Thursday, January 31, 2013

Animals

Greetings good citizen,

In a rare trifecta, the top stories on today’s NY Times provide us with a ‘snapshot’ of the current status of, er, ‘our’ civilization (Which is actually two societies that are no longer even pretending to ‘co-exist’.)

What do YOU make of this puzzling first piece?
Israeli Airstrike in Syria Targets Arms Convoy, U.S. Says
By ISABEL KERSHNER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

Israel carried out a strike deep inside Syria, American officials reported, saying they believed the target was a shipment of antiaircraft weapons meant for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
So, was it a ‘surgical strike’? Did the Israeli ‘aces’ only destroy the boxes ‘addressed to Hezbollah’?

Of course not, this was like a drone attack at a funeral (anyone who was a friend of the deceased was a terrorist…and therefore deserving of ‘summary execution’, which, make no mistake about it, is PRECISELY what a drone attack is.)

Um, I’m not the only ‘unbeliever’ out there but if I’m wrong then hell is filling up mighty fast, wouldn’t you say?

How much sympathy do you think anyone has for ‘tiny Israel’ when they dispense with the entire justice system and murder with impunity?

Which is to opine that this is not ‘civilized’ behavior. If the rest of the world behaved like the Israelis regularly do it would be paved in glass already.

Moving on, we have this perplexing story that hints at communism not being completely crushed in China…(to the chagrin of the capitalists.)
Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months
By NICOLE PERLROTH

The timing of the attacks coincided with reporting for an investigation that found that the relatives of China's prime minister had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.
Seems it doesn’t matter what kind of government you are subjected too, it has a price and the capitalists are paying whatever it takes!

So the ‘politicians’ sell out their countrymen for a ‘better life’ for themselves…

Funny how that ‘monkey see-monkey do crap works, isn’t it?

How do you suppose we break that ‘cycle of corruption’ if NOBODY is ‘trustworthy’?

How about ‘your money is for you’?

Stopping the ‘counterfeiters’ is where it all starts. Most of what’s floating around like turds in our badly broken financial system is ‘fluff’ and prices no longer have any basis in reality.

How bad is it? Did I mention ‘trifecta’?
U.S. Growth Halted as Federal Spending Fell in 4th Quarter
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The government played a role in slowing the economic recovery as cuts in military spending and other factors overwhelmed the Federal Reserve's expanded campaign to spur growth.

Stocks Slip on Wall Street
[That last blurb snuck in and wasn’t intentional despite it being pertinent.]

But that’s nothing, I reported yesterday that GDP slipped and it had something to do with government spending.

Today it appears the story is a bit deeper and much more disturbing, our economy (such as it is) is on ‘life support’ tied to a printing press!

(Worse, the printing press is tied to a machine gun aimed at the hornets nest we call the Middle East!

How long do you think the ‘hosers’ in charge can keep this crapshoot afloat?

Probably just long enough to steal a lifeboat and load it full of the family jewels before bugging out to a tropical nirvana!

They won’t make it…but they ‘believe’ they will and to them that’s all that matters.

(Soon to be the plot of a major motion picture, yes, Hollywood IS ‘shameless’, which is bizarrely unrelated to its pervasive tastelessness… (Which has more to do with the bean counters than the art itself.)

all of which becomes moot when there is no longer a civilization to play to…

How ironic is it that the >One Percent thinks we are already there?

So, in aggregate, what do our top stories tell us?

In the first we see absolute ruthlessness in support of the ‘status quo’. Why is Israel ‘helping’ Assad? Because he keeps the Syrians out of Israel.

We’re back to the old ‘Devil you know’ scenario. Doesn’t matter if his people hate him as long as he holds up his end of the bargain and ‘peace’ reigns in the region.

Put a ‘wildcard’ in Assad’s slot and who knows what will happen next? Perhaps this new leader will unite the rest of the Arab world against the (thieving, murdering) West and upset the delicate balance of global energy supply and demand.

And everything north of the tropic of Cancer will freeze, in some cases, to death.

Our next story points at pervasive governmental corruption. How can anyour civilization survive if our ‘self-professed betters’ keep throwing the rest of us under the bus?

Then we have our ‘war-driven’ economy. What does this say about our children’s future?

As a sidebar/closer has anyone else noticed the, er, ‘eruption’ of desperate acts across the nation over the past couple of weeks?

While many of these incidents appear to be mental health related, we should still view them as the proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine’, a makeshift ‘barometer’ of social health if you will.

The more ‘nothing left to lose’ you see, the less control they have over the situation.

And it CAN BE STOPPED, they just have to ‘change course!’ (And stop treating people like animals…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Horns

Greetings good citizen,

Our lead story from the business section of today’s New York Times was ‘almost as shocking’ as the news of Jim Neighbors tying the knot with his long-time boy toy in Hawaii…
U.S. Economy Unexpectedly Contracted in Fourth Quarter
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 51 minutes ago

Weaker exports, a drop in military spending and a slower buildup in inventories combined to pull the economy down at the end of the year.
The government said economic output in the quarter fell at an annual rate of 0.1 percent.
So we are once again faced with the conundrum of rising stock prices while the ‘real economy’ continues its ‘death spiral’…

Can I get a WTF?

Oh yeah!

Military spending was down so (what passes for) the economy ‘slipped’?

Is it just me or does anyone else think our civilization is being grossly mismanaged?

I don’t think I going to find the answer here:
Boeing Battery Was a Concern Before Failure
By CHRISTOPHER DREW, HIROKO TABUCHI and JAD MOUAWAD 19 minutes ago

Even before battery failures led to the grounding of all Boeing 787 jets, there were problems that raised questions about their reliability.

Timeline: A Rocky Path for the 787 Dreamliner
Graphic: Battery at Center of Inquiry
How ironic is THIS, good citizen?
Boeing Earnings Exceed Estimates
By CHRISTOPHER DREW 25 minutes ago

The company said it did not expect the problems with the batteries on its new 787 Dreamliner to have a significant impact on its earnings in 2013.

Seriously?
DealBook
Chesapeake Energy Chief Steps Down
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 41 minutes ago

After months of investor dissatisfaction, Aubrey McClendon, a co-founder of the oil and natural gas producer, will give up management duties immediately and will retire on April 1.
Don’t know about you good citizen but it don’t look like ‘stepped down’ isn’t the proper description here, looks a lot more like ‘shoved aside’. Wonder who’s corn flakes he pee’d in?
Chrysler Earnings Soar
By BILL VLASIC 8:00 AM ET

The automaker’s profit in the fourth quarter jumped 68 percent and for the year was about nine times that of the year before.
Again, looks like a classic case of if you made a dollar last year and you made two dollars this year, your income is up 100% but you still only have two bucks to show for a years’ worth of effort!

So why is it that only US carmaker still standing after the collapse of the global banking industry still can’t get any respect?
European Cloud Over Ford
By BILL VLASIC

Ford Motor posted a 54 percent gain in adjusted fourth-quarter profit, despite heavy losses in the troubled European market.

In apparently ‘related news’…
Appeals Court Suspends Peugeot's Job-Cut Plan
French Automakers’ Biggest Problem? French Consumers


The next headline simply screams ‘mismanagement’!
DealBook
MF Global's Bankruptcy Nears a Happy Conclusion
By BEN PROTESS

The push to make MF Global customers nearly whole, a goal now surprisingly within reach, is a remarkable turnaround for the brokerage firm.
And nobody is happier than the management of MF Global, who didn’t have to do a minute of jail time…

And our final headline…
Media Decoder Blog
CNN President Tries to Repeat Success in A.M. News
By BRIAN STELTER

Jeff Zucker, who formally took over CNN Worldwide last week, is assembling a new morning show, the first of several building blocks for the ailing cable news channel.

Correct me if I’m wrong here good citizen but isn’t this the same guy that used to be in charge of primetime programming at one of the major networks?

All I’m trying to say here is the wasteland that is TV just keeps spreading…

Returning us to our ‘theme’ of the day, gross mismanagement.

If we don’t grab the bull by the horns it’s going to drag us over the cliff with it…although most would opine that it is far too late for that…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Rare Form

Greetings good citizen,

Oil has edged up to $97 a barrel (which is only 36 gallons when they’re measuring oil) and the Dow is in the black at the moment at 13,916 again, for no discernable reason.

Well, Pfizer did ‘beat expectations’ but Pfizer isn’t a component of the Dow…Under the category of Wall Street’s useful purpose, maybe the optimism is derived from the markets being used to ‘focus’ our politicians on the goals of the One Percent.

And it seems the One Percent needs some new legislation to protect profits from those pesky ‘generics’…(the devil with the consumer! It’s his inability to pay that’s causing this whole mess, (says the One Percent…)

So if any of you are wondering what our (bought and paid for) ‘legislators’ will be working on next…chances are it will be this:
Biotech Firms, Billions at Risk, Lobby States to Limit Generics
By ANDREW POLLACK

The industry’s lobbying effort could blunt new competition to its products and reduce the savings anticipated in the federal health care overhaul.

You can understand the ‘no vaseline’ but did they really need to throw the ground glass in there too?

If we take the point of view that the price of ‘LIFE SAVING MEDICATION’ doesn’t matter ‘cuz the ‘precious few’ plan on exterminating us anyway then stories like this aren’t worth getting angry over.

Since ‘United we aren’t’ we’re all alone in our death march. Nobody’s going to help us because they are all in the murderer’s pay.

How’s that for ‘dim’?

Worse, I can sit here and plead that we’ve got to get our act together but it falls on deaf ears.

Nobody’s going to stick their neck out until this thing reaches critical mass, then it will be too late (to guide it.)

Although you want to talk about ‘tap dancing on a land mine’, the bad boy is gonna blow any day now.

All it’s going to take is one more good push. And nobody knows what direction that push is going to come from.

Which should serve to tell us that things are pretty far-gone when a single headline about the manipulation of our legal system is enough to launch a tirade on the (largely unacknowledged) 'war between the classes!'

But that’s not all that’s going on good citizen…

11:24 AM ET NYTimes
When Good Drivers Pay More for Insurance than Bad Ones

11:22 AM ET Reuters
Goodbye Goodwill as European Firms Pay High Price for M&A

11:16 AM ET NYTimes
Report Gauges Companies' Approach to Advertising on Social Media

11:10 AM ET NYTimes
New Home Office Deduction Is Simpler, but Smaller

10:51 AM ET IHT
French Central Bank Workers Strike Over Job Cut Plans

10:38 AM ET AP
CNN Executive Mark Whitaker Quitting

10:34 AM ET Reuters
Financial Fears Hit Consumer Confidence in January

10:25 AM ET IHT
Appeals Court Suspends Peugeot's Job-Cut Plan

Maybe it just us old people but every time we look at the media we see more jobs going away. Obviously to make us ‘more competitive’ but that hole appears to be ‘bottomless’.

Which is to opine that when we finally achieve ‘parity’ we will simultaneously achieve pauperdom!

But that’s our ‘lot in life’ (according to ‘the One Percent’) and who are we to complain.

We should be GRATEFUL we aren’t euthanized when we are born! (Fear not, legislation along this line is being drafted by Alex as you read this. So much for the conservative devotion to the ‘sanctity of life’, eh?)

Of course, if you talk to one, practically the first words out of their mouths is what a waste of perfectly good butt-wipe the rest of the human race is.

Yet these psycho’s are ‘anti-abortion’, what’s up with that? (Because once you’re born these same freaks are pro eugenics!)

Needless to say good citizen it’s been a rough 48 hours, thus am I in ‘rare form’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Monday, January 28, 2013

Handwriting

Greetings good citizen,

While you’re busy making sure nobody grabs your gun out of its holster (thereby distracting you from other things happening right under your nose.)

A barrel of oil has crept back up to $96 a barrel while the price at the pump hovers around $3.50 a gallon locally (funny how those two numbers, the price per barrel and the price per gallon keep becoming ‘disconnected’, yet another ‘distraction’ considering ALL MONEY IS FUNNY! The price is whatever they want it to be because THEY certainly don’t need the money! And for the pinheads out there, the ‘they’, in this instance, refers to the >One Percent.)

But wait, there’s more! How many of you noticed that the Dow is within spitting distance of setting a new record?

Which really makes you wonder why they (same they) bother because we all know the number is total fiction?

Tomorrow they could claim the Dow hit 44,000 and nothing would change (besides the fact that the rest of us would all become poorer relative to the nation’s shareowners.

Well, how unfortunate for the rest of us that articles like this feed the notion that the One Percent is planning to kill most of us off.
That same month, the online publication Market Oracle reported that “ [t]he new ‘water barons’—the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires—are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace.” The report reveals two phenomena that have been gathering speed, and that could potentially lead to profit accumulation at the cost of communities and commons —the expansion of market instruments beyond the water supply and sanitation to other areas of water governance, and the increasingly prominent role of financial institutions.

In several instances this has meant that the government itself has set up public corporations that run like a business, contracting out water supply and sanitation operations to those with expertise, or entering into public–private–partnerships, often with water multinationals. This happened recently in Nagpur and New Delhi, India. In most rural areas, ensuring a clean drinking water supply and sanitation continues to be a challenge. For-profit companies such as Sarvajal have begun setting up pre-paid water kiosks (or water ATMs) that would dispense units of water upon the insertion of a pre-paid card. It is no surprise that these are popular among people who otherwise have no access to clean drinking water.

With climate change, however, the water crisis is no longer perceived as confined to developing countries or even primarily a concern related to water supply and sanitation. Fresh water commons are becoming degraded and depleted in both developed and developing countries. In the United States, diversion of water for expanded commodity crop production, biofuels and gas hydro-fracking is compounding the crisis in rural areas. In areas ranging from the Ogallala aquifer to the Great Lakes in North America, water has been referred to as liquid gold. Billionaires such as T. Boone Pickens have been buying up land overlying the Ogallala aquifer, acquiring water rights; companies such as Dow Chemicals, with a long history of water pollution, are investing in the business of water purification, making pollution itself a cash-cow.

Understand good citizen this story would be about air if they thought they could get away with it.

Under Manslow’s hierarchy of needs, you will only survive a couple of minutes without air, a couple of days without water and roughly a month without food. Shelter is a slider depending on the hostility of the environment. In a mild climate it comes last but in a harsh one it can supercede water!

You’d think history would have taught mankind the ‘futility’ of hoarding anything, water in particular.

It also provides us with a definitive example of one of the things that shouldn’t have a ‘price tag’ attached to it.

Yet the capitalist thinks everything has a price…and they think nothing of exploiting a situation.

Worse, they are the first ones to cry, “it’s not personal, it’s business!”

Let’s take a step back and look at this for a moment…the ‘businessman’ says he’d love to help you out BUT there’s MONEY involved here. (Keep in mind that ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!)

Stick a gun in his face and all of a sudden HE’S THE ‘VICTIM’!

Did I mention the need to redefine the term ‘criminal’?

The water is no more ‘his’ than it is yours but who is the (criminal) court going to believe?

Which brings us to another ‘marvel’, the fact that you will find humans living in even the most inhospitable environments this planet has to offer.

And despite capitalist insistence that this is due to ‘rugged individualism’ it is in fact due to the overwhelming desire to escape the rabid capitalists!

How can you be ‘free’ when those who run our society do their worst to nickel and dime you for everything they can?

YOU know Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register (and so do the creeps, that’s why EVERYTHING requires a ‘permit’ under capitalism and guess what? Those permits aren’t FREE! Worse, they can be arbitrarily ‘denied’.)

But I digress, the ‘real bad news’ here is it is only a matter of time before the combination of water and energy scarcity erupts in civilization ending ‘class war’.

Under the ‘judge for yourself’ category, real estate ads have started touting a location’s remoteness as a ‘selling point’ and some even use the term ‘bug out’.

What does that tell you?

Think handwriting on the wall…(especially when they try to play the ‘who knew’ card…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner



Sunday, January 27, 2013

White-washed

Greetings good citizen,

As I have opined before, nothing will be ‘fixed’ if we rely on the fools who broke it in the first place to cobble up the repairs.

So we have this story, served up cold by the Corporate Owned Media, thereby making it suspect from the get-go…
Fair Game
Making Them Pay (and Confess)
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Mary Jo White, the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a chance to scuttle the practice of letting companies settle cases without admitting fault.

Talk about your voice in the wilderness, I haven’t hear that complaint from any sector of the C.O.M. over the past couple of years, even while there has been a rash of ‘wrist stinging’ fines doled out by federal regulators. Who let the perps just walk away afterwards without admitting guilt…although since they paid, I don’t think anybody needed to sign a ‘confession’, the check is its own guilty plea.

Which is to ask, is saying ‘sorry’ enough?

I mean if sorry was enough we wouldn’t have anyone in prison! They’re all ‘sorry’ (they got nailed, ‘dead to rights’.)

Which is to go one step further and opine that we won’t see ‘justice’ done until the ‘responsible parties’ are handed STIFF prison terms.

(Or in the case of a simple plan, exile. ASP doesn’t condone imprisonment (It’s inhumane...to the prisoners AND the guards!)

Exile, which is a sort of ‘you made your bed now you’re gonna lie in it’ deal.

This is justice, served very, very cold.

Exile is one-way trip that you make the same way you arrived in this world, buck-naked.

The theory is most people won’t survive exile because exiles are usually lacking in the ‘cooperation’ department.

The concept of having to be a friend to have a friend is lost on them. These rugged individuals try to go it alone.

And should they try to win the cooperation of their fellow inmates, they have nothing to offer in return and these people usually don’t have a ‘normal’ sense of value. If you could smuggle some gold in one of your body cavities you may be able to strike a bargain…So, how much gold can you stuff up your poop chute?

But the guards would have to be mighty dumb not to scan you before placing you on the departure table.

Did I mention exiles are rendered unconscious before being released into a world where they are free to do whatever they want?

How did you think we were going to get ‘em naked? We’re going to cut their clothes off and scan (and surgically remove if necessary) any metal from their bodies before they are placed in the release pen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, am I not?

Our reporter with her thumb on the pulse of global business has asked that the newly appointed prosecutor MAKE THE CRIMIANLS ADMIT THEIR GUILT!

Apparently this will be enough. All we have to do is ‘SHAME’ a few of them and the rest will fall into line!

Now I can sympathize with her position. She can’t be too aggressive because the criminals she’s railing against cut her paycheck.

I have already pointed to the ‘propaganda machine’ as a ‘primary target’ come the revolution.

Those whose power relies on lies NEED the re-enforcement of officialdom!

Without the lie machine the criminals are lost!

But I digress again!

The focus of the article is the White-washing of Wall Street and they have wheeled out a hand picked patsy to do the job.

The people responsible for breaking the global economy have no interest in fixing it. At best we will see some mock trials and some small time players thrown under the bus while the investigation leaves criminals like Paulson, Geithner and Greenspan unmolested.

Worse, it will also stop well short of the politicians who executed the orders of the captains of industry and swept their dirt under the rug of National Security.

How sad is it good citizen that the goal of creating (and sustaining) a nation where justice prevails and freedom reigns remains so elusive?

How successful were the founders, who met in secret to draft the constitution? You don’t think they realized even back then that they were dooming their heirs to live under a web of lies?

Which leads us to wonder what the ‘original’ constitution actually says as opposed to the one we’ve all read that doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality?

Why do these elected chuckleheads keep defying the constitution they are ‘sworn to uphold’?

Maybe the real deal is so contemptuous of the common people that it has never seen the light of day.

Because sometimes it sure seems just like that…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Saturday, January 26, 2013

Accountable

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s ‘milestone’ for the financial markets appears to be more evidence of the criminal’s favorite pass time, fraud.

IF you think the economy has ‘recovered’ I’ve got some nice ‘drainage challenged’ real estate you’ll be interested in…

In the meantime, to consider stories such as this one anything more than ‘jaw-boning’ is a tragic error.
TOP NEWS
As Worries Ebb, Small Investors Propel Markets
By NATHANIEL POPPER

After millions of people all but abandoned the markets after the 2008 financial crisis, individual investors are pouring money into stock mutual funds for the first time in years.

Left to our imaginations is precisely who this ‘small investor’ is? He certainly isn’t the newly re-employed worker, stoking up for retirement. We already know 90% of ‘new jobs’ aren’t even full time and 80% of those pay minimum wage! So WHO is this ‘small investor’ they are referring to?

Could the answer be as unfortunate as Wall Street, in it’s usual fashion, is merely transferring funds from real estate hedging vehicles back to mutual funds, ‘ringing the cash register’ so to speak?

Because you don’t need me to tell you that this is not cause for rejoicing! This is sticky fingered Wall Street churning (and helping itself) to money that was already there.

So, small investor recovery? Hardly, small investor fleecing is more like it but Wall Street has this ‘truthiness’ problem where honesty only creates hard feelings.

Just because the ‘deterioration’ of the employment situation has slowed doesn’t mean it is ‘improving!’ (But that’s the message the meatheads would have you believe. That ‘less-worse = better!’)

It’s the same idea of when the economy contracts, that return to stability is sold by the pundits as ‘recovery’ when in fact after ‘leveling off’ for a brief period, it falls again and the talking heads pretend it’s a mystery.

But it’s not. There was a headline in the local rag the day before yesterday that one of the city’s largest employers is laying off half of its workforce AND sending the work to its plants in China and Mexico.

Still feeling ‘optimistic’, Bunky?

It seems every time they declare ‘the recovery is at hand’ I feel compelled to jump in and cry foul!

And it looks like they got me again.

The question is did they get you?

For every nineteen people who reject hogwash like this there is one who embraces it. Maybe not as quickly as they used to, they are starting to catch on to the fact people are laughing at them behind their backs…

Understand good citizen, the corporate owned media HAS TO report the economy is on the mend, even if it isn’t in order to quell social unrest and dampen ‘animosity’ towards ‘our betters’.

But as I am tiring of pointing out, no amount of jaw-boning is going to alter the facts on the ground.

Our economy (or that limp dishrag that passes for our economy) is broken and nobody has done a single thing to repair it…nobody!

So ‘recovery’, such as it is, amounts to a lesser rate of descent. We merely aren’t sinking as fast as we once were.

What do you suppose should happen to the employer who cut 70 out of 150 jobs and sent the work off-shore?

One of my other ‘hobby-horses’ has been the need to redefine what constitutes a ‘crime’.

Under our current goofy calculus, the owner can send the work wherever he pleases. He is seen as ‘owning’ the work.

But isn’t he also a citizen and doesn’t that citizenship carry a responsibility to the society he lives in?

He’s quick enough to demand justice (or the protection of society) when disaster strikes…so how come he feels no obligation to keep the society that protects him healthy and vibrant?

Because, until such feckless acts like the global race to the bottom are criminalized, our ‘global’ economy (and all but it best connected participants) is doomed.

Not the kind of world I want to raise my kids in and I’m sure many of you feel the same way.
This ‘competition’ baloney is all fake. Worse, it is the old canard of ‘I can teach a monkey to do your job’ writ large!

Which is to point out that the ‘quality problems’ that served as an excuse to cover early job exports have resurfaced in the cheaper there, indicating the problem didn’t lie with the craftsman but with management.

Which tells you what, good citizen?

It’s time to hold management accountable.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner



Friday, January 25, 2013

Distrust

Greetings good citizen,

As we continue to watch the mess our betters have made collapse around our ears we shall examine some of the shakier premises instituted by our so-called ‘leaders’.

Let’s start with today’s top headline:
TOP NEWS
Governors Push Bigger Reliance on Sales Taxes
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Ambitious experiments in collecting revenue that are taking place at the state level could shape the national approach on taxes.
left unexplained in both our history and our civics texts is the ‘rationale’ behind ‘taxation’.

Why didn’t our ‘leaders’ just do what needed doing (since ALL expense is ‘artificial’?)

Worse, the idea of ‘taxes’ was born when those who lead us were the ‘absolute master of all they surveyed’.

Since ‘master’ had already declared ‘ownership’ of the land along with everything on it or under it, why ‘tax’ the people?

Well…Big chief hand on hip didn’t have any farmers working for him, if he didn’t commandeer some food he and his army were going to starve!

This is why taxation predates money!

They ‘converted’ taxes to money as a way to put an end to the earliest form of ‘tax fraud’ submitting spoiled food as ‘tribute’.

This leads us to another fact just as ancient as taxes and that is why BIG tax fraud is never prosecuted while the tax man chases the little guy for every penny and then some! (Remember, they don’t ‘need’ this, it’s all part of the ‘control fraud’.)

Once the royals took over the money supply taxes COULD HAVE BEEN ‘done away with’ but no, because the Royals were now beholding to their ‘peers’ for their power (often having ‘gifted’ them tax authority as the price of their fealty.)

Without the history lesson, taxes are not necessary today and they haven’t been since, well, history would look a lot different if we could roll back the pages and find A SINGLE ‘wise ruler’…

They may have existed but they aren’t the ones who wrote the history books, a major indictment of our deeply flawed character, despite years of ‘preaching’ and ‘holier than thou’ mumbo-jumbo!

A character that could still be redeemed if we wanted it bad enough.

That’s the question…do we possess the determination to change our ways, thereby avoiding self-extinction?

Time will tell but from where we’re sitting today, good citizen, it’s not looking to good and ‘forever’ is a mighty long time…

Moving on…
Towns' Next Hit From Hurricane Is to Tax Revenue
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

As a result of property damage, localities hit by Hurricane Sandy cannot expect to reap the same property taxes from homeowners.
Funny how nobody sees the bear’s claws until they are ripping you to shreds. Yup, the once mighty USA now can’t seem to recover from a simple flood. For some strange reason ‘the government’ is unable to find the funding that will, er, ‘allow’ the private sector to rebuild.

We are, of course, leaving ‘private sector’ insurance companies out of this discussion. Did you know there isn’t a single ‘private sector’ insurance company that offers ‘flood insurance’?

And it’s NOT because they are prohibited from selling flood insurance, NONE of them WANT TO! (Mostly due to the chicanery in town halls across the nation that allow the well-connected to ‘twist’ the zoning ordinances to their liking for fun and profit.

Was THAT a ‘flood plain’? Who knew? Whoopsie…too bad you weren’t insured!

Some have (wisely) asked if we should even bother rebuilding storm ravaged coastal communities in light of global climate change.

I am of the opinion that we should, although we must rebuild ‘wisely’. The new structures should be ‘storm resistant’ capable of remaining watertight during flood conditions and storm surges.

But you aren’t going to see that under ‘shut up and pay me’ capitalism!

Only under an economic system based on general prosperity will the resources become available to build a world capable of withstanding the degradation heaped upon it by the selfish leaders of the past.

Moving forward one more time we find this story filed under the category of ‘it took long enough’, although ‘too little, too late’ may be more apt”
DealBook
S.E.C. Pick Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall Street
By BEN PROTESS and BENJAMIN WEISER

President Obama's choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney, suggested a resolve to hold Wall Street accountable for wrongdoing.

It’s been five six years, good citizen, and the only thing to come out of the ‘meltdown’ of the global financial system is distrust.

How many of you think this move is more than ‘symbolic’? If a prosecutor was going to change things then why didn’t they appoint one five years ago…oh, that’s right, because Bush was still in office five years ago! Well how about four years ago, when Obama first took over?

He had to ‘win the nation’s confidence’ and demonstrate he wasn’t going to do anything ‘rash’ like throw the criminals that elected him in prison! Or take away the punch bowl just when the party was starting to roar!

A world that doesn’t run on taxes, it’s about time, wouldn’t you agree good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Thursday, January 24, 2013

Tinman 2

Greetings good citizen,

I feel good today (despite the gods having gone mad!) Which seems to be today’s theme. Yesterday I complained about society losing its values, today we will take in the leading headlines and scratch our heads, wondering what ‘our betters’ were thinking…because it is obvious they weren’t!
Robot Makers Spread Global Gospel of Automation
By JOHN MARKOFF

Manufacturers of robots and similar machines gathered in Chicago, casting automation as an indispensable engine of economic growth.
Read the last line and marvel over the twit who stated it! Employers LOVE robots, they will work around the clock without taking a break, doing whatever it is they were designed to do, until they break.

The fly in this ointment is a society filled with robots needs nothing but the energy to power them, there is no ‘economy’ for robots.

Do we really need to ask HOW STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE to not understand that?

And yeah, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy kicking the capitalists in the shins every chance I get!

Because it is capitalist stupidity that gives us stories like this:
BUSINESS
Boeing's Battery Problems Cast Doubt on Appraisal of New Technologies
By JAD MOUAWAD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

The 787's difficulties have raised questions about how regulators certify new technology and how they balance advances in design and engineering with safety.
Hold everything! I thing we found the twit who think robots are the answer to the automation problem [idiots!]

Was it an accident or by design that the corporate owned media runs the ‘perfect’ follow up story next?
Share of the Work Force in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low, 11.3%
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the percentage of American workers in labor unions fell to 11.3 percent last year, the lowest since 11.2 percent in 1916.
That’s the other thing employers LOVE about robots! They don’t join unions! So the union isn’t in their face demanding more humane working conditions and that demand they really hate, more wages!

Although it has become the hallmark of capitalist stupidity that people who can’t afford your products won’t buy them, so cutting heads when sales drop is not an ‘effective strategy’.

Oh, and since robots don’t get paychecks (or benefit packages) they also don’t buy your products!

Bottom line. The same people who can no longer afford to pay for your products will eventually STEAL them…but you’re insured, right?

And when the heads you’ve cut burn your plant down, same answer, right? (Naturally, you re-open in China!) But your new employee/customers won’t be able to afford our products either so what will you do?

Same thing as these guys?
Nokia Shows a Profit, but Shares Drop
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN 50 minutes ago

Investor hopes were raised when the Finnish cellphone maker said it would turn a profit, but sales of its flagship Lumia were less than expected.
The homeless don’t need a phone, nobody they want to talk to that isn’t within arm’s reach…which is the fertile soil revolutions are sown in.

How sad is it good citizen that we lack a unifying ideology? [Like A Simple Plan?]

Like a ticking time bomb, how long do you think we have before this bad boy blows?
Euro Watch
Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone
By REUTERS

While the euro zone economy moved a step closer to recovery this month, Spain’s unemployment rate surged to 26 percent.

Sure looks to me like that headline is missing an ‘s’, should read ’points’ but hey, I just cut and paste, ya know?

What’s up with the mixed message? On one hand they are, er, ‘asserting’ that conditions in the euro-zone are ‘improving’ then they point to sky-high unemployment and shrug…

Did I mention our civilization is SEVERELY ‘mismanaged’?

These people shouldn’t just be fired, they should be made to walk the plank into shark infested water (but that would constitute cruelty towards sharks!)

No living organism can eat that many ‘empty calories’ without being adversely effected.

I am no Luddite good citizen. In many cases automation is a larger boon to the employee than it is to the employer.

What I am pointing to is SOME things can tolerate automation and others CAN’T. Wisdom needs to be exercised rather than idiotic profit/loss ratios.

Our civilization is collapsing because society has become unbalanced due to the reckless/relentless pursuit of profits.

When profits supercede people without mitigating factors it is beyond destructive, it is catastrophic!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Disgusted!

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace but the top of my head exploded when I read this nonsense!
The New Tao of Trade: Don’t Just Import from China. Sell There.

Like many American businesses fighting to keep their prices competitive, Vision Quest Lighting turned to China about six years ago. It now imports about a sixth of the two dozen to three dozen parts required to make its lighting fixtures from there. Recently, however, the Long Island company began to see China in a different light: as a sales target. The growing economy of the world’s most populous nation made it ripe for Vision Quest’s architectural lighting fixtures, many custom-made for hotel and restaurant chains like Hilton and KFC.

When one such client, a clothing retailer, ordered 1,500 lights for five stores, Vision Quest’s chief executive, Larry Lieberman, decided it made sense to start manufacturing lights in China. Other American clients, he reasoned, would no doubt begin placing similar orders as their chains sought to capitalize on the world’s fastest-growing consumer market. And with high-quality products from the West coveted in China, Mr. Lieberman also imagined his products on display in Chinese showrooms.

And yet, selling goods in China is not easy. Mr. Lieberman made the 1,500 lights only to see them gather dust in a warehouse in Guangzhou for more than four weeks because he had not yet established a local enterprise approved to process sales.

Pssst! We wouldn’t need to listen to IDIOT SUGGESTIONS LIKE THIS if we castigated (as well as castrated) our legislators for letting work that was originally here to migrate there!

And guess what? Once energy becomes scarce, the ‘cheaper there’ vanishes…and the ‘silent majority’ will be standing here, holding on to an empty bag, unable to afford the goods we ‘used to make for ourselves’.

What seems to be the main problem here?

Looks to me the problem is men like Skippy, who the moment things get busy, the first thought that pops into his teeny little mind is “I could really rake it in if I could farm this out to China!”

Take it from a manufacturing man, 1,500 pieces ain’t nothin, most shops would turn the work away. You also aren’t going to see appreciable saving in those quantities. You aren’t buying enough material to take advantage of the volume discount.

How will Skippy ‘get lucky’? He’ll be directed to a manufacturer who is subsidized by the Chinese government to do work that originates in the US.

That’s where Skippy will reap his profits from and the Chinese shop owner will make his off of the government…and the government will get theirs by charging the Americans more interest as they subsidize predatory capitalism around the globe.

As our ‘standard of living’ descends into the basement and we start moving back towards the trees, the shrinking mindless and clueless ‘middle class’ will continue to wonder why their purchasing power keeps shrinking.

I must admit, I started this post in an ‘agitated’ state, marveling over how we have gotten this far with 20 CENTURIES OF FAIRY TALES being passed off as history.

We are either A.) incredibly STUPID or B.) unbelievably tolerant…(to the point of stupidity.)

I think we’d all be at least a little cranky when the only two possible answers arrive at the same conclusion.

I got started on this (what’s wrong with my species) jag considering the ‘gold paradox’.

True, the stuff is ‘rare’ but it is also ‘useless’ if we consider its electrical properties weren’t discovered until the advent of the electronics age in the 1950’s. It’s been considered ‘precious’ since pre-historic time, a fact that has given rise (and a degree of credibility) to ancient alien theorists.

And this preciousness is based solely on its resistance to oxidation! Shiny gold stays shiny! Whoop-de do!

Well, look at where this ‘silliness’ has landed us?

A global economy on the verge of cascading systemic collapse…because boneheads like Skippy think farming things out to China is a ‘good idea’!

FULL STOP!

What does Skippy’s desire to make pockets full of cash through outsourcing and the value of gold have to do with one another?

Our value system is bankrupt! We have been ‘hoodwinked’ into pursuing ‘representative wealth’ while others step in and simply take the stuff worth having from us.


This is like the people ‘upset’ by Russia’s sudden ban on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens…don’t they think there are enough kids right here in the US that need a good home?

[They’re going to Russia so they can adopt White kids, as sad as that is.]

Perhaps this would be a good time to bring up the issue of not knowing anybody who ISN’T in some kind of fertility program (because they squandered their prime reproductive years chasing their capitalist enforced goals?)

Why isn’t the media paying any attention to this crisis…or does the corporate owned media think (the rabble being unable to reproduce) is a ‘good thing’

I’m too disgusted to continue…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Albatross

Greetings good citizen,

Looks like it’s that time again. It’s bad enough that our betters turn a deaf ear to our ‘petty’ (as far as they’re concerned) issues but when they converge on Davos to, er, difficult to find the proper word here…I’m torn between ‘discuss’ and ‘grandstand’ what THEY THINK the world's problems are...and nothing ever comes of it.

Pitiful to consider how ‘out of touch’ the elite are despite these conferences (which are intended to provide ‘the impression’ that they are listening and they care.)

While I have repeatedly accused the global elite of plotting to ‘thin the herd’, I suspect the desire to do so isn’t universal, so we have these conferences where the evil-conniving blend in with the clueless and pretend nothing’s going on.

Some of these powerful people still subscribe to traditional values of customer satisfaction and safe work places…how unfortunate is it for the rest of us that these people are old and on their way out the door?

Let us visit our ‘herald’ to learn what we can of this latest ‘invitation only’ gathering.
DealBook Column

Prophesies Made in Davos Don't Always Come True
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Many influential people will gather this week at the World Economic Forum to make predictions, and some of them will be right, and some wrong.
And we all know words can sometimes have two meanings…so sometimes what was ‘predicted’ has merely been ‘mis-interpreted’.

And, unsurprisingly, Davos is so popular it has TWO headlines!
DealBook
At Davos, Crisis Is the New Normal
By ALISON SMALE

While global capital remains a driving force of our age, it won't solve big world issues. For those tasks, we must rely either on the nation state or on international institutions whose effectiveness is regularly questioned by the Davos crowd.

Is it from headlines like this that we get the meme that ‘private industry’ would solve ALL of our problems if government would just step out of the way?

Now government is ‘in the pocket’ of private industry and anything even smacking of regulation is nothing more than window dressing, routinely ignored by those ‘in the know’.

Is our civilization ‘functioning perfectly?’

Don’t think so…unless you’re a card-carrying member of the One Percent, then you’d opine things were ‘pretty-good-okay’ (if only for the safety of those you love.)

You gotta love the old ‘go along to get along’ routine. Step out of line and the next thing you know you’re on the outside looking in.

(And it’s cold out here!)

We can only wonder where our intrepid reporter has been, Disaster Capitalism has been all the rage since the Seventies!

Why would she infer that Crisis is the ‘new normal’? (Especially when the vast majority of the ‘crises’ our elite are so focused on are utter fabrications?

Not only do they know why it’s happening but they also know who is responsible!

That pandemic I mentioned yesterday? It won’t be ‘naturally occurring’ in case any of you were wondering…and if we knock around the right heads we could even learn who is behind it!

How many of you would be shocked to learn it was major contributor to the Republican party?

Which is total speculation on my part! I’m just spinning a yarn here and a peasant like myself has no knowledge of what actually goes on ‘behind the scenes’…but I can guess.

Might even call it following a ‘line of logic’ that goes like this: if you’re ‘demented’ enough to fund the party of the One percent it only stands to reason that you’d have an interest in ‘significantly reducing’ the threat posed by ‘the rabble’.

And while showering the rabble with money would accomplish the same goal, for some twisted reason these conspirators would favor a ‘more permanent’ solution.

Talk about ‘unintended consequences’…imagine a plague that wipes out everybody BUT the privileged!

It would be an extinction level event! The pampered few don’t know how to take care of themselves, they’ll be dead in a month! About the same time the lights go off and the phone towers power down.

Worse, planning ISN’T the oligarchs ‘strong suit’. You can bet they have totally ‘overlooked’ this rather obvious aspect of the plan.

While ‘a select few’ could rebuild civilization, most of us wouldn’t know where to begin. Like all puzzles, the pieces are greater than the sum of the parts.

So killing off what these dopes consider to be ‘the useless’ could very well condemn the rest of us to certain death.

We all have our albatrosses, how unfortunate is it that our particular albatross has it in for us?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Monday, January 21, 2013

Self-Extermination

Greetings good citizen,

The hard won holiday has ceased activity on the NYSE, sparing the world from its toxic influence.

Um, a (now long neglected) common theme of my posts is desperation. People will do unimaginable acts of violence if they are ‘desperate’ enough.

It underlies everything I predict, such is the incredible ‘power’ of desperation. Increasingly we are seeing the acts of the desperate and the cowardly corporate owned media is covering them up as the random acts of the ‘psychologically unstable’ (which the feckless capitalists abandoned shortly after ‘privatizing’ health care.) Yet another stick pin on the social map with St. Ronnie’s name on it!

It may be just me but ‘gold bugs’ are very practical when it comes to money (although they don’t get the ‘funny’ part, which sort of erases the appeal of their arguments regarding the ‘conservation of value’.)

Then we have guys like Mr. Hedges here, who have their fingers firmly on the pulse of civilization but take the same ‘wicked left’ when it comes to solving those problems.

How blind do you have to be to see that only the truly wicked claim to ‘speak for God’?

Republicans regularly go ‘on record’ as having had ‘personal dialog’ with ‘the supreme being.’

In most circles this is evidence of insanity but not in US politics where the feckless corporate owned media is involved!

But I, as usual, digress. Let us move forward with today’s offering:
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

As Mr. Hedges indicates, there WILL be a ‘kill-off’ that will be disguised as a ‘Die-off’ (through gross mismanagement.)

Worse, the bought and paid for media will play it as a ‘natural disaster’…although the capitalist’s deliberate mismanagement of the economy has already begun the nutritional squeeze that will lead to the most devastating ‘global pandemic’ the world has ever seen.

Slip an unintended whoopsie in there (such as a real ‘natural disaster’) and it could spell extinction for our already ‘reproduction challenged’ base population.

But the ‘What if’ game is always a ‘dead-end’, we won’t ‘know’ until we get there.

Worse, the rhetoric surrounding climate change has taken on a harder edge, which is making it less credible. Global warming didn’t kill the dinosaurs and it sure isn’t going to kill us!

Which is to opine that we won’t ALL drown and sustainability (along with what it takes to get there) remains an ‘unknown’.

If we are to save ourselves from extinction (by self-extermination) we must manage the resources that remain to reduce desperation to an absolute minimum. (It wouldn’t hurt to put the brakes on the predatory capitalist's worship of gratuitous violence either! The hatred and the killing of your own species is a learned thing, it is NOT natural.)

The article misses another important point and that has been the cessation of all ‘forward scientific advance’ to preserve the ‘patents’ (profitability) of past discoveries.

Again, we need to refocus on the definition of ‘progress’ as the benefit reaped by all mankind from discovery and research rather than the imaginary benefit reaped by a few over the rest of us.

So we have it that stagnation, driven by self-interest, has resulted in creeping ‘desperation' that is shredding the fabric of our civilization…so ‘a few’ can be ‘rich’.

When true progress makes us ALL rich!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Sunday, January 20, 2013

Sanitized...

Greetings good citizen,

Instead of the usual run down of the financial headlines, what jumped at me this morning but this article, written by one of the most clueless economists ever to hold a seat on the Federal Reserve Board.

I only clipped the end of the whole article to give you an idea, a ‘taste’ if you will.
Financial Collapse: A 10-Step Recovery Plan

The meek won’t inherit their fair share of the earth if they are constantly being fleeced. What we learned in the crisis is that failure to protect unsophisticated consumers from financial predators can undermine the whole economy. That surprising lesson mustn’t be forgotten. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should institutionalize it.

Mark Twain is said to have quipped that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. There will be financial crises in the future, and the next one won’t be a carbon copy of the last. Neither, however, will it be so different that these commandments won’t apply. Financial history does rhyme, but we’re already forgetting the meter.

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and the author of “After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response and the Work Ahead.”

His advice in the snippet is surprisingly ‘sound’ (if you believe, as he obviously does, that capitalism can be ‘salvaged’.)

And you already know my position on that particular topic, it can’t and there is no sense in trying…or worse, pretending that there is ‘no alternative’.

Although you won’t find a capitalist who believes such a thing exists, how ironic is it that the part these people love the most about Capitalism is the ‘my way or the highway’ part?

Should you click through to read the article you will find that bullet point number one blames the consumer for ‘regulatory capture’ by making the point ‘Remember that People forget’.

Worse, there is a whole generation coming of age that has no idea what a moron/‘tool’ Ronald Reagan was.

All they know is how dysfunctional our current political system is and they’ll (hopefully, for the usurpers sake) be eager to embrace a ‘more traditional’ form of governance.

(And the elites who were ‘disappointed’ when Washington turned down the crown will have their day!)

There is a reason why the role-playing video world is dominated by medieval culture. It was the time of ‘kings’ and who but our Royal Wannabes wants to step out of their nations' treasuries and ‘take charge’ of the kingdoms their (alleged) great (yada-yada) grand-parents walked away from so long ago.

And it's been the video game industry that has 'glorified' monarchy and popularized the notion that a commoner can, through noble deeds, become an accepted member of the 'noble gentry.'

They want to ‘help’ us good citizen but first you have to want their help and be willing to surrender you’re ‘right to choose’ which you weren’t using ‘properly’ in the first place.

(I wonder why we weren’t ‘using it properly’? Could it be ‘the framers’ put power safely out of the citizen’s reach?)

Rumor has it there were some ‘arguments’ over this decision but the proof is in the pudding and we can plainly see which side ‘won’.

Central to the dominance of the criminals over our species is the idea that we CAN’T rule ourselves, we NEED them to tell us not only what to do but how to do it.

This is just what it looks like, a self-serving lie.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that only a few need to be, er, ‘persuaded’ to go along with this outrageous idea while the rest of us are forced into bloody revolution to throw off the yoke of the criminal tyrants?

Take a hard look good citizen, the only missing piece is naming (and subsequently crowning) the ‘new king’.

In case you were wondering, there will be no ‘elections’…worse, discussion of the monarch’s ‘fitness to rule’ will be ‘strictly prohibited’.

But wait good citizen, the nightmare is only beginning! The ‘new monarchy’ will make a big display of putting every ‘royal decision’ to a public vote…but, (and this is the but that caused the original downfall of monarchy) we will have the return of the ‘infallibility of the monarch’.

What good is being king if it’s not ‘my way or the highway’?

So the monarch will modify whatever policy proposal is before him 'to his liking' regardless of what YOU think of it. Which is to point out the whole voting thing will be a mockery to beat you over the head with!

And don't even entertain the notion of not voting. It will be mandatory.

Worse, the King (or Queen, if they think a female will be more malleable/easily embraced by the public.) will still be subject to that age-old nemesis ‘intrigue’.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term it basically means your relatives, especially those in line to 'inherit' the crown, will kill you if they think they can get away with it.

Remember, once you’re king you can derail royal investigations with the snap of your fingers…(or the wave of your hand if snapping is too much for you.)

After everybody moves up the ladder, the ‘next in line’ clan does whatever it can to pin the former regent’s death on the new one…if they succeed, Yachtzee!

But people are ‘buy-able’ as our current ‘cleptocracy’ has proven repeatedly.

Meanwhile, the culprit in the last regent’s untimely demise has been made a Duke, making them virtually unassailable.

And under the ‘law of unintended consequences’ we find ourselves faced with the classic “meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” scenario.

All because today’s kids are ‘unaware’ that Ronald Reagan (and by extension, W.) should never have been president.

This is what happens when money contaminates the electoral process.

Worse good citizen, it is already ‘too late’.

The ONLY way to ‘fix’ this mess is to flush it down the toilet and start over (while the criminals learn to cha-cha with the Gila monsters!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner



Saturday, January 19, 2013

Led by Charlatains

Greetings good citizen,

It is hilarious that the so-called ‘Progressives’ are accusing the conservo-whackos of living in a ‘permanent fantasy world’ when they persist in serving up tripe like this…

Before we begin this latest excursion into ‘wishful thinking’ let me repeat my ‘mantra’, there is NO WAY to ‘fix’ capitalism with capitalism! All of the fixes are ‘predatory’ too!

6 Economic Steps to a Better Life and Real Prosperity for All
We've got to break out of the old ways of thinking about the economy.

Step one.) A People’s Bank
One area where this logic can be seen at work is in the financial industry. At the height of the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of the banks seemed possible. It was a moment, President Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The president opted for a soft bailout, but that was not the only possible decision.
Banking is ‘personal’ yet the capitalists have turned it into a ‘profit center’ (for themselves) by forcing the rest of us to pay outrageous prices for what we can’t do without.

How do you think a ‘People’s bank’ is going to solve this?

It won’t because it can’t. Nationalizing the banks wouldn’t make them any less predatory. They would still operate on the principle of borrow cheap and lend dear.

The ‘real alternative’ to predatory banking is to make banking an internal function of the payroll process. Your money ‘stays put’. They don’t lend it to anybody (they don’t need to.) We won’t stop the capitalist ‘crazy train’ until we put the brakes on the insane practice of money making money!

Then we get banks out of the ‘lending business’ because all of the things you needed to ‘borrow money’ for are…‘gimmes’!

If you step back and look at it good citizen, the whole borrowing process is nothing but an elaborate extortion scheme…but what would you expect from CRIMINALS?

Moving on:
Step Two.) Move to Universal Healthcare

That austerity and failing reform might open the way to "evolutionary reconstructive" institutional change is also suggested by emerging developments in healthcare.

Cost pressures are also building up—and, critically, in ways that will continue to undermine U.S. corporations facing global competitors, forcing them to seek new solutions. The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that healthcare costs will go up from the 2010 level of 17.5 percent of GDP to 19.6 percent in 2019. It has long been clear that over the long-haul cost pressures are ultimately likely to force development of some form of single-payer system —the only serious way to deal with the underlying problem.
Again, under a ‘sane’ system, healthcare would be FREE, but that’s not what dummy is proposing here, is it?

How sad is it that Plato’s ‘unimaginative worldview’ persists to this day? (He couldn’t imagine a world without slaves.)

But anyway:
Step Three.) Build Community Wealth

“Social enterprises” that undertake businesses in order to support specific social missions now increasingly comprise what is sometimes called a "fourth sector” (different from the government, business and non-profit sectors). Roughly 4,500 not-for-profit community development corporations are largely devoted to housing development. There are now also more than 10,000 businesses owned in whole or part by their employees; nearly 3 million more individuals are involved in these enterprises than are members of private sector unions. Another 130 million Americans are members of various urban, agricultural and credit union cooperatives. In many cities, “land trusts” are underway using an institutional form of nonprofit or municipal ownership that develops and maintains low- and moderate-income housing.
I find myself speechless with the utter ‘blindness’ the above bullet point displays. We’re talking ‘whales and tic tacs’ here! All I have to say is see my initial ‘mantra’ and hold that up to this (capitalism saving) proposal!

Those ‘pretending’ to be Progressives are in fact Libertarians, free-market lovers to the end!

But I digress:
Step Four.) Leverage City Assets [!!]

Yet another arena of institutional growth involves municipal development. By maintaining direct ownership of areas surrounding transit station exits, public agencies in Washington, DC, Atlanta and elsewhere earn millions, capturing the increased land values their transit investments create. The town of Riverview, Michigan has been a national leader in trapping methane from its landfills and using it to fuel electricity generation, thereby providing both revenue and jobs. There are roughly 500 similar projects nationwide. Many cities have established municipally owned hotels. There are also nearly 2,000 publicly owned utilities that provide power (and often broadband) to more than 45 million Americans, generating $50 billion in annual revenue. Significant public institutions are also common at the state level. CalPERS, California’s public pension authority, helps finance local community development needs; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each citizen with dividends as a matter of right; in Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic development.
Rope-a-dope has the whole situation wrong! The only reason the capitalists ‘gave away’ free internet and in some cases free electricity was to boost the sale of portables and hand helds!

There have been some mighty expensive ‘ruses’ perpetrated on the public to mask the fact that our economy was being gutted and this dummy is just keeps falling into the traps left and right!

Next!
Step Five.) Organize for the Long Haul

You can think of the slow buildup of democratizing strategies as the pre-historical developmental work needed to clarify new principles for larger scale application. Just as in the decades before the New Deal, state and local experiments in the “laboratories of democracy” may suggest new larger scale approaches. The new direction has four aspects; democratization of wealth; community, both locally and in general; decentralization in general; and substantial but not complete forms of democratic planning. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Follow the link to the main article…
Politics is largely ‘media driven’. Control the media and politics cease to matter…but these Ivory Tower types don’t seem to get that, thus do you get the above stupidity!

And lastly…
Step Six.) Cut Corporate Power Down to Size [!!!]

To deal with economic issues, ecological challenges and local community stability, we must also come to terms with corporate power dynamics. Public corporations are subject to Wall Street’s first commandment: Grow or die!” You can’t just wish or regulate that idea away.
If I could only remember where I put that magic wand…

What is this guy smokin’?

You are right to be wary of people offering to ‘save the world’ with a few simple changes…those changes need to alter the path of humanity and not just perpetuate what’s broken.

Ironically, we return to the age-old debate where on the surface it appears we have a ‘money problem’ when in reality we have a massive ‘legal’ one.

Until we can truly institute a ‘lawful government’ we will continue to be ‘mis-ruled’ by man…and the likes of unimaginative types such as this writer who thinks more of the same will fix things, somehow!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Friday, January 18, 2013

Useful

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we find ourselves on the cusp of that relic of the New Deal formerly referred to as ‘the weekend.’

We still call them weekends but the week no longer ‘ends’ for the vast majority of us. For the unemployed the weekend represents two bad days to prospect for a job despite the best chance of finding work being in the 24/7 service/retail sector…where it is impossible to get forty hours, never mind forty-one.

So, yeah, the unemployed usually suspend their search for work on Saturday and Sunday because they retain hope that their new job will provide them with those two days off.

Call it ‘tradition’ but we have the Sabbath built into our psyches. (The fact that one is Jew and the other Christian is of no consequence, we have ‘become accustomed’ to having those two days off.

Ironically, our brave new world seldom provides ‘days off’ period.

Some of us are expected to report to work seven days a week but only for a few hours a day (usually ‘peak time’.)

So you only work 28 hours but you have to go back & forth 14 times to get even that little bit!

And you don’t have a ‘day off’…

Now, if you only work four hours out of twenty-four you have most of every day off BUT, in the relentless world of retail, the only days off you get (for now) are Thanksgiving and Christmas.

How ironic is it that you (as a part-time employee) don’t get paid for either of them?

Isn’t capitalism great? (All capitalists think so!)

363 days a year you must wake up and make yourself presentable. Drive yourself to the work place to perform your duties (as assigned that day.) Stay on the job until you are granted permission to depart…(can’t just up and leave come quittin’ time in retail!) and all of this for a minimum wage job that has absolutely zero loyalty.

Screw up even once and you’ll be out the door so fast your head will spin.

But that’s the (broken) ‘make yourself useful’ meme of capitalism. People are ‘disposable’. (And if the people you have disposed of become ‘troublesome’ you have the police shoot them down.)

Sort of going off the rails here when it was my ‘original intent’ to point out that weekends are rapidly becoming ‘a thing of the past.’

And this phenomenon is not restricted to the ‘rabble’ doomed to work short hours for shorter money, people who are routinely dismissed with the threat, ‘be happy you have a job!’

That threat extends to the ‘rank and file’ workers in cubicle land as well. Now the pay is slightly better and the atmosphere (slightly) more ‘professional’ than retail but the threat remains the same…or perhaps it gets turned on its head when the boss asks ‘how many of you can speak Hindi?’

Which might explain inexplicable stories such as this one:
Morgan Stanley's $481 Million 4th-Quarter Profit Beats Estimates
By SUSANNE CRAIG 42 minutes ago

Morgan Stanley reported adjusted earnings of 45 cents a share on Friday, driven by gains in wealth management and investment banking.
On a planet with a broken financial system, how the, er, heck does any bank ‘earn’ 45 cents a share without committing fraud?

Banking is (irretrievably) broken good citizen. The imbalances in the global economy CAN NOT BE ‘corrected’ without a complete overhaul that starts with a ‘clean slate’ (across the board.)

So ‘fictions’ like the one above are exactly that.

Which leads us to our next, er, ‘questionable data’:
Economix Blog
Lifting the Veil on the Fed's 2007 Discussions
By DAVID LEONHARDT 27 minutes ago

The Federal Reserve has just released the transcripts of its meetings in the pivotal year of 2007, when the housing bubble started to burst and the global financial crisis began.
Now that they’ve had five years to ‘muddy the waters’ naturally this work of fiction will have gaping holes in it but it will be downplayed as a side effect of the ‘whole truth’ being ‘unknowable’.

Here is another episode of 'the story that refuses to die' despite the corporate owned media not even hinting that globalization is responsible:
Praised but Fire-Prone, Battery Fails Test in 787
By JAD MOUAWAD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

Lithium-ion batteries are popular because they are powerful and charge quickly, but Boeing has had serious problems with the technology on its new Dreamliner.

Powerful Chemical Cocktail, With a Drawback
And anyone who didn’t see the ‘design-flaw’ card coming needs a serious reality check.

Of course it was a design flaw…but why did the design flaw occur?

Was it because the system was designed in Bejing and built in Seattle? It goes without saying that there was ‘no need’ to test it because it is ‘proven technology’…in the end, stupid is as stupid does.

Yet again, this old dog doesn’t need new tricks, the old ones still work fine!
G.E. Profit and Revenues Top Estimates
By REUTERS 7:40 AM ET

General Electric reported a better-than-expected 7.5 percent rise in fourth quarter profit and a sharp increase in its backlog of equipment orders, sending shares up in premarket trading.
Funny how profitability is easy when you’re half manufacturer and three-quarters bank! If you don’t ‘turn a profit’ from sales you just have the banking arm ‘cook the books’!

Speaking of cooked books and their ‘unintended consequences’:
Shell’s rig was grounded after being set adrift in a storm.
As Shell’s Arctic Drilling Hopes Hit Snags, Its Rivals Watch

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER

Shell’s drilling program, the subject of two federal inquiries, has had problems environmentalists say highlight the dangers of prospecting for oil in the severe Arctic environment.
Talk about your ‘common threads, for years environmentalist have been screaming about the dangers of arctic drilling BUT the ‘too stupid to listen’ crowd goes ahead and does it anyway!

Will they have the chutzpah to say they’re ‘sorry’ after they despoil the arctic chasing what little crude there is?

No, I doubt it, nor will anyone be executed for their ‘hubris’ as has happened here:

At Algerian Oil and Gas Fields Once Thought Safe, New Fears and Precautions
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Local oil executives said foreign oil service companies were in the process of quietly removing several hundred workers until they were confident that the security situation was stable.
Odd how the article implies there was some kind of intelligence indicating the security situation was less than ‘ideal’ but apparently that ‘memo’ was, um, ignored a few moments too long with hostages being taken and killed.

Well, we all know the capitalist credo, ‘profits before people!’ (Power to the shareowners! And oh how they hate the O word! Which is why I use it every chance I get!)

What O word is that, you ask?

The one they can’t defend, ‘Own.’

And for our last entry:
Chinese Economy Expanded at End of 2012, Data Shows
By BETTINA WASSENER

Though there was improvement, economic data also underlined the view that the pace of future growth is likely to remain well below that seen in recent years.
Geez good citizen, I was going to cut this and the story above it off but as it would turn out, they are the two most important stories in today’s offering.

Especially this last offering because it translates to the One Percent’s ‘acceptance’ that the economy as it exists today will constitute the ‘new normal’.

Unemployment will remain as it is as energy prices climb beyond the reach of marginalized citizen.

Which begs the more basic question of whether or not you are still a citizen if the capitalist can’t find a use for you?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner




Thursday, January 17, 2013

Educate

Greetings good citizen,

How pathetic is it that many of the following headlines are either ‘spin’ or rely on accounting gimmicks for their veracity?

But the lead story belabors a point I have been making for decades:
The Education Revolution
Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates

By KEITH BRADSHER

China is making a huge investment in its universities, hoping to leverage its enormous population into 195 million college graduates by the end of the decade.

No irony should be lost that China has overtaken the US as the world’s premiere ‘economic superpower’ on the strength of its ‘blue-collar’ workforce.

Shifting back to our curiously missing OWS protestors, what does this (capitalist profiteering) mean to those who already got soaked big bucks, studying for jobs that will not appear anywhere near here?

I repeat, All economies are LOCAL and no amount of ‘koom-bye-ya’ can alter that!

Let me take it one step further and state unequivocally that it is ‘impossible’ to establish global capitalism as the world’s economic system because of its predatory nature. Resources must be ‘managed’ not ‘exploited’!

Global capitalism gives us stories like this one:
The 787 that made an emergency landing in Japan on Wednesday. All 137 passengers and crew members were evacuated safely.
Regulators Around the Globe Ground Boeing 787s
By CHRISTOPHER DREW, JAD MOUAWAD and MATTHEW L. WALD 51 minutes ago

The directives in Japan, Europe and India follow a Federal Aviation Administration ruling Wednesday that it was grounding the planes operated by U.S. carriers.
Design errors, easily corrected or the by-product of the decades long ‘global race to the bottom?’

This is what happens when you put psychopaths in charge of ‘shaking up’ your supply chain. All of the routine safeguards get thrown to the winds in an effort to ‘bull’ their way to a profit. (by bringing their part of the project in under deadline and under cost, thereby maximizing their ‘bonus’!
Seriously good citizen, these people have lost sight of the rationale behind the awarding of ‘bonuses’ (especially considering half the time management rewards itself for failure!)

And remember, THESE PEOPLE CONSIDER THEMSELVES OUR ‘BETTERS!’

They are ‘superior’ to us…at least in their own minds.

But hey, after Wells Fargo made money producing mortgages, we have the (alleged) ‘dummies’ foundering in the same pond…so who are you supposed to believe?
DealBook
Profit Drops 63% at Bank of America After Mortgage Settlements
By BEN PROTESS 6 minutes ago

The bank’s widely expected drop in fourth-quarter profit comes after it settled legal claims over its mortgage business. It earned 3 cents a share, narrowly beating estimates.
Um, talk about lunacy! Here they are, bleeding from the eye-sockets, settling billion dollar claims against them (for mortgage fraud.) Somehow they still ‘beat the estimates’…and Wall Street is giving them a spanking anyway!

Seriously good citizen, if this story isn’t complete and utter, I don’t know what is!

Somebody’s getting robbed and I have a bad feeling about who that somebody is…

In a related story:
DealBook
Facing Legal Costs, Citigroup Disappoints in 4th Quarter
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG 9:30 AM ET

As the bank works to clean up its mortgage mess, it reported fourth-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or 38 cents a share, significantly below analysts’ estimates.
Did Vikram empty out the main vault as part of his ‘separation package?’ You know how these ‘Master of the Universe’ types operate…

“Sure, I’ll leave…just make sure my golden parachute has a platinum liner!”

Apparently this is something ‘the analysts’ aren’t privy too.

And yet more ‘disappointment’ from the global stage…
DealBook
Rio Tinto to Book $14 Billion Charge; C.E.O. Replaced
By JULIA WERDIGIER and NEIL GOUGH 8:27 AM ET

The mining giant blamed challenges in the aluminum business and at its coal unit in Mozambique for the write-down, and said Sam Walsh would succeed Tom Albanese as chief executive.
I may have dubbed the local rag as the Daily ‘cops behaving badly’ gazette but the business pages of the world’s media are dominated by the details of CEO’s behaving badly (and getting fooked for it…sometimes.)

Then we have this last ditty that lead me to my previous musing regarding the veracity of today’s reporting:
Economic Data Lift Stocks
By REUTERS 52 minutes ago

Wall Street opened higher after some cheery economic reports on unemployment and housing starts.

It’s been two years good citizen and no change as far as my unemployment status. I’m still twiddling my thumbs as are many of my over fifty peers.

Seems the girls of the over fifty club have joined us recently and if you think that’s a coincidence, tell it to Santa Claus!

Part of what I do here is shine a light on the stories the corporate owned media ‘neglects’ and the other part is providing some much needed ‘food for thought’ that should be fueling public debate.

The corporate owned media is paid to ‘pretend’ that things couldn’t be better, our problems are largely in our heads…and they’d be correct about that because it is their fault our head isn’t pointed in the correct direction!

But that’s an issue for another day,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Only in America!

Greetings good citizen,

In yet another jaw dropping example of capitalism at its finest we have a citizen using his garden hose as a flame-thrower after a nearby fracking operation contaminated his water well.

Which is not nearly as disturbing as what the EPA did when confronted with this, er, ‘intelligence’.

I cannot stress enough that the loss of control over our justice system indicates the loss of control over our society itself, and the extent to which treason has permeated the public realm.

(The people elected to serve us are NOT serving the public but those who funded their election, the One Percent…and that is ‘treason’…which has a long standing punishment.)

Again I ask what is it going to take before you reject this greedy grasping and punish the criminals who have impoverished the rest of us for so long?

How long must we suffer before you are willing to act?
The case isn't the first in which the EPA initially linked a hydraulic fracturing operation to water contamination and then softened its position after the industry protested. A similar dispute unfolded in west-central Wyoming in late 2011, when the EPA released an initial report that showed hydraulic fracturing could have contaminated groundwater. After industry and GOP leaders went on the attack, the agency said it had decided to do more testing. It has yet to announce a final conclusion.

Hydraulic fracturing — often called "fracking" — allows drillers to tap into oil and gas reserves that were once considered out of reach because they were locked in deep layers of rock. The method has contributed to a surge in natural gas drilling nationwide, but environmental activists and some scientists believe it can contaminate groundwater. The industry insists the practice is safe.

Range Resources, a leading independent player in the natural gas boom, has hundreds of gas wells throughout Texas, Pennsylvania and other mineral-rich areas of the United States. Among them is a production site — now owned by Legend Natural Gas — in a wooded area about a mile from Lipsky's home in Weatherford, about a half-hour drive west of Fort Worth.
Geez, what a surprise, the EPA backed off once the conservo-loonies got into the act!

Color me shocked…(yawn.) Welcome to midnight in America, and they say the darkest hour is just before dawn…so you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Understand good citizen it is precisely this practice (of contaminating groundwater) that is projected to put the US back on top of the energy exporting world…because we won’t be using it here! (Or at least that’s the plan.)

Which is the ‘sidebar’ to the bizarre predictions of the worlds first country to tap out its energy reserves will suddenly ‘resume’ its role as the world’s biggest energy exporter.

What does that tell you about the rest of the world?

It should be teaching you a boatload about the ‘funniness of money’. You won’t have enough to of it to buy energy but others will (cuz they is keepin’ massa’s factories running!)

Does ANYBODY see the ‘end game’ here?

How about a little taste of today’s business headlines?
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 Last Update: 10:30 AM ET

Deepening Crisis for the Dreamliner
By HIROKO TABUCHI and BETTINA WASSENER 6:41 AM ET

The two largest Japanese airlines said they would ground their Boeing 787 aircraft after a string of problems was capped by an emergency landing in western Japan.

Yet more proof of the stunning failure caused by globalization mixed with a generous portion of unbridled greed!

And speaking of unbridled greed:
DealBook
JPMorgan Cuts Dimon’s Pay, Even as Profit Surges
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG 37 minutes ago

JPMorgan Chase touted a strong quarter, but still chose to sharply cut the pay of the chief executive, Jamie Dimon, in light of a multibillion-dollar trading loss last year.

DealBook: JPMorgan Report on Trading Loss Takes Aim at Top Executives 50 minutes ago
Funny how we start off with corruption in government and it leads us straight to the now defunct engine of the US economy:
DealBook
Goldman Sachs Earnings Soar
By SUSANNE CRAIG 49 minutes ago

Goldman Sachs reported a fourth-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $5.60 a share, beating analysts’ estimates.

DealBook: Goldman Profit Blows Through Expectations 8:56 AM ET
Stocks Pull Back Despite Bank Earnings 53 minutes ago
Does anyone else find it curious how the customerless banking sector manages to make record profits as the global economy founders helplessly?

Share prices keep rising but for no discernable reason…is it theft, fraud or both?

Which leads us to the next article:
Walmart Plans to Buy American More Often
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The retailer’s 10-year commitment, totaling $50 billion, comes as it is under pressure over its overseas sourcing following a deadly fire in November in Bangladesh.
So a little ‘bad press’ and Walmart is suddenly humble and contrite are they?

Somehow I don’t think it would be that easy, just like the idiots who believe peaceful protests are the solution.

If we don’t start burning things down, nothing is going to change (and if we don’t burn most of it down what does change will be all bad!
American Airlines Reports a Profit
By JAD MOUAWAD 55 minutes ago

Lower costs helped the airline, which is operating under bankruptcy court protection, post a profit, compared with a loss a year ago.
And how did AA post a profit? They did it the ‘old fashioned way’ they wrung the savings out of their employees!

Lastly we have this story that begs the question of who thought it was a good idea to rescue these idiots in the first place (sadly, it was Hank Paulson and his successor Lloyd Blankfein!)
A.I.G. Seeks Approval to File More Bank Suits
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

A.I.G. must win a court fight with an entity run by the New York Fed, which the insurer says is blocking its efforts to go after banks that harmed it financially.

Only in America, good citizen could you read such a litany of woe and not think the bottom was going to fall out tomorrow due to public outrage…and believe you-me, the public is plenty outraged…they just can’t narrow it down to who…yet.

But fear not! The corporate owned media will offer up a scapegoat quicker than you can say debt ceiling! (Another grossly mis-reported story of politicians playing the public for chumps with the ‘assistance’ of the bought and paid for media.

But I have kept you beyond your time, good citizen and for that I apologize.

Try and remember when ‘Only in America’ was a good thing…(despite it being a lie then too.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner




Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Unintended Consequences

Greetings good citizen,

While I am not particularly a strong supporter of the NRA I do support what they stand for, a part of the human social contract that predates civilization itself.

Why is nobody ‘defending’ the right of the individual to defend themselves? (Probably because of our long, er, ‘tradition’ of enslaving the weak…but that position doesn’t play well in the press.)

So how do you think the public will react to this news?
New York Has Gun Deal, With Focus on Mental Ills
By THOMAS KAPLAN and DANNY HAKIM

The state Senate on Monday passed a plan that expands a ban on assault weapons and includes measures focused on the mentally ill. The Assembly planned to vote Tuesday on the bill.

Newtown Families Look Beyond Gun Control
As we have observed from our perch in larger society, the mentally disturbed don’t wear signs proclaiming their ‘abnormality’. Worse, more than a few are CEO’s and hold positions of respect and power.

How do you say ‘no’ to a screwball like that?

Short answer, you don’t.

There is already legislation on the books prohibiting the certifiable from ‘legally' owning firearms, so what good does passing 'stronger legislation' do…beyond providing the fig leaf of ‘taking a stand’?

We may as well outlaw evil! (How sad is it that our legal system isn’t up to the task of ‘defining’ evil, much less legislating against it!)

So how, er, ‘serious’ do you think this is?
Obama Willing to Use Executive Orders on Guns
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

President Obama is expected to signal his intention to engage in the biggest Congressional fight over guns in nearly two decades.

‘Executive orders’! Seriously good citizen, did we just elect ourselves a ‘dictator’ (A la W?)

How ‘tenuous’ our grip on ‘democracy’ reveals that it has been a ‘for show’ arrangement from the beginning. Our betters couldn’t risk even experimental self rule because the 'riff-raff' (a.k.a. you & me) doesn’t know what’s good for them!

Like these assholes have a handle on that, take a good look at the world today and assure me it is in ‘good hands’.

Naturally we fall back on the problem with denying the mentally ill access to firearms, who decides who is or isn’t ‘mentally ill’?

Remember my post of a few days ago, where I re-named the local rag as the Daily Cops Behaving Badly’ gazette?

Well, guess who gets to decide who does or does not get a firearms permit?

Political appointees!

And if you’re not of the same ‘political persuasion’, your chances drop exponentially.

But I digress, let us return to the issue that smacks rather loudly of ‘martial law’.

We lost habeas corpus via ‘executive order’ (and haven’t regained it…) What do you suppose is going to happen if El Presidente is ordered by the One Percent to disarm ‘the rabble’?

Can you say automatic civil war?

As I comment in the preamble, the right to protect yourself predates civilization. Anyone who would deny you that right deserves death! (On the basis that they want to enslave you by rendering you defenseless!)

As many right to arms advocates say, they can have my gun any time they want it…bullets first.

(Which led to the counter expression of they can have my gun by prying it from my cold dead fingers.)

Left to our imagination here good citizen is what living in a nation without habeas corpus and the right to bear arms would be like?

You would no longer have to wonder about the ‘despair’ felt by someone living in a third world dictatorship experiences, it would become your daily reality!

They have already stripped you of your legal right to protest unjust imprisonment, removing your right to defend yourself would strip you of your ONLY defense against unjust seizure.

Wouldn’t ‘society’ protect you?

Think about that one and try not to laugh. If you aren’t a card carrying member of the One Percent it is vanity to think your presence would even be missed much less noticed outside your immediate family.

Yeah, we need to tread very carefully indeed, considering what history has shown us how ‘unarmed civilians’ have been treated, and we’re not even talking the distant past…

Should I disappear good citizen, look for me underneath a pile of corpses, cuz I ain’t going ‘quietly!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner