Sunday, March 11, 2012

Bullshit!

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘litany of woe’ continues to grow as the pile of bullshit grows deeper. It’s difficult to decide which is more worrisome, the parade of imbeciles clubbing one another senseless for the Republican nomination or the FACT that we won’t do any better if the (pretend) Democratic incumbent wins re-election.

And I use the term ‘win’ in the loosest possible sense…

Like in how comrade Putin just, er, ‘won’ re-election for his third term as president of the Soviet confederacy.

How fucked up is it good citizen that the ‘president’ is whoever the (corporate owned) media tells you it is?

More ‘troublesome’ is how the cheerleaders in the media (what a shitty way to earn a paycheck, being a professional liar) keep shoveling it in!

The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, and though the unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 percent, that was largely because nearly half a million people had joined, or resumed, the search for work in hopes their prospects had improved.

“We’ve seen a lot less Eeyore,” said Sherry Leginski, operations director at CareerPlace, a job placement center in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. “Maybe they’re turning a little bit more Tigger instead of Eeyore. They’re feeling better.”

Looking over her recent cases, Ms. Leginski cited a new college graduate who found work helping the developmentally disabled, a 60-year-old manufacturing specialist whose contract job in Mexico had led to full-time work back home, and a financial services worker who had landed a management job in Charlotte, N.C.

Skipping the ‘happy talk’ about a handful of exceptions (capable of traveling to take on a new job.) what’s worrisome here is ‘the math’.

Let’s suppose we are ‘charitable’ and give the hiring rate a boost to 250,000 (for the sake of round numbers…

A quarter of a million a month for twelve months (again being VERY charitable!) makes 3 million jobs a year. (Let us not lose sight of the fact that over HALF of these jobs are ‘churned’ on an annual basis as employers look for a better ‘fit’ and employees seek management they are ‘more compatible’ with.)

So what are we saying here? That most jobs aren’t ‘new’ they’re just ‘recycled’. But that’s not how the ‘workforce’ operates, it’s step in as a teenager then it takes forty (plus) years until you can ‘legitimately’ step out (barring catastrophic injury.)

So when we were through with, say, the Clinton years, there were supposedly 21 million jobs ‘created’ (and again, most of ‘em were ‘churn’, the same jobs getting filled by different people, over an over again…)

While it might be the, er, ‘inclination’ of the corporate owned media to look back at the nineties as a ‘go-go’ era. I’m here to tell you, as somebody who lived through them, that this is a TOTAL FABRICATION! The 90’s sucked for 99% of us (and the payroll data proves it!)

And UNDERSTAND that the, er, ‘recession’ of 1989 to 1991 was the First ‘jobless recovery’ (the stock market ‘miraculously recovered but unemployment remained, er, ‘stubbornly elevated’.)

The Dot Gone bust (just after Bush Jr. took office) marks the second consecutive ‘jobless recovery’…the crash precipitated by Bush’s economic policies have resulted in the third/most recent ‘jobless recovery’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that most ‘doomers’ have lived through these ‘challenging times’, which has contributed to their, er, ‘pessimistic’ outlook.

Then we have this bullshit to contend with!
The decision by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association ends months of speculation that a Greek default might not set off the swaps, a result that could have undermined their role as insurance against debt defaults.

“We saw today that the credit-default swap market worked,” said the association’s chief executive, Robert Pickel. “Market participants expected it to work.”

Still, doubts about the instruments’ effectiveness may linger. European officials initially shaped the Greek debt restructuring to avoid activating them. The concern is that future restructurings could be arranged to stop swaps from paying out.

So, for some bizarre reason, the swaps were (finally) activated (this time) but (and it’s a mighty big one) the could, er, ‘restructure’ the debt so they wouldn’t be activated in the future…

Is this starting to look like MF Global writ large?

Throw in a broken justice system and we have all of the fixings for Alice in Wonderland!

A madhouse where if there were any rules at all they would be ‘do as I say and not as I do!’

So what’s going to happen tomorrow?

Perhaps more ‘incredible’ is how the Greeks managed to 85% of their creditors to ‘agree’ to a 50% plus ‘haircut’.

Worse, good citizen is they are ALREADY SAYING that Greece will be in trouble again in the very near future!

And it looks like they will be forced to ‘poison (what remains of) the well’ when they get there.

And that’s just a couple of the more obvious things that sticking in my crusty old craw this morning…

Hope the rest of the day gets better from here as I doubt it could be much worse…but then again.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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