God's Will

Greetings good citizen,

If one thing has become abundantly clear it is that the whole Greek bailout thing is a charade! There is ‘no way in hell’ the Greeks can payback the money that was stolen from them to mask the effects of ‘Globalizing’ the Greek economy.

So what the fuck is this?

"It's important to remember that the stock market is not the U.S. economy, and the U.S. economy is not the stock market," said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist for the brokerage BTIG. "Most people are likely to say, 'Dow 13,000. So, where's my job?"

The consumer confidence reading of 70.8, while much stronger than the 63 that economists were expecting, is still far below the level of 90 that indicates a healthy economy. It was above 110 in mid-2007, before the recession.

Still, Greenhaus said, while 13,000 is just a round number, "it's a round number that's likely to make many [stupid] Americans feel better about the economy and the stock market. It's another sign that things are getting better."

Speaking of ‘useless data’, how about that ‘better than expected’ consumer confidence number?

Better than WHO expected? And compared to what? It has been FOUR fucking YEARS good citizen, by now the general public has adopted the attitude that the economy ‘is what it is’.

Still, this brings us to something we don’t kick around very often and that is the ‘faith-based’ nature of our current economic set-up.

What happens to these ‘faith based’ deals when the party with the ‘upper hand’ decides it no longer has to abide by its end of the deal (a deal made with people that were ready to lynch the dealer, oh so many decades ago?)

The one percenters aren’t ‘stupid’ (not in the traditional sense anyway.) They know they have returned to the point where their ‘predecessors’ were ‘almost’ put to death for their crimes.

What they remember is that this didn’t happen…and they are betting it will be the ultimate outcome this time around as well.

Failure to prosecute practically invites the criminals to repeat the crime! (and you just know their defense will run along the lines of ‘nobody did time/was executed for this the last time!’

Good lordy, lordy but they do have FAITH, good citizen!

(Most of them have put their ‘faith’ in the bought and paid for justice system and that they’ll never stand trial…and that might well be how it goes down. Which is NOT to infer that they {or their successors} will escape prosecution!)

Because the one percenters think nothing of ruining the prospects of entire generations if they stand to personally gain from it (thus do they condemn their own progeny.)

They like it when I use ‘big words’ because they think you’re too stupid to figure out that progeny means kids/offspring!

This is partly what I mean by ‘stupid in the traditional sense’ combine this with the illusion that they will ‘get away with it’ and we return to ‘stupid in the traditional sense’.

Self-delusion is no excuse, neither is ‘well, everybody else was doing it’ (because ‘everybody else’ is going to get prosecuted too!)

But I, once again, digress!

We WERE discussing the ‘faith based’ nature of the current arrangement.

Man has, throughout history, blamed his own, er, ‘failures/shortcomings’ on his favorite ‘whipping boy’.

Most of you know who that is but I’ll point directly to the ‘worlds greatest scapegoat’ for the literal among you, for he goes by many names and the most common of these is God.

Bobo fucks up BUT who does he point the finger of guilt at? God!

If Bobo cheats you out of your fair share, he covers his crime by telling you that it was ‘gods will’ that the collective ‘you’ were shortchanged, he had nothing to do with it!

He makes the decision NOT to install a safeguard and when the crisis arises from this willful neglect, who does he point the finger at?

His favorite Patsy, (the ever ready and conveniently mythical) ‘God!’

Your circumstances in life are ‘God’s fault’. If you have a problem with how you are treated, take it up with God, (in your prayers so the rest of the world won’t have to listen to your WHINING!)

If you are poor that is because it is ‘God’s will’ that you be poor…and what you keep missing is the fucking HUMBLE part!

Why can’t you people be HUMBLE while GOD kicks you in the teeth (repeatedly)?

I (your ‘god’) can’t stand the constant whining! How the hell am I supposed to stay rich AND pay YOU a living wage?

That would take a miracle and it’s not my department, it’s ‘God’s’!

Um, one more thing before we ‘wrap it up’ for another session.

Note how the article points out how the stock market ISN’T the US economy, YET the 1,400 BILLIONAIRES among are all rich because of their…what?

What do they have that the rest of us don’t?

FUCKING STOCKS!

So why is the fucking stock market rising while the global economy tanks?

One answer, good citizen…it’s our term for ‘illegal activity’…come on, good citizen, you know this one!

It’s a fucking CRIME!

We need to shut down Wall Street around the globe! (NOW!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

It's the economy (stupid!)

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘mixed’ this morning with the imaginary ‘cheaper there’ doing significantly better than the former bastion of manufacturing might, the West.

Who do we have to ‘thank’ for this catastrophic turn of events?

The ‘more for me’ capitalists, of course!

Naturally, THEY blame the failure of the ‘information economy’ to pick up the slack left by the older, production driven model!

But the ‘more for me’ crowd has always known that the Information Economy would leave A LOT of people on the outside looking in.

I mean, spying on the civilian population doesn’t generate wall to wall profits…(in case you were wondering what the ‘information economy’ actually involved.)

To put if bluntly, the Information Economy is tied directly to the ‘security state’…in a world woefully lacking in external enemies you don’t need to wonder too hard as to whom the ‘target’ of all of this watchfulness actually is.

It is YOU, good citizen!

Like the proverbial ‘frog in a pot’ they have put you on the stove to boil and they know they need to watch you because at some point you are bound to realize something is wrong and you’re likely to try to save your worthless ass…and that won’t do!

But (naturally) I digress.

Let us return to the matter at hand and that would be yesterday’s noted ‘acceleration’ of the destruction of our civilization, shall we?

We start with Today’s first disturbing headline

Check out the opening sentence!:

These are the best of times for the world’s most ravenous borrower, the United States of America.

A combination of unusual and unsustainable forces has pushed the cost of borrowing as low as it has ever been, so low that many investors effectively are paying to lend money to the government. [But not to worry, good citizen, it won’t last..despite it already being THREE YEARS!]

Investors buying five-year federal debt are accepting such low interest rates that inflation is on pace to reduce the value of their investments by more than 1 percent each year. Yet demand for United States Treasuries remains much greater than the supply. [Worse, good citizen, it is not so much that US Treasuries are such a ‘great investment’, it is obvious from this article they AREN’T, it is their ‘least worst’ status that makes them, er, ‘attractive’.]

The glut of cheap money has allowed the government to keep its annual deficits much smaller than it had expected, holding down the growth of the federal debt. [snip]

John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York, expects rates on 10-year Treasuries to reach 3.75 percent this year, up from about 2 percent now, as investors awaken from what he described as “extreme risk aversion.”

But he added that he didn’t understand why rates had remained low for this long.

Naturally, Mr. Ryding’s, er, ‘feigned puzzlement’ is right up there with ‘the check is in the mail and I love you!’

I mean seriously good citizen the very next article in the NY TIMES business section explains it all quite clearly!

A big drop in business spending on machinery and equipment helped pushed orders for long-lasting manufacturing goods down in January by the largest amount in three years.

Meanwhile, home prices fell in December for a fourth-consecutive month in most major American cities, as modest sales gains in the depressed housing market have yet to lift prices.

The Commerce Department said orders for durable goods — products that are expected to last at least three years — fell 4 percent in January compared with the month before.

Economics 101 good citizen, you don’t ‘borrow’ money if you can’t make a profit over and above the cost of borrowing it!

With a ‘tapped out’ customer base, why invest in new equipment, you don’t have enough (paying) customers to buy what you are producing now?

Most producers have idle equipment on their hands, sitting there becoming antiquated without ever being used! (so why buy new?)

Or we could return to one of my favorite ‘puzzles’…if you hit the lottery, what would YOU ‘do’ with the money?

Once upon a time is was as simple as a passbook savings account…now the ‘free 5%' doesn’t exist anymore!

Would you stick it in a bank vault as cash (and let inflation ‘steal it’?) This is the conundrum faced by today’s billionaires, paying the Treasury to ‘hold’ their money for them at least minimizes their losses.

Because there IS no place TO invest…which also explains why there are no JOBS in a world where CEO pay is tied to share prices (and the easiest way to pump up share price is by screwing the employees!)

Ironically, in this case causation and co-relation ARE related!

And what a wonderful world we have gained! One unfit to support any of us, made so, ironically enough, by those tasked with supporting us all!

Even a deaf-mute prosecutor could make an open and shut case with the facts already in evidence…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tanked!

Greetings good citizen, Happy Monday for whatever that’s worth. Let me kick off the new week with some news that should be obvious to you all, the destruction of our civilization is accelerating!

The ‘cracks’ created by our (criminal) government’s refusal to prosecute the guilty are widening significantly.

It won’t take much more for the whole edifice to crumble and fall.

Some of these ‘cracks’ are close and easy to see

Sentiment in the markets has been buoyed in recent weeks by a seeming calm in Europe’s debt crisis and a run of strong American economic data, particularly with regard to jobs.

One side effect of the positive economic news has been to put upward pressure on oil prices. Despite a modest retreat back below $109 a barrel Monday, the benchmark New York rate is trading far above where it was just a month ago. Last Friday, it hit $109.77 a barrel, its highest close since May 3. Crude has soared from $96 earlier this month.

“At this stage of the global economic cycle, with activity in many of the major advanced economies sluggish, a rise in oil prices threatens to intensify the recessionary prospects facing these economies while, at the same time, raising the headline rates of inflation,” said Neil MacKinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital.

Markets around the globe are bleeding from the eye sockets this morning…why do you suppose that is, good citizen?

Rising energy prices without a ‘co-responding’ rise in demand means supply is dwindling.

Don’t misinterpret, we are not currently in an ‘energy crisis’ nor will we be in one for a while yet, but it’s coming (and ‘traders’ won’t let a perfectly good crisis go to waste!)

While other cracks are obscured by the political agenda of others.

From Madrid to Madison, Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square, London student occupations to Occupy Wall Street, Mason has covered the uprisings of 2011, and he found some surprising similarities everywhere. Those similarities are the subject of his new book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere (Verso), which combines economic analysis, first-hand reporting, and a theoretical understanding of technology, sociology and history into a potent explanation of why 2011 was the year of the protester.

Sarah Jaffe: Tell us what's happening in Greece; you just returned from a reporting trip there.

Paul Mason: The bailout they did Monday night, I think, is designed to do two things: to put off the inevitable moment of Greek default, and to save the rest of Europe from the impact. That doesn't mean that Greece isn't going to slide very quickly into a social crisis—rather, it's already in a social crisis. In the book I document what it's like for the youth who are waking up to the sound of helicopters, moving homes every two or three days; it's like being in the French resistance.

for the workers it's going to get much worse. People have a misconception that it's all about the public sector, but for the Greek bailout to work, private sector wages have to fall 15 to 20 percent. The minimum wage has been slashed by 20 percent.

On my last reporting trip I went to a clinic that's run by the Greek equivalent of Doctors Without Borders. It's aimed at migrants who've fallen through their social security network, and have no healthcare. Now it's swamped by Greeks who've also fallen through the network.

To be honest good citizen, I didn’t read this article…mostly because this particular news outlet ‘mis-identified’ the original uprisings repeatedly by calling them a ‘cry for democracy’.

This is as ‘tone deaf’ as yesterday’s article which blatantly asserted that ‘most people’ involved with in the ‘underground economy’ were all ‘wannabes’.

What is the ‘correct’ answer, good citizen, it’s the economy, STUPID!

Local economies vary but taken as a whole the ‘global’ economy is tanking! (And the fuckheads running the show know it, so (simply) ‘protesting’ their iron grip on money and markets is nothing more than an exercise in futility.)

Worse, misinterpreting this as a ‘cry for freedom’ totally misses what these people actually want (and are willing to die for!) They want ‘control of their destiny!’

You don’t (and won’t) get that with ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you’ capitalism! (There simply isn’t enough ‘market share’ to facilitate ‘capitalist utopia’.)

The ‘existing system’ only ‘works’ for those who ‘own’ it.

Don’t ‘own’ a piece of the system, tough! (It’s not their problem, it’s YOURS!)

But that’s not the half of it, is it good citizen?

I just got solicited (again) for a campaign contribution to the DSCC.

Not particularly surprising. What is, er, ‘disturbing’ is how the ONLY ‘flavor’ on the menu this coming November is CONSERVATIVE!

Seems as though the only ‘option’ you’re gonna get this time around is picking what flavor of ‘crazy’ you want with your conservatism…

Oh, and I don’t need to tell you, [but I will anyway] good citizen, precisely who is responsible for tanking the global economy (for their own, personal, ‘fun & profit.’) [The fucking whacko conservatives!]

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Let me 'clarify' that the posers who call themselves 'Liberals' (but who are really conservative Libertarians!) are NO FUCKING BETTER!

Talk about 'stacking the deck'!

Worse, complaining about the (obvious) 'lack of choice' gets you labeled as a 'malcontent'!

Lottery System

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we are confronted with ‘if this is what a college degree does for you then who needs it’ conundrum. Interestingly enough, this particular article straddles the dubiousness of both economic AND journalism degrees!

First we look at what ‘Modern Economics’ endows its followers with then we can follow up with some ‘critical reading skills’ which is a skill journalism school supposedly endows its students with…

In their book “Freakonomics,” Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt explain, among other things, the odd economic behavior that guides many drug dealers. In one gang they described, the typical street-corner guy made less than minimum wage but still worked extremely hard in hopes of some day becoming one of the few wildly rich kingpins. This behavior isn’t isolated to illegal activity. There are a number of professions in which workers are paid, in part, with a figurative lottery ticket. The worker accepts a lower-paying job in exchange for a slim but real chance of a large, future payday. [snip]

Okay, wait a minute slim…why is Bobo on the corner, breaking the law in the first place?

Did he take a ‘wrong turn’ on the career path of life? Did his ‘gang affiliation’ somehow preclude him from seeking honest work? I mean just look at all of the ‘entry level positions’going begging today…all NONE of em!

What fucktard ‘overlooks’ is ‘less than minimum wage’ is still better then ‘no wage’.

And the official figures repeatedly omit those who don’t (and never have) collected unemployment because they never had a ‘legitimate wage’ job…

You gotta pay in BEFORE you can collect!

Another thing fucktard overlooks is that the criminal world mirrors the corporate world, it’s not what you know but who…the guy on the corner has no ‘illusions’ about his future, he’s just doing what he can to ‘get by’.

If there’s no ‘legitimate work’ then you have to take work on the other side of the fence, it’s all about survival…not ‘illusions of grandeur’ (as numbnuts would have you believe!)

Hollywood is, in some ways, the model lottery industry. For most companies in the business, it doesn’t make economic sense to, as Google does, put promising young applicants through a series of tests and then hire only the small number who pass. Instead, it’s cheaper for talent agencies and studios to hire a lot of young workers and run them through a few years of low-paying drudgery. (Actors are another story altogether. Many never get steady jobs in the first place.) This occupational centrifuge allows workers to effectively sort themselves out based on skill and drive. Over time, some will lose their commitment; others will realize that they don’t have the right talent set; others will find that they’re better at something else. [snip]

Here we see the ‘it’s just a means to an end’, pitch in play. Those who ‘really want it’ will persevere in the end. Which isn’t the case at all! Again it is not ‘what you know but who…’

This puts the lie to that other old capitalist bromide ‘there’s always room at the top!’ the fuck there is! The top keeps getting smaller all the time as the foolish bastards continue to undermine the public’s faith in all varieties of currency, and by extension, organizations!

These idiotic journalists keep making the capitalist arguments that simply DON’T EXIST!

These people aren’t ‘striving to get ahead’, they’re taking what’s offered because it’s the ONLY game in town…and let me tell you, ‘DESPERATION is a TERRIBLE thing!’

Trying to mask it as ‘clever business strategy’ is something the fucking Libertarians would come up with!

Now, many economists fear that the comfortable Plan B jobs are disappearing. Technology and cheaper goods from overseas have replaced many of the not-especially-creative professions. A tax accountant loses clients to TurboTax; many graphic designers have been replaced by Photoshop; and the small shopkeeper by Home Depot, Walmart or Duane Reade. Though a lottery economy is valuable to various industries, the thought of an entire lottery-based economy, in which a few people win big while the rest are forced to toil in an uncertain and not terribly remunerative dead-end labor pool, is unfair and politically scary. If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.

Ah me! What can you say in the face of such ‘profound stupidity?’ First they lay out the case against globalization and the global race to the bottom and then they propose we do absolutely nothing about it! Bemoaning the loss of ‘hardworking low wage strivers’ as a sort of self-inflicted wound!

Um, this article is titled something along the line of ‘Harvard Grads in the mailroom’ and the general thrust of the article runs along the idea that not EVERY Harvard Grad goes straight to Wall Street.

Well Bubba, what about the countless millions who DON”T FUCKING GO TO HARVARD?

What about them? (I’m going to guess people who can’t afford to pay $50,000 a semester tuition are NOT his concern…)

It’s not clear what today’s eager 23-year-old will do in 5 or 10 years when she decides that acting (or that accounting partnership) isn’t going to work out after all. The best advice may be to accept that economic success in America will come as much from the labor lottery as from hard work and tenacity. The Oscars make clear that there is only so much room at the top. In a lottery-based economy, you need some luck, too; now, perhaps, more than ever. People should be prepared to enter a few different lotteries, because the new Plan B is just going to be another long shot in a different field. The role model of our time should be an actress who was never nominated for an Oscar. Hedy Lamarr did well enough on the screen but, just in case, she spent her free time developing something called frequency-hopping spread-spectrum. It’s a wireless-communication technique still in use in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Not bad for a fallback.

I’d LIKE TO kick ‘fucktard’ in the nuts for providing us with only a single ‘success story’ but, in his defense, there probably aren’t a whole lot more.

So is it ‘the best advice’ that ‘economic success’ will come from what might be more straight-forwardly be labeled as ‘luck’ than hard work and tenacity?

Well, the ‘win some lose some’ philosophy only works during periods of social stability…and the current period is rapidly coming to an end on a global basis.

How sad is it good citizen that the Libertarians among us are willing to ‘roll the dice’ with the future of our species…

How frightening is it that the typical Libertarian also believe it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?

I once again ask you, quite candidly, is this the best our ‘education system’ can do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Back to Basics

Greetings good citizen,

Once again the weekend is here, markets closed up for the week in most places but as Jesse of Jesse’s crossroads café points out, the markets aren’t performing ‘as advertised’.

Um, today’s headlines tell us that Iran has no immediate nuclear ambitions (best to file this headline away for when they start pounding the war drums again!) but that is neither here nor there…(unless you’re aligned with AIPAC.)

Nope, it is the, er, ‘side effects’ of these troubling geo-political developments that concern us.

What ‘side effects’ are those good citizen?

How about paychecks you can’t live on ?

With 40% of US Households on some variety of government ‘food assistance program’ it’s high time somebody put a stop to the global race to the bottom!

But wait, it’s worse than just food stamps!:

The housing market remains a potent drag on the economy as home prices continue to slip, foreclosed homes fill some neighborhoods and millions of construction workers scramble for jobs.

But one group is sitting pretty: landlords.

Unlike home prices, rents have been rising, up 2.4 percent in January from a year earlier, according to recent data, not adjusted for inflation, released by the Labor Department. [snip]

Rent increases are greatest in places like San Francisco, Austin, Tex., and Boston, where technology companies in particular are hiring , as well as in New York City and the District of Columbia. But cities like Chicago and Seattle, where house prices are still declining quite sharply, have had rental increases, too.

Why are rents climbing while the housing markets tank?

Because you can’t ’legally’ live in the street!

So ’stick ’em up! Good citizen, pay or head for the local shelter…where they lock your ass in at 7:00 PM and throw your sorry ass out into the cold/wet/whatever at 7:00 AM (even if you have no place to go and all day to get there.)

Why?

Because most shelters are something else during the day.

The only thing the shelter does for you is provide a place to sleep where the cops won’t bother you (you’re on your own as far as the other refugees and getting some sleep are concerned!)

Guess who is driving rents up?

Same asshole who caused the collapse of the housing market, our ‘pal’ Flipper!

Flipper still has his old Tom Vu seminar materials and now he’s sure to be buying ‘income properties’ right! (He’s still unemployed so he also has nothing but time on his hands!)

(Except the dearth of homebuyers extends to renters as well!)

Yup, ol’ Flipper spends his days attending foreclosure auctions, finagling with the banks on the properties nobody bids enough on (because you know his bankrupt ass doesn’t have the $ 5,000 for a bidder number!)

Most banks tell him to fuck off but every once in a while he gets ‘lucky’ and his ‘pitch’ works! (He ‘reasons’ with the bank, let him try to turn the property around, it won’t cost them anything and they’re not getting anything for it now!)

The ‘plum’ Flipper dangles in front of the banker is the promise to maintain the property…a promise they both know Flipper will never keep!

If he can’t find a renter (to exploit) he’ll simply let his ‘doesn’t owe me anything’ property go to hell!

How has Flipper been keeping himself in coin during the downturn he created?

Stripping houses of their copper!

Remember, NOBODY has gone to jail for their part in this collapse. By now it must be obvious just how dangerous this situation is…

But what are we going to do, good citizen? We CAN’T AFFORD to lock the bums up because our bought and paid for politicians let the criminals EXPORT the TAX BASE!

WTF! Good citizen…sometimes you just have to ask yourself What The [Flaming] Fuck!

How fucked up is it that we can’t lock up the criminals because the criminals succeeded in exporting our tax base?

That last one is going to be a real croaker when municipalities have to start paring down their police departments!

Will we go back to the ‘Old West’ with a ‘Sheriff and a couple of deputies’ (usually the Sheriff’s drinking buddies)?

Law enforcement the way it used to be, when most Sheriffs were blind in one eye and couldn’t see anything out of the other?

Except when it came to the law abiding, then they didn’t miss a trick!

Sheriff was mighty quick to fine you for a busted taillight but that son of a bitch still hasn’t caught the bastard that raped your daughter (and your daughter told him who did it!)

Which is to ask, once again, Where is the smart?

With the most educated population the world has EVER seen, where the fuck is the ‘smart’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Slip of the tongue...

Greetings good citizen,

Um (and starting anything with ‘um’ is ALWAYS a bad sign) the markets are ‘up’ this morning, the Dow is 13,001 (and you knew the fuckers would get there eventually!) But (and it’s a mighty BIG but!) oil is $108 a barrel and gold is over $1,775 a fucking OUNCE (it doesn’t matter that there are only ten ‘Troy ounces’ in a ’Troy Pound’ nor is it particularly significant that there are only 33 gallons in a barrel of oil (as opposed to 55 gallons to a barrel of pretty much anything else!)

But it helps to know these things that only serve to muddy the waters and throw off the ignorant.

Which brings us where, good citizen?

Why to Mitt Romney’s campaign speech ‘gaffe’!

Let’s have a look while Mr. Krugman makes his point and I use the same comment to school you on an entirely different fact!

First, Mr. Krugman:

According to Michael Kinsley, a gaffe is when a politician accidently tells the truth. That’s certainly what happened to Mitt Romney on Tuesday, when in a rare moment of candor — and, in his case, such moments are really, really rare — he gave away the game.

Speaking in Michigan, Mr. Romney was asked about deficit reduction, and he absent-mindedly said something completely reasonable: “If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy.” A-ha. So he believes that cutting government spending hurts growth, other things equal.

The right’s ideology police were, predictably, aghast; the Club for Growth quickly denounced the statement as showing that Mr. Romney is “not a limited-government conservative.” On the contrary, insisted the club, “If we balanced the budget tomorrow on spending cuts alone, it would be fantastic for the economy.” And a Romney spokesman tried to walk back the remark, claiming, “The governor’s point was that simply slashing the budget, with no affirmative pro-growth policies, is insufficient to get the economy turned around.”

Weirdo that I am, I will side track for a moment and draw your attention to a word in Mr. Krugman’s first sentence and that word is ‘accidently’.

My ‘spellchecker’ has it flagged as being misspelled, it wants to see accidentally.

Is Mr. Krugman wrong? Did he, in fact, misspell ’accidently’?

Short answer is NO…we have Mr. Gates (and the global race to the bottom) to thank for this slaughter of American English!

But I digress! (knowing full well I am not the only one disgusted to find many common words listed as ‘not in [Microsoft’s] dictionary’)

How fucking sad is it good citizen that such an important utility was treated with the cavalier, “fuck it, ship it!” attitude?

Worse, that NOBODY even tried to fix it tells us something even more disturbing.

That American English is destined for the scrap heap of history…again, thanks to the fucking capitalists!

OKAY, FULL STOP AND SHIFT MENTAL GEARS [rant off!]

Mr. Krugman uses Mr. Romney’s ‘unintentional truthiness’ to label him a closet Keynesian…

I would take that exact same ‘slip’ (made by an individual in a position to know) and direct your attention to the much ignored ‘golden trough’ (Vonnegut was fond of this particular term!)

Ask the average bum, “where does money come from?” and you’ll get answers that vary from the bank to the printing press/stamping machine. You’ll even find a few clueless dolts that will answer God (and they wouldn’t be that far off.)

Again, I needn’t clarify for the average reader that the ‘Golden trough’ is a literary device and not a literal construct.

Money is a ’legal construct’, it is the law itself that provides our money ‘legitimacy’.

If the law said rocks were legal tender then we’d all be rich (for a few minutes anyway!)

But the point is, since money is a ‘legal construct’ our entire economy ‘flows’ from the government!

Which is to point out we have a situation on our hands just like the one with the famous outlaw when he was asked why he robbed banks?

His response was the same as Mr. Romney’s…because THAT’S WHERE THE MONEY IS!

It is also the ‘foundation’ upon which our entire civilization rests.

Properly managed, we would ALL be prosperous…but when 'the few' decide the rest of us ‘don’t deserve’ our share, we suddenly have the ‘unthinkable’; a ‘rich’ and a ‘poor’ ‘class’ (for want of a better term.)

How ironic is it that our ‘major malfunction’ is the ceaseless battle over who ‘deserves’ what, with one side trying to provide for the destitute while the other side creates them by cheating them out of what little they had?

Left to our imaginations good citizen is what our lives would be like without any government at all!

Because that’s the direction the criminal Libertarians are headed with their cursed ‘Tea Party’.

And again we find ourselves confronted with the question of which we will exhaust first, the rope or the light poles?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS, how ironic is it that I live on a street that has underground utilities?

PPS, Give this a read if you want a peak at how all of this 'window dressing' will play out!

Good News/Bad News

Greetings good citizen,

Like the old joke goes, I’ve got ‘good news’ and bad news…which would you like first?

Too bad, you’re getting the ‘good news’ first. The good news is we aren’t bankrupt after all! (I’ll hit you with the ‘bad news’ after the commentary.)

I worked with several MMTers [Modern Monetary Theorists] after the financial crisis, especially Auerback, and met with plenty of scoffs, despite the fact that the renowned Galbraith was a key adherent. When I published a piece on the deficit in the Huffington Post which featured the insights of several MMTers, I received more mail than I've ever gotten on a single article -- most of it hostile (See: The Deficit: Nine Myths We Can't Afford). The majority of the liberals and 'progressives' I spoke to about MMT could not begin to consider an approach than upturned so much of what they knew to be "true" about the economy -- despite the fact that much of that "truth" had been handed to them by neoliberals.

Establishment types told me the theory was "too out there" and "too controversial." But to me, "out there" and "controversial" was just what we needed to shake up a field that was mired in dangerous mythology and flawed thinking. Gradually, MMTers became part of a vibrant economic conversation on the websites bold enough to publish their work (New Deal 2.0, a blog I founded in 2009, was at one time such a venue). Recently, I've been proud to introduce Auerback to a new and receptive audience at AlterNet. Coming soon: economist Stephanie Kelton of UMKC will be explaining the theory in a feature article for AlterNet.

In the mean time, here's a look at what people are saying.
From the Washington Post:

"In contrast to “deficit hawks” who want spending cuts and revenue increases now in order to temper the deficit, and “deficit doves” who want to hold off on austerity measures until the economy has recovered, Galbraith is a deficit owl. Owls certainly don’t think we need to balance the budget soon. Indeed, they don’t concede we need to balance it at all. Owls see government spending that leads to deficits as integral to economic growth, even in good times.

The ‘bad news’ good citizen is something I have been ranting about for years, we are SERIOUSLY ‘mismanaged’!

Not to let the MMT’ ers off the hook so easily. Balancing the books still ‘matters’

It is generally ‘true’ that ‘deficits don’t matter’ EXCEPT when they indicate the mal-distribution of funds at the expense of the larger economy!

The ‘bumper crop’ of billionaires generated by the totally fictional stock markets is just such an indicator!

My only ‘gripe’ with Modern Monetary Theory is it omits the single most critical feature money has always lacked… ‘intangibility’.

In this respect I will back track a bit and remind you that despite what the corporate owned media says, we haven’t been suffering a ‘monetary crisis’. The crisis (as always) has been a ‘legal’ one (compounded by an abysmal failure to prosecute!)

But wait, good citizen, the criminals haven’t stopped!

This economy is over-regulated, intended to insulate insiders from competition and deeply resistant to change. Though Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, often harangues countries like Spain, Italy and Greece to become more competitive, the German economy features some of the same flaws that they do, including protected professions and zoning laws that favor existing businesses over new ones.

“Germany has what I would call a dual economy,” said Andreas Wörgötter, a senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.
“On one side, we have this very dynamic, innovative, competitive and refreshingly unsubsidized export sector,” he said. “On the other side, there is a much less glamorous services sector which depends on barriers to entry, subsidies and not developing and reaching out for new activities.”

And they won’t stop until there are only a handful of companies and those few control 99% of the market share…which is to (correctly) point out that ’capitalism’ is NOT about ’competition’ or choice, it is about grabbing as much market share as you can, any way you can…and if you destroy the global economy in the process…tough!

Capitalism ever and always results in Monopoly.

But you knew that…just like you’ve always known that ALL money is funny, especially gold!

But (like most of us) you play the hand you’re dealt.

I’d opine that most of us got a pretty shitty deal (although the ones who want us dead don’t think it was shitty enough!) but not to fear, they’re working on it.

And what are they working on? They’re working on giving your kids an even shittier deal than you got!

This is why history is full of ‘revolutions’ ( followed closely by largely undocumented ‘counter-revolutions’) It’s like the Rats among us know they have to let us win a few if they want to keep milking the system (with impunity) like they always have!

Thus A Simple Plan (which is Rat Proof!) although it could fail if ‘mis-managed’ badly enough and failure at the top is endemic…it even happens to the Rats!

(How fucking sad is it good citizen that coups among rats usually tend to clean things up for a while just like honest revolutions do?)

Sadly, the ‘grace period’ is often seriously short-lived (like don’t blink or you’ll miss it short!)

Which is why a change in leadership is NEVER enough. Methodology must ‘evolve’ too!

Then there’s the ‘vigilance thing’…ironically the rats are always on top of disturbances/challenges to their rule (and the most successful ones deal brutally with dissent.)

But you can’t let a little thing like difficulty stop you.

(Hell, these days you eat a pound of ‘difficult’ before breakfast!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Save Me!

Greetings good citizen,

After crowing about how close they were to 13,000 yesterday the traders on Wall Street apparently lost interest (or were taken aback by the negative commentary {OTHER THAN MINE} that the short hop to 13,000 would take…)

Anyway, markets are down slightly this morning on news that the latest Greek bailout does absolutely zero for the Greek economy (which is crashing and burning!)

Naked Capitalism is reporting that Greek tax collectors have been put under the gun to step up their game! They are being told they need to collect 200% more than last year!

Depending on how you read it, it appears that NONE of the, er, ‘arrears’ collected will go to the Greek government, it is all slated to head into a trust for Greece’s creditors.

Left to our imaginations is the incentive the Greek people will have to pony up for these increased taxes while their garbage piles up on the curb, uncollected.

Um, this variety of financial ‘stick ‘em up’ constitutes precisely the kind of fiscal mismanagement that politicians must be held accountable for!

After all, these aren’t the debts of the people Greece, this mess was caused by the Greek central bank!

This is ‘government debt’ that Greece’s central bank ran up…just like Iceland.

This has fraud written all over it and the world’s corporate owned media remains mute…

Does anyone wonder why?

Which brings us to today’s first offering A lie so huge it begs credibility!

Have Americans turned over a new leaf since last year by saving more money versus incurring more credit card debt? The short answer is no.

Bankrate's February survey, just more than half, or 54 percent, of Americans said they have more money in emergency savings than in credit card debt. This compares to 52 percent last year. One in 4 Americans has more credit card debt than emergency savings, up a smidgen from 23 percent last year.

And this year, 16 percent of survey respondents said they have neither credit card debt nor emergency savings. "This means they're only one unplanned expense away from having high-cost debt," says Greg McBride, CFA, Bankrate's senior financial analyst.
"Those most likely to have more in emergency savings than credit card debt are households with incomes of $75,000 or more, college grads and retirees," says McBride. And parents are most likely to have more credit card debt than emergency savings.

Let’s start with the 54% figure, shall we?

What we aren’t told is how many people were ‘sampled’ (It takes 4,000 respondents to create even a 5% margin of error when compared to the total US population, as this article attempts to do!)

If we were to be, er, ‘open minded’ about this we could speculate on the number of people who even have (genuine) credit cards (that provide them instant loans rather than being ‘pre-paid’ which is a horse of another color entirely! Then there are debit cards issued/backed by a credit card company, they have the logo but it’s still YOUR money you are spending!)

So, given the shear magnitude of the ‘credit crisis’, how many people (below the top dectile in the income distribution) even have credit cards? [that 20% that is responsible for 80% of the spending in our {imported} ‘consumer economy’.]

From the looks of the data, ONLY people with savings accounts were polled, providing us with an extremely lopsided picture! But we don’t know the details…making this rather ‘up-beat’ report next to worthless.

Which sort of brings us to our second offering

Thirty years of slashing corporate taxes and what has it gotten us? Yet Bobo wants to, you guessed it, slash the corporate tax rate!

Guess what good citizen, Bobo thinks YOU are STUPID!:

WASHINGTON — President Obama will ask Congress to scrub the corporate tax code of dozens of loopholes and subsidies to reduce the top rate to 28 percent, down from 35 percent, while giving preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama also would establish a minimum tax on multinational corporations’ foreign earnings, the official said, to discourage “accounting games to shift profits abroad” or actual relocation of production overseas. [Somehow this provision will curiously ‘disappear’ while in either house of Congress before it is submitted for signing…just like the ‘public option’ of the final healthcare bill!]

With the framework for changes that the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, will outline on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will enter an election-year debate with Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race who seek even lower taxes for businesses. But an overhaul of the corporate code is unlikely this year, given that political backdrop and the complexity of an undertaking that would generate a lobbying frenzy as businesses vie to defend old tax breaks or win new ones.

This presidential election cycle has taken on a very surreal quality considering the ONLY candidates for the nation’s top office are ALL CONSERVATIVE!

What the flaming fuck, good citizen!

This truly begs the question of why bother with holding elections if there is only one flavor on the menu?

Do we re-elect the current milque-toast (and pray he doesn’t fuck things up worse than they already are) or do we give one of the other ‘whack-jobs’ running a ‘mandate’ to remake the nation to their (campaign sponsors) liking?

Oil is nearly $106 a barrel and gold spiked up $25 yesterday, which could be construed as a mini ‘flight to safety’…

But there is no ‘safety’ in a world where ALL money is ‘funny’ (especially gold!)

Like the stock market, gold has zero ‘basis in reality’. If you want to get DEAD, buy gold!

The opposite is also true, the ‘gold nuts’ will kill you for your wedding band so you’d best lock that up if you want to hold onto it too!

Um, in case you were wondering, the destruction of our (global) civilization is proceeding apace!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'We' (re-defined)

Greetings good citizen,

In a shattered world with a hopelessly broken economy, the dream weavers are shamelessly celebrating the Dow’s return to the 13,000 point level.

How this relates to the real world is incomprehensible to the typical non-psychotic. You have to be bonkers to believe the Dow IS at 13,000!

But that isn’t nearly as disturbing as this latest ‘re-definition’ of the word ‘we’ that confounds us:

He said rhetoric about the American Dream has been featured during this election cycle more than in decades, which he attributed to the tough times the nation has been suffering. "It's pretty basic stuff (Obama) talks about and I think as it turns out that's pretty much where the dream is right now," Ford said. "We can say the dream might have been lowered a little bit in terms of its aspiration but the aspiration is still there, and it's always there."

Some polling suggests that, despite voters' continued unhappiness with the economy and Obama's handling of it, the president may be convincing Americans he's on their side. A recent CBS/New York Times poll shows people view Obama as the candidate who best understands the needs and problems of "people like you," and see his policies as more apt than those of the GOP candidates to favor the middle class or the poor.

Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod said "the viability of the middle class is the central economic challenge of our time, so I think that this is very essential in terms of this election." "He's been talking about this for years, that there are certain things that are pillars of a middle-class life, and he's been very focused on those things and addressing them as president," Axelrod said.

How fucking sad is it good citizen that the only time any candidate even mentions the poor it is relationship to caring ‘more’ about them than the opposition does.

Although one can’t help but wonder if somebody researching useless facts glanced at the polling data and (wrongly) figured out that the ‘majority’ of voters were 'middle class.'

Which is to point out, guess what boo-boo, there are ‘poor people’ living in/near ‘rich’ neighborhoods/voting districts!

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the LAST THREE ELECTIONS have centered on ‘The Middle Class’…like there were only two, the rich, and the middle…nobody gives a fuck about the ‘working poor’ (although they make up the bulk of the population!)

Naturally, this brings us full circle to another, er, ‘common misperception’. The working poor are very likely to ‘mis-identify’ themselves as ‘Lower to Middle’ ‘middle class’.

Which brings us to yet another conundrum of why people ‘supposedly’ vote against their own best interests?

And the, er, ‘unfortunate answer’ to that question is they were ‘mislead’ by what we commonly refer to as ‘political speak’.

This is why the (near) complete absence of both the working class and the poor from our national conversation is so disturbing to me.

It also sends a rather clear message about the future of this burgeoning Banana Republic…

Such as the message we see repeated here

Symons, fresh out of college, entered this brave new world thinking she'd do pretty much what her parents' generation did: Work for just one or two companies over about 45 years before bidding farewell to co-workers at a retirement party and heading off into her sunset years with a pension.

Forty years into that run, the 60-year-old communications specialist for a Wisconsin-based insurance company has worked more than a half-dozen jobs. She's been laid off, downsized and seen the pension disappear with only a few thousand dollars accrued when it was frozen.

So, five years from the age when people once retired, she laughs when she describes her future plans. "I'll probably just work until I drop," she says, a sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor, by numerous members of her age group.

Unlike Ms Symons, I do not have a college degree (but most of my contemporaries in the rapidly shrinking world of ‘non-communist manufacturing’ do either!)

If I held my resume to my chin it would hit the floor!

How sad is it that I’ve had more jobs than my fifty-five years and more often than not I have worked two jobs (adding to the heap!)

Let’s not forget that I have been unemployed for the last year. (as our Ms. Symons comments toward the end of the article, the older you get, the harder it gets to find another ‘situation’.

So we return full circle to the plan of most over fifty workers…’the work til you drop’ plan.

It’s not that they don’t intend to draw their social security, they do! It is just that lately Social Security has been sending them ‘statement of account’ with ‘estimates’ of what they can expect come retirement time…

And most people have already determined that they can’t live on what (for most of them) is the ONLY income they will have (until the government collapses…and it will!)

Yup, most have been ‘churned' out of formerly good paying positions long before they became vested in the company pension plan. Then their 401k’s were, er, ’plundered’ by opportunistic fund managers who squandered their life savings on the alphabet soup of risky bets connected to ’securitized mortgage obligations’.

Funny how NOBODY HAS BEEN prosecuted for these brazen thefts…which isn’t to say that NOBODY WILL BE.

Because retribution is coming…and the hundreds of millions that have been ’screwed’ out of their future economic security will do whatever it takes to insure it doesn’t happen again.

Which brings us full circle to A Simple Plan.

Let’s briefly revisit the last presidential campaign and examine the, er, ‘mis-interpretation’ of the term ‘Yes WE can’…

You now know THAT ‘we’ didn’t include YOU (and by extension, yours.)

How much longer can our civilization survive these 'politics of division?'

I will once again leave you to ’connect the dots’, ( YOUR future depends on it!)

A Simple Plan, one people, *one purpose!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(* to provide for the needs of ALL humanity, not just a selfish few!)

Defending OWS

Greetings good citizen,

It appears as though the ‘meme for the day’ is Class War! Um, what has me scratching my head is the question of why are they just getting around to this now?

And now I have to clarify, politicians (especially conservative politicians) defending their broadly unpopular positions, use ‘class war’ as a defense for their useless tax cuts for the rich.

In this respect we’ve been hearing about ‘class war’ for a long time. It has only been recently, when globalization produced its inevitable results that ‘class war’ in its more practical context came into play.

Like our third consecutive ‘jobless recovery’…

Kinda hard to hide the fact that the labor force is smaller today than it was before the last, er, ‘downturn’.

But no!

Instead of an intelligent discussion about the new global monopolists, we get this useless garbage centered on OWS:

It’s a double-edged sword: the popular recognition nods to Occupy’s resonance, but also wields capitalism’s sharpest tool – recuperation. The risk is that Occupy stops providing a context of unrest and just blends in to the current cultural context as is. If Occupy actions and ideas don’t continue to surprise and challenge people, public awareness of the movement becomes no more potent than knowledge of the latest Ryan Gosling meme. “30 Rock’s” recognition of a coming insurrection might be a self-denying prophecy: What sort of political upheaval is preempted by a Thursday night comedy interspersed with commercials?

That said, a call for a nationwide general strike on May 1 has come out of numerous Occupy groups — and the debates around this are as unwieldy, confusing and full of potential as were the conversations leading up to Occupy Wall Street’s public inception on Sept. 17 in downtown Manhattan. No one knew what an occupation of Wall Street could look like or mean; same is true of May Day 2012. How will TV writers, or any writers, for that matter, get their heads around this one?

In last night’s “30 Rock,” Jack Donaghy warns, “There’s a war going on out there and you’re going to have to pick a side.” Gladly, there’s a side, enraged by the current context and weary of capitalist recuperation, that will never be comfortable as the punch line of an NBC comedy joke. 

If this is as ‘bold’ as the alternative press is going to get then we are (still) in a heap of trouble, partner!

Isn’t the biggest problem facing our crumbling society the, er, ‘unwillingness’ of anybody to stand up and speak out?

How sad is it good citizen that we have remained silent so long that speaking out now threatens one’s life?

Sadder still, the US isn’t the only place to fall under the dark pall of ‘political correctness’.

Weird how some think it was ‘about time’ that the US ‘caught up’ with the more repressed ‘rest of the world’.

Unfortunately the only ones who think that way are the people responsible for/are cool with instituting the ‘reign of fear’ we currently live under.

Had to add the ‘cool with’ group in there. Facts be damned, these people will NO LONGER TOLERATE other people ‘criticizing’ THEIR nation! (No matter how much it deserves it…)

And this is a ‘form of’ class war that has been going on for centuries!

So which ‘class war’ are we in danger of collapsing into today, good citizen?

Will it be OWS’s '>One Percent vs. the Ninety-nine percent' or 'the Conservatives vs. the (invisible) Liberals?'

(You can believe me when I tell you that the One Percent is pushing for a Liberal/Conservative face-off, the ‘useful idiots’ evens things up considerably!)

So who are these ‘progressives’ and just what the fuck are they selling?

Well, it looks to me that these deceivers are actually selling the ‘status quo’.

They (after 230 years of failure) want you to believe the ballot box can be used to rein in an out of control ruling body.

(Despite the electoral process being completely ‘money driven’!)

Which is to ask are these people STUPID or do they just think YOU ARE?

Sure looks like they are playing the rest of us for chumps!

You know how it goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!

So, who’s zooming who on the subject of class war?

Perhaps more interesting is the very real threat of class war/ worker uprising during the more recent than you care to think about Great Depression.

Of course, the battle lines have shifted almost completely.

Now instead of being overworked, there’s no work…which ironically leaves you in the exact same place, if you can’t live on what the chiseler pays you, it’s not his problem, it’s yours!

Either way he bleeds YOU dry…and there isn’t a thing you can do about it!

Seems we often return to this more than a little ‘helpless’ juncture.

And we will keep on returning to it UNTIL we place the laws we ALL must live under BEYOND THE REACH of the ‘self-interested’.

Anarchy (rules WITHOUT rulers) = Liberty for all!

(How ironic is it that is it the ‘for all’ part of that statement that ‘Libertarians’ have a fucking problem with? They only want Liberty for themselves, the rest of us can go twist in the wind!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Savages!

Greetings good citizen,

I stumbled upon this article yesterday and it disturbed me deeply.

While the left has long been divided into ‘activists and pacifists’

The article goes on to claim:

have occasioned much recent comment. Their behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react, like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals. In those debates where the moderators did not enforce decorum, these right-wingers, the Republican base, behaved with a single lack of dignity. For a group that displays its supposed pro-life credentials like a neon sign, the biggest applause lines resulted from their hearing about executions or the prospect of someone dying without health insurance.

Who are these people and what motivates them? To answer, one must leave the field of conventional political theory and enter the realm of psychopathology. Three books may serve as field guides to the farther shores of American politics and the netherworld of the true believer.

Most estimates calculate the percentage of Republican voters who are religious fundamentalists at around 40 percent; in some key political contests, such as the Iowa caucuses, the percentage is closer to 60. Because of their social cohesion, ease of political mobilization and high election turnout, fundamentalists have political weight even beyond their raw numbers. An understanding of their leaders, infrastructure and political goals is warranted. Max Blumenthal has done the work in his book "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party." Blumenthal investigates politicized fundamentalism and provides capsule bios of such movement luminaries as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, John Hagee and Ted Haggard. The reader will conclude that these authority figures and the flocks they command are driven by a binary, Manichean vision of life and a hunger for conflict. Their minds appear to have no more give and take than that of a terrier staring down a rat hole.

The, er, ‘savage’, this inner beast that this article refers to resides in ALL of us!

You know he’s/she’s in there, it even pokes its head out and makes its presence known during ’tense’ social situations. (Unfortunately, most of us are arrested shortly afterwards…)

So, what is the writer telling us? That conservatives are ‘okay’, it is merely, er, ‘unfortunate’ that the savage inside us all finds conservatism ‘more appealing’?

No, it’s not that at all (even though that’s how it reads…)

Last time this force was ‘used’ it was by the ‘so-called liberals’ when they took the ‘take no prisoners’ stance in the fight for workers rights!

The ‘conservatives’ have marshaled these beasts to their cause by pounding the war drums and attacking mythical ‘big government’.

How ironic is it that it is mismanagement, often by the same people who are calling for less government, that is at the root of the problem?

Not only do they say they don’t know how to govern but they turn around and prove it!

Could this be ‘the key’ to the oh so may ‘lost elections’ is in fact the appeal to the ‘action oriented’ voter.

Understand good citizen, there’s a damn good reason why the media doesn’t report the actual carnage of the wars they wage!

The ONLY thing keeping ‘the beast’ in check is the reality of what happens when that beast is released.

Remove the killing and the dying…bring the wounded forward and treat them like heroes (while ‘the eye that never blinks’ is on them, then cast ‘em away and forget ‘em! The moment the fanfare dies down.)

Why do you suppose the suicide rate is so high in this mostly senseless ‘Police action’?

This isn’t ‘war’…this is an ‘occupation’, our soldiers are there to ensure the safety of US commerce (and by extension, those who own that commerce!)

Worse (and you know me good citizen, there’s always a ‘downside’…even to horrendous behavior!)

The (mock) ‘war’ serves to filter out those who would protect innocent civilians rather than follow orders.

Because that has always been the big obstacle to a military coup.

You can’t pull off a coup if your soldiers find their orders ‘morally repugnant’.

Well, how do you find soldiers who are willing to obey orders without question?

You run ‘em through a ‘filter’.

The ones that don’t break under the pressure are your kind of sociopaths!

They’re the ‘never compromise, never surrender’ no minds.

Because regardless of the ‘cause’ (and these idiots don’t really care) they WILL ‘fight to the death’ for either side!

So ‘the right’ is currently ‘appealing’ to these simple minded Lemmings who follow their leader (pretty much anywhere and its especially true when they are kept ignorant of the ‘consequences of their actions.’

How pathetic is it good citizen that when one of these savage beasts is confronted with the carnage they are responsible for, they, quite honestly, claim ignorance.

They literally are ‘too stupid’ to figure it out for themselves.

Does this make the blood-lusty millions ‘bad’?

Not necessarily…what it really illustrates is the EXTREME DANGER there is in hiding the end results of their unbridled aggression from them.

Once they ‘see’ what their aggression results in, they ‘smarten up’.

So…is it conservatism we need to fear (it is) or is it the conservative’s ‘shameless pandering to the savages among us' that needs to be combated?

Thanks for letting me into your head,

Gegner

PS. Once again the (lying) media IS the problem! This goes directly back to the (wealthier than ever) >One Percent!

Crunch (goes the global economy!)

Greetings good citizen,

Like the housing bubble, the mythical cheaper there, the driving force behind globalization has finally collapsed under it’s own logistical contradictions.

Besides, complete capture of just the top 20% of the market has proven ‘counter productive’. Driving the other 80 % out of the market place has only fermented open rebellion (especially in the ‘cheaper there’ itself!)

But while China’s industrial subsidies, trade policies, undervalued currency and lack of enforcement for intellectual property rights all remain sticking points for the United States, there is at least one area in which the playing field seems to be slowly leveling: the cheap labor that has made China’s factories nearly unbeatable is not so cheap anymore. China has experienced sporadic labor shortages, which in turn have driven up its once rock-bottom labor costs.

This trend is particularly evident in the weeks following China’s Spring Festival, or New Year, when more than 100 million rural migrants return to the countryside to spend the year’s biggest holiday with family. Coaxing those same migrants back into the urban work force has proven increasingly difficult.

This year has been no exception. Although nearly two weeks have passed since the Lantern Festival that officially marks the end of the 15-day holiday, cities across China are still facing a serious labor shortfall. In order to lure new workers and retain the old, some companies give employees sizable bonuses just for coming back to work, while others offer cash for every new employee they bring along with them. And in many areas, wage increases ranging from 10 to 30 percent have become the norm.

Funny how ‘time’ has played a factor here as well. China makes no bones about throwing you out into the cold after you turn thirty (because you can’t keep up with the kids!)

Which means their ‘hungry’ pool (of formerly communist) workers is exhausted.

The currently available pool KNOWS that THEY have the upper hand (the work HAS TO get done! Miss the JIT shipping date and there goes the profits!)

Worse, most of this shit CAN’T be shuffled (on a moments notice) to some other third world hell hole, the equipment and the raw materials required aren’t exactly ‘portable’…then there’s the ‘learning curve’. The machine does most of the work but the Monkey WATCHING the machine has to know what ‘proper operation’ looks like as well as being able to tell when the machine is fucking up!

Ironically, it was these factors that led the capitalists to start calling US workers ‘greedy’ (for wanting a wage above sustenance level!)

Which (naturally) brings us full circle to the fair days wages for a fair days work equation (that neither money nor capitalism has answered satisfactorily.)

The capitalist believes he’s lived up to his end of the bargain if the worker doesn’t starve to death, and the worker sees the employers ‘toys’ and lavish lifestyle and KNOWS who is REALLY paying for it all!

Understand Bubba, it takes a whole boatload of workers to make a single wealthy, er, ‘family unit’. (The loop isn’t closed until the trophy wife spits out a couple of kids to insure that the judge will award her ‘generous’ child support/alimony payments!)

So, to add insult to injury, the worker has to pay for the employer’s ‘mistakes’!

Well, the world of ‘tangible goods’ will always require knowledgable workers…who will continue to demand higher than sustenance wages.

Until they abandon their ’need for speed’ and allow workers to build some kind of life for themselves, the ‘cheaper there’ is officially ‘toast’!

What’s really gonna put a major kink in things will be the ‘sudden’ reassertion of longstanding ‘anti-trust laws’.

Few of you realize this but an ‘imported economy’ makes YOU a VERY ‘captive audience’.

Soon, local sources will start driving multi-national brands from the market place because Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register! (and you CAN’T BEAT FREE!)

Clever local operators will start beating the (real) greedy bastards at their own game!

Once again we see workers being blamed for increases in prices.

How ‘hollow’ is this claim when working US citizen is officially an ‘endangered species’?

It galls me to no end to see GE (ONCE the world’s largest manufacturer) using ‘made in the USA’ in its advertising!

Those heartless pricks laid off hundreds of thousands of US workers!

What the ‘average’ worker doesn’t know is our supposedly free markets are anything but!

They are contractually bound to buy from certain vendors, often regardless of price!

So the next time you go to the store and notice the price of (fill in the blank) has taken a stiff jump, it would behoove you to question the validity of the (often bogus) news item related to the increase.

Look at housing prices? Locally they’re still ‘sky-high’ yet in the next state (up) they are virtually ‘giving’ property away! (Because it has ALWAYS been an ‘economic desert’ up there!)

And, mind you, neither story is making the news.

Because the ‘truth’ is that we will soon be faced with overwhelming ‘dearth of buyers’ situation that will literally destroy current property values.

The entire region would go up for sale overnight as everyone hoped to lure ‘the greater fool’ into buying their place (at the current greatly inflated price!)

If you step back a couple of paces and mentally blend the ‘Global race to the bottom with Peak Oil’, maybe you will begin to appreciate why National Geographic has begun ‘profiling’ ‘Dooms-Day Preppers.’

Left to our imagination is what it means when the corporate owned media starts admitting ‘the cheaper there’ is no more?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

All the wrong incentives...

Greetings good citizen,

Some themes just keep popping up and today AlterNet is running a story on a topic I hammer on quite a bit, Are we REALLY as (and this is key) ‘evenly divided’ as the corporate owned media pretends we are?

Where Are We Really?

If most Americans don't really identify themselves on a left-right scale, and often hold complex and conflicted opinions on subjects that don't line up politically with the labels they choose, how do we figure out what people really think?

In a 2011 paper (PDF) on the polarization of Congress, Ferguson pointed out that it may well be a mistake to assume that people vote based on “hot-button” issues like abortion or gay rights. “Huge numbers of people holding hot-button attitudes continue to affiliate with the 'wrong' political party,” he noted. (This played out in California, when the referendum banning same-sex marriage passed at the same time Obama swept the state's presidential vote.) [snip]

(One piece of Florida's report that was interesting was that so-called conservative political affiliation strongly correlated with a large percentage of blue-collar workers in a state, but those self-identified conservatives “appear to be split along class and income lines when it comes to the issue of whether government should provide help for the poor.” He cited a survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that 57 percent of Republicans with family incomes of less than $30,000 said that government does not do enough for the poor. Unsurprisingly, the rich Republicans think the government is giving too much of their money away. Of course, Florida doesn't bother extrapolating this information to the idea that maybe conservatism as defined by Republican politicians simply isn't as popular as its reputation but that would be complicated.)

As I have pointed out repeatedly, only one in five voters ‘self-identify’ as Republican. This information comes from the ‘registered voter’ information people file when they (appropriately enough) ‘register’ to vote.

The ‘crux’ of my argument has been (and remains) it is MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a conservative to ‘win’ election, yet they do all the time and it’s usually a ‘squeaker’!

IF the ‘corporate owned media' can be trusted.

Understand, there is NO ‘independent verification’ of ANY election results and ‘poll workers’ are politically appointed!

Could this be part of the reason why we, in defiance of all logic, constantly see this sort of bullshit going on? (Mr. Krugman’s ‘Moochers against Welfare’ editorial from today’s NY Times…)

Left to our imagination is whether or not we live in a nation populated by the most highly educated but terminally STUPID people on the planet…

Or are we faced with the much more likely scenario of living in a society cursed with an ‘untrustworthy’ media? One that reports what it is paid to report while completely ignoring whatever is, er, detrimental/derogatory to the status quo?

Or is our society ‘insane’…trapped in a ‘self-destructive cycle’ of repeating the same behavior, over and over again, each time expecting a different result!

Which is to point out that if people ‘don’t know’ what happens when they vote conservative by now, chances are good to excellent they never will!

And, chances are (in for a penny, in for a pound) the corporate owned media will continue to curse us with corrupt politicians until our civilization collapses!

This goes far beyond Democrat and Republican…we have transitioned all the way to Criminal/Victim!

When the criminals make the laws, their victims have no place to hide…

And the only way to protect themselves is the take the law back into their own hands!

Which leads us to our final offering a story about what happens when ‘bad behavior’ is incentivized

As it happens, after a decade of Moscow’s investment, a trans-Siberian oil pipeline is scheduled for completion in this year’s third quarter. That will create opportunities for Russia to export petroleum more cheaply than its current railroad shipments to a Pacific port where it is then pumped into tankers for shipments to Japan and South Korea — two countries that, as strategic American allies, will be looking for substitutes to Iranian oil.

The new pipeline, called the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline, forks in Siberia so that oil can be sent either to China or to the coast, for export to other Asian customers. It will give Russian exporters the ability to easily exploit likely price differences between customers like China, if it continues as expected to buy Iranian oil, and Japan and South Korea, which probably will not.

“They could arbitrage between the two,” Mr. Mercer, the analyst, said of this Russian flexibility, “and it could play to their advantage.”

You have to be a ‘gray-beard’ like me to remember the gas lines of the mid-Seventies (fucking weird how ‘That Seventies Show’ totally ignores this reality.)

We weren’t ‘out of gas’ then and we aren’t out of gas now…but oil is over $102 a barrel just on rumors of an Iranian embargo.

So the question, good citizen, is ‘Are we REALLY that stupid?’ How long are we going to let these criminals keep getting away with this shit?

the 'wrong' party keeps winning (which is excellent for the > One Percent!) but the rest of us are getting, er, 'spanked'...when we should be the ones doing the spanking!

Just something to chew on as you get ready for what passes for your 'weekend'...

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shit that makes you go 'Hmmn'...

Greetings good citizen,

Once again our ‘investors’ seem to be stricken with ‘irrational exuberance’. The Dow is up over 100 points on news that the number of ‘new claims’ for unemployment dropped for the fifth week running.

So the logic goes, fewer lay-offs means the sky high unemployment rate will drop…the fact that people have been unemployed for almost two years and are finally exhausting their claims has nothing to do with this tragic misinterpretation of the data.

Using this same logic, what would the number of new claims dropping under 10,000 tell us? Nothing because it is impossible? (under the current system) or that there’s no way to know because social cohesion would collapse long before that happens…

Naturally it is not the first time the markets have made a big deal out of a largely meaningless statistic.

There is absolutely NO correlation between fewer lay-offs and more jobs.

None!

So why do some of the smartest people the world has ever known keep feeding us bullshit?

The housing market can best be summed up in one (albeit compound) word, over-built, yet we continue to get THIS tripe!

The consistent decline indicates that companies are laying off fewer workers and that hiring is picking up. When applications drop consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.

In January, the economy added a net 243,000 jobs, the most in nine months. And the unemployment rate dropped for the fifth-straight month, to 8.3 percent. The economy has added an average of 201,000 jobs a month for the last three months. [snip]

Construction began work on 508,000 single-family homes last month, a 1 percent drop from December and the first decline in four months. A big rise in volatile apartment construction helped offset the decline in single-family homes.

Still, the number of December single-family homes was revised up strongly to show builders started 513,000 homes, a 12 percent gain from November.

Once again we are compelled to ask ourselves are they STUPID or do they simply think we are?

It’s one of the two good citizen and I highly doubt they think it's them, so…

This brings us where, good citizen?

It brings us right back to a place you must be getting awfully sick of returning to.

It returns us to the ‘what are you gonna do about it’ spot, doesn’t it?

Well, what are you gonna do about it? Same thing you always do, I suppose, nuthin’

It’s just another ‘stick in your craw…' well, don’t look now boys and girls but it’s starting to look like a fucking forest in there!

You’d better do something about it quick or ‘somebody’ is gonna start tossing matches around in there!

Don’t want your craw catching on fire now, do ya?

If it was ‘generally right’ or only ‘kind of optimistic’, you could afford to let it slide but these are whoppers that downright dare you to call ‘em on it…and you don’t.

Every week it’s the same bullshit.

I guess the old conservative formula makes it necessary, ‘keep repeating until true’

The worrisome part here good citizen is IF they keep telling us the economy is improving (when we know for a fact it is not) then most of us won’t be prepared when it collapses.

Now I ask you good citizen, who ‘wins’ in that situation?

It sure as hell won’t be YOU!

WHEN the economy collapses a LOT of shit is going to be ‘abandoned in place’

Worse, the already corrupt beyond belief justice is ALREADY foreclosing on properties the owners HAVEN’T defaulted on!

The (guess who?) corporate owned media is treating this as a minor ‘boo-boo’, the sort of ‘mistake’ that could happen to anybody but there have been dozens of incidents!

Who is going to protect YOUR rights when the ‘new sheriff in town’ is on Blackwater’s payroll?

Well, you can already see where this is headed, it’s headed towards the big show-down out in the parking lot.

The one where the tough will be sorted out from the wannabes and the name of the game is, once again, winner take all (yeah, that includes yours!)

If you’ve got a problem with this arrangement, one of jug-head’s boys will give you a bullet in the vitals…and the problem goes away!

There’s only one word to describe what’s coming and that word is ‘grim’.

If you intend to come out of this with your hyde, you have to be the grimmest bastard on the face of the planet…

Now,like that cutesy cough drop commercial, let me see you ‘war face’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Work for Free!

Greetings good citizen,

The markets are once again enjoying a relatively ‘mellow’ day (which is mighty fucking amazing considering the global financial system is bankrupt…)

Er, the President’s ‘approval rating’ crept back up to 50% in a recent CBS/NY Times poll (among whom remains a closely guarded secret.)

Oh, and (most of) those who had a pension/retirement fund yesterday still have one today! (which, mind you, says absolutely nothing about the ‘performance’ of those funds…)

Now we can proceed, having shared three partial/relative ‘truths’ with my readership…such as it is.

Now it’s time for a walk on the stupid er, wild side!

You can’t make this shit up good citizen!

Senate Republicans Want to Force the Unemployed to Work For Free

Along with efforts to drug-test the unemployed and deny benefits to those without high school diplomas, Republicans now want to make "volunteer" work a requirement. February 12, 2012  |     Advertisement    In recent months, Florida and South Carolina have talked about forcing people to "volunteer" for their unemployment insurance benefits, only to be told it was against federal law. Now, Senate Republicans want to change federal law to allow states to pass such laws but to require all long-term unemployed people to "volunteer" 20 hours a week to continue receiving benefits, with an additional bill introduced by North Carolina's Richard Burr calling for them to spend 20 hours a week looking for work. Those requirements could be added to Republican efforts to allow drug testing requirements and to deny unemployment insurance to people who don't have high school diplomas.

number of job-seekers for every available job just dipped below 4 to 1 for the first time in nearly three years. There are still simply no jobs for more than two out of three people looking for jobs. Job-seekers receiving unemployment insurance benefits spend more timelooking for work and are more likely to have looked for work through five out of six different methods than people not receiving benefits. A law requiring them to spend 20 hours a week looking for work is nothing but an insult to people who are already searching desperately; making it a requirement would likely add a reporting burden that would either detract from their search or force them to spend time beyond their active job searching.

Forcing them to spend 20 hours a week "volunteering" additionally takes time people need for the very hard work of keeping their heads above water on limited means. And of course, creating an involuntary volunteer workforce is no kind of incentive to job-creation—why would any organization being provided free labor by the government ever create a job?

The frightening part here good citizen is how the senate is very close to being ‘evenly split’. How fortunate is it for the rest of us the neither ‘house’ of our government is anything close to being ‘representative’ of our downtrodden population?

The truly frightening aspect here is the ‘money powers’ own ALL of ‘em…which is why our ‘allegedly’ Democratic Congress can only pass decidedly conservative legislation!

And the bought and paid for media gets to claim it was ‘the will of the people’ (and it was. I’m sure the >One Percent deeply appreciate the risk their bought and paid for politicians took for them…because it is the Pols who will be hung for treason when the time comes, the >One Percent (we manage to capture) will be hung for ‘General Principals’.)

So, how does ‘the party of ideas’ look to you now?

Let us return to the place where Mr. Williams is keeping track of how those ‘ideas’ are panning out…

No. 417: December 2011 and Annual Trade Deficit 

February 10th, 2012

Annual Trade Deficit Widened to $558 Billion in 2011, from $500 Billion in 2010,

A Negative for Both the U.S. Dollar and the U.S. Economy

Trade Could Pressure GDP Revision to Downside

More Jobs Lost to NAFTA

No. 416: Payrolls, Unemployment and Revisions, M3, PCE Deflator 

February 3rd, 2012

Basic Economic Outlook Unaltered by Stronger Labor Data  

January Jobs Reading Still at Levels of 11 Years Ago

January Unemployment: 8.3% (U.3), 15.1% (U.6), 22.5% (SGS)

Money Supply M3 Growth Is Picking Up 

Um, hard to decide what’s more twisted, the notion of making the unemployed ‘volunteer’ their labor for their unemployment check or the fact that precisely such a thing would disqualify them from collecting under unemployment laws as they stand today?

Then there’s the ‘no jobs’ problem…just because there aren’t any jobs doesn’t mean people have nothing to do.

In fact, that is the conundrum staring most of us in the face.

There is absolutely NO shortage of shit that needs doing…so why isn’t it getting done?

Maybe the ‘>One Percent’ can explain (although that’s doubtful, they’ve got theirs, fuck the rest!)

Short answer is ‘resources’…the >One Percent ‘owns’ (our) resources and they expect/demand to be paid for them!

You know > is the ‘less than’ sign, don’t you?

You should be >tolerant of this bullshit…but those who ‘own’ the Justice system make the rules…and you, once again, are doomed to suffer under those rules.

Until you decide you’ve had enough!

What do you say, good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where's the Smart?

Happy Valentine’s Day, good citizen!

Not that the markets are enjoying a particularly prosperous day. Once again reality threatens to reassert itself, causing the hindmost to lose their shirts!

Which also provides an excellent segue into today’s topic du juor! “Where’s the smart?”

While the linked article explores how ‘classroom training’ tends to ‘cripple’ the ‘liberal activist’, I choose to cast the net much wider and ask, with the most educated populace the world has ever known, WHERE THE FUCK IS THE ‘SMART’?

Seriously, good citizen, we have more ‘degree’d professionals’ than we’ve ever had…are we truly suffering from a case of ‘too many cooks?’

Um, not a chance in hell…because that’s not how ‘the system’ works!

Let’s put a ‘finer point’ on this shall we? Did the infamous ‘they’ listen to ‘The smartest man who ever lived’ when they had the chance?

No.

Because?

That’s not how ‘the system’ works!

To make matters worse, we are still ‘ignorant‘. As Einstein liked to point out, we KNOW one millionth of one percent of NOTHING!

Let’s pause in the larger discussion for a moment and examine [excerpts of ] what 'our intellectual’ has to tell us:

Originality doesn't matter
In the academy, original thought that adds to the body of human knowledge is the most prized commodity there is. That, and only that, is what they hand out PhDs for. It’s also what gets you an A in most classrooms. Your professor doesn’t want warmed-over ideas pulled from the book or your classmates or the kids back at the dorm. She wants you to think for yourself — to exercise your brain, do some original analysis and synthesis, and come up with some fresh insights on the subject. Cribbing ideas from somewhere else is lazy at best; at worst, it’s plagiarism and it’ll get you kicked out of school.

Grab 'em by the guts
One of the things our professors beat into our little puddin-heads back at the U was that appeals to personal experience or emotion are unwelcome in classroom arguments. What you feel passionately in your heart, what you believe to be a moral imperative, or what you’ve been through in your own life simply don’t qualify as evidence in the classroom. The rules are clear: Emotion is out of bounds. Experience is merely anecdote. You must argue from the facts; and those facts must come from well-executed research or well-regarded authorities. If you can’t document it in a footnote, it has no place in your classroom debate or thesis paper.

Call out the bad guys: our story needs them
In a college classroom, we are taught that it’s always wrong to personalize an argument. There is no place for ad hominem attacks, name-calling, or impugning someone’s intentions. According to the laws of reason, that’s just not fighting fair. We’re supposed to be congenial colleagues debating tough issues on their factual merits. There are no good guys or bad guys; there’s just a mutually respectful search for the truth in which everybody’s good faith is assumed and protected.

I omitted one of her ‘bullet points’ for brevity, you can read the whole article by following the link…

She is, correct in her keen insight and clever use of logic but we are still left scratching our collective noggins (or backsides if you must!) regarding the puzzle of why, in a world that has never seen a higher level of ‘educated individuals’, there is so much ‘stupid’?

And it’s not just a random bit here and an odd slip there. Much of the ‘stupid’ is generated by these highly educated individuals themselves!

Which leads us use ‘deductive reasoning’ (after you’ve eliminated everything it can’t be, what’s left is ‘the answer’.)

I chalk up a huge amount of the ‘stupid overflow’ to the, er, ‘over-estimation’ of just how stupid the average individual is…n’t.

As our ‘futurist’ tells us in her article, college ‘teaches’ YOU that YOU are ‘special’…and it looks like the more literal bastards out there took this message to heart!

Understand, this goes ‘double’ for the ‘silver spoon’ crowd (especially those on the cusp, which includes those with the money but not the ‘lineage’ and those with the lineage but, for whatever the reason, who no longer have enough money…)

They is SPECIAL (which, in their view, means NOBODY else is!)

Thus do they, er, ‘treat’ the rest of us like a bunch of morons! (Ugh! Me Tarzan, You ‘hired help!’)

So Bubba, ‘where’s the smart’?

And here comes the irony (again!)

You looking for ‘smart’? Look at the political arena and how the chiselers sold globalization (now universally reviled as a bad idea…except by the highly paid liars that draw their paychecks from the ‘monopolists’.)

First they secretly merged their media empires, then they bought the political parties, this allowed them to ‘pick’ the politicians and with that they were handed control of ‘the justice system’!

After they seized nominal control of the electoral system, they used their new ‘legislative clout’ to seize control of the media…the rest of it.

Talk about busy, while they were ‘dismantling’ our constitutional freedoms, they were also tearing down the barriers that financed the whole shebang, and they exported our economy…creating a HUGE economic desert.

Ironically, these ‘economic deserts’ have been popping up around the world, in tandem with the ‘global race to the bottom’.

A race where there can only be ONE winner…and it won’t be YOU!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Final Destination

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you spot the Article du juor before you log in to your e-mail account!

So you don’t get a chance to see that markets open higher but were headed down on news the Greece has, er, ‘approved’ the ‘new’ austerity measures demanded by their, er, ‘creditors’ (which is really quite laughable considering NOBODY has the funds to ‘bail’ anybody out…but this is the sort of shit that happens when all money turns ‘funny’.

And don’t get me wrong, All money BY ITS VERY NATURE, is ‘funny’!

Making the following headline just that much more disturbing:

Russians alarmed by rash of teenage suicides

Russia has the world's third-highest rate of suicide among teenagers aged 15-to-19, with about 1,500 taking their own lives every year, according to a recent UNICEF report. The rate is higher only in the neighboring former Soviet republics of Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In recent years, there have been 19-to-20 annual suicides per 100,000 teenagers in Russia — three times the world average, Boris Polozhy of the respected Serbsky psychiatric center in Moscow said Friday.

"Until the highest authorities see suicide as a problem, our joint efforts will be unlikely to yield any results," he said. In the southwestern Siberian region of Tuva, the rate reaches a staggering 120 suicides per 100,000 teenagers, while the nearby region of Buryatiya has an average rage of 77 per 100,000. Both regions are impoverished and have high crime and alcoholism rates.

Um, one would question the necessity of pointing out the, er, ‘redundancy’ of telling us that the suicides take place predominantly among those, er, ‘marginalized’ by their respective society.

Left to your imagination is why these kids are ‘packing it in’ on the doorstep of adulthood?

Could they have ‘looked down’ and noticed they were already standing in their grave?

Makes you wonder what Mr. Darwin would have to say on the subject of ’unnatural selection’.

Nowhere in nature (except lemmings and that has been chalked up to stupidity!) do creatures voluntarily end their own life, especially prior to reproducing, one of our strongest drives!

They give the decidedly ’lame’ example of two girls who leapt from the roof of a 14 story building to escape being punished for cutting class for two weeks!

Of course, I’ve never personally experienced detention in the Russian school system…may it was justified after all!

But you know I don’t believe that…kids only ever take the ‘easy out’ when they look at their parents and see their own future in their haunted, hopeless eyes.

Must be an extremely, er, ‘sobering’ moment that makes one so young abandon all hope!

But that’s the world we’ve left them.

If you weren’t born the child of a well-connected party operative, you may as well ‘jump off a building…or walk in front of a subway train, be you Russian or from anywhere else!

But that would make the revolution that much harder to mount!

Revolutions are fought by people who believe they can make the future better, not by people who have already surrendered.

I’ve already told you what happens to those people (buried alive in a mass grave, wounded but not yet dead.)

Why is this happening good citizen?

Because of the central bank’s cheap financing, some economists warn, sick banks now face less pressure to confront their problems — to clean out bad loans and other impaired assets, or even wind down operations if there is no hope of a turnaround. The European Central Bank, they say, could inadvertently spawn a cohort of “zombie banks,” burdened by nonperforming loans and assets that remain on the books, like the ones that helped make the 1990s a lost decade for Japan.

“It’s a huge bet,” said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. “If the crisis ends up well, the E.C.B. will have pulled off a miracle. If things go wrong, then commercial banks will be in a much worse situation than they were before.”

Professor Wyplosz said the central bank might be making the banking system more fragile by encouraging institutions to load up on risky assets, especially government bonds from troubled euro zone countries like Spain or Italy. Banks can use those assets as collateral for more loans from the central bank.

The longer we ‘do nothing’ about our desperately broken economy the more difficult it will be to cleanse the avenues of commerce and repurpose the engines of production into a sustainable, society supporting system!

This watching the death spiral of the banking system is all very, er, captivating BUT it is a distraction from what we need to be doing!

Watching (and waiting) for the financial system to collapse will neither prevent its collapse nor put us back on the path of sustainability (not that we were on that path in the first place…it’s where we NEED to go but can’t get there with capitalism!)

We aren’t yet strong enough to attempt military action (although that will change rapidly) and you can bet the eventual collapse of the financial system will be followed immediately by widespread panic!

Many will die in the weeks after the collapse, especially when it dawns on us ‘en masse’ that we’re ALL fucked!

A goodly number of them will take the same route the kids in our opening article took!

Starve to death, eaten by hungry cannibals, jump off a bridge, funny how the destination remains the same!

My final question to YOU good citizen is ‘how much evidence do you need to witness before you reject predatory capitalism?’

These kids have seen the writing on the wall and taken what they believe to be the ‘appropriate action’…all because YOU will not fight!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner