Monday, April 30, 2012

Imagination

Greetings good citizen,

There are two, er, ‘distressing’ articles in today’s news, one from the the Libertarians pretending to be liberals at Alternet and the other comes from today’s NY Times editorial section.

Libbies first:
Vandana Shiva, who addressed the Reimagining Work conference via video, is another activist/thinker bringing new work ideas to her largely women-initiated projects in India.

There is no one template that is guiding these rapidly growing worldwide efforts. The writings and videos of the people named above, plus Matthew Fox, David and Fran Korten, Ahrundati Roy, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paul Gildering and others are resources for many new economy innovators.

What all have in common is the realization that the old system is breaking down. Within the distinction made by Grace Boggs between protest organizing and visionary organizing, they fall on the visionary side. Many believe that small and local are best, especially at this stage. All tend to be non-dogmatic and inclusive rather than exclusive and rigidly ideological. All are committed to fair treatment of all stakeholders involved. Cooperation and community are valued over competition and individualism. Genuine leadership is valued and respected. Hierarchy for its own sake is not.

All share a sense of urgency driven by the growing waste of human potential, and the race to avoid ecosystem catastrophe.

Re-imagining work is nothing more than the old capitalist doctrine of, if you can’t find work then make your own job!

Which is perfectly sound reasoning…until you ask yourself why there’s no such thing as ‘capitalist utopia’.

Sadly, the answer to both questions is ‘market share’.

Your ‘enterprise’ thrives (or starves) solely on it’s ability to capture market share.

Do you know what the statistics are surrounding ‘new ventures’? NINE out of TEN FAIL during their first year! The ten ‘survivors’ of a hundred newly established enterprises, NINE of those will fail during the first five years…and the sole survivor will be limping along against its ‘better established’ competitors.

Now THAT’S ‘Capitalism’!

(Did I forget to add the primary reason why most of these enterprises fail, the ‘fuck you, pay me’ part of the process?)

How ironic is it that the same people who give you a ‘leg-up’ in your new venture just happen to be the same people who shovel the dirt over its corpse…after all, they are really in the ‘juice’ business. They exist to put the squeeze on YOU!

And little moronic articles like this one are merely ‘advertisements’ for ‘suckers’ to buy into the Capitalist Ponzi Scheme.

Can’t find a job? Just grab yourself by the fucking ‘bootstraps’ and create your own!

Seriously good citizen, this is only a fraction removed from claiming that the wealthy are ‘innocent’ of ‘gouging the public’ because it was ‘God’s Will’ that they be rich!

How fucking ‘enchanting’, huh? You wake up in the morning and trudge out to the garage (which doubles as your ‘storefront’) as almost ALL ‘kitchen table’ operations literally do start out on the kitchen table!

And you sit there and wait for the customers to show up…

And after a couple of days of ‘nothing’, the wife suggests maybe this ‘do it yourself’ thing isn’t for you and the mortgage payment will be due next week so maybe you ought to find something to bring in some cash in the meantime…

Well, a few more days go by and lo and behold, you still don’t have any customers! Naturally, some ‘genius’ tells you your problem is advertising! You need to let the world know you’re there!

But you have a different problem, don’t ya? Your ‘lack of customers’ isn’t due to ‘invisibility’. Your problem is there’s no reason for your neighbors to buy your product/service over the better-established brands…if they haven’t cut that particular item out of their budgets in the first place.

You just can’t attract enough ‘market share’ to your brand (fast enough to keep our doors open!)

So if you hang your own shingle out, like a typical ‘Libertarian’ will tell you to do (because nuthin’ go up top!) you’re gonna starve!

Wishing is not reality and the reality is our ENTIRE economy is FUBAR, you will NEVER SUCCEED in ‘wishing that away’ either!

Let us switch gears here for a moment and check out our second offering, such as it is:
Campaign Stops
Finding the Limits of Empathy
By THOMAS B. EDSALL

In order to campaign effectively, President Obama and Mitt Romney have to figure each other's supporters out. It isn't easy.

Taken at face value, this editorial appears to ‘assume’ that Obama supporters have a lot in common with Romney supporters.

So we are ALL ‘just like’ the >One Percent.

Or should we view this with a more cynical eye and interpret it to mean that the >One Percent are the only ones who matter?

Understand, good citizen that there are hundred of millions of voting aged individuals out there who don’t like EITHER candidate!

So ‘spinning’ this election will be a taller job than any the corporate owned media has taken on before.

For the first time (and definitely far too late) the announcement of the election results will be met with widespread disbelief and cries of BULLSHIT!

Regardless of who is declared the ‘winner’.

How sad is it good citizen that as matters stand, a win for either candidate is a loss for the nation as a whole?

Only a few more months good citizen…prepare.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Sunday, April 29, 2012

Foresight

Greetings good citizen,

You know what they say, if something sounds ‘too good to be true’, chances are it’s not.

One could dismiss this latest round of ‘republican bashing’ to the ‘Monkey see, Monkey do’ playing to the base variety of campaign tactic.

More disturbing is the notion of who are they bashing if there aren’t any Republicans anymore?

Nowhere on the horizon will you find a ‘champion of the working man’ just as you WON’T find the ‘let’s think about this some more’ Conservative.

Ironically, the conservatives are all done with thinking. They know what they want…the frightening part is they don’t give a damn if anybody else wants it too! (and most of us DON’T!)

You needn’t peel back the skin too far here to reveal this ‘tempest in a tea pot’ for what it is, pure, orthodox Republican ideology!
I often have similar thoughts about Mitt Romney. A surpassingly perfect villain for our times, he appears to come straight from central casting as the slick, shifty-eyed C.E.O. who’s fixing to downsize your ass — and implement his evil scheme for world domination while he’s at it. The G.O.P could not have run a more astonishing incarnation of the self-parodying cluelessness of the 1 percenters if they tried. For all practical purposes, it’s as if the the top-hat-and-tails-wearing Monopoly guy was their candidate.

Think I’m exaggerating? The Mittster’s latest Richie Rich moment from the campaign trail has him regaling an audience of economically anxious college students with some swell advice on how to succeed in business: just be like his “friend” sandwich shop entrepreneur Jimmy John, and get your parents to bankroll the costs of a start-up! Hey, that sounds easy — why didn’t I think of that?! Here’s Mittens:

This kind of divisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

There is nothing more ‘sinister’ here than what’s been preached by conservatives throughout the ages: Borrow from your well-connected kin…and if you don’t have any, tough!

It’s the same thing they say about you’re not being able to live on what you’re paid…it’s not their problem, it’s yours!

Which, ironically, ‘pinpoints’ the main flaw in conservative ideology.

It is impossible to construct a viable social model using selfish, self-centered principles.

That’s why capitalism doesn’t work (but we’re saddled with it anyway, thanks to the bought an paid for courts/justice system.)

Which is to point out that these things AREN’T ‘accidents’ or the ‘unfortunate side-effects’ conservatives moan about liberals taking too seriously or that they make more out of them than what they are.

Worse, conservatives KNOW this is not the case…but they prefer this to the alternative, a level playing field where they face the ‘danger’ of not being as successful as they currently are.

Sadly, good citizen, ‘fear’ that their situation will deteriorate instead of improve is enough to drive some people to support ideas and institutions that DO NOT have their best interests in mind.

And a good politician is capable of exploiting this dread…which is why we will ‘do away’ with elected political office.

Under A Simple Plan there are NO ‘legislators’, the people make the laws and vote directly on their passage. (So we don’t find ourselves where we are today, where ‘law-makers’ are capable (and commonly do) exempt themselves from their own legislation!

This is what happens when any government starts playing with ‘the cloak of secrecy’.

Worse, good citizen almost EVERY ACT of the PAST TWO administrations has been declared ‘secret’ and placed beyond the reach of a public that very well might prosecute the criminals involved for their misdeeds.

Although my point with the above paragraph is how the situation has worsened in the recent past, State Secrets and Executive privilege extends all the way back to the founding of this nation…which DOESN’T make it ‘permissible!’.

A government that has to hide its actions from the people it serves IS corrupt!

If the people of today would ‘misunderstand’ the actions taken it is highly likely those acts were criminal.

If you (as a representative of your people) cannot stand up and say, ‘hey folks, this is what happened and this is what we intend to do about it.’ You have either chosen the wrong course of action or you are guilty of trying to deceive the public, a crime that automatically strips you of your membership in society.

Which is to ‘opine’ that preventing a public panic is, in my humble opinion, ‘overused’. If you’re faced with this situation then you have let something else go on farther than it should have and you (again) don’t deserve a position of public power and trust.

The people who ‘win’ positions of public power and trust will demonstrate that they already possess the foresight to avoid these situations by choosing the actions that win them the position.

It is this singular quality that our species needs to cultivate if we are to advance beyond being a species that exists merely to waste planets.

Do we have what it takes? Awareness is 99% of the battle.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Saturday, April 28, 2012

Legacy

Greetings good citizen,

What does it mean when so-called ‘investors’ behave indifferently to market information that the rest of us find, er, ‘disconcerting’?

Is it really as simple as asked:

Markets Shrug Off a Disappointing G.D.P. Number
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

Although data showed the economy expanded at an unexpectedly low 2.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index capped its best week in a month.

And answered?

I’m going to ‘vent’ a little bit here but I’m saving some for later.

‘Our government’ (and I use that term in the loosest possible context) bows to the ‘investor class’ who finances BOTH SIDES of the political divide.

WHY doesn’t the ‘investor class’ give a flying fig if US GDP is in the crapper?

Could it be because their ‘interests’ are being served better…elsewhere?

Let’s see what this article has to tell us:
Outsourced: American Corporations Create More Jobs Overseas Than At Home

With the nation’s unemployment rate still above eight percent, millions of Americans are looking for work, and the country’s biggest corporations are hiring. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, however, many of those corporations are adding jobs overseas at a faster pace than they are at home. Even worse, others are cutting their domestic workforces while adding jobs in other countries at a rapid pace:

Those companies, which include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT +2.70% International Paper Co., Honeywell International Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., boosted their employment at home by 3.1%, or 113,000 jobs, between 2009 and 2011, the same rate of increase as the nation’s other employers. But they also added more than 333,000 jobs in their far-flung—and faster-growing— foreign operations.

The companies included in the analysis were the largest of those that disclose their U.S. and non-U.S. employment in annual securities filings. All of them have at least 50,000 employees. Collectively, they employed roughly 6.4 million workers world-wide last year, up 7.7% from two years earlier. Over the same period, the total number of U.S. jobs increased 3.1%, according to the Labor Department.

Now I’m (naturally) pissed.

The fucking morons who ‘own’ commerce in this dumbfuck country have put their interests ahead of those of this nation…which is TREASON any way you want to slice it!

The ONLY way it is NOT TREASON is when the same dumbfucks responsible for exporting our manufacturing base have seized control of what passes for our ‘justice system’.

[It’s not treason if you’re the one who gets to decide what is or isn’t treason.]

Oddly, a little closer to home, it’s not theft when they steal your retirement funds with their CDS, it’s a ‘bad investment’ that everybody but you knew about ahead of time…and the fucking bozo fund manager went ahead and sunk your money into it anyway!

So, I will ask (rhetorically,) how do we ‘fix’ this, good citizen?

I say rhetorically because we already know the answer…we CAN’T!

The tools are beyond our reach. It is up to our (corrupt) elected officials to fix our justice system, so it would prove extremely foolish to allow them to do so.

Which is to opine that we are incapable of trusting the repair of our justice system to the same people who broke it.

Which leaves us no alternative but to wipe the slate clean and start over from scratch.

Worse good citizen, we already know what the upcoming election will bring; four more years of the same (or accelerated) bullshit we’ve suffered with for the past four years!

It also means four more years where nothing gets done about the badly broken economy.

Are you prepared to apologize to your children for bringing them into a world that has no place for them? A place where they will likely be ‘exterminated like vermin’ (if they don’t starve to death first?)

Their deaths will be (if they are even acknowledged) dismissed as a sad case of being in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’.

Where their most grievous error will be that of gathering in sufficient numbers to make their extermination effective!

It is a badly broken world we are passing on to our children…but they don’t know that!

The bad news is they think things are the way they are supposed to be!

We do them a great disservice if we don’t disabuse them of this notion, the corporate owned media ain’t gonna do the job!

NOW is the time to start thinking about your ‘legacy’…

Don’t put it off.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Friday, April 27, 2012

Elimination

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Friday to those of you who are looking forward to their weekend. (One day stretches into the next when you’re unemployed, although weekends mean there are people around!)

Um, for some bizarre reason oil is up to $104 a barrel and gold is up $50 an ounce in the past couple of days but neither of these stories made the headlines because stiff price increases are NOT GOOD NEWS for the economy, although investors seem to enjoy them. (Which tells you something else about the ‘interests of investors’ that you should always keep in mind!)

So we have this headline:

U.S. Economic Growth Slows to 2.2% Rate, Report Says
By SHAILA DEWAN 9:52 AM ET

Gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2.2 percent, easing from the prior quarter’s rate but maintaining what economists have called a “sustainable” pace of recovery.

(Like these jokers would know what a ‘recovery’ was if it kicked them in the balls!)

One thing is certain, the only way we the public know anything about any recovery is because the well paid liars in the media continue to insist there is one!

Repeat after me, ‘There is NO recovery’ (and there ain’t gonna be one UNTIL we remove the criminals from power, then conditions will improve immediately; almost magically!

The other headline from today’s business section tells us:

Stocks Unclear on Direction
By REUTERS 10:07 AM ET

Major market indexes were mixed in early trading, putting a fourth consecutive day of gains in jeopardy.

4th day of ‘gains’? The news all week, hell, all YEAR has been horrendous! How the FUCK can stock values be climbing when the rest of the economy is tanking?

Oh, but wait! I’m a fucking liar! Look at the ‘profits and earnings’ the ‘wizards of shake and bake’ have cooked up the books with to dazzle our eyes!

It’s the old ‘garbage in = garbage out’.

Company A buys out competitor B and shazaam, company A is ‘profitable’ (because it is now the sole source of commodity C in a given region, hell, hemisphere…fucking magic all right!)

There’s another ‘game’ that is playing itself out. Not too long ago the beancounters decided ‘retail was retail, why make two trips to do the weekly marketing?

Suddenly you could buy food from the same people who used to sell you underwear!

The ‘warehouse stores’ pioneered the idea but now the ‘big box stores’ offer ‘one stop shopping’, hell you can even fuel up while you’re there!

Which begs the question of how far away are we from just having our paychecks mailed directly to them?

Weird how ‘convenience’ is becoming the ‘enemy’. It may be ‘more profitable’ to do business this way but cut out too many ‘middle men’ and you end up in a world of slip-shod products that suck. (Once you’re the sole source 'quality' is whatever you want it to be…

New slogan: This AIN’T Burger King. You take the mo’fukker MY way or YOU don’t get the sum bitch!

Worse, one stop shopping also seriously reduces the number of ‘job opportunities’ there are in a society that is already plagued with hopelessness.

You don’t want a majority of the population just twiddling their thumbs, they’ll get restless and start wrecking the things they can’t have.

How ‘profitable’ will that be?

Which brings us to another concept most of you don’t ‘understand/appreciate’ and that would be the question of ‘what is profit’?

Is it the coin the retailer puts in his pocket after it is all said and done or is it the benefit society reaps from the effort expended?

Your typical capitalist will cagily answer ‘both!’ but he really only gives a fuck about the first part, the ‘coin’ he puts in HIS pocket, society be damned!

No irony should be lost on the fact that keeping the businessman honest is the very reason governments are established in the first place…especially considering what happens once a government is ‘co-opted’ by the very people it is supposed to be overseeing…

Which brings us (isn’t it interesting how one topic leads to the next?) to A Simple Plan, which eliminates the need for the watch-dog by eliminating the reason commerce needs to be watched!

If we shift the emphasis of our commerce system to the latter part of the equation (the benefit society reaps from the effort) and eliminate the ‘privatization’ of commerce (which only benefits the owner) we greatly improve our society!

Everyone (except the former ‘owners’) will agree!

I belabor the obvious when I point out that YOU don’t NEED to OWN ANYTHING! All you need is the ‘use’ of certain things while you’re here (or there or anywhere else for that matter.)

YOU (invariably) take a beating on anything you sell because it’s ‘used’. Okay, ‘real estate’ appreciates but ONLY under the ‘correct’ market conditions, something the last crisis destroyed for the next three generations!

Worse, real estate is a lousy ‘investment’. If you want to ‘dabble’ in real estate, become a banker where you keep getting paid for the same hunk of land, over and over again in perpetuity…until the bottom drops out like it just did.

Then you don’t want anything to do with real estate…(but you can’t let the public know!)

Um, where were we?

Oh yeah, Happy Friday, good citizen!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Thursday, April 26, 2012

Mirror, mirror...

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes your target for the day presents itself to you before you’ve had a chance to look at what else is happening in the world, not that I commonly choose the top headline to pontificate upon.

Most often my topics are subjects I’ve expounded on before like last week’s story about cops cuffing kindergarteners’

"She was kicking and screaming and fighting and in hysterics," Croft said. "At that point my daughter ran up to her against TSA's orders because she said, 'My daughter is terrified, I can't leave her.'"

The incident went on for maybe 10 minutes, until a manager came in and allowed agents to pat the girl down while she was screaming but being held by her mother. The family was then allowed to go to their next gate with a TSA agent following them.

Croft said that for the first few nights after coming home, Isabelle had nightmares and talked about kidnappers. She said TSA agents had shouted at the girl, telling her to calm down and saying the suspect wasn't cooperating.

"To a 4-year-old's perspective that's what it was to her because they didn't explain anything and she did not know what was going on," Croft said. "She saw people grabbing at her and raising their voices. To her, someone was trying to kidnap her or harm her in some way."

A buddy of mine has been urging me to apply to the TSA for work…and I’ve always ignored his suggestion…partly because I’ve worked ‘security’ before and it is full of no-minds like the ones portrayed here!

There’s ‘procedure’ and that’s that!

What kind of a nation terrorizes its own children in the name of safety…or is this really the ideal job for a closeted child molester?

Put a badge on ‘em and the pedophile part becomes academic?

Seriously good citizen, this is the price of sacrificing your freedom for safety.

It was just last week we had full grown policemen dragging kindergarteners out of pre-school in steel cuffs, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by the total lack of respect displayed by those too stupid to exercise common sense!

So ‘cowed’ by the dictates of intellectuals who don’t understand what they are asking their subordinates to do that they can’t figure out a four year old ISN’T a threat!

Sadly, this is just another example of what happens when you ‘fail to be specific’.

You shouldn’t HAVE to tell a full grown adult that small children are A.) terrified of strangers and B.) HIGHLY UNLIKELY to present a serious threat to air transportation.

But if you DON’T, this is what happens…and now that kid will be in therapy until she’s an adult…and then some considering how fucked up our ‘do as I say and not as I do’ criminals run things.

Of course, we could dismiss this as being signs of the ‘End Times’ but we still have a ways to go before the bottom drops out, end of the summer before trouble starts and the onset of cold weather before disaster strikes.

Um, and you KNOW neither will have anything to do with the Mayan Calendar!

No, the latest rumbling they’re all grumbling about is how our ‘stabilized’ financial system is going to fall apart…again.

What I find, er, ‘odd’ is that nobody is pointing to the obvious reason why the global financial network is going to ‘crash and burn’ in much the same way the energy situation will play out, too much demand and not enough supply.

TO the ‘odd’ part:

Banks make their money ‘lending’ to ‘borrowers’…the latest ‘credit event’ proved that 90 percent of the population is no longer ‘creditworthy’.

Which means the banks HAVE BEEN MAKING LOANS to, er, ‘less than creditworthy’ customers. (It’s that or starve! They have to make money somehow or the branches would all shut down.)

The latest ‘crack’ to appear in the global financial system is India’s inability to ‘afford’ energy to keep its power plants running.

What do you suppose is going to happen when the price of energy puts Joe the average guy in the position of having to choose between paying his loan or putting gas in his car? Will Joe keep going to his job that doesn’t pay him enough to pay all of his bills?

Now comes the interesting part. The ‘world as we know it is brought to you by…YOU!

It is YOU getting your sorry ass out of bed and going to do what YOU get paid for!

Because if YOU don’t, it doesn’t happen when it’s supposed to happen and the whole works gets fucked up.

Something you will eventually figure out for yourself when you hit the light switch on the wall and nothing happens one fine morning.

I know I (most of the time) belabor the obvious but you can appreciate what happens from our featured item for the day when you ‘fail to be specific’.

Which is why the lack of questions regarding A Simple Plan concerns me. If you don’t ask them now while I’m here to explain the intent behind the various clauses, what’s going to happen when somebody else decides to figure it out for you?

Like the idiots in charge of the TSA…or the child molesters over at Homeland Security.

Naturally, we also have other bad examples of what happens when there is a ‘difference of opinion’ over certain issues.

There are how many different denominations of Christianity out there…and if you pick the wrong one, you’re straight to hell!

So what do you say, good citizen, ready to ‘chat it up’ out there?

Thanks for letting me inside our head,

Gegner


Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Hunger Games

Greetings good citizen,

For those of you who are skeptical of my assertion that our civilization is becoming unraveled and is doomed to fail any day now, I present you with a reminder of my primary evidence:

46 MILLION households are on SOME KIND of government ‘food assistance’ because these people’s jobs don’t pay them enough to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their heads. (And wheels under their ass so they can get to their jobs that don’t pay them enough to live on…)

Now, some of you wouldn’t be swayed by this ‘evidence’ of mine, You would counter that poverty and hunger have always been with us (and the truly STUPID among you would insist it’s no worse now than it was a century ago!)

Um, some of you might note that I continue to use the term ‘households’ instead of the fuzzy and indistinct assertion that these Federal food assistance programs deal with people on an ‘individual basis’ (like the lying corporate owned media would like you to believe.)

Now there are nearly 330 MILLION ‘individuals’ in this nation of ours, BUT there are only 117 million HOUSEHOLDS, so you see why this distinction is important.

46 million out of 330 million is less than a sixth of the population…but 46 million out of 117 is almost HALF!

Which is to point out that, once again, the official figures ‘seriously distort’ the extent of the problem. Just like the way the unemployed are ‘counted’ seriously distorts the severity of the unemployment crisis.

There are 243 MILLION ‘working aged US Citizens' and less than half of them work at all!

Which is to point out there is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with our system of commerce that fifty percent of the workforce can be ‘excluded’ from participating and the rest just keeps rolling along.

And let’s not ignore the rising level of decay through neglect out there.

Because at the end of the day it’s all due to ‘mismanagement.’

Let’s have a look at the first column of the business section in today’s NY TIMES:

British Economy Slips Back Into Recession
By JULIA WERDIGIER 8:23 AM ET

Official figures indicated that the British economy shrank in the first quarter, pushing the country into its second recession since the financial crisis.

S.&P. Gives Negative Outlook for India
By BETTINA WASSENER 8:17 AM ET

Standard & Poor’s now says the country has at least a 1-in-3 chance of seeing its debt downgraded to junk status.

Healthy Earnings Propel Stocks Forward
By REUTERS 2 minutes ago

Stocks opened higher after strong results from Apple lifted optimism in a corporate earnings season that was already outstripping expectations.

U.S. Durable Goods Orders Fall Sharply
By REUTERS 9:22 AM ET

Demand for long-lasting manufactured goods was the weakest in three years in March, suggesting the economy lost momentum as the first quarter drew to a close.

Marcia Newton took her son Maxx to a hospital where debt collectors were among employees.
Debt Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

One of the United States’ largest medical debt-collection companies is under fire in Minnesota for placing employees in hospitals and demanding patients pay before receiving treatment, documents show.

Insurers Alter Cost Formula, and Patients Pay More

DealBook
Credit Suisse Profit Falls 96% in First Quarter

By JULIA WERDIGIER 9:11 AM ET

Credit Suisse said on Wednesday that profit fell 96 percent in the first quarter, as it continued to contend with the dual headwinds of a new regulatory environment and an economic slump.


Rupert Murdoch appeared before the Leveson Inquiry on Wednesday.
In Testimony, Murdoch Plays Down His Political Pull
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL 20 minutes ago

Speaking before an inquiry on Wednesday, the News Corporation chief, Rupert Murdoch, sought to deflect suggestions that he wielded influence with British officials to further his corporate interests.

Ericsson Reports Strong First-Quarter Earnings
By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN 5:17 AM ET

The company said net profit more than doubled on gains from the sale of its stake in a cellphone venture and demand from operators in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia.

Sprint’s Loss Is Less Than Forecast
By BRIAN X. CHEN 41 minutes ago

Sprint Nextel reported a net loss of $863 million, deeper than the loss of $439 million a year ago but less than analysts had expected. The company said revenue climbed 5 percent to $8.73 billion.

Apple Profit Rises on Higher iPhone and iPad Sales
By NICK WINGFIELD

Sales in China helped lift overall iPhone sales by 88 percent over the same quarter a year ago, dispelling fears that sales would lag in nations with lower annual incomes.

Apple Infringes on Motorola Mobility Patent, I.T.C. Says

While the headlines claim (again) that stocks are ‘up’ due to ‘better than expected earnings’ we see only ONE example of this and that was due to a one time charge from the SALE of one of their divisions!

Is this prosperity? Fuck NO! It’s fucking ‘happy talk’.

It is no different than being dismissive of the 50% of the population receiving ‘food assistance’.

It’s mismanagement, it’s a lie and it cannot stand!

Although…you have to admit, it does raise a serious question about how much we will ‘put up with’ so long as we have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, today?

But I crack the lid on another pot of shit, the hundreds of millions of school kids who live in cars and motels…

Still think we aren’t pushing the breaking point?

We will soon see who is right, keep an eye on the price of energy, that’s what is going to push the whole deal over the edge.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Q & A

Greetings good citizen,

In the usual ‘pump and dump’ fashion, yesterday’s losers have become today’s bargains as the Dow has skipped back up over the 13,000-point level (however irrationally.)

Earnings Help Stocks Rise
By REUTERS 43 minutes ago

Wall Street stocks rose as earnings from AT&T and 3M helped the Dow Jones industrial average.

Survey Shows U.S. Home Prices Still Weak 9:21 AM ET
3M Beats Profit Expectations 8:44 AM ET

Um, ‘earnings’…in a world where ‘market share’ is shrinking dramatically due to rampant ‘cannibalization’ (and resulting in monopolization) ‘earnings’ aren’t a useful measurement to use at all.

Nobody’s getting a raise despite prices rising out of control, so where are these so-called ‘earnings’ really coming from?

Why they are the gains made by the ‘new’ entity that replaced two former entities. When you fold two into one, the net result is always (at least numerically) a ‘gain’…even if the gain is really a loss compared to what the two firms brought in separately.

But enough ‘fun with numbers’ and the creative way Wall Street looks at things for the benefit of their ‘masters’.

Our civilization IS being destroyed and the few this benefits aren’t about to halt, much less reverse this ongoing disaster.

Which, weirdly, brings us to this situation

Last year, the Occupy Movement rose up spontaneously in cities and towns across the country, radically shifted the discourse and rattled the economic elite with its defiant populism. It was, according to Noam Chomsky, “the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” In his new book, Occupy, Chomsky looks at the central issues, questions and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How are the wealthiest 1 percent influencing the lives of the other 99 percent? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuinely democratic election look like?

What? ANOTHER ‘book review’ from Alternet? Be that as it may, I am a Chomsky ‘fan’ from way back. Despite my misgivings over his ability to ‘ride the wave’ between the worlds of ‘popular dissent and the corridors of power for so long, not that the right hasn’t done their utmost to discredit him…because he serves a useful role.

Yes good citizen, Noam is a ‘tool’ and a useful one at that (because he offers a ‘rational explanation’ for some decidedly irrational acts.)

Look at the list of ‘mysteries’ he offers to expose within the pages of his latest work!

Did you notice that NONE of those questions are, er, ‘relevant’?

Shouldn’t the first question be why does the ‘>One Percent’ even exist?

Won’t there ALWAYS BE a >One Percent?

(Ironically, there will be a ‘>One Percent’ under A Simple Plan simply because it is a ‘meritocracy’. Mankind is not sufficiently evolved to attempt a social structure that does NOT reward achievement.

So we would still have a ‘top tier’ of performers but their circumstances will be VERY DIFFERENT that today’s ‘greed heads’ and they WILL NOT be ‘significantly’ better compensated than their non-management counterparts.

Your ‘regular Joe’ will live a good life and want for little, the ‘achievers’ among us will be only slightly better off. They’ll be the ones who can get tickets to the World Series or the, er, Superbowl (should such sporting events survive into the future where all such competitions will be strictly ‘amateur’.)

That’s right, NO PRO SPORTS!

Even ‘futbol’ will be played for ‘the love of the game’. NOBODY will be given a paycheck to ‘play’ sports…on the other hand there will be plenty of time to participate and train as the work week will be cut in half.

But, naturally, I digress.

We WERE discussing the, er, ‘shortcomings’ of Mr. Chomsky’s latest work.

So, is there a way to keep money out of politics? I can only think of one way and that is the method employed by A Simple Plan, zero cash.

You (nor anyone else) will be capable of ‘donating’ or bribing or contributing to a political campaign because…under A Simple Plan there are no political parties nor are there any ‘elected’ positions.

Ironically, there will be no ‘charities’ under A Simple Plan because they will become what they always SHOULD HAVE BEEN, 'unnecessary.'

A Simple Plan offers YOU (and everyone else) cradle to the grave security, regardless of what you ‘need’.

Will this cause ‘bottlenecks’ in service? Most likely, but you can only do the best you can with what you have to work with!

What will ‘true democracy’ look like?

If you don’t vote directly on the laws then YOU DON’T HAVE ‘TRUE DEMOCRACY’…and this ‘representative horseshit’ that we’ve been saddled with in its place hasn’t worked out real well either.

Well, there it is good citizen, all of your questions answered and you didn’t have to shell out $30 bucks for the book (that doesn’t have any of the answers anyway!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Monday, April 23, 2012

Predators

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Monday and what a Monday it’s starting off to be with stock markets around the globe in unanimous agreement that the global economy is FUBAR.

WHY is the global economy FUBAR?

Could it be due to predatory capitalism at its finest?

Which is to belabor the obvious, the private sector wants control of the nation’s prison population (for less than altruistic reasons…)

Observe:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Can’t find a job Bucko? Get busted for minor possession (or something equally as trivial) and you’ll get a job all right with the State picking up the tab for your meals, health care (sometimes) and lodging while you work for ‘pocket money’ to spend at the prison PX!

And when I say ‘predatory capitalism at its finest' I naturally mean its most vile.

You know why YOU (or your kids) can’t find a job? It’s because the self-centered assholes that run private prisons are playing both ends against the middle!

And it ain’t just the ‘private prisons’ that play this game.

Have a good look at our badly broken economy where tens of millions work but don’t earn enough to put food on the table…and just imagine what’s wrong with this picture?

You don’t suppose greedy employers aren’t jumping on the opportunity to have the ‘price advantage’ of having their low skill labor requirements met by people they pay a few dollars a day for?

And where does that leave the ‘law abiding citizens’ of this nation?

On the outside looking in!

Imagine for a moment how $5 a gallon gasoline is going to affect this segment of the population?

You don’t suppose places like Aaron’s or Rent-a-Center will be seeing a ton of returns, do you?

Priorities…you can sit on your ass (without the fancy sectional you’re paying $99 a month for 99 months) but you’ve still gotta eat (and you can’t eat the fucking couch!)

Stop right here for a moment and look at how fucked up this situation is becoming!

Why is capitalism ‘predatory’? Because it inevitably turns on its own employees as a ‘profit center’.

And if it can be done ‘cheaper’ on the outside then the permanent employees get axed!

Fuck the family and fuck you, that is what the predator capitalists say!

How are YOU supposed to survive when profits trump the family unit?

Don’t look now but THAT’S WHERE WE ARE!

Um, sorry…I get carried away.

Worse, you knew that because this is not ‘new’ by any stretch of the imagination.

What might be new-ish is the notion that we can fix this situation with some good ‘old-fashioned Yankee know-how’…not.

Which is to point out the ‘futility’ of attempting to ‘cannibalize’ that which has already been laid to waste and made barren.

Turning our ‘trash into treasure’…ain’t happening.

Some things are ‘salvageable’ and some things aren’t.

Civilization is definitely ‘salvageable’ but the capitalist ‘monkey-boy’ has to go.

Especially the one clinging to tangible currency. It’s his ticket to a ‘free ride’. Yet those morons in Washington have turned a blind eye to the criminal act of ‘helping yourself’ to ‘legal tender’.

Well, as we have known for quite a while, good citizen, the ‘end result’ of rampant tampering with the money supply is to render it worthless.

Which is to point out, like this morning’s global red ink that has totally escaped, er, ‘comment’ by the lying corporate owned media. It is only a matter of time before you start getting asked whether or not you have something else to trade at the check-out counter…

And shortly after that your (fill in the blank) will be no good, you’ll be forced to trade ‘in-kind’.

Don’t get ‘blind-sided’, good citizen; prepare!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Sunday, April 22, 2012

Unsustainable

Greetings good citizen,

Occasionally one will stumble upon something that is truly worthy of the word ‘profound’, such as this little sharp-shooting paragraph from yesterday’s Some Assembly Required

I am an ardent reader of Mr. Michaelson and deeply appreciate his worldview (which is, admittedly, far ‘mellower’ than my own.)

For your edification, good citizen:
Saturday, April 21, 2012
SAR #12112

There are many truths, but only one reality.

Inertia: A lot of attention being paid to income inequality in the US, as though that were the problem. It is not. Our income inequality is a symptom; the disease is the control of the government and the political process by the rich. It is unrealistic to think that politicians bought and owned by the rich, by Wall Street, and by the corporations would turn on them. It's not going to happen. There is no democratic way to reverse the conditions that now prevail. There probably is no peaceful way, either.

The ‘poetry’ of the above statement is elegant beyond compare…and note, he did it all without using a single exclamation point!

Had it been me, there would be at least a half dozen (and two thirds of the passage would have been bolded.)

But then there is the content itself, which is exquisite!

It perfectly illustrates what I have been saying for quite some time…that we are trapped and there is no (peaceful) way out.

Which may make today’s primary story appear somewhat superfluous.
The environmental movement, and indeed the progressive movement as a whole, is at a critical crossroads. Defending past accomplishments and continuing to strive for stronger environmental laws and regulations are obviously important and necessary. However, the challenge now is greater. As James Gustave Speth, a leading environmentalist and former adviser to two presidents puts it: “For the most part, we have worked within this current system of political economy, but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.”

What Speth and countless others have come to realize is that the world simply cannot wait for the increasingly remote possibility that somehow “business as usual” will generate a politics that can alter the deteriorating trends. A new economic system of environmental stewardship must be built from the ground up, community by community, state by state, region by region in the coming period.

Just such a “new economy” movement is, in fact, quietly building up momentum just beneath the surface of media attention—paradoxically, in large part because the failure of national and international strategies produces more and more economic and ecological devastation. Citizens in all parts of the country have been taking the lead in constructing new economic models and institutions that not only promote democratized economic opportunity, but also, ecological sustainability.

Um, what a bunch of hogwash! Yes there are people, er, ‘attempting’ to establish a ‘green-for profit’ infrastructure out there but it’s NEVER going to work because of the ‘profit’ part of the picture.

Let me explain:

The ‘world of capitalism’ (which we all live in) is awash in debt. Much of this debt is ‘unsustainable’ because it is ‘unreasonable’. (in case you don’t understand what I’m getting at, I’ll cut to the chase and say it, I’m pointing at the huge ‘rent seeking’ portion of the economy.

No irony should be lost on the fact that our entire financial system is based on this ‘rent seeking’. Something that is currently exemplified by Benjamin Franklin’s (now) exceeding foolish remarks about passbook interest! Because he was unable to conceive of a world where a quadrillion dollars would be chasing that five percent…)

Understand that the world of capitalism was based on ‘perpetual’ five percent interest for regular savings accounts. So called ‘riskier’ loans commanded higher levels and, wouldn’t you know it, once the ‘Credit Genie’ got loose from the bottle, it took interest rates in excess of 20 percent to put it back in!

Now passbook interest is some fraction of a single percent and banks are (still) going broke trying to pay it.

So how are we going to achieve a ‘sustainable economy’ if we can’t/don’t fix our financial system?

And, the next thing you need to understand is the crowd who ripped the rest of us off wants things to remain precisely as they are.

They’ve got theirs, fuck you!

You aren’t going to see ‘renewable energy’ at anything resembling affordability because the already wealthy don’t care how much it costs (er, you.)

Worse, good citizen is where this kind of ‘myopia’ leads…it leads to a world of shortages.

The thing you need to wake up to it the EXACT NATURE of situation, those with plenty of (funny) money WILL NOT be the ones suffering from a shortage of anything, it will be the REST OF US, clawing one another TO DEATH over the crumbs that remain.

Now I am just as capable of writing without, er, emphasis as Mr. Michaelson is.

But I prefer to use emphasis to illustrate the points I make…(as clownish as it might sometimes seem.)

Our styles may differ but I believe our overall goals are, er, ‘similar’. (Feel free to slap me upside the head if this notion is in error, CK!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

If we are to survive as a species, we must remake our entire social model…and A Simple Plan does just that!


Saturday, April 21, 2012

Boycott!

Greetings good citizen,

Um, you may be interested to hear that the Dow is up 174 points for the week while, as we noted yesterday, the global financial network is being held together with duct tape and paper clips.

A stiff breeze would obliterate it.

Which is to say that I hope you all appreciate what I mean when I tell you about ‘all money being funny.’ If money were an actual corporeal substance, they wouldn’t be able to get away with all of this ‘fudging’…

Yet here we are.

Let’s see what Mr. Williams has to say about all of this?

No. 430: March Industrial Production and Housing Starts
Subscription required April 17th, 2012

• Industrial Production Unchanged for Second Month
• Housing Starts in 40th Month of Historically-Low-Level Stagnation, Following 2006-to-2008 Collapse in Activity More ...

SPECIAL COMMENTARY No. 429: Consumer Liquidity Update, March Retail Sales Subscription required April 16th, 2012
• Gain in Inflation-Adjusted March Retail Sales Was Not Statistically Significant
• First-Quarter 2012 Consumer Income Increasingly Constrained
• Sustainable Economic Growth Is Not Possible Without Underlying Growth in Income and Credit More ...

No. 428: March CPI and PPI, February Trade Balance
Subscription required April 13th, 2012

• CPI Headline Inflation of 0.3% Was 0.8% Not Seasonally Adjusted
• March Year-to-Year Inflation: 2.7% (CPI-U), 2.9% (CPI-W), 10.3% (SGS)
• Broad-Based Inflation Reflected in Stronger “Core” Inflation
• February Trade Improvement Should Boost GDP Expectations More ...

I think the most damning item in Mr. Williams commentary is the fact we are all well aware of, it is the last remark/truth he points to in his ‘special commentary’ about there being no economic growth without corresponding growth in income and credit.

Which will make the push for sustainability appear a bit weird, considering the goal becomes the opposite of what the capitalist wants to see.

Which is to belabor the obvious (once again.) Under A Simple Plan the ‘metrics’ of society will be completely different.

Instead of measuring ‘productivity’ we will monitor consumption and strive to level it off rather than push it ever upwards.

When we have more than just this planet to work with, then we can turn our gaze back towards expansion but until then we need to conserve what we have for the long haul.

Although, I suspect we will make rapid progress toward conquering space once we remove the ‘economic roadblocks’ standing in our path forward, placed there by the guardians of the status quo!

Which brings us to today’s tidbit where we are asked, "Would knowing ‘who’, specifically, was ‘buying’ our elections change anything?"
The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves

If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available on line immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.

In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing.

Naturally, the, er, ‘miscreants’ who are using their wealth to, er, influence the electoral process don’t WANT YOU to know they are behind the attack ads.

YOU might encourage others to BOYCOTT their products! (Not that this has ever happened, but it’s possible.)

But then we have our ‘politicians’ jumping through hoops to keep this information hidden…it’s just not right!

[Not that this has EVER stopped them in the past…]

More importantly, since we already KNOW who is behind the bulk of this ‘electoral hijacking’, why not just boycott ‘em anyway?

Are we ‘afraid’ of jeopardizing the jobs of innocent workers? We ALL have to live with the consequences of ‘corrupt politics’.

Let us bow our heads in a moment of collective mourning for all the electrons that died needlessly just to poke a stick into the Republican’s cage.

Since, as I have repeatedly pointed out, there ARE no Democrats, just Libertarians POSING as Democrats, all of this finger pointing is nothing more than eyewash. Worse, it is stupid stunts like this that prove my accusation.

But whatever you do, don’t just sit there and nod, he’s right and go back to sleep.

When the fuckers come to take you away, you’ll want to be ready for them.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Friday, April 20, 2012

Family

Greetings good citizen,

I’d say Thank (you know who) it’s Friday but that misses the mark by a couple of miles because the nonsense just keeps on coming.

Let’s have a look at today’s headlines, shall we?

TOP NEWS
Fears Rise That Recovery May Falter in the Spring

By ANNIE LOWREY

Global finance leaders are meeting in Washington to discuss oil prices, unemployment and other issues putting a cloud over the global economic picture.

Okay, not particularly surprising and consistent with the world most of us wake up to each day.

This is what the lede to the business section reads like:
BUSINESS

Special Report: Global Trends
A Tarnished Standing for Europe

By ANNIE LOWREY and JACK EWING

European problems will be at the forefront of discussions this weekend at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Kim Appointment May Spur Changes at the World Bank
BRICS Agitate for a Seat at the Table

DealBook
Threat of Credit Downgrade Persists for Morgan Stanley

By PETER EAVIS and SUSANNE CRAIG

A credit rating downgrade could hurt the bank's huge derivatives business, forcing the group to come up with billions of extra dollars. [?]

No Power, No Boom
By VIKAS BAJAJ

India cannot get enough fuel to run power plants, and the problem has contributed significantly to a second year of slowing economic growth in the country.

This more closely resembles a litany of woe than a declaration of prosperity but guess where the Dow is right now? Up more than a hundred, ‘in sync’ with a global rally in stocks!

Now the lying ‘corporate owned media’ claims this is due to ‘earnings’ but we have seen the rather ‘creative’ way Wall Street arrives at it’s ‘earnings’ figures.

Then there’s the ‘basis in reality’ part that no one (credible) is willing to debate in either direction.

This is ‘The Walrus’ biting us on the ass. What Walrus? The one who said, “My words mean exactly what I want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less.”

How fucking sad is it that the ONLY, er, ‘entity’ that KNOWS what you mean is YOU (and even then there is a degree of waffling because speech is a far from perfect medium!)

So, stock markets around the world are rallying and we can only wonder “who is loony enough to be buying stocks in this market?”

And survey says?

The fuckers who make their living off of the markets…

Okay, not enough? How about this bit of speculation from today’s edition of Alternet

The growing minority vote (which leans heavily Democratic), the shift of white college graduates from red to blue and the shrinking white working class (which traditionally votes Republican) are good omens for the left, said Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics, said he largely agreed with Teixeira’s analysis, although he sees room for the GOP to make gains down the road.

Teixeira and Trende told Governing that however these trends play out on the federal level, the effects are likely to be felt in state legislatures and governorships. The 2010 midterm elections, in which Republicans gained 69 seats in Congress and nearly 700 seats in statehouses nationwide, are the latest example of that correlation.

"It could have a huge impact,” Trende said. “The evidence definitely suggests that state politics follow the national trends.” Teixeira concurred, with the caveat that state politics have their own peculiarities (such as the gerrymandering of state legislative districts) that distinguish them from national elections.

“These trends have got to filter down in some ways,” he said. “This will have a big effect.”

How fucking sad is it good citizen that the Democratic Party as we now know it is nothing more than a sock puppet controlled by the minority conservatives?

By their actions shall they be known…well, I know I’m not the only one to notice that the ONLY legislation getting passed through Congress these days is decidedly conservative (and putrid!)

But this is what happens when money takes control of politics.

And I again belabor the obvious when I point out that this should surprise nobody.

Um, is the ‘browning’ of the US the reason it has been ‘abandoned’ by our great white leaders? (The ‘owners of commerce’)

I’ll bet the Native Americans wish they knew this earlier, they could have chased the Europeans out of here with the ‘threat’ of non-white grandchildren!

Sadly, this, in perspective, explains efforts to EXTERMINATE the Native peoples…it seems this planet isn’t big enough for some white people…

Maybe we should figure out a way for them to get off? (This ‘contaminated’ planet)

(And Gegner is white!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner (A proud member of the ‘family of man’)


Thursday, April 19, 2012

Foreclosure

Greetings good citizen,

Wall Street is hopping up and down while traders continue to call sow’s ears silk purses.

As we can observe from this headline from today’ NY Times:

Trading on Wall Street Is Mixed
By REUTERS 10:31 AM ET

Stocks opened with a slight lift as investors grappled with euro zone uncertainty, a raft of corporate earnings and softer-than-expected data on the American labor market.

Um, I’ll bet that last bit caught your eye!

We are all left wondering just who it is that keeps getting surprised by these very straight-forward, cause and effect results.

Worse, is the raft of bank stocks that lost money but not as much as some (obvious moron) ‘estimated’ they would. Why something like that turns the whole situation into a ‘net positive’ is beyond stupid.

But let’s not get into what our so-called ‘betters’ think of us right now, shall we?

In other news, the man most often considered to be a ‘living fossil’ because he’s been in the public eye for so long has passed away.

Yup, Dick Clark is dead. Ironically, his obituary not only outline his long and distinguished career but it also ballparks the fortune he left behind!

Um, a fortune that did the guy who accumulated it absolutely no good and is unlikely to do anyone else any good now that he’s passed away.

How pathetic is it that IF it is donated to ‘charity’ the administrator of that charity will pay HIM/HERSELF 80 to 90 cents on the dollar as ‘salary’ for overseeing the fund…

Any amassed fortune is always thus: Lower prices the consumer never saw AND higher wages the workers never received!

Did I mention our commerce system is both highly illogical and moronic…besides being beyond repair?

Well, it’s worse than you might imagine good citizen. It’s one thing to visualize what foreclosures are doing to our society and quite another to read actual accounts of people being turned out of their homes.

Understand that most of the incidents listed are ‘outliers’, normally, the average individual/family is nowhere to be found when the Sheriff comes knocking to throw them out. (And we have ‘stage fright’ to thank for that…and the typical sheriff usually does smile when this common human foible does his job for him.)

I don’t have ‘hard numbers’ on how many foreclosures turn into Mexican stand-offs because the (corporate owned) media keeps these incidents of 'bureaucratic brutality' out of the public eye.

Naturally, the banks have received trillions in ‘bail-outs’ (Hank Paulson’s $700 billion was just ‘eyewash’, chicken feed, compared to what the financial sector really needed!) So why are the, and let’s not sugar coat this, ‘people responsible’ for this disaster still trying to collect by forcing people out of their homes?

It seriously begs the question, good citizen, of how many times the public, in its role as the taxpayer, is going to be forced to pay for this?

Weirder still is this BS is going on in a feeble attempt to (re) enforce the idea that a contract is still a contract (depending on who the counter party is.)

If the deal is between you and the bank, a deal is a deal and the fuck you, pay me part stands…but if the deal is between an investor and a bank, well suddenly your ‘deal’ is ‘negotiable’.

And if the deal is between the bank and the government, forget about it.

YOU have to make the bank whole regardless of how stupidly they handled the transaction!

Did I mention that what passes for our justice system is also FUBAR?

The only way to fix it is to purge it completely.

Restoring confidence in a new system will require us to deal harshly with the administrators of the old, corrupt system.

I belabor the obvious when I point out that ANY ‘new administration’ will be suspect until it ‘proves’ itself.

Under A Simple Plan there is only ONE contract and that is the contract between the individual and society itself.

It is your agreement to surrender your labor in exchange for having ALL of your needs addressed. (And you do have a ‘choice’, you can choose not to surrender your labor and you will be provided with free transport to any nation that accepts you…but this is a one way ticket, you can NEVER come back.)

All free with no taxes (which were actually invented as a means of paying ‘owners’ for shit that wasn’t theirs in the first place!)

You will still be obliged to ‘pay’ for food and other high demand perishables, but not to worry, your labor will be compensated commensurate with your experience/skill level.

This is ‘money’ as it was intended to operate, as a ‘regulator’ for scarce items.

More curious is you can neither gift nor bequeath your money when you die, your money is for YOU and you alone. EVERYONE ‘earns their own way’ under A Simple Plan.

As an addendum to the above ‘choice’ you have, should you reject A Simple Plan and the country that welcomes you subsequently decided to adopt A Simple Plan, you will be expelled from that country and provided free transport to anywhere that will accept you. (So be careful who you piss off because countries that adopt A Simple Plan will NOT trade with countries that are ‘unaligned’, making those places technologically backwards by default.)

In the unlikely event that there is no place left to ‘adopt’ you, a die hard ‘rugged individualist’, you will be transported to a desert isle to cope as best you can with the resources available. (Um, desert means ‘uninhabited’ and by no means guarantees ‘habitability’, refuse a sure bet (ASP) and you takes your chances.)

A Simple Plan, the choice is yours!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Wednesday, April 18, 2012

O.O.C.

Greetings good citizen,

Considering the ‘Land of the Free’ also boasts the world’s largest prison population we probably shouldn’t be too surprised by this disturbing development
The case is among thousands across the country fueling a long-simmering debate over when educators should bring in the police to deal with disruptive students. A 6-year-old Georgia kindergartner became the latest test case last week when she was hauled off in steel handcuffs after throwing books and toys in a school tantrum.

"Kids are being arrested for being kids," said Shannon Kennedy, a civil rights attorney who has filed a class-action lawsuit against Albuquerque's public school district and its police department on behalf of hundreds of kids arrested for minor offenses over the past few years, including having cellphones in class, destroying a history book and inflating a condom.

Civil rights advocates and criminal justice experts say frustrated teachers and principals are calling in the police too often to deal with the most minor disturbances. But other teachers say a police presence that has grown in response to zero tolerance policies of the 1990s and tragedies like the Columbine High massacre is needed to keep teachers and well-behaved students safe.

Ironic as the topic of this morning’s radio broadcast on NPR (increasingly becoming National Republican Radio, gotta get that ‘P’ out of there!) was ‘racial profiling’ and the ‘problem’ this presents law enforcement personnel.

In defense of racial profiling (or more succinctly, in denial) was the statement that we all must think cops are outright racists if we were to believe they were being ‘bigoted’ in the performance of their duties.

No, the truth of the matter is we all KNOW cops are too fucking stupid to deal with juvenile offenders sensitively…

I mean, they busted a six-year old who was obviously having a ‘bad day’. WTF, good citizen!

There’s one ‘badge’ that needs to be flushed down the toilet, pronto! and, in fairness, a teacher who needs to find another line of work!

Just as bad as Out of Control cops are the O.O.C. teachers who call them into their classrooms!

Worse, good citizen, it appears we have an epidemic on our hands…and the fucking Corporate Owned Media doesn’t breathe a whisper about this heavy handed policing that is taking place right under our noses!

And what is the ultimate ‘verdict’ rendered here? Unfit parents. Not unfit teachers with hair triggers or idiot cops who will bust anyone (even a six-year old) on someone else’s say-so…

Do you think we have a ‘problem’ here…because it appears a majority of these kids are getting ‘records’ (although the fucking dickwads causing our children to be arrested instead of imposing detention or a more suitable punishment deny it) that will, because we’ve seen it ourselves, NEVER GET ERASED.

These juvenile offenses will follow these kids to their GRAVES, because that IS the ‘mentality’ behind busting kids for being kids!

Which is to ask, where is the criminal statute against ‘possession of a cell phone?’

What did the cop bust the kid for? Certainly not possession, so it must be a ‘civil disobedience’ charge.

And do YOU honestly think something like THAT is going to be ‘purged’ from your child’s ‘permanent record’?

You know how they ‘purge’ this stuff don’t you? They don’t remove the document and destroy it (unless you pay a crooked cop to ‘fix’ your records) No, they just make a note beside it, leaving it there for whoever pulls your records later in life, to haunt you.

Worse, future fucktard can read (and act on) this information, PRETENDING they didn’t see it because it was marked ‘deleted’.

Worse, if YOU ask to see your files, they WILL make sure to ‘pull’ all of the stuff marked as ‘deleted’ so all you see is the stuff you already know is there!

Which is to say you will NEVER succeed in asking to see your files, and have someone walk over, pull them up on a screen and print them out…

NO, you will have to file a information request and they will MAIL them to you…so someone can take the time to ‘edit’ the parts that they would surely be sued for if anyone else saw them!

But then we have the opposite end of the dilemma to deal with, good luck finding a lawyer willing to take THAT case!

Worse, good luck finding a court willing to hear it (because what passes for our ‘Justice system’ is totally corrupt.)

So today’s Big Red Flag is OOC policing in our classrooms that will/is making an appearance in our workplaces.

Since schools ‘main objective’ is to train you to be an OBEDIENT and (semi) competent worker (in that order,) how long do you think it will be before the boss has you arrested and fined for being late? (Or ‘stealing’ for taking too long to return from break?)

[Which is a rhetorical question, I am well aware that we are already there and beyond already! It has become so commonplace that it doesn’t make the news…which should surprise no one.]

We (sadly) already know that the cops ‘do what they’re told’. Heaven forbid they think for themselves! (Or they’d know better than to arrest a six-year old! But maybe I expect too much from a college educated adult with ‘public relations training’…I mean seriously, WTF!)

Equally as bad is how the corporate owned media thinks this ISN’T ‘newsworthy’!

The very foundations of our civilization are under attack by (ruthless) profiteers and our media is mute about it?

Well, that isn’t true either, is it? Because here’s a story about exactly that from a major national publication…

But it ISN’T a story about OOC teachers and cops, no! It’s a story about A FUCKING LAWSUIT against the STATE OF ARIZONA (in the Republic of Lunatics) about OOC policing!

This is, good citizen, a very damning indictment of our badly broken society.

It is not a question of whether or not we have crossed the line but if our knee-jerk reactions have driven sanity and judgement out of our daily affairs?

Which is to point out what we all know, the ‘search for excellence’ should remain, ever and always a ‘metaphorical’ pursuit.

The thing we need to have ‘zero tolerance’ policies for is zero tolerance policies!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Appointees

Greetings good citizen,

Markets around the world are rising meteorically…for no good reason, must be that ‘bargain thing’ nobody but brokers working on straight commission understand.

Naturally, stock market performance (these days) has absolutely nothing to do with the state of the ‘real economy’…

But it appears nobody explained this development to our politically appointed civil servants

Another witness, current Deputy Commissioner Susan Brita, was instrumental in asking Inspector General Brian Miller to investigate the 2010 conference. His stinging report was made public April 2. Since then, the agency head resigned, two deputies, including Peck, were fired and 10 employees have been placed on administrative leave.

Brita had emailed Peck in July that the inspector general found no substantive agenda for the Las Vegas conference. She said expenses for a clown suit, bicycles used for a team-building exercise, tuxedos and a mind-reader didn't lend themselves to the claim of a substantive conference.

Brita also questioned why a regional administrator in charge of the conference, Jeffrey Neely, received only a disciplinary letter that "is not even a slap on the wrist." Neely on Monday asserted his right to remain silent at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

I heard this headline first on the radio this morning and it immediately struck me as odd that this particular ‘regional administrator’ was pleading the 5th.

Um, why was a public servant invoking their right not to incriminate themselves? Aren’t they sworn to deal honestly on the public’s behalf (or are political appointees exempt from this?)

And justice is ‘blind’ too, tell me another one.

Which begs the question of who is this clown trying to protect?

IF he was responsible for the, er, ‘poor decision-making’, man up and accept responsibility…but invoking the 5th sounds like he was ‘following orders’ and is doing his best to avoid revealing who TOLD HIM to do what he did.

Not for nothing but it is a foregone conclusion that we, the taxpaying public, will NEVER learn the truth behind political boondoggles such as the ‘Western Regions affair.’

Malfeasance is almost always cloaked under either ‘National Security’ or as a State Secret when it is committed on the federal level.

Um, I hope you see where this is going.

We have arrived, once again, on the doorstep of the public’s need to know and the failure of the Justice system to prosecute crimes committed by federal officials, ESPECIALLY political appointees who ‘abuse’ their positions to give their political opponents a ‘black eye’.

The only thing more ‘fucked up’ is the fact that it is all ‘window dressing’. This totally gratuitous blowout in Vegas is nothing more a thinly disguised ploy to disgrace a non-existent party FOR THE PUBLIC’S BENEFIT!

Can YOU say ‘TAX AND SPEND LIBERAL’?

It is more important to ask ‘what fucking liberals are you talking about, Bub?’

There AIN’T no ‘liberals’ around here, not in government, not anymore.

The D is now an L and it don’t stand for Liberal (lunatic is closer to the mark!)

The only thing worse is the R stands for C and the C really does mean Crazy!

But take heart, good citizen. Just because we have been ‘shut-out’ of the political arena doesn’t mean we are out of the game.

But it is a ‘game-changer’, that’s for sure!

How does that saying go…those who ‘impede’ civil discourse insure civil unrest (or something like that.)

Just ask the 80% who believe they are the 99%.

The >One percent have the (extremely gullible) top 20% on their side, their loyalty bought with positions of relative power over the oppressed.

They are the ones who keep reassuring the bottom 80% that they don’t have it so bad, that they should be grateful for what they have (and that they shouldn’t ask for [much less expect] more.)

And weirdly, the top 20% AREN’T too badly off…but they are seriously mistaken when it comes to their ‘underlings’.

Take this GAO boondoggle for instance…the $3,000 a night suite represents three MONTHS pay for workers in the bottom dectile of the income distribution, people who do society’s shittiest jobs for minimum wage or worse. (And are, sadly, happy to get the work for the small measure of ‘independence’ it affords them.)

Incredibly, (and it does defy logic) they continue to play the ‘government malfeasance card’ over and over…but for how long will they keep it up?

And no, we WILL NOT get a ‘people’s rebellion’ out of this, we will, most likely, get a coup…by the very same fuckers responsible for this mess in the first place!

But it won’t go well.

Because, (insanely) people here ‘believe’ they are ‘free’…

And it’s going to take a considerable amount of, er, ‘force’ to disabuse them of this silly notion…

Seriously, good citizen, I believe they have carried this charade far longer than I would have though possible…which is why I have been predicting the bottom would (and still COULD) drop out ‘any day now.’

The global financial system is FUBAR, there is no ‘repair’ possible.

The only thing left is the ‘reset button’ and you don’t want ‘thieves’ pushing that…but it sure looks like we won’t have much say in the matter.

I was going to ‘spare you’ the now familiar ‘under A Simple Plan’ counterargument to the above article (and if you aren’t interested in reading it, you can stop here and we’ll catch you later…

But I do us both a disservice if I don’t explain how it would be different.

First off, the GAO would ‘disappear’; there would be no such thing as ‘government accounting’ because quite literally there would be no (sitting) government…

Hold your horses, don’t get antsy now, let me explain!

What used to be handled by the government would now be handled by the Services Division, a sort of ‘catch all’ branch that administers things that government used to do like the military, police and the courts. (Education and science get their own divisions)

(See A Simple Plan for a detailed description of the divisions and what each one does.)

We could add to that the lack of political parties specifically INTENDED TO DIVIDE US, would also work to prevent boondoggles like the one featured above but that belabors the obvious.

Which brings us full circle to the conundrum of ‘if the goal is the betterment of the 'human condition', who is the ‘opposition’?

Well, we all know the answer to that one, our opponents are the ‘self-serving’ among us (who literally consider themselves our ‘betters’.)

Thanks for letting me inside you head,

Gegner


Monday, April 16, 2012

Popular

Greetings good citizen,

Once again I finished this piece before I started the ‘intro’ (such is passion!) Naturally an opportunity to smack both of my favorite targets in one article proved irresistible!

How often do you get two disturbing headlines in one!
50 Percent Pay Cuts at GE's Plants: Is This the Future of American Jobs?

The company President Obama called a "model for America" is squeezing its workers, cutting pensions, wages and benefits--but workers are organizing to fight back.

Ha! That ain’t happening, the ‘unions’ at GE are in the company’s pocket, selling out the rank and file is what the e-boards of GE’s unions do best!

The surest route to a management job at GE is to become an E-board member!

But I digress, let us take a moment to explore the ‘heart’ of this article.

The 58-year-old assembler at the General Electric plant in West Burlington, Iowa, was called back to work in September.

She had been on layoff since 2007 from the non-union factory, which makes electrical, switch gears for municipalities and energy-hungry factories, hospitals, and call centers. “You know how you have a fuse box in your house?” she asks. “These are like fuse boxes for a city,” the size of a refrigerator.

But the job came with new terms: a 50 percent pay cut—she’d now make $12 an hour. No health care coverage when she retired. And no chance she’d get the $5,000 bonus GE’s union workers won in last year’s national contract.

Um, the blurb is self-explanitory; GE whacked their pay in half because they could (Thank you Mr. President.)

And speaking of the ‘incompetent-in-chief’, How do you like his ‘vision for the future’ now?

How disgusted does it make you that the ‘make believe’ Democrat is going to get re-elected because the alternative is a Republican who really doesn’t know what end is up?

But I guess it was inevitable, only a complete moron would want the job of being the ‘sock-puppet-in chief’. (So we shouldn’t be too surprised that only ‘morons’ are running…)

Which only belabors the obvious, the state of play has seriously deteriorated over the past few decades.

This leaves us with a more disturbing problem; Mr. Obama won election because he didn’t present himself as an idiot, yet he turned out to be one. Now he is being quiet because he knows ANYTHING he says can cost him the election (which is already in the bag.) What he’s ‘guarding’ right now is his ‘elect-ability’, the general perception that it is possible that 50% of the 30% who bother to vote, might have voted for him…

And the ‘war on women’ thing, just short of brilliant! Most voters are female and if they were all so easily flattered, our political campaigns would be very different indeed.

Some would speculate that giving women the right to vote turned elections into popularity contests (like they weren’t in the first place.)

(Although before (suffrage) it was more keyed to machismo, which guy did you want in the big chair if war broke out sort of thing.)

But, not for nothing, you don’t suppose the current ‘male model’ and the former movie star [Reagan] became president on their ‘qualifications’, do you?

Um, talk about funny bounces, how did we go from corporate cruelty and malfeasance to the debacle ‘popular elections’ have become?

But Rome didn’t collapse overnight; it collapsed due to a build up of ‘little things’.

Under A Simple Plan we would no longer ‘elect’ leaders (who would then be co-opted by the wealthy.) Leaders would ‘win’ the job and PROVE to us BEFORE they got the job that they were qualified to do it!

The other caveat here is that leaders would no longer be ‘legislators’, they would be ‘problem solvers’.

It would be the leader’s job to solve problems and keep things on an ‘even keel’.

In a majority of situations you should be able to solve almost any given problem with the laws you have, not the laws you’d like to have to make the job easier!

Which is to point out that THE LAW DOES NOT EXIST TO MAKE LAW ENFORCEMENT EASIER!

We have, quite literally ‘gone nuts’ trying to legislate away our social problems, this has not been a ‘positive development’ because the end result is a ‘police state’.

The last forty years and the astounding increase in the use of both ‘executive privilege’ and ‘National security’ has lead us to where we are today, a nation led by criminals.

It struck me last night as I was watching the old TV series Wiseguy on Hulu that they were laying the groundwork back then for today’s widely shared ‘you can’t trust the government’ public sentiment.

Which leaves us all in one hell of a pickle, if we can’t trust the government then who the hell is supposed to be watching our backs?

The law isn’t on our side…does that mean the criminals win?

Not that government corruption is anything new by any stretch of the imagination…that’s why A Simple Plan is ‘cashless’ not only is all crime but all corruption is ‘cash and carry’.

No cash = no problem…and yes it is a ‘legislative’ solution the self-serving criminals currently in power wouldn’t tolerate, but that’s another problem for later.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: back to the article and the obvious inference to how we are being ‘transformed’ into a Banana Republic just goes without saying…




Sunday, April 15, 2012

Choke

Greetings good citizen,

Around the world the ‘insufficiently connected’ are being forced into unacceptable situations while the people commonly responsible for these circumstances are routinely ‘bailed out’ at the taxpayer’s expense.

The price of food and fuel continue to spiral upwards as the financial sector loots the ‘real’ economy.

Understand, the financial sector isn’t eating all of the losses reckless lending by ‘imprudent’ bankers caused a certain degree of ‘cascading systemic failure’…
TREVISO, Italy — On New Year’s Eve, Antonio Tamiozzo, 53, hanged himself in the warehouse of his construction business near Vicenza, after several debtors did not pay what they owed him.

Three weeks earlier, Giovanni Schiavon, 59, a contractor, shot himself in the head at the headquarters of his debt-ridden construction company on the outskirts of Padua. As he faced the bleak prospect of ordering Christmas layoffs at his family firm of two generations, he wrote a last message: “Sorry, I cannot take it anymore.”

The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.”

There’s a weird saying in the business world that goes like this, You’ll get yours when I get mine. Most of the time our entire (screwed up) economic system operates ‘on credit’; everything is billed ‘net 30’ and actually paid between 90 and 120. Worse, you know ‘squeezing’ the people who owe you won’t expedite the process because they are in the same position you are; they don’t have it…(yet.)

This is why the feckless banks went, hat in hand, to their politicians and told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to be ‘bailed out’ or the financial sector around the world was going to ‘collapse’.

Well, the politicians (idiots that they are) took these bankers at their word, never realizing that the bankers WOULDN’T extend the same kind of consideration to their customers…

So the banker got a ‘pass’ courtesy of the taxpayer but the bank’s debtors got what they always get, ‘fuck you, pay me!’

Understand good citizen, NONE of these banks ‘skipped’ paying their staff ‘bonuses’ (They HAD TO or these ‘highly skilled’ technocrats would go ‘elsewhere’…)

Like the entire banking sector around the world DIDN’T (and believe me, it DID) ‘collapse’.

The, er, ‘government (taxpayer) bailouts have been the ONLY thing keeping the (crooked) banking system afloat for the past four years!

Worse, the banks have had TRILLIONS pumped into them and they’re STILL BROKE! (Because the ‘shadow banking system’ had created a quadrillion dollars worth of debt that the brick and mortar banking system is ‘trying’ to make good on…)

Instead of telling the fuckers that created this garbage to go piss up a bent rope!

But that’s okay, that quadrillion dollars will ‘vaporize’ when we institute the new monetary system A Simple Plan uses! (Partly because ALL DEBT will be illegal and mostly because placing someone in YOUR debt will be an EXILE OFFENSE!)

Um, under ‘fair use’ you are only permitted to use three paragraphs of someone else’s work. So if you don’t click the link and read the entire article you will remain ignorant of the fact that the article goes on to (briefly) examine the ongoing effects of this, er, ‘perpetrator free’ phenomenon.

Yeah, if not for my rant about the bankers getting ‘rescued’ but the people who owe bankers not making out so well, you’d be left to your own devices to try and determine who was responsible for this, er, ‘collateral damage’.

In the first three paragraphs of this article it is made out that the ‘fragile economies’ of the affected countries is to blame for this banker created carnage.

Well, good citizen, the bankers are at least ‘partly correct’ that they don’t deserve ALL of the blame, the fucking politician’s hands are dripping with blood as well.

While yesterday’s post examined what it takes to ferment revolution, we should take a moment to examine the miniscule amount of corruption it takes to implement widespread oppression!

The first key is money. Take over a nation’s money supply and you ‘control’ that nation. If you want to ‘simplify’ this process then you ‘manipulate’ the other bankers into agreeing that one currency will be the world’s ‘reserve currency’, making the manipulation process easier.

One you control the ‘printing presses’ you proceed to ‘buy’ control of the ‘business friendly’ political party in each nation.

After you have control of half of the total political ‘pie’, you ‘exterminate’ the other half, keeping it alive only as a ‘sock puppet’ so you will have the only ‘opposition’ in your pocket.

Now that you control the political process, it is a simple matter of co-opting the courts and you have true ‘free rein’.

There is no need to add the ‘rinse and repeat’, this ‘winning formula’ has been repeated throughout the entire (now) capitalist world.

Understand, good citizen, this wouldn’t be possible under any other system. It was only by turning communist China capitalist that they were able to ‘co-opt’ the formerly communist government.

The part we all should get a kick out of is that they did it all with ‘funny money’ (and the cooperation of some REALLY STUPID people.)

I’m gonna drop this one right here and you can try to work out whether or not I just called YOU stupid…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Revolution

Greetings good citizen,

I know most of you have me pegged as one of the first to get ‘disappeared’ come the ‘crackdown’ (and you’re probably right.) If you’re looking for a ‘canary’ to watch in this whacko coal mine of ours, you could do worse than keeping an eye on this page.

So it might come as a surprise to you that my latest effort to tempt fate tackles the thorny issue of  ‘revolution’:

America's greatness and prosperity was built on the strength of her working and middle classes. Together, we — the 99 percent — built the world's strongest democracy, enforced the rule of law, provided for the common defense, promoted the general welfare, established an ever-rising standard of justice, ensured domestic tranquility and secured the blessings of liberty for many generations of American families.

Now, our 99 percent way of life is gone, devoured by an elite 1 percent who took over our own government and used it against us to seize both the personal and the common wealth amassed for us by generations of our ancestors and provided to us by the bounty of this land.

We want our American birthright back. We want to restore rule by the 99 percent. We want the elites to return our futures and our government to us. We will challenge them by every means we can find until this happens.

We are not going away. Their 1 percent's dream of an American feudal state is over. Our American dream of sustainable prosperity and opportunity for the rest of us is now beginning — again.

[Note: this text was italicized in the original article.]

You’re tempted to add to that last line something like ‘I hope we’re ‘luckier’ this time…’ because we didn’t make out too good last time.

In fact, things went south right out of the box last time.

Ya know, it scares the daylights out of me to see people advocating revolution without spelling out (in this case, not even vaguely) what we’re revolting for.

Just re-read the first line. That’s the sort of (BS) that makes historians mouth’s water.

Empty platitudes that tell you only vaguely ‘what’ and not at all about ‘how’.

I’m pleased to say A Simple Plan doesn’t suffer from either of these ‘deficiencies’.

Of course, then there’s the ‘mythical’ six people you can’t run a revolution without…

Which are enumerated for us as follows:

Activists

Intellectuals

Artists

Insiders

Supportive Elites

The Masses

Ahem, I’ll give the writer the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that these ‘groups’ are in no particular order.

Then I’ll belabor the obvious, if you don’t get the masses riled enough to at least ‘defend’ you, then you’re gonna end up in jail before you know what hit you.

Activists are NOT revolutionaries, in fact they are most often focused on working ‘inside’ the current system, a system they have little interest in disrupting.

Intellectuals? Seriously? WTF!

It might be nice to have the art’s community on your side but it’s only gonna help if they can shoot straight!

Er, if you have the people you’re trying to overthrow on your team, the only thing you’re doing is helping them escape prosecution for their numerous crimes…worse, you’re spreading the ‘welcome mat’ for them to screw us all (again.)

The, er, frightening statistics are that most ‘revolutions’ are fought by a tiny minority of the population, but ‘sympathy for the revolution’ has to be near universal!

This also explains why most ‘popular revolutions’ are, er, ‘co-opted’ almost immediately after the dust settles (sometimes even before that!) the people you threw out of power retake control BEFORE you get a chance to change anything! (What they do to hide their treachery is make superficial changes that change nothing.)

Then there are ‘supportive elites’, just what we need in our leaderless world, more stuffed shirts!

Yup, like I comment above, you don’t even need the masses, there is already enough support in this country (I’d dare say any country) for a popular revolt to succeed…‘sight unseen!’

The sad truth is the primary goal of any revolution is to wipe out the former ruling class, that is the ONLY way you will enjoy a ‘fresh start’.

And if we don’t achieve a ‘fresh start’ PDQ, we are doomed as a species.

So imagine my excitement when I spy the ‘recipe for revolution’ ready to distribute and it turns out to be another plea to sit in a big circle, hold hands and sing ‘kum-by-ya’…

Seriously good citizen, the ground is plenty ‘fertile’ and the time is right. Mismanagement by the powers that be has been colossal (and also deliberate) fostering massive ‘ill will’ against the ‘status quo’.

All we need is our own ‘One Percent’ to coalesce into an army. (That is the same percentage as fought in the ‘original’ revolution…)

Hell, good citizen, how fucking scary is it that the ones responsible for this CF are trying to incite a revolt too? (Only you won’t be too happy with how that will turn out.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner