We're Saved! ('scroomed' is more like it)

Greetings good citizen,

In a ‘too good to pass up’ headline, I jumped on an article titled ‘Romney ‘vows’ to deliver country from economic travails.’

He, like all conservo-whackos, has been lying his ass off from the get go. So imagine my surprise when I clicked through (wasting one of my ten shots) to find not A SINGLE PROPOSAL, CONCRETE OR OTHERWISE to support this stupendous claim.

He’s gonna ‘save’ us but it will be via fucking magic!

But you too can check for yourself and see if I missed or omitted anything.

You’ll notice that I didn’t ‘excerpt’ any of the long-winded article that lavishes praise upon an unworthy presidential wannabe.

Which only serves as proof where the corporate owned media is coming from.

More, er, ‘curious’ is the fact that Clint Eastwood, er, ‘performed’ at the RNC doing an ‘empty chair act’ where he took the (unchallenged) incumbent to task for all of his unfulfilled campaign promises…(including the ones he didn’t make in typical conservo-whacko style.)

The conservo-whackos would really like to blame the economy on Obama but we all know it was his predecessor’s fault.

And the party of his predecessor stonewalled every attempt to rein in Wall Street…so that’s why we should all go out and vote for Bain Capital this November.

American employers NEED to be ‘freed’ from oppressive government regulation and the ceaseless demands US workers.

What part of ‘If you can’t live on what I pay you, it’s not my problem’ don’t they get?

But increasingly we are seeing that the ‘problems’ employers choose to ignore (underpaid employees) have a way of becoming the government’s headache.

All because of the fake ‘competitiveness meme’.

One of these days the ‘high priests of freemarkets’ are gonna swing for their false teachings!

It ain’t about ‘competition’. It’s the same as it’s always been; it’s about ‘market share’ and ‘locking the doors’.

What few people remember (because our schools don’t go there) is that back in the ‘bad old days’ you couldn’t buy or sell (anything) without the King’s express permission.

This is a situation the well connected turned to their advantage at once!

You didn’t have to compete, you didn’t even have to worry about things like product quality if you could control who was granted ‘the king’s permission’.

Now a days things have changed…a little. The thieves on Wall Street can force you to sell your company to your ‘competitor’ through their control of YOUR share price!

Works very much like the ancient ‘permission of the king’ bullshit did.

Which also lies behind the ‘return of monarchy meme’ I often float on these posts.

If you know what you’re looking at you can almost see our modern ‘Royals’ peeking out from behind their ‘freemarket’ thrones. They are just busting for the day when we will all be forced to kneel before their greatness.

I’d die first…(and pinhead will be more than happy to accommodate me or anyone else who feels likewise.)

[Although I am not above kneeling if it helps to steady my aim…I’d rather kneel than miss!]

You can see an ‘infamous quote’ in the making right there…‘If I kneel, it will be to steady my gun/aim!’

It is far better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, good citizen.

And that old saying comes directly from what’s headed in our direction in the not too distant future.

I’d even opine that the royals are already in their places, having used capitalism’s predatory nature to carve out new ‘empires’ for themselves.

What they have yet to do is re-establish their thrones (and in the process, command the respect their position demands.)

Somehow their crimes against humanity are viewed as ‘great accomplishments’ among their peers…

The thing you need to keep in mind is YOU are NOT among their ‘peers’.

That noted, having voluntarily exempted themselves from penalties of civil society, they will NOT be afforded any of the benefits when they are brought to justice.

How unfortunate is it that they are putting all of their hopes in a criminal justice system that they control…but won’t when the executioner comes for them?

Simply put good citizen, you can’t take the ‘good’ parts of civilization and ignore the bits that interfere with your running roughshod over your brothers and sister.

When you do that, society and civilization itself dies.

If we are not ‘good citizens’ then we are bad ones.

They’ve already made their choice, how about you?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Extravaganza!

Greetings good citizen,

Ready for the annual ‘extravaganza’? It’s my Birthday…(and my twin’s; can’t forget her!)

If some of you are confused it’s okay, Gegner is male and has a female twin…not all that uncommon as there are three sets of male/female twins in my extended family alone.

What really screws people up is that I’m married to an identical twin (and no, since we BOTH have twin sisters, our twins are NOT married to each other…although it would be possible here in Massachusetts.

Speaking of ‘double trouble’, markets around the globe are swimming in red ink, likely because the latest spike in energy prices has caused the ‘tenuous at best’ recovery to be extinguished (again.)

Did I mention ‘gross mismanagement’?

Of course, that assumes that none of this is ‘intentional’…and I posit that it is, in fact, intentional!

Although I am fond of pointing out that our affairs are being (intentionally) ‘mismanaged’ by our self-professed betters!

Sorry about the full circle there but sometimes that’s what it takes to fully appreciate the spectacle as it unfolds.

This whole C-F is all about ‘perception management’ as demonstrated by the insane disconnect on display during the Republican National Convention.

How these criminals can face the nation and soberly intone that they are the only ones who can save us from their own disastrous policies is hypocrisy in its most odious form!

They truly exemplify what it means to be a psychopath (as well as being sociopaths!)

And no, the two terms are not mutually exclusive, it is possible to be both!

But the ‘mental state’ of what passes for our leadership is a topic for another post. Right now we have bigger problems (albeit brought on by the ‘diminished capacity’ of those who are our leaders as well as those who want to assume the role.

How fucking disturbing is it to you good citizen that the man responsible for our current plight and his ideological successor are BOTH card carrying members of the >One Percent?

What does that say to you about the current state of electoral politics in this nation?

How can a member of that class even HOPE to stand a chance of being elected and if he is, how does he expect to NOT have his legitimacy questioned?

To give you an understanding of just how much this stinks, over the past forty years we have had five Republican presidents and during that same period the number of people who ‘self-identify’ as Republican number at less than twenty percent.

How does a political party that only one fifth of the voters subscribe to puts their candidate in office five times out of seven?

Sure looks like broken ballot box to me.

Especially when the party in question represents the nation’s ‘rich minority’.

We WON’T accept that outcome.

Which is why they have their boy Obama waiting in the wings. His re-election is probably the only thing standing between a deeply troubled populace and a new civil war.

Although the ‘mouse’ we call the conservo-loonies has pledged armed insurrection if the incumbent receives another term.

And you know that is just ‘lip service’, the conservo-loonies love the man for saving them (temporarily) from the hangman’s noose.

(Um, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s my birthday and I am invoking my right to ‘rant’!)

Before we get too far afield, let me just quickly review these headlines:

Prosecutors Link Money From China to Iran
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

Prosecutors say they found evidence that banks may have been flouting United States sanctions against Iran.

Um, we have ‘prosecutors’ who go after sovereign nations who don’t ‘obey’ the imperial edicts of the mighty US empire?

Can you give me a WTF!

Consumer Spending Rose in July
By REUTERS 9:25 AM ET

The increase was the biggest in five months, offering hope that economic growth could pick up this quarter.

How come they never acknowledge the loud sucking sound of your pockets being sucked dry at the fuel pumps? Since when is this ‘magic?

Under the ‘no shit Sherlock’ category:
Wall Street Turns Lower 9:55 AM ET

And the beat goes on:

DealBook
Carlyle to Acquire DuPont Performance Coatings for $4.9 Billion
By EVELYN M. RUSLI 6 minutes ago

The Carlyle Group has agreed to buy DuPont Performance Coatings for $4.9 billion in cash, as the private equity firm continues a deal-making binge.

Just another bite in the relentless pursuit of market share!

Remember, competition is ‘good’ for the Consumer…until there isn’t any, then you’ll pay whatever they demand…or you’ll do without…and the fuckers who stole your government from you will thumb their noses at you.

And lock you up for rioting if you protest.

Um, I’m off to ‘enjoy’ the rest of my day, Hope you have a good one too!

Gegner

The Price

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the markets are ‘up’ a tiny bit although that tells us nothing. Markets around the globe are a ‘mixed bag’ all up or down, but not significantly in either direction.

As one might expect in an election year, our first headline announces:

Second-Quarter Growth Revised Up to 1.7 Percent Rate
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 52 minutes ago

The American economy fared slightly better than initially estimated in the second quarter, the government reported in its first revision of gross domestic product.

Like a lot of things ‘statistical’ the variation on display here isn’t ‘significant’. The only reason you’re hearing about it is because it’s ‘up’, if it were down it would remain obscure if not unknown.

This is one of those ‘it should piss you off’ sort of things! Here’s our economy, sucking pond water due largely to ‘gross mismanagement’ and who has to brave streets filled with starvation crazed rioters?

YOU WILL!

Yet here are the Twinkies crowing about abysmal economic growth like you were ‘saved’.

Hallelujah, the rapture came after all!

Fucking twits!

It’s ‘the other shoe’, always.

Speaking of ‘pipe dreams’:

Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank says there can be no return to the many currencies that preceded the euro.

Central Banker Facing a Test
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, will be under pressure to provide details of his plan to shore up the euro zone’s weaker member nations by buying their bonds.

Dunno how it will play in Peoria but it seems asshole’s mouth cut a check his ass is unable to cover.

Like two wrongs don’t make a right, two lies don’t suddenly make it true!

But politicians have a, er, ‘difficult time’ comprehending that concept…

Especially when ‘the truth’ jumps up and takes a big bite out of your backside, like we see here:

Shut Out of the Debt Markets, Catalonia Asks Madrid for Emergency Aid
By RAPHAEL MINDER

The request from the most economically important region of Spain underscores a growing regional debt burden as the country struggles to pull out of its economic tailspin.

As many observers have pointed out, where are the Euros supposed to come from to bail out all of these mismanaged economies?

Looks to me like they’re going to borrow them from Bob Mugabee! (What the hell, he has trillions!)

It’s what Zimbabwe Ben is doing…and it might be a good time to remind everyone that our ‘apolitical’ Fed Chief, like his predecessor, is A FUCKING REPUBLICAN!

But THAT doesn’t matter, and coincidentally, neither does this:

Germany and Italy to Meet on Euro Crisis
By MELISSA EDDY and RACHEL DONADIO

Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy is hoping to persuade his European partners to let the European Central Bank buy more government debt to help keep borrowing costs lower.

We can appreciate that the ‘Prime Minister’ of Italy really NEEDS to pull a rabbit out of his hat (and not just any rabbit, a ‘credible rabbit’!)

Funny thing about ‘funny money’, it requires a lot of faith that its worth something…a difficult task indeed when the thieves in the stock markets keep jumping their price, thereby ‘devaluing’ the purchasing power of money (regardless of whose it is!)

Naturally, when there’s only ‘one source’ for everything we will all be compelled to pay whatever they demand…or their private army will shoot us.

Again I ‘project’ but I suspect we are closer to that day rather than farther:

E.U. Widens Probe of Ryanair Bid for Aer Lingus
By REUTERS 30 minutes ago

Regulators began an in-depth review of Ryanair’s latest bid for its Irish rival, signaling the budget airline may have to make big concessions to ease competition concerns or face failure.

Don’t be deceived good citizen, this airline thing is but one of many often hidden ‘mergers’ that have been providing the economic data with a false ‘positive spin’.

Company ‘A’ gobbles up company ‘B’ cementing a near monopoly in a given market sector, the price goes up to pay the cost of the take-over (as well as to line the pockets of the out-going executives being made ‘redundant’.)

And viola! We now have profits were we once had ‘stagnation’!

(It’s Magic, fuck you!)

Speaking of ‘magic’, it appears not everybody is gullible enough to take the ads for electric cars seriously: Sure you don’t have to buy gas that often but the last time I checked, nobody was giving away ‘free electricity!’:

A Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle, front. Consumers so far have been slow to buy electric cars.
U.S. Sets Higher Fuel Efficiency Standards
By BILL VLASIC

The rules, first proposed last year, would require new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving by 2025.

The real question being put to you here good citizen is ‘will you be driving anything ‘inorganic’ come 2025?’

You will be considered ‘crazy well-to-do’ if you have a horse or some other form of ‘drayage’ (like oxen.)

Only the extremely wealthy will have ‘motor vehicles’ (and they will expect us to keep up the road network for them!)

The job title ‘mechanic’ will be preceded by the word ‘personal’ because if you can afford a car, you can afford a mechanic and you probably won’t want to risk going to a garage (that regularly has its tools stolen.) So you’ll keep the tools and the mechanic safe behind your gated walls, guarded by your security team of private merc’s.

But again, I project.

Just as this somewhat disturbing ‘sign of the times’ bodes poorly for the, er, ‘less than affluent’.

The Patriot-News, which won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Penn State sex scandal, intends to print three days a week.

Newspapers in Syracuse and Harrisburg, Pa., to End Daily Distribution
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The decision by Newhouse Newspapers follows its similar move in New Orleans and is set to take effect in January.

Many have given up the physical delivery of newspapers because the Internet tells them what they need to know.

Naturally, there’s a downside to this as well. Under capitalism, information is a commodity and thus for sale.

If you can’t afford the asking price then it gets added to the ever growing list of things you ‘do without’.

You might have noticed that I limit myself to the ‘headlines’ of the NY Times stories because the ‘free’ edition limits me to actually clicking through to read a mere ten articles a month.

That’s not even one a day. (But you knew that!)

The headlines, on the other hand, remain ‘free.’

And with a little luck, so will we.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lovely Ladies

Greetings good citizen,

Today we tackle the idea that this coming election will be decided by the nation’s female population…as they do, indeed, out number the males AND they’re more likely to vote!

Unhelpful is the fact that a large portion of the ‘conservative base’ is both female and elderly.

However, the largest segment of the female population in the US is militant and liberal.

The GOP’s corporate owned media has the task of convincing us that ‘enough’ men combined with the elderly women of the conservative movement will be sufficient to swing the election in the GOP’s favor.

Despite having a party platform drafted exclusively by men from the Religious Right.

The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”

Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy.

As you can imagine, the article goes on to name names and provide the pedigree of each ‘contributor’…which can only make us wonder who will be drawing up the planks of the, er, ‘progressive’ party platform?

What will Libertarian Lou include to attract the ladies to the progressive banner besides NOT being republican?

Because the way things are going, not being Republican has a lot going for it already!

Twitchier still is how Republicans are predicting armed insurrection if THEIR BOY Obama is re-elected…

While those of us who will be voting for WHOEVER ELSE IS ON THE TICKET that ISN’T a ‘conservo-whacko’ (a category that includes the unchallenged incumbent) are predicting the same thing if their boy Mitt gets the ‘win’.

It's the classic 'Heads I won, Tails you lose' situation...(and we're all getting more than a little tired of it!)

I think I speak for the majority, the 99% if you will, regarding the consequences of a conservative victory this November.

The global economy was DESTROYED by ‘conservative policies’, further conservative, er, ‘rule’ will destroy our society and see a return of slavery to this world!

You’re already some ‘employer’s bitch’…how would you like to see that asshole handed a bill of sale with YOUR name on it?

What, you’d be thrilled?

Naturally, you’re thinking of the ‘upside’…if he ‘owns you’ he has to take care of you.

Take a fucking minute to consider the fucking downside of that.

Once your ‘upkeep’ exceeds your extractive value your more likely to be sold as ‘dog food’ (or perhaps the gross equivalent of ‘soylent green’, the fucking capitalist doesn’t care!) than to be allowed to muddle along in a ‘diminished capacity’.

Say watering the lawn or weeding the flower beds. It is far more likely you will end up ‘feeding the flowers’, literally!

That is what ‘hangs in the balance’ in the upcoming election, the one where all choices SUCK!

Of course, since I have ‘no control’ over the situation, I’m probably ‘exaggerating’ the situation a teensy bit.

But I’m willing to bet that more than a few of you find my ‘point of view’ at least within the realm of belief.

Because of ‘gradualism’.

You remember what ‘gradualism’ is, don’t you?

It’s that series of small, nasty steps the large institutions use to get you to accept the unacceptable.

Once upon a time the, er, ‘government’ used to sacrifice YOUR CHILDREN to ‘appease’ the ‘gods’!

Naturally that was BEFORE the separation of Church and State…now consider if you will just WHO wants to see them ‘reunited’…

Here we are, throwing a lot of shadows on the walls because the truth is only the ‘old’ vote. Kids don’t have (or don’t bother to ‘make) the time’.

And, ironically, there are now more ‘old people’ than ever before (the first wave of the Baby Boom has already retired!)

So how do YOU think ‘cutting entitlement programs’ is going to go?

Which is to ask, just how much faith do YOU have in the ballot box?

The ballot box did absolutely ZERO when it came to protecting your job OR your pension fund!

And we really can’t level the electric gattling gun at either political party…but there is a target right behind those ‘meat puppets’…the > One Percent.

Guess who is ‘responsible’ for off-shoring YOUR job and POCKETING your pension savings?

I know, don’t remind you…but hey, this is all going to be laid at ‘the girls’ feet, isn’t it?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Energy and its addicts!

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are in barely positive territory for reasons as of yet unfathomable. Let it suffice to say the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace…

And it is the forces behind this destruction that are preventing desperately needed changes in our social psyche.

Fossil fuels were never ‘unlimited’ and we have finally reached a consensus that we are beyond the halfway point of consuming all there ever was.

One factor adding urgency to a deteriorating situation is our growing (and rapidly ‘Westernizing’) population.

If we don’t start switching to renewables soon there is going to be a major crisis.

Which maybe a bit ‘premature’, it appears we WILL experience a catastrophic financial meltdown BEFORE we are hit with a catastrophic energy shortage…

Ever wonder why, five years down the line that the only thing ANYBODY can think to do is ‘bail-out’ the banks?

Which is to ask the age old question, are they just plain stupid or do they think the rest of us are?

Um, not to go all shin-kicking or anything but this article (like most Alternet pieces) misses the mark by a wide margin.

We need an environmental movement that can put millions of people back to work, giving them the tools and the technologies they need to retrofit, re-engineer, and reboot the nation’s energy, water, and waste systems. Green-collar jobs can restore hope and opportunity to America’s failing middle-class and low-income families while honoring and healing the Earth. Those new jobs could create a ladder up and out of poverty for jobless urban residents. Under even the most depressing of scenarios, there certainly will be economic opportunities and green-collar jobs—from building dikes and levees and reconstructing devastated structures to installing community-owned wind turbines and operating renewable biofuel factories using regional feedstocks. The United States can fight global warming, energy scarcity, and poverty in the same stroke.

With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States now produces 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution. It also locks up 25 percent of the world’s prisoners in its domestic incarceration industry. Those numbers document the notion that too many U.S. businesses and political leaders govern as if we have both a disposable planet and disposable people.

As the new green economy springs to life, will we live in eco-equity or eco- apartheid? Will clean and green business flourish only in the rich, white parts of town? Will our kids be left to deal with the toxic wastes of polluting industries, the life-threatening diseases that decimate polluted communities, and the crushing lack of economic opportunity as the old polluting economy goes bust? How we answer these questions will impact the fate of billions of people.

The first thing this article suffers from is myopia, green energy will NOT make up the entire ‘new economy’.

The second thing this article ignores is ‘WHY’ nothing is being done about instituting ‘renewable energy alternatives’.

Do YOU know why (besides the bulk of the industry being based in China) green energy alternatives are ‘dead in the water’?

This ties directly to the irrational tendency of US (and foreign) auto manufacturers to persist in producing gas guzzling SUV’s and their doppelgangers, the ‘cross-over’.

(How friggin sad is it good citizen when the number of people a vehicle can bed down trumps its fuel economy?)

Why are these irrational policies persisting? Is Wall Street as deaf and blind as Washington?

You betcha!

Let’s roll the stock ticker back a few notches and have a look at why the richest people on the planet are rich.

The answer, invariably, is fossil fuels.

Why would the most powerful people on the planet ‘support’ alternative energy?

Short answer, they don’t.

But millions (if not billions) will die if we don’t convert to a sustainable energy source!

Talk to the hand little man!

This is that ‘entrenched power’ thing the feckless founders were always warning us about.

This shit was also completely preventable but the myopic greed heads didn’t want to lay down the necessary obstacles to what they thought their kids might be able to cash in on.

Add to this the disturbing episode of ‘Through the wormhole’ I saw last night. There the ‘opinion’ was expressed that people who felt they were not ‘in control’ compensated by ‘rationalizing’ their fears with conspiracy theories that were often the symptoms of mental illness.

How many of you think I’m mentally disturbed because I persist in pointing to a, ‘cartel’ that is controlling energy policy ‘worldwide’?

This is not the ‘Abra-cadabra brotherhood’, it is the ‘by-product’ of global capitalism!

Some nations have made great ‘progress’ in switching to alternative energy…because they don’t have a domestic source of fossil fuel under their control.

I fall back on the old standby, Just because (I am) you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they AREN’T out to get you!

But we digress.

The point I am making here is one where we will not, er, ‘enjoy’ renewable energy until the entrenched interests are uprooted and driven from their positions of power.

This will not happen until capitalism is replaced with a more equitable commercial system.

A Simple Plan, and idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The need to redefine the term 'criminal'

Greetings good citizen,

I love it when my ideas ‘reverberate’ through our culture! Sadly, while Mr. Sirota expanded on a theme of mine, he’s a little ‘off the mark’ as far as his interpretation of the message goes:

It’s always dangerous to state you were first when it comes to perceptions but I was definitely ahead of the esteemed Mr. S in the category of perception management :

One spot for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (read: the casinos) shows a woman climbing onto her desk to demand a vacation. Another for McDonald’s implores us to fight back against employers and “overthrow the working lunch.” Still another for a Coca-Cola subsidiary seizes on the stress of harsh working conditions to create buzz for a branded “Take the Year Off” contest.

“Marketers are adopting the theme of workers’ rights at a time when unions themselves are confronting declines in membership and influence,” notes the Times. “In effect, some labor experts say, they are turning a pro-worker theme on its head to serve the corporate interest.”

In one sense, this is good news for organized labor — at a moment when unions are under assault, the ads reflect polls showing persistent mass support for both the concept of worker solidarity and the economic outrage voiced by worker protests. Indeed, companies wouldn’t be echoing such themes if they didn’t know they were wildly popular.

Looks to me like Smack Water Jack done dropped his shotgun!

Besides, you KNOW what’s gonna happen if you ‘demand’ anything from our corporate overlords…you’ll be singing that old familiar tune, ‘Hope I like my next job better’. While trying to out distance your newfound reputation for being ‘a difficult employee’.

But if this feeling of persecution is enough to ‘motivate’ you into taking a much-deserved vacation (and you ARE ‘the man’) just go ahead and do it!

Because that’s who these commercials are really ‘targeted’ at. Not the poor cubicle dwellers but the guy that put them there, they’re trying to get HIM to take some time off! (‘The most valuable man in the office’ really believes the company won’t run without him so he doesn’t take vacations…despite being the only one who can afford to!)


You can find this next offering under my rants about redefining the term criminal :

“We had people who were locking down to concrete barrels and other devices to prevent them from evicting the house and we were mobilizing people to come and defend the house,” Espinosa said. Over the course of the five eviction attempts there were 26 arrests. The last time Espinosa was arrested along with 14 others and charged with rioting in the third degree, defined as “Violence or the threat of violence to people or property when more than three are gathered.”

They face up to two years in prison. Espinosa noted, “There are 15 people now facing riot charges who were arrested doing nonviolent civil disobedience, basically sitting down and linking arms on the front steps of a house.”

“The chief of police was there the night I was arrested. Four other officers stepped over us as we were sitting in front of the door,” he continued. “He stepped directly on top of us, on our shoulders and necks, to come into the house.” The previous day police had grabbed protesters by the neck to move them out of the way, and women activists complained of feeling sexually assaulted, having been groped by the police. “Somebody's hand went up one of my friends' shirts,” Espinosa said. One of the Cruzes' neighbors was arrested while standing on the sidewalk outside her house holding up a sign in support of Occupy Homes.

What’s the first thing to strike your eye here good citizen? Was it the fact that you’d never have heard of this incident if you didn’t live in that particular neighborhood or if not for this Alternet article?

The corporate owned media doesn’t grant a forum for ‘lawbreakers’ (not of the >One Percent variety.)

Which only punctuates our need to redefine the term ‘criminal’. We’re locking up the wrong people while the real felons walk free!

Which leads us directly to our third piece, yet another theme I harp on all of the time, the one regarding the ‘purpose of government’

Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.

Obviously a government does not have to be on the side of its people, as can be seen by the existence of countless dictatorships and oligarchies throughout the world. Even the corporatocracy that currently exists in the United States falls far short of being on the side of its middle class. But US history shows that a government committed to serving its citizens can, in fact, help create and maintain a healthy middle class even in the face of powerful corporations whose only interest is maximizing their own power and profits.

It is like the story in old westerns of a big bad landowner who takes what he wants when he wants it, ruthlessly terrorizing a town without a strong sheriff. Any individual who tries to stop the landowner is beaten into submission or killed. The situation continues until the town finds a strong enough sheriff to regain control over the landowner and his gang. This is the Old West version of the feudal system. In westerns, the feudal lord comes first and the sheriff comes later. But in the United States of thirty years ago, the government was the strong sheriff keeping the late-twentieth-century feudal lords from taking what they wanted. As long as the government was supported by its citizens—particularly its middle class—no one could ride into town and steal what belonged to the people. But if the government were weakened or destroyed, a different situation would arise. The intent of the plan for Corporate Feudalism was to convince the middle class to fire their sheriff. And that’s just what happened.

Again, this article is just a touch ‘off the mark’. The ‘plan’ is not to get the ‘middle class’ to ‘fire the sheriff, they can’t!

The plan was to get the middle class to believe it’s a ‘good idea’ to fire the bum who keeps letting the criminals ‘get away’…when it wasn’t really his fault, the ‘judge’ kept turning ‘em loose!

Ever wonder why you can’t do nothin’ to a judge?

Well, now you know!

Like I said months ago, the ‘plan’ is for a coup against the ‘perceived ineffective’ government.

And we all know what’s going to follow once the “Law & Order” types seize control.

Truth(iness) and Goodness, sprinkled ‘liberally’ with some good old fashioned ‘fire and brimstone’ in support of ‘righteous retribution’ (against those who couldn’t pay!)

Which is to say ‘Hell on Earth’…
It will be better known as the ‘war on the poor’.

How fortunate is it that the poor also comprise the largest segment (in the >One Percent’s mind) of the ‘surplus population’?

The only good news is the ‘war machine’ doesn’t/won’t have the necessary energy to roll around the world like it did the last time…unless the stupid bastards do ‘the unthinkable’.

Switching gears here, they’ve already done it once, purposefully bankrupting the global financial markets, so why stop now?

We truly are in a struggle for our species future…who will you side with?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

3 ' Fer

Greetings good citizen,

Happy weekend to you! Today’s three offerings are all from this morning’s edition of Alternet, those closeted Libertarians pretending to be Democrats.

Um, I have long opined in these posts that our, er, ‘understanding’ of economics is both deeply flawed and (purposefully) incomplete.

You, the average individual, are provided with the most basic of equations, you work you eat…and if you don’t eat everything you make then maybe you can buy yourself a toy or two!

That’s economics 101 for the average dope.

That’s all the employer commits to these days, you’ll be paid enough to buy food to keep you alive so you can come to work tomorrow.

So the rest of this bullshit is just so much hocus pocus

Nearly everything economists do is based on some model. For example, the famous story that prices are determined by supply and demand is a model. Consider the price of oil. On the one hand, there is supposed to be an upward-sloping “supply curve”: the higher the price of oil rises, the more oil producers want to pump. This curve is an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that producers would pump at any given time, if oil prices were at different levels.

On the other hand, there is supposed to be a downward-sloping “demand curve”: the lower the price of oil falls, the more businesses and consumers want to buy. This curve is likewise an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that consumers and businesses would buy at any given time prices were at different levels. The point where the imaginary curves intersect—where the price is such that the amount of oil producers would pump just equals the amount of oil businesses and
consumers would buy—is supposed to determine the actual price of crude oil and the amount of oil that is pumped.

All we ever see is the point where the imaginary curves are supposed to intersect: the actual oil price. Nobody has ever seen supply or demand curves; they are models. They can be useful, but should not be mistaken for a literal picture of reality. If you trace, over time, the movement of actual gasoline prices versus consumption, you see loops and zigs and zags that don’t look anything like imagined supply and demand curves.

Take a good look at today’s gasoline prices. It’s almost $4 a gallon and the price of a barrel of oil is less than it was when gas cost $3.30 a gallon!

Now the liars on Wall Street say that the refinery in CA that went offline is squeezing capacity and causing prices to rise…

Did you know that the refinery in CA distills gasoline for CALIFORNIA ONLY?

I can appreciate the (alleged) refinery outage in the Golden State has to be made up somewhere else but it doesn’t explain why a new refinery hasn't been built in this country since the Bicentennial! (1976)

Um, did I mention that our civilization is BADLY MISMANAGED?

Let’s roll around the idea that there’s no place to invest any more as we contemplate our crumbling infrastructure.

Why do investors no longer desire to invest in America?

Hold that thought because this isn’t the time for that particular question, although our next topic is also one of neglect:

It’s just astonishing to us how long this campaign has gone on with no discussion of what’s happening to poor people. Official Washington continues to see poverty with tunnel vision – “out of sight, out of mind.”

And we’re not speaking just of Paul Ryan and his Draconian budget plan or Mitt Romney and their fellow Republicans. Tipping their hats to America’s impoverished while themselves seeking handouts from billionaires and corporations is a bad habit that includes President Obama, who of all people should know better.

Remember: for three years in the 1980’s he was a community organizer in Roseland, one of the worst, most poverty-stricken and despair-driven neighborhoods in Chicago. He called it “the best education I ever had” and when Obama left to go to Harvard Law School, author Paul Tough writes in The New York Times, he did so, “to gain the knowledge and resources that would allow him to eventually return and tackle the neighborhood’s problems anew.” There’s a moving line in Dreams from My Father where he writes: “I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail” and “bring it back like Promethean fire.”

Oddly, though, for all his rhetorical skills Obama hasn’t made a single speech devoted to poverty since he moved into the White House.

We see things like this and we can only wonder, is the man that tone deaf that he doesn’t remember who put him in the White House or is this and example of being so tightly muzzled that he CAN'T point out his handler’s ‘shortcomings’?

Um, if I’m right, ‘We the People’ DIDN’T put this sorry excuse for a Democrat in the Oval Office, the > One Percent did!

Thus does the ‘meat puppet’ make serious gaffes nearly as comical as the ‘legitimate rape’ mis-step made by the Missouri Senate hopeful.

So fearful are they of the public’s wrath that they don’t permit their own ‘meat puppet' to behave the way he should.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is refusing to ‘play the game’ because it is the only option open to him.

It will be curious indeed to see if he changes his tune now that this glaring oversight has been made public?

Understand good citizen, MOST US citizens are ‘poor’, you just won’t find that many who are willing to admit it!

Not only are forty plus percent of US households on some kind of federal ‘food assistance program’ (the only thing staving off a full out revolution!) but MILLIONS of US citizens have ‘food assistance’ as their ONLY source of income!

And yet the poor aren’t even mentioned by either candidate…

Must not ‘need’ their vote…

Which begs the question does it have to be this way?

Earlier this summer we explored some things we could do as a nation to improve work-life balance, from the basic (paid sick leave, anyone?) to the truly innovative. This time, we're looking around the world: which countries fare better than ours in helping citizens survive without working themselves to death?

Of course, it’s hard not to respond to this question: “hmmm anywhere without child labor and a two-day weekend!” After all, not only do we rank among the worst in terms of paid leave for parents or family sickness and have zero mandatory vacation hours, Americans often don’t even take the vacation we’ve got!

Again our Libertarian leaning buddies want you to believe/ignore the deep schisms capitalism has left upon the world.

Paid sick leave (something you only get if you have a government job these days…or if you’re in management.)

Once upon a time even ‘Joe the Plumber’s’ boss offered paid sick leave because it was hard to attract workers if you didn’t offer benefits they could get with a ‘factory job’.

Now there are no factories…

No (soul-sucking) factory jobs means no benefits.

Now you work you eat…and if you don’t spend everything you make on food, maybe you can afford to buy yourself a couple of toys…

But hey, the Libbies are cool with that. If you don’t ‘own’ then you don’t deserve nothing.

But riddle me this Libbie baby, How do you get ahead if you can’t get a break?

Short answer, you don’t!

Sort of along the lines of ‘the world needs ditch diggers too!’ (Back in the day when such labor-intensive work was done by hand…now, not so much!)

But I digress…the last article’s point is other countries can do it which means we can too.

Ironically, our lives would much better just by reshuffling the deck a little bit.

Otherwise it’s ‘eat the rich’ because if you get hungry enough, ‘what you eat’ matters less and less.

Three rather thought provoking ‘topics’, the pieces themselves are worthless.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wasted

Greetings good citizen,

The problem with posting late last night is it has left me with little material to offer this morning.

Not that there aren’t myriad topics ‘the media’ (pick one) is ignoring in favor of their other hobbyhorses.

Just watching the boob tube I see so many incidents where disinformation is being disseminated to the brainwashed masses.

Like the Romney commercial that basically blames Obama for the Bush economy, WTF?

I have no love for Obama but I have even less for the conservo-whackos.

Which is to ask if you really need this current ‘debate’ broken down for you in bite-sized pieces, it really is as easy as ‘Class War’, the >One Percent vs. the rest of us.

Tax cuts for the One percent, Austerity for everybody else.

I still marvel that an adult can tell me with a straight face what a ‘wonderful president’ Reagan was…although we really don’t have much to compare him against since I’ve been old enough to vote.

As far as I’m concerned, they have all sucked, big time!

And that pretty much sums up the general miasma affecting the public regarding the ‘wrong course’ this nation is on and our perceived ‘helplessness’ in creating a solution to this problem.

When we are led to believe that losers like Reagan are as ‘good as it gets’ it is small wonder so many of us believe our situation is ‘hopeless’.

I dunno how helpful it is for me to point out that the central stage of our lives is carefully choreographed to ‘exclude’ stand-out individuals (None of the >One Percent liked Roosevelt, worse, they didn’t see it coming either.)

That is why exemplary people are kept off the world stage, because the >One Percent fear to the core of their being another ‘class traitor’ like Roosevelt.

This is why we’re told ‘meat puppets’ like Reagan is ‘as good as it gets’.

Ironically, the >One Percent has already made it their mission to, er, eradicate the exemplary once they shit hits the fan.

The strategy is commonly referred to as ‘cutting the head off of the snake’
Which is to ask do I think I am one of these ‘exemplary people’?

And I will once again remind you, it doesn’t matter what I think, it’s what YOU think that matters.

Which is to opine that if you think a ‘B’ list actor like Reagan (his sole ‘claim to fame’ are the Bonzo movies…what you don’t remember Bonzo? Get the picture?) is as good as it gets, you keep right on believing, ironically, it’s the same reason stupid is permanent!

Then you have an idea as to the mentality of the people running this nation…and it’s pretty fucking pathetic.

But I would be remiss in not pointing out that the rest of the world follows our lead.

After all, we are the oldest existing government on the planet…

Something I think too few of you appreciate the implications of.

Um the worlds stock markets continue their downward lounge…except for the Dow a few moments ago, the rest of the entire fucking world is in the shitter; but not the home of the Masters of the Universe! The Dow (comprised mostly of banking/financial sector stocks these days) just turned positive!

Probably ‘Zeus’ flexing his muscles…while the rest of us watch in horror as our purchasing power circles the drain.

You know, not for nothing but I have often wondered about why you find people in some of the most hostile environments this planet has to offer. Why not just stick to the nice places where ‘living is easy’?

But I think we all know the answer to that one.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely!

People know asshole when they encounter them…and the smart ones run before there is a confrontation…

Which explains why you’ll find people living in some of the most inhospitable place on the planet.

Fat lot of good it did them, now those places are all the home of third world cesspools!

Worse, the developing world is cannibalizing the (allegedly) ‘developed’ world as people are kept in the dark about conditions in the allegedly ‘lesser developed’ parts of the world.

Case in point: The Discovery series Gold Rush is opening a new location in Guyana, SA.

Well, the man I wouldn’t follow across the street took his (much better paid than one would expect) crew and trekked into the desolation of the Amazon. Once there, Todd commented, people in third world countries would consider this place the third world…(yet the guy had ATVs to rent and they got there on a jet boat…)

So how ‘third world’ is the third world?

Well, their fucking GPS still worked!

Which is to say perception is key.

We’ve been led to believe that the rest of the world lives in grass shacks and mud huts but this is not the case.

You are being manipulated good citizen. The longer you do nothing about it, the worse your situation will become.

If you let them make you wallow in your own cesspool they will quickly come to the conclusion that you ‘prefer’ it there and inflict further indignities upon you, because YOU DON’T COMPLAIN!

[Not that they fear or even care about your complaints.]

It’s the fact that you don’t DO anything about being stripped of your standard of living.

Start burning down their factories and watch ‘em take notice…but a little fire won’t put the fear of ‘retribution’ into ‘em, you’ve gotta string a bunch of ‘em up too!

Again, I’m not telling you what to think, I’m just giving you something to think about.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tard-y

Greetings good citizen,

Sorry for the tardy post, dealing with a frustrating problem with my vehicle, spent some serious dollars and it’s still not fixed.

Must not be looking at the correct factors…and trying to get information out of a dealer is futile.

Not that it particularly matters. Won’t need a vehicle after the shit flies and neither will pretty much anyone else.

What shit is that good citizen?

How about trying on a cascading systemic collapse for size:

China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods
By KEITH BRADSHER

The severity of the country’s inventory surplus has been masked by the blocking or adjusting of economic data by the government.

Graphic: Chinese Sales Lag
Manufacturing in China Slows

No surprise here good citizen, even the stock markets tanked mightily today in reaction to this economic hard landing.

No customers has a way of causing these ‘gridlock’ situations.

Piles of finished goods nobody can purchase because they lost their jobs to offshoring…

This is ‘why’ the government (used to) protect the rest of society from monopolies

I think it is a valid question to ask why it no longer does…

But look at what’s coming after November’s ‘theft’:

News Analysis
Mitt Romney campaigned on Thursday in Hobbs, N.M., discussing his energy plan at Watson Truck and Supply.
Giving Reins to the States Over Drilling
By ERIC LIPTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS 9:10 PM ET

Mitt Romney is proposing to end a century of federal control over oil and gas drilling and coal mining on government lands to court western voters and supporters from the energy industry.

Energy is sold on the ‘world market’ meaning no matter where it is found, the price per barrel is set on the ‘open market’ and it ‘doesn’t matter’ if you pumped it yourself, the retailers are going to mark it up to the current price per gallon regardless.

Thus is Willard’s plans for ‘energy independence’ full of shit!

In case you’re wondering (or are just plain absolutely stupid) the reason why energy continues to climb steadily is because the numbers of end users keeps growing!

It also reflects the fact that modern life itself is very ‘energy centric’ you use a lot of energy living a ‘western lifestyle’.

So what’s the Mittster really up to? He’s going to make all of the GOP wannabes sell the oil rights (even if there’s no oil) in all fifty states.

And in many cases this will be a massive fraud…but that’s okay, the justice system is already FUBAR! So none of these politicians will be ‘prosecuted’ for selling what isn’t theirs.

And why does the Mittster want energy independence (that is completely unachievable under capitalism?)

The first 2013 Cadillac ATS left the line at G.M.’s Lansing Grand River assembly plant in Michigan on July 26.
G.M. Has High Hopes for New, Smaller Cadillac
By BILL VLASIC 9:14 PM ET

Three years after General Motors hobbled out of bankruptcy, it is betting that the new Cadillac ATS will become a global contender in luxury cars.

Rapidly vanishing from the global scene is the American Success story…probably why GM is headed back towards bankruptcy.

Apparently they can’t build a car that competes with the Japanese (for monopolistic reasons, they’ve already promised the Japanese our domestic business in exchange for being the ‘guinea pig’ for the bankrupting of western civilization.)

Mind you, ‘the deal’ is between their one percent and ours so everybody else is ‘scroomed’.

Until we start stringing up the one percent from the nearest lamp posts…

Bullshit says you…

You got a better explanation?

What you capitalist attack dogs don’t understand is you’re asking everybody else to commit suicide for your inability to comprehend the mechanics of rampant monopolism!

And naturally, you see nothing ‘wrong’ with this situation:

The company is trying to find ways to show lucrative ads to mobile users without cluttering up their hand-held screens and driving them away in frustration.

Bits Blog: Facebook Speeds Up iPhone and iPad Apps | Deal Will Allow One-Tap Purchases Through Facebook

Let me once again thank my lucky stars that I don’t have a facebook account!

How do such bright people keep coming up with such idiotic ideas?

Could it be because they aren’t particularly bright?

Facebook is proof of the dearth of investment opportunities.

And what we have here is the end result of the ‘death of creativity’:

Economix Blog
Big Income Losses for Those Near Retirement
By CATHERINE RAMPELL 7:25 PM ET

The typical American between the ages of 55 and 64 has a household income almost 10 percent less than it was when the recovery began three years ago.

And this is shocking, why?

Talk about a generation of people who have had the rug pulled out from underneath them and they think the conservatives are the best thing to come along since sliced bread…

Because those worthless assholes really know how to ‘stand up for themselves’.

Which is to say I find it deeply disturbing that reasonably nice people support an ideology that is destroying their way of life.

Leading us back to the old saying, “Stupid is permanent, ignorance can be fixed.”

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Prisoner

Greetings good citizen,

In case you were wondering, the collapse of our civilization proceeds unimpeded, not that any of you were expecting to be rescued anytime soon.

Unemployment is still at crisis proportions while the famine is gathering steam as safety nets around the planet are exhausted.

Not a pretty picture but at least the nonsense (stock) markets are ‘sympathetic’ (all in the red as of 9:00 AM 8/22)

Not that it matters to the average grunt out there.

Can you say ‘scroomed’? (Get used to it, it’s gonna be a word!)

Funny how the direction things are headed in is NOT where they are going to end up, although this article doesn’t paint a pretty picture regarding the future of work:

Almost one-third of American workers now do some kind of freelance work—and they lack almost every kind of economic security that permanent full-time workers have traditionally had.

Though exact figures are impossible to find, many experts and labor organizers estimate that about 30 percent of U.S. workers are “contingent.” That means they don’t have a permanent job. They work as freelancers, temporary workers, on contract, or on call, or their employers define them (often illegally) as “independent contractors.”

Their ranks include writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers—and their number is rising. Richard Greenwald, a sociologist of work and professor at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, estimates that their share of the U.S. workforce has increased by close to half in the last ten years. In July, Staffing Industry Analysts reported that the average share of contingent workers at companies it surveyed had gone up by one-third since 2009, to 16 percent. Last year, a different survey found that contingent workers averaged 22 percent of the workers at 200 large companies.

This is a disturbing trend established back in the Seventies, right after they started disassembling our economy and shipping the working pieces overseas.

Not only did the jobs go but the equipment to do the job went too!

So we couldn’t make the stuff ourselves even if we wanted to.

And guess what? We were perfectly happy making these items for ourselves. NONE of the work shipped overseas ‘begged to go’; the tens of millions of unemployed DID NOT clasp their hands with joy and cry, “I hope I like my next job better!”

Even though many did ‘pray’ that they WOULD ‘do better’ only to end up accepting less because they didn’t have the skills the new jobs required…despite those requirements being ‘pie in the sky’.

Oh, they ‘short-sheeted’ us good!

And why? So they could post bigger profits for their ‘share-owners’…and you know who owns the most shares in any given enterprise?

The owners! (It sure as hell ain’t the workers!)

Um, in case you were wondering, the ‘cheaper there’ (the places all of these jobs went to) is an ‘artificial construct’…it doesn’t really exist.

It came about through ‘currency manipulation’ that formed the basis for the outright fraud that bankrupted the global economy today.

But you’re never going to read that in a corporate owned media press release…or maybe you will, after the crash when distribution drops to zero!

THEN you’ll see all of these so-called ‘journalists’ rushing to ‘scoop’ one another with stories us old people already know.

Naturally, being who we are, the ‘blame game’ will start and those with the megaphone are going to blame the rest of us for not ‘standing up’ (when the courts were hanging whistleblowers out to dry with frightening regularity!)

Yup, it will be ‘our fault’ we ‘didn’t protest in the streets’ after our justice system proved repeatedly that it had failed.

And there’s no doubt that we’ve all known this for a very long time…so it’s ‘our fault’.

What we don’t see is the danger this situation presents.

Because the same people who broke the justice system are NOT the people who should be allowed to ‘fix it’.

But that’s the thing that makes bloody revolution inevitable. The criminals start prosecuting the people who protest their illegal behavior, which turns the public against them.

But as we also know, the criminals don’t care what you think, it’s what you believe that matters!

Because what you believe is what you will act upon!

And once you believe that the criminals are helping themselves at the expense of you and yours, you’ll act!

Just a little ‘tell’ that has appeared in the paper a lot lately is the suicide rate for US service personnel is the highest it's ever been…

What do you suppose the ‘red-blooded, conservative’ reaction to that news is…besides deafening silence?

Would it be something along the lines of ‘if they’re too chicken to fight for this country then maybe they’d better kill themselves?

Whoa, Silver!

Why would anybody be happy with being a ‘button man’ for a bunch of capitalist pigs who don’t give a fuck about you?

Like our Syrian soldier in yesterday’s post, he too had a ‘WTF am I doing?’ moment.

All I can say good citizen is it’s a damn good thing people are ‘basically good’ (with a huge ‘tolerance’ for ‘wicked’) or our species wouldn’t have made it this far.

And the race is far from over.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mutual Feelings

Greetings good citizen,

In case you were wondering, it’s NOT ‘just you’ (that suspects the world is operating against its own best interests.)

People in other parts of the world are experiencing the exact same thing, which results in a variety of ‘disillusionment’ we see displayed here:

QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"I used to think the army was to defend the country and resist and fight the Western projects in the Middle East. My conclusion, after that, was that we were serving in an army that does not protect its own people."

JAMAL ABU HOURAN, a former Syrian soldier who joined the rebels fighting the government in April.

Makes you wonder just how many US service people would echo that exact same sentiment…

And when the time comes, how many of them will join the rebels for precisely the same reason?

Life With Syria's Rebels in a Cold and Cunning War
By C. J. CHIVERS

A rebel group presents a cross-section of a nation in upheaval – an accountant, real estate agent, farmers and laborers who have taken up arms believing their time has come.

Which returns us to a more complex question, good citizen. How do you know when it’s ‘time’?

We all have the sneaking suspicion that when you’re running for cover you’ll have missed that “I should have been ready for this” moment.

Meaning most of us won’t know it’s ‘time’ until after the fact. This also means the decision to act will be made ‘for us’.

The question, naturally is ‘who will make this choice for us?’

And the answer to that question is simple, if you’ve been paying attention.

Who the hell has been trying to exterminate us?

Short answer, the > One Percent.

What is this tiny group’s most potent tool?

The Corporate owned media.

Who represents this group’s ‘boots on the ground’?

The GOP (and to a lesser extent the DNC.)

So ironically it will ‘probably’ start as a clash between the Tea Party and the OWS movement.

And you have to wonder…what happened to the leaderless, causeless ‘movement’?

Was the ‘we don’t like what’s going on’ (but we offer no alternatives) movement die of ‘lack of interest’?

How fucked up is it good citizen that they go as far as drawing attention to the 99% then they sit on it?

We’re going to ‘occupy’ (space) until you arrogant assholes straighten up and fly right!

And we all saw how THAT worked out, didn’t we.

We’re especially thankful for the raises we all got because the 99% ‘flexed its muscles’…or not.

But I digress…

What about this ‘rebel spirit’ that is sweeping the Arab nations of the world?

The Corporate owned media is calling it the ‘cry for democracy’…but those of us living under so-called ‘democratic societies’ know it must be something else because those people won’t be any better off if the current government steps down.

Like the tune says: ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!’

Isn’t that the lesson currently being taught to the Egyptians?

You can stick whatever face you like at the top, so long as that face goes along with the ‘Status quo.’

How fucking sad is it good citizen that the (currently running unopposed) incumbent US president is the exact same deal?

Which brings to mind the question of, ‘how wise is it put a ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ remark like the one above most of the way through a 3 page essay?

As for the other ‘rhetorical questions’ asked here, it truly doesn’t matter who shoots who first. There WILL be blood and the best estimates at the moment dictate there will be lots of it.

Some of it innocent; but the bulk will be those who richly deserve it.

A little ‘read between the lines’ here…disregard what you see on the corporate owned media, it’s mostly bullshit anyway.

The real question is how long do these morons think they can keep a lid on things?

Are we really going to see a test of the principle, ‘you can only control that which you can destroy’?

Probably…and more the pity because these blackguards hallmark has been ubiquitous waste!

But freedom never comes cheap…a lesson that needs to be relearned repeatedly.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Willard

Greetings good citizen,

Apparently nobody worries when stock markets around the world reflect reality as they are all bleeding from the eye-sockets at the moment.

How disturbing is it to watch them rise irrationally, knowing that our economy is broken and yet ‘stocks’ (the principal reason rich people are rich) continue to rise…inexplicably.

Once again we return to the heart of the matter and the obvious solution to the, er, ‘unemployment crisis’.

Part one of the task of achieving ‘full employment’ is to cut the workweek in half, thereby doubling the number of workers needed instantly!

Naturally, there’s a minor problem with this proposal, If you cut people’s paycheck in half you also need to reduce their expenses by roughly the same amount…and if we are to ‘speed the recovery’ providing demand a much needed kick-start, we’d reduce the expense picture even more!

I propose we start here:

A Measure of Change
Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

President Obama’s response to the housing crisis was deliberately subdued, and some economists believe stronger action could have softened the economic impact.

Graphic: What Happened to Homeowners Seeking Help

What do they tell these guys before they accept the ‘job’ of being their ‘lapdog’?

We’re going to kick the crap out of you in the press but when you’re done you’ll be living large on Easy Street, heck, they’ll give you our own library and even name an aircraft carrier after you!

Which is to belabor the obvious. We know why nothing has been fixed. It was Pinocchio’s job to make sure nothing got fixed or prosecuted.

A simple task and he excelled at it.

We can only hope he’s happy with the broken world he’s leaving his children…not that his kids will have to worry about it.

But knowing these asshats, his grandchildren are probably ‘Scroomed!’

[The ‘assumption’ here is that a ‘correction’ doesn’t land on him (or his) with both feet, squishing them all flat, but that’s the chance he took when he accepted the job.]

Still blows my mind that he thinks he’s going to get away with it…it is only thanks to him that the Smirking Chimp is still a free man.

Now his, er, ‘continued freedom’ relies on Willard and Ryan keeping a lid on things until he can ‘slip away’.

Although I’m in the camp that believes Willard’s election will spark a revolt that will sweep the world.

Outrage over an obviously ‘stolen election’. But you all know that Willard is Mitt’s real name.

Willard was also the title of the first film about homicidal rats…

Coincidence?

Naturally, I digress…(sometimes worse than others…)

Where were we? Ah yes, we were fixing the unemployment crisis in a couple of simple to understand sentences.

[Seriously, good citizen, how many of you think I should be ‘in charge’? I poll horribly with the One percent but pretty much everybody else likes the idea!]

I would reduce the average citizen’s expense picture to virtually nothing because in the end the true purpose of commerce is not to make a few ungrateful assholes rich, it is established to meet your needs!

When it fails to meet your needs and we end up with a huge bucket load of assholes, it’s time to start over!

Hard to say what’s more disturbing…the fact that our grandparents gave the capitalists a ‘second chance’ and they turned around and went right back to their old ways or the fact that most of us are standing here bewildered, uncertain about what to do next?

Under A Simple Plan, a roof over your head and a job that pays a living wage are you’re ‘rights’!

You have a right to participate in society! Participation should not be predicated on making yourself into an income stream for an economic parasite commonly called an ‘employer’!


Same goes for the roof over your head, it is your right and not somebody else’s college tuition plan for THEIR kids!

If we are to survive as a species we must put a stop to this ceaseless screwing of anyone who crosses our path…in that respect we are only millimeters away from being better off killing each other on sight.

As I am fond of saying, I’m not here to tell you what to think, my job is to provide you with something to think about.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sympathy for the Devil

Greetings good citizen,

Must be ‘one of those days’. In what I would call a major gaffe, (You will never read one of my pieces where I refer to our species as ‘animals’…inferring, as in this case, that they are ‘mindless and needy’.)

Yet from the headlines of today’s NY Times we have this:

QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."
TERRY GOU, chairman of Foxconn, which has more than a million employees worldwide but is using a growing number of robots.

Speaking of which:

The iEconomy
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
By JOHN MARKOFF

Robots far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other industries are replacing workers in both manufacturing and distribution.

I am sore tempted to type this in ‘caps lock’, the writer’s version of screaming but I’m going to ask you to simply imagine that I’m ‘screaming’ until I say otherwise:

[Scream on]

Hello, is anybody fucking home? This is what I mean when I say these assholes are blind as well as Deaf!

How much luck do you think Sparky would have selling his worthless bullshit to his fucking robots?

Because when it’s all said and done, that’s what’s left of the ‘paying economy’.

Who is raising these freakazoid capitalists to believe that money grows on trees and comes for divine entities that don’t need an income source?

Because there’s a name for this phenomenon, it’s called ‘counterfeiting’.

Not wanting employees is the same thing as saying ‘I don’t want customers’.

Hello?

Did I forget to mention the close correlation between workers and commerce? Without workers there is no commerce (because you have eliminated the ‘paying customer’.)

Somebody remind me why we let these morons manage our affairs? (WTF!)

[Scream-off/Rant-on]

Perfect fucking timing, just received a phone call to verify that I received a pledge card for the Cancer Society…is THIS how they’re spending my donation? Even if we assume the sweet person on the phone was doing it out of the ‘goodness of her heart’, the phone call itself came from Michigan and must have cost a chunk of change as I live next to the frigid North Atlantic.

Again WTF!

Eliminating real jobs through automation to create, er, ‘idiot jobs’ like the phone call I just received is not the path to universal prosperity we so desperately need to switch to.

Note I do not say we need to ‘find the path’ to prosperity, it’s already right there before us…we need to step onto it but first we have to eliminate the greed heads blocking the way.

Have I mentioned lately that our civilization is severely ‘mismanaged’…although this has been true for time out of mind.

People just don’t ‘get’ the whole ‘money thing’.

Examples like the one above happen when the object of doing a given task is reduced to its monetary terms.

MONEY IS NOTHING!

IT IS NOT AND CANNOT BE 'THE GOAL', yet our entire economic system is based on the opposite belief, that money is the 'be all, end all.'

If capturing large amounts of our ‘medium of exchange’ is all it took to achieve success, why not just run the printing presses until everybody had pockets overflowing with MONEY?

Is it because once you do something like that the whole ‘incentive to work’ flies out the window?

Giving money away destroys it.

Sucking all of the money out of the ‘bottom of society’ destroys civilization…and will destroy our species.

Which has no rational reason for happening save an elite group trying to destroy the government and its monopoly on the law.

There is one theory that explains this irrational behavior…and that’s so far off the reservation I refuse to go there, even if it’s true!

Unfortunately, good citizen, the more [evidence] I see, the clearer that one possibility becomes.

So as you lay your ‘little animals’ down to sleep, remember what their future employers regard them as.

I can only pray your mind rebels at the prospect.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Happy Talk

Greetings good citizen,

As might seem obvious, ‘happy talk’ in not one of my mandates…that said, I don’t go ‘out of my way’ to trash talk our badly mismanaged economy either…

(Well, not too far out of my way.)

…Okay, I trash talk the economy all of the friggin’ time, every chance I get.

Left to your imagination is whether or not I am being ‘too critical’, that, good citizen, is for you to decide.

Although I would be the first to admit that I have my, er, ‘biases’.

Naturally, by now some of you are wondering what set me down this trail this morning and the answer is The NY Times:

Off the Charts
Recovery in U.S., Though Lackluster, Trumps Europe’s
By FLOYD NORRIS

Economic recovery in the United States may be slow, but it is steady, while several European economies are either shrinking or stalling.

Graphic: Measuring Recoveries
Euro Watch: Merkel Sides With E.C.B. on Spain and Italy

Now Mr. Norris is well known in the world of economic commentary as one of the ‘serious people’, a proverbial ‘voice of reason’.

So what does it say when he has to resort to frivolous comparisons to distract you from the train wreck that will surely engulf the entire world?

He knows it’s coming. He’d be a fool to deny it. We can only wonder why he uses this space to go ‘rah, rah, sis-boom-bah!’ rather than to warn you of the inevitable collapse of the Euro-Zone. (Followed closely by the ‘mathematical collapse’ of the rest of the global economy. Understand, good citizen, as long as ‘the greater fool exists’ it will be ‘game on’ no matter how ‘bad’ (ridiculous) things get.)

YOU, the average individual, will literally start giving out ‘dope slaps’ to people who cling to outmoded realities.

(Understandably, you’ll be handing out these dope slaps with your pistol in your other hand…in case chucklehead takes offense.)

You think things are strange now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
But, naturally, I digress…moving on:

Economix Blog
Is Simple Demography Behind Weak Economy?
By DAVID LEONHARDT

How important are demographic trends to the great growth slowdown of the last 12 years?

Throughout the Western world, as life expectancy increased, the number of children the ‘average’ family produced has decreased.

But pointing to the dwindling number of births in advanced nations has no bearing on our current unemployment crisis.

Bonehead is pointing to a drop in demand that is NOT (as is obvious by our rapidly rising population figures) due to a lack of customers but due rather to a lack of PAYING CUSTOMERS thanks to the GLOBAL RACE TO THE BOTTOM!

Which, naturally, arose from the ascendancy of global capitalism.

This should provide ample proof of how ‘toxic’ capitalism is yet the slavers among us still need to be convinced.

Don’t be hoodwinked, good citizen, there is an ample ‘customer base’ out there, the problem is capitalism has no use for them, capitalism has labeled them ‘surplus’!

So what about it good citizen, has capitalism made YOU ‘redundant’?

If you’re anywhere near ‘average’, it has several times already…and every time you’ve had to scramble to find a new way to ‘make yourself useful’ to worthless employer.

Ironically, half of these jokers didn’t even have a viable business model, they created ‘nothing jobs’ in order to mask the wholesale cannibalization of our economy!

A process that continues to this day…

Okay, so we have two well known and respected NY Times economists, neither of whom has felt the need to warn us of the pending collapse of the Euro-Zone and what that means for the rest of the global economy.

Do you think perhaps they will get ‘blindsided’ by the collapse, like the financial crisis snuck up and caught both of them unawares?

Yes good citizen, any ‘old time Yankee’ like me remembers when ‘snuck’ was a word…a word that disappeared when the FUCKING RABID CAPITALISTS AT MICROSOFT ‘farmed out’ the dictionary in word to India!

For all I know ‘snuck’ is a bad word in Hindi…so they ‘erased’ it.

Along with dove, the ‘past tense’ of dive. Maybe ‘Doves’ are sacred?

It is also a damning testament to our weak educational system that apparently NONE of the English Majors out there took MicroSoft to task for cavalierly altering our native tongue.

Or perhaps the blame lies with our badly broken justice system which seems totally incapable of punishing a corporate felon no matter what they do.

Just a few tidbits remain:

A strong Canadian dollar weighs on the auto industry as contract talks start

This, like the Euro, boggles the mind. How the fuck does the currency of a nation with only 27 million people trump the almighty US Dollar…probably the same way the flipping Euro does, fraud!

This is just another example of how capitalism perverts value!

Often to a disturbing degree:

The Kalashnikov factory in Russia is humming thanks to American buyers

Why do you suppose people are snapping up Kalashnikov’s here in the US? Are they fearful the turban wearing people of our society are gonna suicide bomb them when they least expect it?

That’s what the corporate owned media would like you to think…but you’re supposed to leave the killing to ‘Homeland Security’.

Or, more accurately as may be the case, are people arming up because they increasingly sense that our ‘internal security apparatus’ has adopted an ‘us vs. them’ mentality?

Probably being downplayed elsewhere but lately, in this neck of the woods, there has been quite a string of incidents involving men in uniform behaving badly.

The incidents often involve ‘officer brutality’…which once again calls into question the effectiveness of the ‘screening process’ these gun-toting apes are subjected to.

And like rape, for every incident that makes the news there are a hundred you never hear about.

But my, that ‘blue wall’ is effective.

Um, probably just me. I think police serve to protect the interests of the public although it would seem today’s police are selected for their ‘attack dog’ like obedience.

Which is to opine their willingness to attack on command is more desirable than their ability to deal calmly with the public.

I will once again state that I am NOT ‘anti-cop’ but I am definitely anti- the people who run and set policy for our law enforcement services…mostly lawyers and their ‘ilk’.

Lastly:
Amtrak’s Acela train service is dominating travel in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor.

And once again this story needs little explanation from me; the price of fuel combined with the increasing belligerence of Homeland Security makes this story completely ‘self explanitory…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thunk!

Greetings good citizen,

As should surprise no one, news of the train wreck that is the Eurozone remains sparse and guarded…while conditions on the ground deteriorate into chaos (not Anarchy!)

Um, the Stupidity Markets have traded sideways most of the week, unable to justify further upwards movement but unwilling to reflect the crumbling global economy.

Remember good citizen, stocks are what make rich people rich!

For what it’s worth, here’s Friday’s top business headlines:

U.S. Reliance on Saudi Oil Heads Back Up
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Imports of oil from the kingdom have grown by more than 20 percent, leaving the United States vulnerable to tensions in the Persian Gulf.

Wait a minute Slim, don’t we get the ‘bulk’ of our fossil fuels from Canada and Venezuela? Mining the ‘Tar Sands’ has boosted, er, ‘domestic’ oil production by a half a million barrels per day.

So what’s this horse-pucky about? Is this another ‘red flag’ being waved by the war-mongers in the Pentagon?

Or are we simply expressing our ‘concern’ for the ‘well-being’ of our allies?

Give it a fucking rest, will ya?

Blood for oil is only a ‘good idea’ if it’s not your blood.

The next headline appears to be murkier than usual:

Treasury Changes Fannie and Freddie Bailout Deal
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 9:59 AM ET

The government is changing the terms of its bailout agreement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a way that will shrink the holdings of the two mortgage giants more quickly and will require payment to the government of all quarterly profits the companies earn.

Hmmn, that last line is a puzzler, isn’t it? What kind of ‘quarterly profits’ are we talking about if the bailout is ‘ongoing’?

Left to our imaginations is how a hybrid-public/private corporation makes a profit by guaranteeing mortgages?

The whole process just doesn’t compute yet here we are.

How frigging sick is it good citizen that BOTH of these entities EXIST to SHIELD banks from the ‘liability’ of lending to the ‘less than creditworthy’ consumers? (a situation of their own making?)

And how many BILLIONS has the government forked over to keep these two ‘charitable organizations’ operating?

And there you have it, good citizen. The strength of the public, supposedly ‘backing up’ our (failed) banking system (at the public’s expense!)

Speaking of ‘failed banking systems’:

Euro Watch
Merkel Backs European Central Bank
By JACK EWING and DAVID JOLLY 8:58 AM ET

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, supported conditional support for Spain and Italy, but a Finnish official suggested that euro zone leaders were preparing for the worst.

Talk about ‘mixed signals’, what the hell are we supposed to make of those two conflicting messsages?

Um, does anyone give a fuck what Angie supports? And it also stands to reason that the other Euro-zone leaders are ‘preparing for the worst’…even when that means getting out of Dodge before the rush because there isn’t anything else they can do once the currency ‘collapses’.

By now it has been stated by hundreds of sources, mathematically, there is NO WAY OUT OF THIS CRISIS VIA CAPITALISM!

And if you don’t have A REPLACEMENT FOR CAPITALISM, IN PLACE, before they hit the reset button, they are only ‘postponing the inevitable’.

I get a kick out of these assholes who say there’s a way to ‘protect yourself’ from the coming collapse because you KNOW they’re full of shit!

Owning gold is inviting death or at the very least robbed AND swindled (if you’re EXTREMELY LUCKY.)

IF you want a chance at ‘protecting yourself’ you need a small stockpile of ‘trade goods’, common commodities that other people would be willing to swap you something you need for.

The more common, the safer.

Whiskey (nips of all kinds) beer and cigarettes will all be high value trade items.

Nips without seals will be considerably tougher to move due to the high levels of fraud that exist now…but later fraud will be punishable by death so it will become less prevalent.

Speaking of fraud:

Wall Street Opens Mostly Flat
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 41 minutes ago

It appeared in early trading that investors were still digesting a mixed bag of earnings from retailers.

Um, save those who cater to the >One Percent, NO Retailers are earning profits. The rise in ‘aggregate’ retail sales is due to the recent spike in energy prices…and DOES NOT signify a ‘resurgent consumer’.

NOBODY is MAKING more money so nobody is spending it…it really is that simple.

Which is a little misleading. The >One Percent CONTINUE to increase their share of the global economy as they consolidate their ownership of the global markets.

Which does YOU ‘the consumer’ ZERO good.

Having only one source makes you, by default, a ‘captive audience.’

Now the relentless pursuit of profits means the only way to increase shareowner value is to 'adulterate' the product.

So how long will it be before you’re being sold pet food that is mostly rat poison?

In a captive market NOTHING stands in between a capitalist and his profits, not even dead customers.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Eye-Opener

Greetings good citizen,

Unemployment is up, sales are down, the stock market is up and nobody knows why…we can only guess this may have something to do with astounding failure of the justice system to find ANY criminal wrongdoing throughout the financial sector. The debacle at MF Global being the latest disaster to be ‘swept under the rug’.

In a tiny ‘change of pace’ I have selected today’s top three headlines rather than the top stories out of the business section…just to demonstrate where the corporate owned media’s priorities are at:

Despite Alarm by U.S., Europe Lets Hezbollah Operate Openly
By NICHOLAS KULISH

Washington and Jerusalem insist Hezbollah is a resurgent terrorist group with Iranian backing, but the European Union treats it as a Lebanese social and political movement.

Weird how this one lends itself to the old ‘consider the source’ axiom. The warmongering whackos at the Pentagon and their Middle Eastern branch office believe EVERYBODY living near the Saudi Peninsula are card carrying members of Al Queida!

(At least that’s the assumption behind the drone strikes being carried out over there!)

If we were to lend any credibility to the claims of Hezbollah being a terrorist group we would first have to admit that the Republicans are Hezbollah’s US equivalent.

If we were to consider that it is Republican filibuster that is keeping the drone air strike program going, we might even have to conclude they are MORE DANGEROUS than a civic organization that promotes the rights of Muslims.

But that’s just a ‘perspective’, good citizen. You’re left to decide on your own if everyone who wears a turban is a threat to you and your children…or if the ‘clear and present danger’ isn’t the oil market-manipulating capitalists?

Um, Why bring it up if it wasn’t one of today’s top headlines…

No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global
By AZAM AHMED and BEN PROTESS

Investigators are expected to conclude that sloppiness, not criminal intent, was the main driver behind the disappearance of customer money.

Seriously? They’re wheeling out the old ‘incompetence defense’ after they hacked away decades of regulations and bought off the inspectors?

The act of ‘legalizing’ these crimes is a crime itself! There are battalions of lawyers who should be disbarred for their part in laying the groundwork for the inevitable collapse of our civilization, but no!

It is all being chalked up to ‘incompetence and sloppy procedures!’

Could the same be said of the Justice Department’s ‘failure to prosecute’?

Again, that is for YOU to decide…

Lastly, we have yet another ‘disturbing disconnect’ on display:

Years After Haiti Quake, Safe Housing Is a Dream for Many
By DEBORAH SONTAG

Two and a half years after the earthquake, the pressing need for safe, stable housing for all displaced people in Haiti remains unmet, despite billions of dollars in reconstruction aid.

I believe, statistically speaking, the western half of Hispanola (commonly referred to as Haiti) remains the most (officially) impoverished place on the planet.

Unfortunately there are a multitude of contenders for ‘second place’ here in our capitalism dominated world.

Haiti is, and has been ‘characterized’ as being a bastion of ‘shocking poverty’ so it is, er, ‘disingenuous’ to imply, as this headline does, that there ever was an abundance of ‘safe stable homes’ on Haiti.

Part of the reason why the earthquake was so destructive is due to there being no building codes to speak of over there.

Haiti is the poster child for your classic Banana Republic.

A relative handful live in the lap of luxury while the majority struggles with shocking poverty.

As close as I can tell, fundraising efforts are still ongoing to provide relief…but as the article points out, relief remains virtually non-existent, despite billions being donated.

But that’s the way Banana Republics operate, billions up top, crumbs at the bottom.

Looks suspiciously like the way things operate over here in the US, don’t they?

The >One Percenters have more than they can spend while the rest of us jump through hoops, struggling to keep our heads above water with paychecks that don’t crack our expenses…

But that’s our problem, isn’t it?

Well, I’m ready to put this ‘wake up call’ in the can (with all the rest.)

Take a good look around you and TRY to be honest with yourself about what you see.

If you don’t see a society on the edge, you gotta lay off the Kool Aide (or the Prozac, pick one!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fooled Again!

Greetings good citizen,

It appears the people have been ‘taken in’ once again. This time by the man who ran as an opponent of Austerity…just as Obama ran against the high-handed tactics of the oligarchs…before revealing himself to be one of their ‘lapdogs’.

Since this article was generated by the Corporate Owned Media it is hard to tell what the true ‘facts on the ground’ are here.

They very well could have had a funeral for a boy killed on a motorbike just as there very well could have been an incident of reckless driving that same night, but neither seem to have any connection to the riot.

The second sentence of the snippet below tells the real reason:

Hollande's government has identified the northern quarter of Amiens as one of 15 "priority security zones" across the country, which will be established from September.

The emphasis will be on tougher policing rather than on schemes to alleviate the impact of record unemployment and falling real incomes for the poorest sections of society.

Figures released Tuesday showed the French economy flat-lining in the second quarter of the year and most economists expect a further deterioration as Hollande's government cuts spending in most areas in order to reduce its budget deficit in line with eurozone requirements.

Trade unions battling job cuts across French industry have already warned of a "hot autumn" of protest unless the government eases up on the austerity drive.

Hollande on Tuesday promised a tough response to the unrest in Amiens.

"The state will mobilise all its means to combat these violent acts," Hollande said. "Security is not only a priority for us, it is an obligation."

Once again we see an opportunity to remind the foolish, those who would trade their freedom for security deserve neither!

What will these ‘law and order’ types do when the general public revolts in reaction to their implementing the austerity plans of the oligarchs (who surrender NOTHING.)

Up hold ‘the law’, even when it is the ‘law of man’ that is in direct opposition to the interests of the people?

Again, it is difficult to say which is more disturbing, the evidence that the ballot box contains NO SOLUTION to our oligarch problem or the fact that the government is now focused on fighting the very people it was established to protect?

This is serious bullshit, good citizen!

We too are rapidly approaching another ‘illusion of participation’ election cycle where we are being given one of the worst ‘non-choices’ I have ever seen.

The incumbent is a lapdog of the One Percent while the challenger is a bonafide member of the One Percent.

Worse, it appears as though our ‘overlords’ have already decided they’re going to ‘give’ the election to one of their own, the public be damned!

Once again playing their strongest card, the ‘what are YOU gonna do about it’ card.

Well, what ARE you gonna do about it?

Are you gonna cheer as Willard and his cohorts divvy up the Social Security trust fund among themselves via that corrupt paper shredder we call Wall Street?

When your benefits no longer cover your expenses and they throw you out into the streets (to die) it will be a piss poor time to decide you should have done something about the stolen election.

If you wait until you’re on death’s door to pick up a gun you’d best be intent on putting yourself out of your own misery.

It is beyond pathetic good citizen to KNOW that this coming November will be a test of the HOW STUPID ARE YOU question.

Worse, there are no ‘good’ choices in the US elections.

Makes you wonder if the people of France aren’t asking themselves the same question, just as the people of Greece and the people of Italy with their ‘bank appointed’ leaders.

You look at these factors and marvel over how anyone can believe that the Eurozone hasn’t already collapsed.

Is this just another example of the ‘How Stupid are you’ test!

But wait, it’s easy to keep up ‘the appearance of normal’ even if that’s only true for ‘the One Percent’. So the ignorant public is to be forgiven their mistaken impression that everything is fine ‘across the pond’ just as the peoples of the Eurozone remain blissfully ignorant of the everyday problems of the average ‘American’.

This is a perfect example of the old sod, ‘appearances can be deceiving’.

Things may ‘look’ all right but reality is a different story altogether.

Ironically, that clock is already running. How long it will take for reality to overtake the false impression being fed to us by the One Percent?

You won’t know until the One Percent are ready to reveal their deception.

But if you look closely, the signs are everywhere!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner