eye sockets today…although none of that bleeding is real or consequential.

Despite their best efforts it appears we have survived yet another week…but the fateful year of 2012 isn’t over yet…there’s 50 more weeks to go!

Then there’s the questionable wisdom of tempting fate on Friday the 13th

Although (fish that I can sometimes be) I rose to the bait and jumped into a curious fray:

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not , in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company. [which is still no excuse for its gross mismanagement!]

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Mr. Krugman is correct, the US is NOT a corporation so success in business (as relative as that can be) does not a successful president make.

We can take the (over) venerated (and recently departed) Mr. Jobs as an example.

In a move that many of his admirers call ‘genius’, he used a ‘contract manufacturer’ to actually produce Apple’s technological wonders…

By, er, ‘massive coincidence’ this very same contractor has been plagued with an abnormally high suicide rate.

Only ‘Jobs apologists’ deny a connection.

And, truly, it is ‘unfair’ to point at that single blemish and tar him as a ‘poor leader’, after all, he did make a handful of people fabulously wealthy! (And that alone has proven enough to win him a permanent spot among the ranks of ‘the saints of capitalism’!)

This points to a yawning, er, ‘character flaw’ in the American mythos, that ‘successful individualism’ is not only ‘enough’, but that it is enough for all!

The ‘failures’ of the countless millions (capitalist point of view) have resulted in the grinding poverty that is destroying our civilization today.

Do we really need men like Steve Jobs (or Mitt Romney, for that matter) running things when they both owe their ‘success’ (such as it is) to the disaster they have created?

Yes good citizen, that’s right, this mess is THEIR fault.

Although they would both be quick to point a finger at their ‘investors’ (who both would claim they did it all for!)

Nor is there any irony in the fact that both Mitt and Steve easily qualify as ‘one percenters’…but I don’t think either makes it into the more exclusive ‘one TENTH of one percent club’.

That’s where the ‘lions share’ of everything disappears into and it is from there that the tragic decisions are made that have destroyed the global economy.

Which presents the very frightening thought that this whack job is fucking with us just to prove he/she can!

Isn’t that how it goes good citizen, money talks and bullshit walks?

Then why is it so ‘inconceivable’ that the ‘money masters’ have a master that they all take orders from?

Even mobsters bow to a ‘pecking order’ (even if they dispute their own rank within the, er, ‘organization’.)

And how ironic is it that it is usually wealth that determines this pecking order rather than, er, ‘muscle’? (But that has more to do with cleverness being more ‘advantageous’ than strength…in most cases.)

Still, the question folds back upon itself, if not an ‘executive president’ then who(m)?

Well, we’re all partial to our own solutions and I’ll be the first to admit that I DID NOT make this one up…I merely ‘lifted’ it from the most long-lived society our species has ever known…the Native Americans.

we begin with the question: "What did it take to become the chief?"

Two prime requisites were strength AND wisdom. The tribe would not follow a weakling any more than it would (willingly) follow a moron.

But there was a second step…anyone up for the job had to ‘prove’ they were up to the task by accomplishing a variety of ‘tests’ designed to reveal their ‘character’.

Which is to point out there are a million ways to solve a problem but it is how you go about it that tells us ‘who you are’.

Um, it is the only ‘tele-play’ (pilot for a t.v. series) I’ve ever written and it finished in the top ten of the (only) writing competition I entered it in. (I haven’t bothered circulating it more widely due to the sensitive political nature of the material…which is to admit it would NEVER get a ‘green light’ under our decidedly corrupt socio-economic system. Contrary to popular belief, there is a considerable effort expended to maintain the fiction that what we have is ‘as good as it gets, which is really quite pathetic!)

Which is to say given the importance of this process to the nation, it is extremely likely that the event(s) would be televised…sort of ‘redefining’ reality TV.

It sort of goes without saying that if you fold like a cardboard box under a spotlight, it is, er, ‘unlikely’ you would make a satisfactory leader, considering every thing you do is public!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner