Saturday, March 31, 2012

>One Percent

Greetings good citizen,

You may recall that in yesterday’s post I noted the Dow’s ‘nosedive’ towards negative territory, but it must have been an, er, ‘aberration’ because the Dow closed up for the week!

Which brings us full circle to the topic du juor of yesterday’s piece, the lying lies of the corporate owned media.

Is there ANY REASON IN THE WORLD for stocks to add 144 points yesterday?

Let’s see what Mr. Williams has to say on the subject

No. 426: Economic Update: Mired in A Protracted Downturn
Subscription required March 30th, 2012

• GNP Growth at 1.8% versus 3.0% GDP
• Real Durable Goods Orders 10% Below Levels Seen in 2000
• Shenanigans in Industrial Production Benchmark Masked Small Downside Revisions to Recent Activity
• Recession Deeper than Previously Estimated

Not only do I find no, er, ‘positive’ news in Mr. Williams analysis, he too has difficulty reconciling the constantly revised data.

And make no mistake about it, the whole so-called recovery has been ‘revised away’ right after it is reported!

Happy numbers to show the folks at home followed a month or so later by the more, er, ‘disappointing’ data as the headline numbers are ‘very quietly’ revised.

Which is to opine, good citizen…and again I will re-iterate, it is just my OPINION that IF WE KNEW how bad things REALLY WERE, we’d be panicking right now!

Worse, good citizen, the reason things aren’t improving is because our so-called ‘elected officials’ aren’t doing their jobs.

At some point in the not too distant future, they really are going to be forced to ‘let the bodies hit the floor’, a shake out where we find out who has been ‘swimming naked’ all of this time.

The danger here is letting the bodies hit the floor WITHOUT, er, ‘repairing’ the ‘economic environment’ first.

Under the current ‘non-existent’ enforcement of business regulation, we could wake up facing a ‘monopolized’ world…one where they will tell us how much they want for their stuff and if you can’t afford it, tough!

There is (nor will there be) any alternative. You buy this (from me) or you don’t get the sumbitch!

The infamous ‘they’ will be dealing from a ‘position of strength’ (already having all of the money they will ever need) they don’t need to ‘talk price’, they don’t even ‘need’ your business.

It’s YOU that will be forced to lick their boots and choose between staying warm and staying nourished (if that is even possible with all the fillers and additives they use to ‘boost profitability’.)

If you’re not ‘afraid’ good citizen, you should be…and you shouldn’t need me to point this out to you.

Here’s the thing good citizen.

We are all aware that > One Percent controls more than fifty percent of ALL OF the wealth. The next 40% is controlled by the top 10%…the remaining 10% of the world’s wealth is divided among the bottom 90%.

What you NEED TO BE AWARE OF is civilization, like money, is a ‘legal construct’ we AGREE TO abide by…as long as it is TO OUR ADVANTAGE to do so.

Increasingly, it is being seen by more and more people as NOT being to their advantage to, er, ‘obey’ the civilization agreement.

This will prove out during this summer’s ‘energy riots’.

Where the price of energy will skyrocket, thanks to ‘political wrangling’ between Washington and the Middle East, such as today’s announcement that the president has determined that there is ‘enough oil’ to place sanctions on Iran.

Which is being done to ‘appease’ AIPAC…

But I digress…

WHEN the public starts to despair over the price of heating their home in a (still) broken economy and keeping food on the table. (Because a gallon of home heating fuel cost more than $6.) people, a vast majority of them, will be unable to afford to go to their part-time, minimum wage jobs, keep the lights and the furnace running AND put food on the table.

And the politicians of this country will just shrug and say, “there’s nothing I can do about it! Go ahead and elect somebody else, they won’t be able to fix it either because we ALL take our ‘orders’ from the > One Percent.”

And that’s the trouble we’re all facing good citizen, a ‘ruined economy’ thanks to the selfish few that we ‘failed’ the regulate effectively.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, March 30, 2012

Deceit

Greetings good citizen,

The Asian markets closed down, the European markets managed to trade sideways for most of Friday’s session in positive territory, causing US markets to open in positive territory, where they promptly took a nosedive. I logged out and logged back in again (to the business section of the NY Times) and the Dow dropped 10 points, and it was only up 20…

Weird how the market’s performance segues into today’s offering about how the public is regularly ‘duped’

While I had hopes for some kind of breakthrough, it turns out the story us well known to us all:
But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and resignations. Taken together— and given that a good percentage of the pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic storylines—they mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs. [snip]

Operatives words here good citizen are ‘should have’…and it leaves open the even more disturbing question of why (almost) nobody got the proverbial axe for being so fantastically wrong!

Why did the ‘older crew’, the guys who had been around the block a few times, fuck up so royally?

Let’s see…you don’t suppose they got ‘the word’ laid on them, do ya?

You don’t suppose management came down and told ‘em, point blank, “if you want to keep getting your paycheck, here’s the ‘angle’ we’re looking for!”

How much you wanna bet before the editors had that little chat with the reporters, the owners had a very similar chat with the editors…and some of ‘em even went as far as, er, ‘implying’ that all of the other news outlets would be toeing the same line.

For nearly a generation now it has been common knowledge that NOTHING the Corporate owned media comes out with can be trusted!

You know it, I know it and they KNOW we KNOW.

It must send them into fits of hysteria when they see the ‘not so attentive’ panicking over something they read or heard in the media.

But at the end of the day it’s all a big joke so why not have some fun while they’re at it?

Yup, the same old story:

The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.

What I didn’t understand was that these weren’t cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

How tragic is it good citizen that this fellow isn’t in on the joke?

Ironically, there are a lot of people who A.) only suspect something is amiss or B.) have no frickin’ clue and think the press HAS TO tell the truth!

So when you see the Headline “President considering sanctions on Iran.” YOU KNOW it means Israel is agitating to attack Iran and we, as usual, are providing ‘cover’…

Maybe it has become an accepted part of modern culture, we now expect to have to ‘decipher’ the headlines to try and figure out if anything worth knowing is going on.

You know the default mode is silence laced with intermittent spurts of cheerleading/chest-thumping. The headlines aren’t ‘news’ in themselves but ‘clues’ usually to what they DON’T want you to notice!

But there’s a more disturbing dynamic at work here…

One that I have pointed to repeatedly in the past.

I know it drives some of you nuts when I dance around like this so I’m just going to come out with it.

What are YOU gonna do about it?

And the answer is…NOTHING!

If the people we elected to do something about it, DON’T…YOU’RE SCREWED!

The government has come right out and TOLD us that THEY can name ANY ONE OF US an ‘Enemy combatant’ and have us EXECUTED…

AND THERE AIN’T A FUCKING THING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!

Do any of you reading this think, for a single instant, that the government officials who passed this legislation GIVE A FLYING FUCK what the rest of us think of them?

So, when they actually start executing ‘enemies of the state’, what, precisely, do YOU intend to do about it?

(Cue sound of chirping crickets)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Die!

Greetings good citizen,

For the third consecutive day the world’s stock markets are taking a beating, which can be viewed as the ‘super-rich’ culling their ranks.

Which is to once again belabor the obvious, you were either ‘born to it’ or you weren’t.

Which brings us to today’s offering where the ignorant wannabes wish a speedy death upon themselves:
As a favor to struggling Americans, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed a federal budget last week ravaging programs for the poor, elderly, disabled, young, veterans, jobless, students and other vulnerable people. Ryan did it, he said, because these programs, food stamps, health insurance, Pell grants, veteran’s hospitals and the like are demeaning.

So Ryan plunders them and gives the savings to the rich in the form of additional tax breaks. Half of the savings in Ryan’s budget come from destroying health insurance programs. That would cost tens of millions of Americans their coverage.

Uninsured and underinsured toddlers, injured veterans, and disabled workers may die from some curable disease as a result. But at least Ryan will save those people from being demeaned!

What do you do with Chowdah heads like Representative Ryan?

Why is he even in government? (Which he obviously loathes and much more importantly DOESN’T UNDERSTAND!)

WTF, good citizen?

It asks an even more curious question such as WHAT THE FUCK WERE THE PEOPLE IN HIS DISTRICT THINKING?

But you already know my opinion on the matter, it doesn’t mater if NOBODY in Wisconsin can be found that admits to voting for him, we’d have gotten him anyway because the ONE who reports the election results ‘owns’ the election (even if nobody shows up!)

Which brings us full circle to our ‘corporate owned media’ problem.

The media is constantly reminding us that we are ‘evenly divided’ so unlikely outcomes at the ballot box will seem plausible.

HOWEVER, the OWS movement brought one simple fact to the fore good citizen, that we are FAR FROM being ‘equally divided’. There is the >One Percent and there’s the rest of us.

So when this election, like so many before it, goes the way the >One Percent wants it to, (Which is ‘Re-elect the incumbent’) then we will have nothing to bitch about.

Except for the Elephant in the room; that the most unelectable president in US history is running ‘unopposed’.

We are indeed, once again staring down the barrel of the ‘is this the best ‘we’ (big money) can do?’ question.

If it is then our political machinery is broken beyond all repair.

And there is only ONE WAY to repair it…eliminate the ‘Middle Man’ that actively prevents YOUR participation in the government of YOUR affairs!

Exile the current (and all living former) elected officials and NEVER replace them!

Of course to do this you would have to subscribe to a social/economic system where ‘exile’ was legal…(such as A Simple Plan.)

We all know it’s not about us, it’s about the future. Which is why you should be pissed off because the >One Percent ARE running things like it is ALL ABOUT THEM!

Under A Simple Plan the > One Percent ‘goes away’…never to return.

Which is to point out that the current group won’t be directly genetically related to future groups claiming to be our ‘betters’.

Which is to admit that the nonsense of ‘pedigree and breeding’ won’t die just because we outlaw their ability to rob the rest of us blind.

Nope, as soon as the new social order establishes itself there will rise up a ‘secret’ new organization of our self-professed ‘betters’ (because these socio-paths honestly believe they are ‘superior’ to the rest of us.)

Naturally, whenever one of these ‘hate groups’ surfaces, its membership will be exiled.

And, weirdly even that won’t make the problem go away…

Just saying, ya know?

Which brings us to the real reason I picked this article…

It is obvious that Alternet picked it because it shows conservatives acting like conservatives.

I, naturally, like to back up a step or two and look at it without the ‘political filter’.

The basic ‘us vs. them’ battle because it really is a ‘Master-Slave’ battle going down here.

If you ‘work’ (or engage in any activity that isn’t at least semi self-serving) you are automatically ‘inferior’ (and therefore deserving of contempt.)

(This whole ‘better’ thing is actually quite easy to understand. ‘Born to wealth and privilege’ = Master. Not? Well, I’m sure you can figure it out…)

The dynamic hardly changes at all if we adjust it to the more ‘politically correct’ terms of ‘employer and employee’.

It helps to view things in ‘absolutes’ like this because it makes what is going on easier to understand.

Tarzan doesn’t give a fuck if ‘the hired help’ is happy, it’s not his problem.

Tarzan really wishes he could run you through a meat shredder instead of firing you, that way you’d be of some use to him after you’re gone.

Need medical care? Good luck trying to find some one who will care for you out of the kindness of their hearts because (thanks to YOU) Tarzan has enough to PAY for the very best, FUCK you!

Um, if something about this image is disturbing to you, I strongly suggest you DO something about it…PDQ!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Conversations

Greetings good citizen,

Since the NY Times is cutting way back on the number of ‘free articles’ you can read, I am, er, ‘practicing’ getting my news items from other sources.

Not that this has proven very, er, ‘reliable’. Alternet and RawStory are both driven by different political agendas than the Corporate owned media so their focus is often at odds with the bullshit they pipe into your living room/car 24/7.

So while the, er, ‘second tier’ media outlets quite readily call ‘bullshit’ on the Corporate owned media, they then tend to spin the story with their own ‘agenda’ driving the story…and let’s face it good citizen, propaganda is propaganda.

Which is also my way of apologizing for being a day behind this news item, because the ‘alternative press’ is also often a ‘day behind’ (besides being a little ‘off the mark’ as well.)

Let us examine today’s paltry offering for example:
Republican leaders, including those in 11 states with the highest percentage of uninsured residents, don’t want to fix our broken healthcare system.

The Republican Party again showed its petulant, "party-of-no" face on Tuesday as lawyers representing 26 red states and conservative think-tanks told the U.S. Supreme Court that nobody should be forced have health insurance—even if people carrying insurance end up subsidizing the defiantly uninsured who get ill.

“Could you tell me,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor began, in perhaps the most succinct moment capturing this schism, addressing Paul D. Clement, an attorney representing the law’s challengers, “do you think the states could pass this mandate?”

represent 26 states,” he replied. “I do think the states could pass this, but I….”
But they won’t. The Republican leadership in his clients’ states, including 11 with the highest percentage of uninsured residents in America, don’t want to fix a broken healthcare system. Forget that these states are supposedly more religious than liberal America—they are not their brothers’ keepers. It’s everyone fending for themselves: that’s the America they want.

While they do an admirable job of the ‘he said, she said’ reporting, they don’t deviate from their laser like focus on displaying Republicans in the worst possible light…when we are all well aware of just how rotten conservative whackos can be.

Again, it’s easy to criticize…but this particular issue is much larger than it on the surface appears.

Why are the proxies for the > One Percent playing the ‘rugged individual card’ in this battle over a healthcare plan that they themselves designed?

And one that would piss off one of their main campaign contributors big time if it gets overturned!

It’s every insurer’s wet dream, ‘mandated insurance’…and they already do it with automobiles…so there’s your ‘precedent’ right there!

Compulsory insurance is almost as old as the auto industry itself…and perhaps it is me who isn’t getting it because auto insurance isn’t meant to protect YOU, it’s there to protect THE FUCKING BANKS!

Now, under A Simple Plan there is no insurance of any kind…none.

How can we get away with that? Because money is fictional, it’s make believe.

People do what they do because that’s what they get paid for…and the things they buy with their pay are ‘free’. the resources utilized in producing the item are ‘free’ from nature who, coincidentally, doesn’t have a cash register.

And yes Virginia, you do have to ‘husband’ your resources thus do some things ‘cost’ more than others.

So if you get sick (really sick…like laid up in the hospital sick) it won’t ‘cost’ you anything. It’s what those people do for their pay and there’s no need for you to ‘pay’ them too…that’s the ‘idiocy’ of capitalism!

You often pay twice for what should be, by right, yours for free!

Since I’m already ‘off the reservation’ (again) I might as well task you with another little tidbit that most of you are unaware of…the reason our current social model is ‘broken’.

Under our current capitalist social model you pay for EVERYTHING…and since only a few of us enjoy, er, ‘inexhaustible wealth’ (at everyone else’s expense) the ‘inability to pay’ keeps causing the system to break down…

I mean the ‘fuck you pay me’ scheme even fostered the NEED for an ‘insurance industry’!

But now I digress, we can’t get too far away from the central fact in play here…

That our social model is broken.

No where on the horizon is there a proposal to ‘fix’ our broken model…the only thing we are seeing is a fierce stepping up of the ‘fuck you, pay me demand behind the badly broken model.

Well, I shouldn’t say ‘nowhere’, should I?

Let us return to our original topics, the scarcity of news outlets and their propensity to promote their own agenda (such as I have done here…but I doubt many will deny the need for a solution to our current plight as we can’t ALL be filthy rich, which is the only acceptable solution to the 'fuck you, pay me' crowd…those exceeding rare ‘rugged individuals.’

Um, which is to point out that while we might all be cool with the idea of paying ourselves handsomely, it is not a ‘practical solution’.

Start pumping up the money supply and you will spark a ‘wage/price spiral’ where wages chase prices that chase wages until you find yourself in Zimbabwe, paying a billion dollars for two cucumber sandwiches with a bottle of spring water apiece…

Did I mention that all money is ‘funny’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Horror

Greetings good citizen,

Ayn Rand is dead…but the photos were taken while she was (allegedly) still alive…creepy, ain’t it?

How sad is it good citizen that her ideas live on?

Income taxes would end, so the lowest-paid, ten-cent-an-hour, non-OSHA-supervised factory workers would enjoy wages taxed at the same rate—zero—as their billionaire bosses in distant cities and foreign lands. Dynasties of American royalty would arise, as fortunes pass from generation to generation, untaxed.

Nonprofit organizations, apart from those serving the egos and social calendars of the self-indulging rich, would see their funding dry up as government support vanished. The super-wealthy, having repudiated their “giving pledge,” would now enjoy their riches without guilt, no longer motivated to share their billions with the poor. Philanthropy would be an obsolete relic of discarded moral codes and forgotten history.

Such is the Ayn Rand vision of paradise: an America that would resemble the lands from which our ancestors emigrated, altruism confined to ignored, fringe texts, grinding poverty and starvation coexisting alongside the opulence of the wealthy. Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would become like Cairo and Calcutta, with walled enclaves protecting the wealthy from the malnourished, uneducated masses outside.

Why even bring this up? Because the >One Percent have embraced Rand’s (bizarre) cross of social Darwinism with ‘free market’ principles that more closely resemble the ‘laws of the jungle’.

How ironic is it that one would have to be a ‘Superman’ to survive in such an environment…although it could be argued that one would be better served having their head examined for even attempting such a foolish venture!

Sir Alan Greenspan is considered one of Rand’s closest associates…and much of what he believes was ‘influenced’ by Randian philosophy as well as the equally off the wall ‘efficient market hypotheses’ spewed by that other whack job, Milton Friedman…

The whole article quite accurately captures the horrors of that which is to come…(perhaps it is more accurate to say ‘is already here’, the ‘super-wealthy’ have had an absolutely astounding twenty year run,) but, sadly the time has come to pay the tab.

Now we get to the ‘horror’ part.

Without going into a decidedly twisted thread of logic, let it suffice to say that Rand’s ‘Libertarian Paradise’ is the kind of place where people would, indeed, kill one another on sight…seriously.

Shoot first, ask questions later.

(Funny how after they’re dead, they are ALL ‘enemy combatants’.
Did I mention that we are already headed in that direction?)

Weird how most of us fail to realize that we’re already ‘dancing with the Devil’ with each ‘State Sanctioned murder’.

Weirder still is how this is perfectly okay as long as it is some stranger because it will NEVER be one of us, or worse, you in particular…would it?

So we continue to dance along the edge of the cliff, blithely ignoring the danger, worse, blissfully ignorant of the fact that we are flirting with death itself…

How disturbing is it that it takes the same variety of blind arrogance to entertain either notion?

Dunno ‘bout the rest of you good citizens but I’m getting kind of nervous now that the rule of law no longer protects us and you can be ‘disappeared’ if you piss off the wrong people…(but that’s always been the case, hasn’t it?)

Dead is dead and it don’t matter if the mafia does it or the government gets ya. Hell, these days so looney tunes serial killer could do the same thing…but you really have to wonder, the ‘real deal’ HAS TO BE fairly rare, if there were as many of them as Hollywood would have us believe, the killings would be a daily event!

Now just take a second and look at how badly ‘mismanaged’ our society is (and what I mean by that is just consider what you’ve already read thus far, see the pattern?)

No accident and no ‘incompetence’, the ruthless socio-paths are deliberately shredding the very fabric of society so they can profit at our expense…and we can’t lift a single finger to stop them!

The lessons of the past have to be repeatedly re-learned:

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely!

Well Houston, we have a problem…some greedy fuckers have gotten their sweaty little paws on a whole bunch of ‘absolute power’ and now we’ve got to snatch it away from ‘em before they hurt a whole bunch of people.
How fucking sad is it that the greedy little fuckers never hurt themselves with the stuff?

Maybe that’s what it takes to handle it safely, unbridled greed!

But the article shows us where ‘unbridled greed’ will lead.

The question is why we persist in following those who do not have our best interests at heart?

Are we too ‘optimistic’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, March 26, 2012

Hero worship

Greetings good citizen,

Recently having a bad experience with GE’s personnel department has left a bad taste in my mouth regarding my (now almost twenty years in the rearview mirror) ‘former employer’.

I sit and curse at the TV when I see the ‘Thank you GE’ commercials come on. The ad (falsely) paints them as ‘saviors’ when there are tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of ‘former’ GE employees who remember things going down somewhat differently than these cheesy commercials would lead you to believe.

Although make no mistake about it, at GE it is a given that you would be ‘plenty thankful’ to work there…because the alternative is usually something akin to dumpster diving…

Anyway it seems I’m not the only one who noticed this attempt to whitewash the reputation of the leader of the global race to the bottom…
The GE ads skillfully trigger a sense of warmth as they show GE workers expressing pride in their skilled work, satisfaction in assisting severely-ill patients, a profound sense of teamwork crossing racial and gender lines, and a deeply-felt mission based on the slogan: "GE Works." To highlight just a few elements of GE's public-relations offensive:

1) In one ad, GE workers at the Waukesha, Wis. Medical Equipment Division, which makes magnetic resonance imaging machines, X-ray machines and other cutting-edge medical devices, are shown getting their-much-cherished wish of meeting a busload of cancer patients whose recovery was aided by GE's medical products.

Unmentioned, however, is the fact that GE has transferred the headquarters of the Medical Equipment Division to Beijing, China. "Waukesha will not be doing GE's innovations, which will now be centered in China," said Chris Townsend. "This doesn't mean that the Waukesha plant will close right away, but the company's advances will be taking place in China and Waukesha will be making more out-of-date products. GE will be bringing in the new machines from China," Townsend adds.

Oddly, depending on which ad you view, the workers practically prostrate themselves, thanking GE for a ‘second chance’ when the other big employer in town followed GE’s lead and left for Beijing!

And naturally, if you weren’t really paying attention, most of the commercials are being made in ‘right to work’ states, meaning the chances are good that the employees are ’unorganized’.
Perhaps more disturbing is the ease with which GE could shutter such plants if the Union even ’threatened’ to get a foothold…

Just our worthless politicians, doing what they do best…

Which brings us full circle to the question there is currently no debate over, what is the ‘purpose of government?’

Listening to the right/conservatives/(closet Libertarians) we would have the government’s sole purpose would be to provide for the ‘nation’s defense’.

Which is ironic because government’s ‘primary function’ is to insure that the needs of society are ‘equitably met’ and government’s principle responsibility is to PROTECT ITS CITIZENS from the PREDATIONS OF THE PRIVILEGED!

Something the political parties of this nation have FAILED AT MISERABLY for the past FORTY YEARS!

And, ironically, this ‘failure’ is directly attributable to a situation that OWS brought to the fore of the national stage just last year.

What situation was that good citizen?

It was the ‘re-definition’ of who was and was not a ‘member of society’.

The fact that those who (could and ultimately DID) BUY the government they wanted became the government’s ‘primary focus’.

And, naturally, it was the immensely smaller but considerably richer Republican party that got (and bought) all of the necessary influence.

So the question is, do we REALLY ‘vote against ourselves’, good citizen?

The answer is a resounding NO…mostly because not enough of us vote, but that doesn’t matter either way because they can jigger the ballot box six ways to Sunday if it serves their purposes.

Although there is one thing you can be certain of this November, serious levels of ‘voter dissatisfaction’ and a close to zero tolerance for ‘more of the same’.

The riots will be incredible.

And the corporate owned media will be at a loss to explain them away…so they won’t even try.

Which is to opine (and I’m always giving my opinion around here) that ‘the coup’ (of the royals) will NOT be televised.

The, er, >One Percent knows they cannot maintain the charade of the ballot box indefinitely…and the public outrage over the ‘lack of action’ will force them to sweep aside the pretense that this is all due to ‘incompetence’ and (attempt) to seize control.

Sadly, they already know they will fail.

Their actions will be driven by the desire to heighten public anger; to insure that the carnage is as widespread as possible.

Worse, many of them will lead rebellions against their own kind!

How will you know you are being led by a ‘pretender’? Because their rhetoric will be more than a little ‘Republican’ flavored.

Their talk will be about ‘family values’ and ‘rugged individualism’. While they stay behind the scenes to ‘direct’ the battles your comrades will fight and die in.

Ironically it will be their ‘uncanny ability’ to ferret out the strongholds of their former friends that will cement their leadership role…

While they surround themselves with the most brutal (and stupid followers) they can find.

So if loyal but stupid gets promoted over brave and competent, chances are good ‘your leader’ is one of them!

We have a lot of work to do good citizen, and many battles to fight before we rest.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Connect the dots

Greetings good citizen,

As we head into ‘primary season’ and the most disappointing president EVER remains unopposed (not that there are any ‘genuine Democrats’ remaining)which means one simple thing, the damn cavalry ain’t coming!

And this is where the ‘voting for a representative’ thing gets dangerous.

It is generally accepted that our government is broken and it has been hijacked by the very criminals it was established to protect us from!
Here we are, surrounded by still-smoldering financial wreckage, and almost everyone in Washington is falling over themselves to repeat exactly the same kinds of actions that got us into this mess. Last time around it was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, introduced by Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and enthusiastically signed by President Clinton in the presence of Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

This time it's the deceptively named "JOBS Act," introduced by the far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members of both parties. [it is fraudulent in the extreme to even IMPLY that there are TWO INDIVIDUAL schools of political thought in this country, there is only ONE, separated by two degrees of boot-licking!] The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a deregulating frenzy. Some of those protections were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which sociopathically unscrupulous business people conducted a hoax that ruined thousands of families and deprived many of their life's savings.

The hype that led Washington honchos to name this tragic bill the "JOBS Act" is the same brand of patented b.s. that inspired lawmakers to call Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the law that overturned Glass-Steagall, the "Financial Services Modernization Act." That act of "modernization" actually turned the clock back - from 1999 all the way back to 1929, stripping away some of the common-sense measures that prevented the formation of too-big-to-fail banks that could gamble with their customers' money or bring the economy to the brink of ruin - which they promptly did, less than a decade later.

Why NOBODY remembers Billy Jeff’s part in this is a baffler we can thank the corporate owned media for.

Just more evidence of the dangers of , er, ‘trusting’ the self-interested with the unhindered control of the ‘facts‘…

Yeah, how ironic is it that the ‘Jobs Act’ has nothing to do with increasing employment (here) just as the Clean Waters Act had nothing to do with the environment…

Even more ironic is how the Republicans will use the Act’s ‘ineffectiveness’ as a club to beat Mr. Obama over the head with (during his even more ironic) second term?

When it is clear even now that the legislation won’t create enough jobs…and wouldn’t have passed the house without Republican support…

But they continue to play the rest of us for ‘stupid’.

Which, as much as they don’t think so, will be something they’re going to regret (deeply) later, once this whole charade goes sour.

Recent history shows us just how far gone our situation has become, you don’t need me to connect the dots for you.

If we rewind to the mid-2000’s we’d see the ‘early effects’ of, er, ‘business friendly’ legislating in action.

After the Dot-Gone bust the economy stagnated (largely because we were still ‘exporting jobs’ wholesale)…so the financial sector stepped up to the plate and started handing out ‘free money’…if you could prove you were alive, you got the loan…no questions asked.

This (naturally) resulted in the collapse of the banking system and the resultant ‘epidemic’ of ‘uncreditworthy consumers’.

Thus does this ‘over-extended’ consumer cause the market for just about everything to dry up. All thanks to the repeal of Glass Steagall (although it probably would have happened anyway because that’s the track they were following…)

Ever since St. Ronnie of Reagan APPOINTED that Randite, Greenspan to the Federal Reserve Corporation! (don’t ever forget it is a ‘privately owned’, closed books operation)

And ‘efficient market theory’ (which fosters ‘unbridled capitalism’) became the rule of the day our economy has been circling the drain as we exported jobs and imported stuff we were perfect capable of making ourselves.

And while Greenspan was ‘knighted’ for destroying the global economy, (while simultaneously paving the way for the return of Monarchy…) didn’t he feign ‘surprise’ when the markets proved considerably ‘less efficient’ than they were supposed to be…

Like the simple act of admitting his, er, ‘mistake’ was sufficient to absolve him of his sins.
As I have stated repeatedly, NONE OF THIS was even remotely ‘an ACCIDENT’.

It was not a ‘miscalculation’ nor was there any ‘incompetence’ involved…not even the judges (who turned a blind eye to all of this) are ‘innocent’.

They KNEW, thus shall they PAY!

Just as I know I am accusing the ‘Masters of the Universe’ of High Crimes. How ironic is it good citizen that accusing the elite of high crimes is itself a ‘capital offense’, yet it does not alter the facts!

Although there is little comfort on the notion that history will eventually exonerate me, dead is dead.

If you wish to avoid joining me among the ranks of the condemned, you must fight like your life depends on it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Reason

Greetings good citizen,

As the rise in energy prices threatens to choke the global economy to death, we can only wonder what the twits who manage our society plan to do when ‘normal weather’ returns?

Why am I tempted to opine the answer to that is ‘laugh’? (I can’t honestly conjure up a mental image of genuine concern, it is too far out of character for them.)

Europeans have frozen to death in the abnormally cold weather they have had overseas…but in exchange for that we have just seen the end of one of the mildest winters on record. Temps ‘averaged’ 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) above normal.

How sad is it that the US media doesn’t care if the identical commercial system to the one it uses resulted in the death of hundreds of its citizens?

No, we don’t advertise the, er, ‘unsolvable’ problems that business owners are unable (or unwilling) to address.

“Pay our workers more while charging our customers less is a recipe for insolvency! (And if I lose the summer cottage in (fill in the name of a local paradise here) I’ll be facing something even worse, a divorce!”) [said the capitalist]

Which once again shines the spotlight on the ‘mismanagement’ of our financial markets and the shocking imbalances that plague our society.

But belaboring the obvious has proven worthless.

Those responsible for these, er, ‘difficulties’ have no interest addressing these ‘imbalances’…(mostly because they are ‘profitable’ for them personally.)

Which brings us to the crux of our modern problems…what my Dad would call the ‘Hooray for me and fuck you’ attitude.

HFM&FY is never ‘self-correcting’. The closer ‘the squeeze’ gets to the ‘fucker’, the more they squeeze the ‘fuckee’…(which in most cases is YOU.)

Worse is the driving force behind HFM&FY, the unwillingness to ‘compromise’.

And since this bad boy is sort of ‘freestyle’ I DO NOT (for once, digress!)

Oh, what a tangled web they weave!

One that is getting more tangled with each passing day.

In the ‘beginning’ we could dismiss the ‘fringe’ programming of the cable networks as too many hours to fill and not enough content.

But now that our deaf and blind corporate owned media has jumped on the ‘panic button mentality’ bandwagon’, you can’t help but wonder what the hell is wrong with the people running the networks?

In fact, what passes for ‘news’ (supposedly useful information) these days now rivals the goofiest apocalyptic ‘infotainment’ shows.

And if we turn our attention to the political theater we can only wonder where those guys are getting their information from…

How sad is it that the most we can hope for is it’s not the same planet we’re living on?

Again, how sad is it that there are too many hours to fill and not enough programming…

Because capitalism requires that most avenues which would provoke serious thought that may result in public debate and begin the questioning of long held values MUST be contentiously avoided!

That’s why the bulk of network programming is focused on ‘escapism’.

Don’t think about the world as it is (and heavens forbid you think about WHY things are the way they are!) Your goal is to ‘escape’ the real world for the ‘fantasy world’ we bring right into your living room every night.

Better you ignore TV as the wasteland that it is rather than start questioning your lot in life!

In case you were wondering why, as lucrative as it is, most TV absolutely sucks!

So why isn’t TV used as a medium for expanding social awareness?

Because that would shine a spotlight on just how badly the powers that be are fucking the rest of us…

Seriously good citizen, it wouldn’t take a whole lot of scrutiny to uncover a damned mountain of ‘inequity’.

Then there’s the ‘treason factor’…which is the REAL REASON the ‘status quo’ doesn’t want YOU asking too many , er, ‘difficult questions’.

Should the truth ever come to light, the light poles from here to Timbuktu would be ‘adorned’ with the hanging corpses of greedy capitalists.

Treason, (or the placing of your own interests ahead of those of society) has been little prosecuted under treacherous capitalism.

Hard to protect the public while subscribing to a system of commerce that actually promotes the same variety of ‘self-interest’ (that would normally get you hung!)

The question, good citizen, is what kind of world would you like to live in, today’s ‘FUCK YOU, SUE ME!’ environment or one where we are ALL equal under the law AND in the marketplace?

Um, how fucking sad is it the choice IS (ultimately) YOURS, but you are going to have to kill a lot of greedy fuckers for the chance to make that choice!

And before you get to even one of the greedy fucks you’ll be forced to fight through an army of their stooges first!

Making the fact that the money is all funny that much more pathetic…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, March 23, 2012

Idiots in Charge

Greetings good citizen,

Um, I belabor the obvious were I to comment that the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace.

Stock markets are bleeding from the eye sockets around the globe but none of the pundits seem worried about it…which is curious all by itself…considering what it is that makes the filthy rich…well, filthy rich.

No irony should be lost on the fact that it is the thirst for ‘imaginary wealth’ that is driving the real economy over the cliff. Those with large ‘on paper’ holdings keep converting their ‘paper assets’ into real ones, er, chewing up assets that might be better utilized elsewhere, if you follow what I’m saying…

But that is neither here nor there because the spin doctors have really outdone themselves this time!
At the same time, Americans are pumping significantly less gasoline. While that is partly a result of the recession and higher gasoline prices, people are also driving fewer miles and replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient vehicles at a greater clip, federal data show.

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

“There is no question that many national security policy makers will believe they have much more flexibility and will think about the world differently if the United States is importing a lot less oil,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environmental senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For decades, consumption rose, production fell and imports increased, and now every one of those trends is going the other way.”

So this is exactly like a (terminal) cancer patient crowing about how much the Chemo treatments are saving them at the hair stylists!

Or how the dual amputee can take comfort in the idea of never having to go shoe shopping again!

Seriously good citizen, we are ‘finally’ achieving ‘Energy Independence’!

WTF!

One vacillates between, ‘what do you want from a government so corrupted that it regularly misreports unemployment and consumer inflation statistics’ and the ‘do they honestly think we’re that stupid’? responses.

These are the same people who, for the past four years (because yeah they were saying recovery even before their stooges in the Fed declared the Great Recession ‘officially over’) have been pointing to a recovery that only Wall Street could see!

What’s wrong with that?

Um, I think we all know that the NYSE has ZERO relationship to the ‘real economy’.

So the, er, ‘fortunes’ of the people who broke the real economy have no bearing on how the rest of the world is faring…

But that’s not what our politicians think!

How fucking sad is it good citizen that our elected officials CONSISTENTLY refuse to prosecute their largest campaign contributors?

Worse, most of ‘em are lawyers, so they’re well aware as to how the laws were, er, ‘skirted’.

They also know what would happen to them if they ever TRIED to bring any of these scumbags up on charges…

As I have stated many times before, we have one fuck of a situation on our hands, good citizen.

And, ironically, a lot of people who got themselves in over their heads are actually HOPING we are going to ‘bail them out’.

They’d be all too happy to ‘assist us’ in cleaning up their mess…but we’d have to agree to take their word and not to ask any, er, ‘uncomfortable questions’ in exchange for their, er, ‘assistance’.

And you KNOW what that means…they’d be telling you ‘tall tales’ while they were extracting whatever they could from the people they have ‘dirt’ on…making deals in exchange for their, er, ‘silence’…

Which is why the ONLY way to clean out our beyond corrupt house would be to totally revamp our system of commerce.

The ONLY way to prevent corruption is to defeat the criminal’s ability to ‘profit’ from their misdeeds.

I think the average citizen will be amazed at how much more there is to go around once the ‘criminal’s cut’ is eliminated.

But that comes later, job one is to wake the giant from his drunken stupor…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Human Condition

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we are ‘treated’ to a ‘news story’ that continues to regard The Greater Depression as some mysterious event.

And believe me good citizen there are more than a few who can’t, for the life of them, figure out what’s wrong.

It’s no coincidence that they are, to the last one, ‘conservative’.

Let’s have a look at the ‘mystery’ shall we?

FRANKFURT — A key indicator of business sentiment in Europe unexpectedly fell deeper into recession territory Thursday, compounding concerns about the global recovery following signs of slowing manufacturing in China.

Major stock indexes in Europe slipped and the euro fell against the dollar after a survey of purchasing managers suggested that growth in the euro zone shrank during the first three months of the year. That would be the second negative quarter in a row, meeting the definition of a recession.

The data suggests that the 17-nation euro area is still struggling even after a flood of cash from the European Central Bank helped assuage anxiety about a major banking crisis and credit crunch.

Geez, let’s see, the global race to the bottom bankrupts the global customer base that results in a global depression…except the ASSHOLES who sold what has essentially become ‘global monopoly’, sold it on the basis that it would ‘supercharge’ the economy.

(what they ‘mis-represented’ was the part where the economy would be supercharged ONLY for the handful of multi-national corporations who would dominate the global markets.)

Just a little ‘white lie’ between the politicians and their oligarch ‘key’ campaign contributors….

Yet the corporate owned media notes none of these well established events, and we can only wonder why?

Does the answer lie in the words ‘corporate owned’?

I just recently re-stated the reasoning behind the ‘fallacy’ of a ‘free press’ that is solely reliant on advertising revenue for its profits.
That is NOT a ‘free press’ by any stretch of the imagination…and neither is the apparatus we call the Right Wing Noise Machine, that exists solely to spread dis-information and fear.

In the future such organizations will be prohibited, just as the corporation will become extinct.

It will soon be a crime for people to hide behind ‘legal fictions’ to protect them from being prosecuted for their misdeeds.

And don’t you fret for a single moment that ‘nobody’ will step up and do the jobs society needs done.

There are already people willing to do the job correctly and responsibly which automatically protects them charges of wrong-doing.

But I digress!

Weren’t we discussing ‘The Mystery’ as to why the world’s second largest economy was dead on its ass?

And didn’t we determine the problem (which EVERYBODY IN A POSITION TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT) is IGNORING?

Er, what was the problem again?

Oh yeah, that the global customer base has been squeezed to death by the global race to the bottom (in preparation for the chaos that the ‘End of cheap energy’ will cause!)

But that’s a lot of concepts to keep in your head (or at least that’s what they’re hoping, that the more ‘dots’ you connect, the less ‘believable’ something becomes.)

In fact, (if it serves their purposes) you are supposed to suspect ANYTHING that has more than one cause and results in more than one effect.

Because you are supposed to be incapable of understanding complex, interrelated issues.

Which is why they keep writing incomprehensible legislation (that even they don’t understand) to prove that YOU are ‘too stupid’ to do their job!

It also serves as proof of their, er, ‘superior intelligence’…which should be evident to us all just from a cursory examination of the carnage they have so skillfully wrought!

How fucking sad is it good citizen that most of you still get taken in by the now ancient ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ ruse? Noting that it is part of ‘the human condition’ changes nothing.

Since there is nothing that can be done about gullibility we all need to learn to live with it.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation, we also need to stop playing one another for ‘stupid’.

In fact, more harm has been done by the meme ‘you can’t be criticized for being to simple’ when many things are ‘simplified’ by lying about them!

The unscrupulous right is famous for this tactic and even more famous for defending it ardently!

But again we stumble along the edges of an area where nothing can be gained by debate, as long as there are liars there will be lies!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Etiquette

Greetings good citizen,

The world’s stock markets WERE bleeding from the eye-sockets earlier but the financial ‘wunderkind’ on Wall Street are chasing those ‘green tears’ away by insisting that values are much higher than they currently are!

For no observable reason, no less!

Aren’t ‘confidence games’ fun?

Well, what do you suppose the take away is on this, er, ‘non-news’ item?
The customs piece of it can be substantial. Each item shipped overseas has to be labeled with information like country of origin and materials used. And certain products cannot go to certain nations — Spain, for instance, forbids imported playing cards, according to FiftyOne, while to send an alligator purse to someone outside the United States, retailers need a Fish and Wildlife Service permit.

Delivery, meanwhile, could cost as much as the product itself. Macy’s said that it could cost $200 to send $100 worth of merchandise to Australia after adding shipping costs and the value-added tax.

The Macy’s Web site will soon detect the location of international visitors, and show them a welcome screen in the local language that explains how international shopping and shipping works. After the welcome screen, the shoppers browse the English-language site used by shoppers in the United States, but at checkout they get a final price, plus shipping costs, in their local currency.

Is the ‘newsworthy feature’ here the fact US retailers are now chasing a rapidly shrinking customer pool into their foreign homes?

Remember, back in the high flying days before the crash, 80% of retails sales were attributed to the top 20% of the income distribution!

This is a situation that has only grown worse as money/credit has become further concentrated at the, er, ‘upper reaches’ of global society.

People I have grown accustomed to calling the ‘the new royalty’.

(And are they ever gonna be pissed when [almost nobody] bows to them/drops to their knees when they enter a room! These sick fucks honestly think they deserve it…but so did their predecessors.)

Well, that bridge will burn when it gets here, it will probably take ‘em centuries to bring some, er, ‘customs’ back. In the old days it was easy. People were accustomed to ‘prostrating themselves before god’ so if you wanted people to prostrate themselves before you, it was simple, all you had to do is tell them that their ‘god’ chose you to be his proxy here on Earth.

To be in your presence was the exact same thing as being in his!

So without ever having to say the words, people (accustomed to prostrating themselves before god) would ‘automatically’ prostrate themselves before you!

But then again there’s the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ thang still goin’ on. Only a handful of suck ups could have the rest of us bowing and scraping before someone we ordinarily wouldn’t wipe our feet on!

It would also amaze most of us as to how quickly a ‘display of fealty’ would become mandatory, with the death penalty attached to ‘non-compliance’.

You only THINK things couldn’t get much worse than the already are

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! History has shown us that weird can be the ‘word of the day’, every day, almost overnight!

And while you’re scrambling to keep your feet under you, the assholes are laughing at you because they’re playing YOU like a puppet on a string!

Instead of blowing up in righteous indignation, you will (most amusingly) embarrass not only yourself but everybody else who has no idea what is expected of them…(except the shut up and nod when told to do so crowd! That’s their whole role in the entire freak show!

It will (as always) be, er, ‘difficult’ to rebel when the self-styled ‘leaders’ are instructing us on how we are expected to behave…and killing/maiming any who get it wrong!

And like I said, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse.

But that’s something to think about for the upcoming elections (which are doomed to fail) then our ‘self-professed betters’ will seize the reins of power and make it their mission to teach us all some ‘respect for authority’. [As they brutally put down the armed insurrection their power grab will incite!]

Worse I suppose are these posts that point to the ‘unraveling’ of our civilization and disintegrate into grim warnings of that which is to come.

Why, when everything is falling apart, would the fucktards responsible for this disaster decide it was time to teach the (non-revolting) members of the public ‘etiquette and decorum?

They do this to keep a leash on you. The ones who ‘obey’ when they should be fighting are useful, the ones who resist need to be weeded out and made examples of!

Insisting on ‘proper behavior’ is what our public education system is all about.

The need to send you ‘back to school’ has nothing to do with furthering your education…you’re already ‘smarter’ than they’re comfortable with.

No, it’s the ‘pay to play’ system writ large.

Does it pay off every time? No.

It only pays off if you are very lucky or if you have somebody ‘watching your back’ for you.

How sad is it that those little favors end up being so costly when it’s time to pay them back?

So when they kick down your front door, how are you gonna go…with your hands on your head or the trigger of your gun?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: They can only kill you once, but if given the chance, they would be more than willing to make you WISH they would kill you a thousand times a day!

Keep your finger on the trigger and here's to hoping your aim is true!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

War

Greetings good citizen,

The world’s stock markets are selling off, the typical ‘profit-taking’ that we should all be used to by now.

And guess what today’s top headline on the NY Times is?

Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior Iranian leadership, and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict.

Yet these specialists continue their work, saying that any insight on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis carry out a strike — and what the American position will be if they do.

Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices

War with Iran…

Can you believe it good citizen? We have been ‘at war’ in the Middle East for the past 25 years good citizen and the clueless motherfuckers want to go again!

And WHY do we want to attack the followers of the Ayatollah this time?

Same reason as last time, Israel is ‘scared’.

The last dozen years (which just recently sparked a massacre due to ‘multiple deployments) are winding down and all of a sudden the prospects of a ‘nuclear armed’ Iran is ‘scaring’ a country that doesn’t even share a border with Iran!

So I ask you good citizen, just how STUPID is the average American if they believe the leadership of Iran has suddenly become ‘suicidal’?

Because that’s the story you’re supposed to be buying, good citizen! That the Iranians, (being Moslems) are ‘too fanatical’ to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Yet who is it that has repeatedly attacked it’s Arab neighbors and currently ‘occupies’ much of their territory as a ‘safety measure’ (while treating the original inhabitants of the region like second class citizens?

Why it is the same nation that is claiming to feel ‘threatened’. (It is also the same nation that has ‘access to’ US nuclear weapons stored on their territory…)

This is the ‘ally’ we are being asked to deploy US blood and treasure to ‘defend’?

We (as well as the Israelis) should be asking just how valuable their ‘friendship’ will be once the Middle East exhausts it’s exportable oil supply?

Some might even opine that such, er, ‘military adventurism’ is spurred by the prospects of the Arab world closing down the export spigot ‘early’.

As I have stated repeatedly, much of what is today known as the Western World would become ‘uninhabitable’ for much of the calendar year without a steady supply of cheap and abundant energy.

Let’s dial down the rhetoric a few notches, shall we?

The Israelis are no more frightened of Iran obtaining nuclear arms than we are. MAD still holds sway across much of the civilized world.

Which is to point out there is a far greater danger of Iran being nuked by US than the other way around!

Given the, er, ‘uncertain quality’ of US leadership, I’d suggest that Israel keep one eye fixed over its shoulder as well!

The scoundrels in charge appear willing to throw anybody ‘under the bus’ if they can turn the resulting situation to their personal advantage…

See, this is one of the, er, ‘difficulties’ that surround the global collapse of the ‘rule of law’.

Without the ‘safeguards’ the rule of law provides it all comes down to ‘who do you trust’?

Like they say, if you sit down at a poker table and you don’t know who the mark is…chances are its you!

Which would be okay if you were all ‘equally as vulnerable’ but we all know that’s not how it works.

First they gang up on you and bleed you, not quite dry but you’re hurting because you didn’t see it coming.

Then they set upon you again and now you’re in too deep. You can’t pay what you owe and all of a sudden your ‘old friends’ don’t return your calls anymore…

The truly disturbing part is there are a thousand guys just like you…and just like you, half of ‘em will end up getting ‘sacrificed’…because the others gotta eat, you know!

And when they’re all wise to the game, then what?

Now you CAN’T trust anybody and the whole ball of wax just falls apart.

Which is to point out that’s there’s nothing you can do.

Destroy the ‘rule of law’ and you ultimately destroy the ‘bond of trust’.

And once the bond of trust is destroyed, the whole game comes to a screeching halt.

Now the problem is what to you do for the next thirty or forty years while you wait for people to forget that they CAN’T TRUST NOBODY?

We’ll see.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, March 19, 2012

Invisible Sun

Greetings good citizen,

As I commented in my ‘American Empire’ post, much of the, er, ‘prosperity’ we allegedly enjoyed during the post WWII era was in fact, ‘propaganda’…

No different from the ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT they are spreading today.

Investors will be closely watching for another rise in interest rates when trading resumes on Monday, after the bond market’s sharpest move in nearly six months caught some traders by surprise last week.

Despite the sudden swing higher, most Wall Street strategists are playing down the danger of a surge in interest rates, which have been historically low because of demand for bonds from both the Federal Reserve and private investors wary of all but the safest assets.

The sell-off last week was caused by increasing signs that the economy might finally be gaining steam, lifting the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds to 2.31 percent on Friday, from 2.04 percent a week earlier. That was the biggest move in bond yields, which move inversely to bond prices, since October, when rates briefly topped 2.4 percent.

I doubt it is just me who chokes when he reads a corporate owned media article that cites a ‘recovery’ that only the corporate owned media can observe…through their super secret, bought and paid for ‘privileged information’ connections.

In fact, when it comes to the bullshit game, it is nearly impossible to decipher who tells who what.

Does the media tell the government what to report or vice versa?

Allegedly it is the other way around but does it matter when the report is incapable of withstanding even the mildest scrutiny?

But then again, we have become a society that ‘rewards’ fucking up!

Which is to point out what we all already know, bankers aren’t clear on what a bonus is, never mind why you would be granted one!

So I guess it isn’t ‘helpful’ to point out that falling applications for ‘NEW’ unemployment claims HAVE NO RELATIONSHIP to HIRING!
Just because fewer people are getting axed DOESN’T mean more are getting hired!

Never mind the fact that the recent upswing in hiring has been restricted almost exclusively to minimum wage, part time employment!

For some STRANGE REASON, you don’t hear the LYING FUCKS ‘crowing’ about that little FACT, do you?

NOPE, all YOU get is ‘less lay-offs mean more jobs’…(If you can’t live on what the job pays it’s not their problem, it’s YOURS!)

WTF, good citizen!

All right, moral outrage mode /off:

What does higher bond rates mean to you and me good citizen?

They mean it is getting more expensive to borrow money…certainly unhelpful when your money buys less and less, isn’t it?

Funny how that works, the less your money buys the more of it you need!

Which brings us to the other side of the madly unbalanced equation, which is, what have we been trading for our almost totally imported economy?

Um, like most ‘emerging economies’, we have been trading raw materials, natural resources and basic commodities for our Japanese cars and Chinese everything else…(If you’re an American Executive, you get a German car!)

It’s like yesterday’s nitwits that are still collecting to buy TENTS for Haiti!

It’s been three fucking years, wake the fuck up!

Of course, in the case of the (seriously conflicted) American nitwit, it has been three fucking decades, what’s wrong with you?

Are you living fucking proof that ‘stupid is permanent’?

(Sorry, I’ll have to get the ‘moral outrage’ switch looked at…off again.)

Fair warning, there is no guarantee it will stay ‘off’.

It is unnecessary to remind you that I’m not getting paid for this, not now and not ever.

While Marx got royalties for his multiple ‘manifestoes’, he still died broke.

So in the extremely unlikely event that A Simple Plan does take off and I get the (thankless) job of overseeing its implementation. Neither my heirs/progeny, nor I will exit office ‘rich’ by anyone’s (conservatives don’t count, they think you’re fucking King Midas if you’re still breathing upon exiting ‘public service’!) standards.

But that is neither here nor there good citizen, I should stop screwing around and take advantage of the gorgeous early summer like conditions that have graced us here in New England as winter draws to a close…

I know better than to get too used to such a thing. We often lament in mid-May that the weather was more ‘hospitable’ in mid-March!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Armed Thugs

Greetings good citizen,

I went to the local supermarket this morning and, as is often the case, I saw people holding up posters, taking up a collection for…more tents for Haiti.

The earthquake was what, three years ago? Don’t you think in that time anyone who needed a shelter had taken care of the issue by now?

So what are we seeing, a new, predatory ‘permanent aid mission’ bent on milking a now ancient natural disaster in perpetuity?

One thing is clear, they will keep on soliciting as long as people are STUPID enough to keep giving…

But wait…things are tough in Haiti, worse, things have been tough in Haiti for a long time, just like Somalia.

What we’re really seeing in Haiti is the same gross mismanagement that has become the ‘standard’ in our own ‘let ‘em starve’ society.

So when I came upon this ‘hit the panic button’ article I decided it was time to lay it on the line, but first, ‘Nervous Nellie’:
But looking toward the national political conventions, the hurdles are more formidable, she said, because the police and various federal agencies are not discussing their plans.

“We are working with legal teams in Tampa and Charlotte who are looking at ordinance challenges, permitting issues, etc.,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “As it unfolds I would expect there to be legal challenges, but part of the initial hurdle is trying to pin down from law enforcement what the restrictions are going to be. One of the tactics that the government uses is to try to wind down the clock and not provide information on restrictions until the last minute so that you are only able to go to court on a short time-frame and without opportunity to develop a record to overcome the pretextual and untested security claims that will be presented to the judge. The fact is they know well in advance what they are planning to do.”

There are other major factors the police cannot control, however. The first is the number of people who will protest—whether it is in local Occupy protests or national political events. When enough people take to the streets, police cannot arrest everyone. Nor can they control the media from covering police overreach and excessive force. Together those factors can change the political climate and force governments at the local, state and national level to adopt reforms—not because legislators are feeling benevolent, but because they are worried about what is happening in the streets.

Ahem, let me clarify (once again) that THE PEOPLE ARE THE LAW!

We’ve been being cowed by the men in the blue uniforms for far too long…and they do whatever makes their job easier. (So fuck your ‘rights’, you want to sue? Knock yourself out…)

Which is to say we are far beyond playing by what the ‘enemy’ tells us is ‘legal’.

Do you understand that the law, as it currently stands, is meaningless?

How many times to you have to see them ‘flaunt’ the law to understand that ‘legal’ has become whatever these shiftless assholes say it is?

So YOU don’t have to listen to what Officer Dickhead says.

He’s protecting HIS PAYCHECK, the fuck with YOU!

Um, the hard choice here is on Officer Dickhead. He can remember what he was sworn to do OR he can follow orders so he keeps getting his paycheck…and probably get, er, Severely Socially Ostracized, which could mean any number of vile acts that would threaten the safety and well being of themselves and their families.

(Don’t think it will come to that? Keep ‘following orders’ against your own better judgement, we saw how well that worked out the Nazis…the people ‘know’ AND they’re watching you!)

What does it take for you to wake up to the fact that the police aren’t there to protect YOU or what you think are YOUR RIGHTS!

They work for their paychecks and the elected officials whose orders they follow NEVER seem to take YOUR RIGHTS into consideration…because it’s not about what you’re entitled to, equal treatment or equal protection, it’s about what the One Percent wants and how far they’ll push (you) to get it!

UNTIL there is JUSTICE FOR ALL, ‘the law’ is null and void.

So the guy in the street dressed in body armor and pointing a ‘riot gun’ at you is nothing more than a hired thug who I being paid to do YOU harm…

Something to keep in mind should you ever be placed in a position of having to defend you or yours against a raving lunatic with a badge…

Um, the best thing to do about this situation is DON’T PROTEST, it’s useless.

If you want to change how things get done around here you are going to have to ATTACK!

A broken legal system filled with blind and deaf judges is NEVER going to lead a crusade to restore JUSTICE!

You won’t see the return of justice (or your rights) until YOU make it happen!

Until then all of this is just a waste of so many electrons (not that they had anything more important to do.)

It seems most people don’t think their ‘rights’ are under attack…and maybe that’s the one positive outcome of the, er, ‘non-violent’ protest…but all of the ‘protesting’ in the world will do you no good until it gets violent. Which will signal to the other side that they had better back off before things get nasty…and as pissed off as people are right now, it’s a little too late to be backing off.

Until we can restore ‘justice for all’ the guys with the guns are just armed thugs following orders.

Don’t let that slow you down!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Doubt

Greetings good citizen,

I’m chuckling to myself because of an old truism about the three things people hate, cameras, mirrors and the truth.

I titled yesterday’s offering ‘Truth’ and it hasn’t gotten a single read! (Must be that day before the holiday thing happening…)

Understandably, since much of what I write is opinion, it is a bit brash of me to label my opinions as ‘truth’, but the truth is always ‘relative’ (even the ever so elusive ‘bald truth’.)

Then there’s the old adage about opinions, that they’re like assholes…because everybody’s got one.

Well, good citizen, how much of your life is the result of somebody else’s ‘opinion’?

It’s not as stupid a question as it first appears…

Here’s a little peek into what happens when an outlier goes mainstream

I started to think along these lines a few years ago, during the long stock and housing bubble expansion in the stock market that led up to the financial collapse. And we must certainly thank Mr. Greenspan and his Fed for that, as it is clear they knew exactly what was happening. And rather than fulfill their pledge to stop it, they aided and actually promoted it.

What is shocking is that these are no longer rogue operations, no statistical outliers, no isolated dirty dealings by obscure hedge funds.

The moral hazard and decay has progressed so far, has tainted so much, that the US markets are not even worthy to be called casinos, much less captial management and efficient allocation mechanisms.

They have become abattoirs where the real wealth of the nation is taken and slaughtered. These fellows produce nothing, create nothing, except for fraudulent conveyance to take other people's wealth.

There is no better example of this than MF Global, but you can trust your instinct, that there will be more. The blood feast has only begun.

Wait until the wiseguys start skinning their own, those who think they are going to profit from this because they are smarter and better than the rest, and on board. Then you will real some real howls of outrage. I just wonder if there will be anyone left to care.

The very lives we live rely heavily on what we believe…when doubt starts to worm its way into our perception things fall apart quite quickly…

I continue to predict what will be termed as ‘systemic collapse’ because of the ‘cascading effects of doubt’ that will destroy the current flimsily constructed supply chain.

As the ‘smash and grab’ tactics of MF Global escalate, ‘faith’ in the (wholly faith based) stock markets will ‘evaporate’.

If you can’t trust stocks, bonds or banks, what do you do with your (decidedly shaky) money?

Hard to tell because it’s value will vary (wildly) depending on where you try to spend it.

This is a situation that will get out of hand so quickly that people will abandon, er, ‘legal tender’ completely (in favor of ‘fair trade’)

Sadly, this automatically abolishes your paycheck! (and ‘benefits’? Forget about it!)

Which is to opine that the ‘new’ hand to mouth existence will redefine the term ‘hardship’. (You will be absolutely amazed at what you will happily put in your starving mouth …seriously.)

Things we ‘take for granted’ will literally ‘disappear’ and other things will become, er, ‘unreliable’.

Just try calling the cops AFTER paychecks start bouncing to the moon! If someone answers the phone, you will likely be asked how you intend to pay for their, er, ‘services’…

Is your house on fire? Hope you can drive a fire truck (and can figure out how the hoses hook up before the only thing left is the concrete foundation!)

Yeah, as I have been advocating for all along, what we do and why we do it is going to change whether you like it or not!

And anything resembling ‘normal’ will only return if we completely erase our current (predatory) system of commerce.

How ironic is it that this WON’T start with a King?

In order to ‘resurrect’ our civilization we must embrace the rule of law, that is placed ‘beyond the reach’ of men who would do as they wish, unopposed.

You have to dedicate a lot of thought towards remaking the world/creating a ‘viable’ social model, (although all of the ‘pieces’ have been around for centuries.)

NOTHING in A Simple Plan is ‘new’ (except the ‘cashless’ feature that would have been impossible to implement before the 1980’s)

And that is just icing on the cake because it greatly deters ‘corruption’. (Sadly, there isn’t yet a way to effectively prevent ‘stupidity’ something we are all, on occasion, guilty of.)

So, yeah, things are falling off the old ‘slippery slope’ at quite a pace right now, it will be, er, ‘interesting’ to see how things go from here.

Er, thanks for letting me inside your head,

And stay safe out there!

Gegner

Friday, March 16, 2012

Truth

Greetings good citizen,

Yet another day dawns over our crumbling civilization while our ‘anonymous leaders’ nod with satisfaction as their plans unfold unhindered…

Funny how the ‘prosperity’ of the post WWII era now looks like a propaganda campaign. We were only ‘prosperous’ because we ‘believed’ we were prosperous, (the man on the TV told us it was so!)

Now that we look back on it, not so much…

More interesting is the sudden ‘re-appearance’ of our ancient foe, Poverty.

Like polio and tuberculosis, the welfare state (allegedly) ‘exterminated’ poverty…but both of these medical scourges are back…and why do you suppose that is?

Because their old friend ‘poverty’ has returned and created fertile ground for these scourges to thrive in!

Then Willy Jeff Clinton killed welfare… and look who’s back!

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious -- qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.
While I shake a crooked finger at a former president, the problem goes deeper than that. Poverty has ‘resurged’ because we have failed to abolish capitalism!

I almost wrote ‘predatory’ in front of the word capitalism but that infers that there is a non-predatory variety of capitalism and that simply isn’t true!

There’s just no way you can stack ‘fuck you, pay me’ into a non-predatory outcome!

Remember good citizen, if you can’t survive on what they pay you, it’s not their problem but YOURS!

Odd how this little ditty brings us full circle to the crux of the problem, one that few even acknowledge exists. One where if YOU ‘own’ the, er, ‘media outlet’, you get to decide what is or is not ‘true’.

It’s not that the ‘owner’ of the media can’t stand to look in the mirror, often they understand full well that they are ‘propagating falsehoods’.

But they also understand that if they, er, ‘offend’ their advertisers, they’ll starve.

Thus do we encounter the first line of ‘live on your knees’ cycle. You may know you’re doing the job ‘wrong’ but that’s the way the man cutting the paychecks wants it done.

YOU are in no position to question his judgement (if you want to keep that paycheck coming!) You just do it the way he pays you to do it and you shut up.

One of the most prevalent messages one learns down here on the bottom of the food chain is YOU aren’t being paid to think, you’re being paid to DO AS YOU’RE TOLD!

When outsiders question the (often unwise) methods of the owner that same individual is quick to point to the men themselves and claim that’s they way they WANT TO DO the job…(and it’s no skin off of his ass so long as it gets done on time, correctly!)

Things are set up the way they are because that’s the way BONEHEAD PAID to have them set up! But even the most casual observer knows that…so it is unclear whom, precisely, he thinks he’s fooling.

Which brings us to another serious issue, the ‘cattle in the chute’ dilemma.

For all of our (alleged) ‘freedoms’ you actually get to make very few choices ‘on your own’…which is to point out that your choices are limited by other factors that are beyond your control…

Your job on the back of a rubbish truck does not afford you a fully staffed ocean front estate with which to call ‘home’.

Which leads us to the rough edge of an entirely different problem that we won’t go into right here and now…(but I sure would like to!)

Back to ‘cattle in a chute’…and we aren’t talking ‘rodeo’ here good citizen, we’re talking ‘slaughterhouse’, which, ironically, makes those herding the rest of us to our doom, er, ‘cannibals’.

Despite the fact that they don’t ‘eat what they kill’ (not yet anyway.)

Just wait until they put a ‘price per pound’ on what our betters consider the largest ‘pest problem’ challenging their continued ‘rulership.’

Because at the end of the day good citizen it ALWAYS comes down to the question of ‘how far will you go in order to maintain your current level of privilege?’

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘honest answer’ to that question goes way beyond what would normally be considered ‘depraved’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Post 900, The Difference

Greetings good citizen,

While the ‘cracks’ in our civilization appear to have widened visibly overnight we still haven’t reached ‘the end of the line’ the Doomsday crowd is ‘preparing’ for.

I’m gonna have to ‘go off’ on that topic in the not too distant future, partly because of the ‘bird-brains’ they have ‘judging’ these psycho’s efforts.

There’s a dynamic at play in this whole ‘hoarding to survive’ meme that is more then a little ironic, considering how we got to this point in the first place.

Behind this latest collapse of ‘Western Civilization’ is ‘more for me’ capitalism.

Now just how ironic is it that some of these greedy fucktards are trying to ‘buy their way out’ of a situation CREATED by this very same GREED?

Worse, they are justifying what they do as ‘protecting’ THEIR food source from, er, ‘predators’ (formerly known as ‘employees’! Although let’s not forget Chumps and Muppets!)

If you don’t have enough bullets to ‘kill ‘em all’ I’ve got bad news for ya, it’s not YOUR food, it’s everybody’s!

But, (naturally) I digress.

Today’s offering shows us the true dynamics of civilization, (a dynamic the so-called conservatives ignore!)

Put this in the context of only conservatives running in this fall’s election and howl with dismay!
The view that the private sector is the independent engine of economic growth is obviously false. It’s time for an articulated economic framework which describes how the modern state has worked in an active co-venture with the for-profit sector.

Who knows what kind of tax system on debt position the nation would be in if we had created a venture capital bank that explicitly shared in commercial revenues as all venture capitalists do? Put another way, what would a public finance system look like if the public shared the private profit and personal wealth that was made with the help of our money?

Elizabeth Warren has clarified how the social web and the physical infrastructure that government supports is essential to market function, growth and wealth creation. It makes sense to go a step further and clarify how government action and public dollars serve as a direct partner with the private sector in advancing growth and wealth. Then, it would not be so easy to take the money and run.

Government’s ‘JOB’ is to provide for (all) of society (not just the One fucking Percent.)

UNDERSTAND, it is the government that gives legitimacy to EVERYTHING (including religion!) thus when your government undergoes a ‘hostile take-over’ like ours obviously has (and I’m talking world-wide here, good citizen.) You end up with ‘mis-management’ on the scale we’re currently witnessing!

Mis-management that leads to situations like this

Which are the Middletowns of our new era of precarious living? Is it Muncie, whose denuded industrial landscape tells a familiar story of Rust Belt decline? Or is it the new industrial landscapes of Smyrna and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where jobs that look a lot like those the residents of Muncie once had have become posts for a downwardly mobile working class? Or is it Sun Belt boom-cities like Nashville, where the promise of postindustrial transcendence has created its own reserve army of low-wage service employment, condemning many to lives of permanent poverty and vulnerability? Or is it some byzantine conurbation of them all, a commons of the American Nightmare—a Middletown of the 99 percent?

Muncie was my first stop, for it seemed as good a place as any to begin a tour of working-class life in America, to discover what it once had been and what it had become.

Which is to point out what you’ve all know all along…what happened here was no ‘accident’. Nor was it what they try to pass it off as, ‘incompetence’.

The destruction of our civilization (by and for the greedy) was quite deliberate.

The part that sucks is THEY will insist it is OUR FAULT they did what they did.

And much carnage could have been averted IF we had stopped them sooner…BUT, by then they had the keys and were firmly in the proverbial ‘driver’s seat’, all we could do then was to wait for the inevitable ‘crash’!

Um, the reason we are standing PRECISELY where we were almost a hundred years ago is because LAST TIME, the fucking perps ‘walked’, nobody ‘paid the price’ for destroying the economy.

Which leads me to opine that this time they will pay in spades!

[Either that or we will abandon the entire concept of living ‘socially’ and become ‘lone predators’, killing (or enslaving) one another on sight until our eventual extinction. (Which for some species won’t be soon enough, given what we’ve done to their habitat.)]

But I strongly doubt the latter option (as attractive as it might sound to a pin-headed Libertarian…)

So as you wade through the offal that masquerades as ‘news’ try not to get too discouraged, the old world is passing away…but a new one is about to rise…and it is this new one that we need to fight for!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Incompetent

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday the markets lost no time in surging straight past the 13,000 point barrier, and pushed the NASDAQ to a new record high, on the alleged ‘strength’ of the retail sales report (which was mostly driven by inflation!)

Not that there is anything (beyond agitating for a congressional investigation into the matter) you can do about ‘blatant fraud’ in the financial markets.

Under the category of ‘really now?’ we have this little tidbit to kick off today’s offering:

ON THIS DAY

On March 14, 1900, Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act.


Honestly, good citizen, how many of you thought we were on the ‘Gold Standard’ from the get go? (I know I was under that impression.)

Well, the ‘Gold Standard’ only lasted ‘til 1972 when it was abandoned for an ‘anything goes’, er, can’t quite bring myself to call it a ‘system’, because it isn’t. So I guess anything goes is going to have to stand alone!

Um, you don’t need me to admonish you not to be misled; these new ‘record highs’ are as meaningless as the previous ones were as neither had any relationship with real world economic performance. All of this is only ‘eyewash’ for the economically feeble minded!

On a more, er, ‘sensitive’ topic, it is tough for an Eeyore like me to start bashing (and this isn’t the first time) the team who is supposedly on the same side I’m on…although there is no ‘connection’ between (progressive) liberals and Anarchists, thus the ‘ideological differences’.

While we’re here, there is also absolutely zero connection between (true) Anarchists and those asshole Libertarians who mistake ‘rules without rulers’ to mean ‘no rules’ whatsoever!

But I digress, it is not the Libertarians I’m kicking in the shins today, it’s the so-called ‘progressives’

Apparently the have been ‘toeing the company line’ for far too long!
This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?

Yes, Susie makes an excellent reference to ‘the search for excellence’ thinking that is behind the misguided management practices we see today but it seems she doesn’t have a firm grip on the scope of the unemployment situation.

And what will have to be done to ‘realign’ the economy!

It is ‘unsurprising’ to see progressives locked onto the old 40-hour workweek (while totally ignoring the fact that there aren’t enough 40-hour jobs to go around to make even half of our society, er, ‘viable’.)

In order to cut the workweek in half and double the workforce we would need to halve the average living expense in the process! (Under my proposal (A Simple Plan) that involves ‘wiping out’ the Real Estate market, it’s ‘artificial’ anyway.)

I also ‘wipe out’ the entire financial sector but there are other reasons behind that move.

Again, while we’re here, explaining things, I also ‘re-purpose’ commerce to its ‘original goal’ of meeting the needs of society (as opposed to merely ‘enriching its owners’!)

So yeah, the only way to ‘solve’ the unemployment crisis is to cut the work week/day in half…So why are the dimwit progressives stuck on a ‘forty hour schedule’?

Well, we live in a ‘forty hour’ economy (Which is also a grave ‘mis-perception’, a perfect example of ‘middle class myopia’!)

Which brings us full circle to another decidedly disturbing ‘elephant in the room’,

Who stands for the workers and where the hell are they?

Understand good citizen, that the ‘middle class-knowledge worker’ does NOT consider themselves a ‘worker’, they think of themselves as ‘professionals’ who provide a ‘service’.

It is bullshit like this that has caused the ‘working class’ to disappear from the public lexicon!

There are the ‘poor’ (which are generally acknowledged to be the former ‘working class’) there is the ‘middle class’ (who consider themselves the ‘professional next door’) and there are the ‘rich’ who those middle class professionals all work for (even in retail!)

Is it any wonder our nation doesn’t work, all of the workers have been ‘wiped out’!

Which you and I both know isn’t true. There are still plenty of hardworking people keeping the lights burning and making the trains run on schedule.

How fucking sad is it that these hard working people don’t have ANY political support in the current government?

Just another thing to chew on while you’re trying to figure out if you’re a worker or not…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner