Thieves

Greetings good citizen,

Half hour into today’s trading session and you can’ make heads nor tails out of the Dow. The number says it’s up but the chart looks like it’s dropping like a rock…probably have to wait a while to get a grip on its direction.

Um, I am always disturbed when I encounter the day’s offering on my mail server’s homepage such as stories like this one which jump out at you when you arrive.

Police have added the patrolling of farmland — sometimes on horseback — to their list of daily tasks. Farmers in some areas are teaming up to carry out nighttime patrols on their own. In villages near farming areas, several thousand paramilitary Civil Guards, regional and local police are even setting up checkpoints to sniff out not drugs or drunken drivers but stolen fruit or farming equipment, like copper wire used in irrigation systems. The Civil Guard says sometimes its officers mount "cage operations" — sealing off whole villages to check cars and trucks for, say, pilfered pears.

The stolen goods are mainly for resale: The food ends up in small roving street markets and the metal goes to scrap dealers. Last year alone more than 20,000 thefts were reported at Spanish farms. The Interior Ministry says it has no comparative figures from other years, or for so far in 2012. But authorities and farm groups blame the thefts on Spain's economic crisis and say they are a big enough problem for the patrols, which began last season, to stay in force this year.

Here in Sant Climent, a village of 4,000 just outside Barcelona in the northeastern Catalonia region, the loot this time of year is cherries — dark red, shiny and sweet — dangling like ornaments from stubby trees in orchards rising up the slopes of a river valley. They're everywhere, with people selling them from their front doorsteps and on stands inside bars for €8 a kilo ($4.50 a pound). A drawing of a cherry adorns the mayor's business card.

Again, it’s difficult to tell which is more disturbing, the economic forces behind the rising thefts from farms or the media taking pains to make it clear that the ‘theft’ is NOT for ‘personal consumption’ but for ‘personal enrichment’!

Left to your imagination is why people are stealing shit in the first place?

Do YOU know the answer, good citizen?

Why are people stealing what they would ‘normally’ buy?

Could it be because our commercial model is broken?

Bizarrely, it’s been broken from the outset…but the freakazoid capitalist will never admit that. They prefer to call this failure ‘structural unemployment’, that the system, out of necessity, fucks a certain percentage of the population.

And their explanation of this phenomenon is just as lame, the old, ‘it’s that way because that’s the way it is!’ Or the wheel-out the old standby, ‘full employment is impossible’.

Again, wrong by dint of the missing phrase/word. Full employment is not ‘profitably’ possible.

Hire ‘everyone’ and the profit margin for the owner falls to near zero.

So what happens when that couple of percent ‘structural unemployment becomes/accounts for tens of millions of people?

It is what it is, right?

Nope, there’s no need to fear; the endless sunshine of the spotless mind will save us all!

"We are united in our resolve to promote growth and jobs," the draft says, declaring that the leaders will announce the "coordinated Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan" to achieve those goals, although the draft does not provide details of the plan.

"Strong sustainable and balanced growth remains the top priority of the G20, as it leads to higher job creation and increases the welfare of people across the world," the statement reads. It throws its support specifically behind greater government spending as a response to a worsening global economy, saying that countries with the resources "stand ready" to take fiscal action.

The plan says the Obama administration pledged to prevent sharp tax increases and government spending cuts from kicking in at the end of the year, as scheduled under current law, to avoid sending the U.S. into another recession.

Here’s a curious mental puzzle for you good citizen, how many of you think President Obama WANTS TO BE ‘re-elected’?

Were I standing in his shoes, I’d take the money and run.

Hell, I’d vote for Mitt! Let him fulfill his father’s dream/ambitions.

What do you think the ‘probability’ is of the G-20 nations returning to unbridled growth?

How about slim to nil. They COULD pull it off for a few months but once the heating season returns in earnest that ‘pipe dream’ goes ‘poof’!

That’s what’s driving the whole collapse, we no longer have enough energy to support a growing global population…

So the people whose power relies on the control of our energy supply have decided to extend their reign by ‘right-sizing’ the population.

How fucked up is it that ‘right-sizing’ is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a single billion, give or take a billion…

Killing off the other six billion is an ‘ambitious’ undertaking to put it lightly.

I propose all we need do is, er, ‘eliminate’ the >One percent and re-shuffle the deck so I is more equitable.

Sacrificing all of that labor is terribly wasteful but those in power now have never cared about how wasteful they have been.

They murder freely whenever it is ‘in their interest’ to do so.

And that’s who is ‘yanking your chain’ this very minute, good citizen.

Don’t forget to get out and vote! (They rely on YOU buying the lie!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner