A Simple Plan

Final Destination

2012-02-13T11:50:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you spot the Article du juor before you log in to your e-mail account!

So you don’t get a chance to see that markets open higher but were headed down on news the Greece has, er, ‘approved’ the ‘new’ austerity measures demanded by their, er, ‘creditors’ (which is really quite laughable considering NOBODY has the funds to ‘bail’ anybody out…but this is the sort of shit that happens when all money turns ‘funny’.

And don’t get me wrong, All money BY ITS VERY NATURE, is ‘funny’!

Making the following headline just that much more disturbing:

Russians alarmed by rash of teenage suicides

Russia has the world's third-highest rate of suicide among teenagers aged 15-to-19, with about 1,500 taking their own lives every year, according to a recent UNICEF report. The rate is higher only in the neighboring former Soviet republics of Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In recent years, there have been 19-to-20 annual suicides per 100,000 teenagers in Russia — three times the world average, Boris Polozhy of the respected Serbsky psychiatric center in Moscow said Friday.

"Until the highest authorities see suicide as a problem, our joint efforts will be unlikely to yield any results," he said. In the southwestern Siberian region of Tuva, the rate reaches a staggering 120 suicides per 100,000 teenagers, while the nearby region of Buryatiya has an average rage of 77 per 100,000. Both regions are impoverished and have high crime and alcoholism rates.

Um, one would question the necessity of pointing out the, er, ‘redundancy’ of telling us that the suicides take place predominantly among those, er, ‘marginalized’ by their respective society.

Left to your imagination is why these kids are ‘packing it in’ on the doorstep of adulthood?

Could they have ‘looked down’ and noticed they were already standing in their grave?

Makes you wonder what Mr. Darwin would have to say on the subject of ’unnatural selection’.

Nowhere in nature (except lemmings and that has been chalked up to stupidity!) do creatures voluntarily end their own life, especially prior to reproducing, one of our strongest drives!

They give the decidedly ’lame’ example of two girls who leapt from the roof of a 14 story building to escape being punished for cutting class for two weeks!

Of course, I’ve never personally experienced detention in the Russian school system…may it was justified after all!

But you know I don’t believe that…kids only ever take the ‘easy out’ when they look at their parents and see their own future in their haunted, hopeless eyes.

Must be an extremely, er, ‘sobering’ moment that makes one so young abandon all hope!

But that’s the world we’ve left them.

If you weren’t born the child of a well-connected party operative, you may as well ‘jump off a building…or walk in front of a subway train, be you Russian or from anywhere else!

But that would make the revolution that much harder to mount!

Revolutions are fought by people who believe they can make the future better, not by people who have already surrendered.

I’ve already told you what happens to those people (buried alive in a mass grave, wounded but not yet dead.)

Why is this happening good citizen?

Because of the central bank’s cheap financing, some economists warn, sick banks now face less pressure to confront their problems — to clean out bad loans and other impaired assets, or even wind down operations if there is no hope of a turnaround. The European Central Bank, they say, could inadvertently spawn a cohort of “zombie banks,” burdened by nonperforming loans and assets that remain on the books, like the ones that helped make the 1990s a lost decade for Japan.

“It’s a huge bet,” said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. “If the crisis ends up well, the E.C.B. will have pulled off a miracle. If things go wrong, then commercial banks will be in a much worse situation than they were before.”

Professor Wyplosz said the central bank might be making the banking system more fragile by encouraging institutions to load up on risky assets, especially government bonds from troubled euro zone countries like Spain or Italy. Banks can use those assets as collateral for more loans from the central bank.

The longer we ‘do nothing’ about our desperately broken economy the more difficult it will be to cleanse the avenues of commerce and repurpose the engines of production into a sustainable, society supporting system!

This watching the death spiral of the banking system is all very, er, captivating BUT it is a distraction from what we need to be doing!

Watching (and waiting) for the financial system to collapse will neither prevent its collapse nor put us back on the path of sustainability (not that we were on that path in the first place…it’s where we NEED to go but can’t get there with capitalism!)

We aren’t yet strong enough to attempt military action (although that will change rapidly) and you can bet the eventual collapse of the financial system will be followed immediately by widespread panic!

Many will die in the weeks after the collapse, especially when it dawns on us ‘en masse’ that we’re ALL fucked!

A goodly number of them will take the same route the kids in our opening article took!

Starve to death, eaten by hungry cannibals, jump off a bridge, funny how the destination remains the same!

My final question to YOU good citizen is ‘how much evidence do you need to witness before you reject predatory capitalism?’

These kids have seen the writing on the wall and taken what they believe to be the ‘appropriate action’…all because YOU will not fight!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lobotimized!

2012-02-12T12:19:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

If I have correctly interpreted the ‘theme of the day’ it seems today’s erection is firmly planted in ‘Divided USA’ (although most columnists use the term ‘Divided America‘, which is another issue entirely!)

While the pundits marvel over how the nation became ‘equally divided’, nobody seems to question who this false meme serves…

Cui Bono, the question every ‘good’ reporter answers but, as we have observed, there aren’t many of those around these days.

Hell, even I’d admit to being, er, ‘reluctant’ to come out with half the crap I, er, ‘allege’, postulate, theorize (because I have no proof) if my, er, website were more popular.

But it isn’t…and I’m semi-safe here behind my ‘opt-in’ firewall so let the, er, ‘wild speculation’ flow!

If we posit that the last dozen presidents were ‘hand picked’ by the people who own the national media, it only stands to reason that that same media has a ‘vested interest’ in pedaling the lie that we, the people of this nation, for the most part, can’t agree on ANYTHING!

Increasingly, it has become apparent that ‘the media’ has used (if not itself ‘created’) radical fringe groups to, er, ‘illustrate’ to the general public just how ‘divided’ we supposedly are.

Take the vaunted ‘Tea Party’ for example…all 30,000 of em!

Trekkies outnumber this political fringe group but you’d never know that from what the media tells us!

And isn’t EVERY ‘controversial’ piece of legislation in Washington ‘stopped cold’ by wishy-washy politicians who fear angering this tiny media creation?

I mean WTF, good citizen?

How STUPID do they think we are?

Well, the answer to that (conveniently) is right here in the ‘conservative heartland’

How sad is it good citizen that these people are too stupid to realize that ‘stasis = death’?

Mr. Peterson used a workers’ compensation settlement to buy a farm that he managed with his brother-in-law, who is mentally handicapped and also on government disability.

“He was my legs, and we worked it,” Mr. Peterson said.

They grew corn, soybeans and rye, and even kept steers for a while. In good years they earned enough to live on. In bad years they lived on the government’s checks. Life would have been very difficult without them, he said.

Mr. Peterson, an easygoing man who looks down when he thinks and smiles sheepishly when he offers an opinion, looked down after completing the story of his own dependence on the safety net.

“It’s hard to beat up on the government when they’ve been so good to you,” he finally said. “I’ve never really thought about it, I guess.”

Lately, the government has been very good, indeed. The county, with federal financing, bought a corner of Mr. Peterson’s farm to build a new interchange for Interstate 35. He used the money to open a gas station at the edge of the farm in 2008 to serve the traffic that rolls off the new ramp. The business is prospering, and he no longer worries that he will need to depend on Social Security.

“But you can’t take that away,” he said. “My own sister has only Social Security. That’s all. That’s all she’s going to have. And if you take that away from her, Christ, she’d be a street person. I don’t think we can cut them off on that.”

Two bitch slaps for ‘rugged individual’ Peterson.

It is a natural by-product of conservatism to ‘discount’ government assistance. (When asked, the ungrateful pricks invariably insist the did it all by themselves!)

And number two? What do you suppose Mr. Peterson is REALLY concerned about? His sister living on the street or her landing on HIS doorstep?

Which provokes yet another WTF?

And here, I put it to you, good citizen, lies the true liberal/conservative divide.

Conservatives seldom venture out of the world of ‘I’, a (true) liberal thinks of the plight of others.

Too bad there aren’t any left, we’ve all been driven (by the conservative media) into our own personal ‘world of I’.

But let’s back up a step and look at the ‘big picture’ here. The ‘focus’ of this article is how screwed these conservative idiots would be if the demon ‘guvmint’ cut them off from their support payments!

This, ironically, is why I am, er, ‘predicting’ (although some would say ’advocating’) economic collapse.

No ‘well’ is bottomless, it will run dry eventually.

Again, I suspect oil will serve as the ‘trigger’ for this, er, ‘planned collapse.’

Which will result in utter chaos (we could only wish it would result in Anarchy!) because there are no, er, ‘plans’ to prevent it.

But again, I touch on an entirely different topic.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What's Normal?

2012-02-11T15:29:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds both on schedule and as planned.

Increasingly, the ‘progressives’, the heirs apparent to the now defunct Democrats, have been displaying their ‘centrist’ credentials.

Which gives the rest of us a nauseatingly small amount of room for disagreement with ‘Conservative Dogma’.

Eliminate the opposition good citizen and the only thing that remains is the isolated people who ‘disagree’ with mainstream dogma…

How fucking sick is it good citizen that most people falsely believe ‘The Progressives’ have their backs? when every mainstream political movement has ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy!

Why Going 'Back To Normal' Is No Longer An Option for the American Economy -- And Where We're Headed Now

Stop waiting around, because "normal" as we know it isn't coming back. [snip]

Other theorists, including Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs and Umair Haque, agree that there’s a phase shift happening under our feet — but they believe the real shift lies in the changing structure of capitalism itself. Forming markets is a core human activity that we’re not any more likely to abandon than eating or breathing. But our understanding of the purpose and value of markets — and the role of capital within them — is overdue for a profound change. Haque argues that “twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations." But, he continues, "both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair, non-consensual, and often irreversible.” The result is a great imbalance that we are finally being forced to fully reckon with, one that will call us to radically change our focus, creating a totally new kind of capitalism.

Haque makes a distinction between “thin” and “thick” value. Things with “thin” value tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Hummers, McMansions and Big Macs are all examples of thin value items. They’re produced without any recognition of our larger values context or the externalized costs to the community, and consuming them tends to add to the overall imbalance in our economy. Thin value, he writes, is “profit that is in many ways a financial fiction, because it fails to exceed a fuller, truer economic cost of capital.” And the phase shift is evident in the fact that the companies that are falling hardest right now are the ones whose past profits have relied most heavily on monetizing our common wealth for private profit.

“Thick” value — produced by companies that practice “constructive capitalism” — is value that is sustainable, that has a moral component that matters, and that multiplies itself. Companies that practice it tend to win because they produce things that have a deeper meaning to people. Their real wealth isn’t what they’re able to extract from the rest of us, but in their long, deep, trusting relationships with their customers. The world is shifting from the economics of a game reserve to those of an ark, says Haque. The companies that are thriving now are the ones that increasing their focus on “constructive advantage” — “how free a company is of deep debt to people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.” While this focus-shift is far from complete, the current economy abounds with firms that are showing us a new way forward. (Apple is a prime example of a company that creates “thick value,” [Seriously?] but we’ve seen recently that its commitment to this ideal has some rather glaring thin spots.)

WTF, Good citizen!

How screwed up is it that the only ‘acceptable’ political solution to our crippled economy MUST center on ‘for profit’ capitalism?

What does it tell you about their dogma when the only ones who support it are from relative ‘newcomers’ to predatory capitalism (or the brainwashed and clueless children of the one percent?)

This mirrors the recent attempts to ‘print our way to prosperity’ (which is working about as well as it did(n’t) in Zimbabwe!

‘Responsible Capitalism’ is an oxymoron! (Especially when capitalism provides the vehicle with which to ‘buy off’ regulatory oversight!)

How pathetic is it good citizen that ALL mainstream political movements have ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy for access to the funding necessary to mount a campaign!

When there is only one source of political funding…(and let’s not have any lies between us, good citizen, there is only one source!) Politics becomes a one note song!

Maybe we are confronted with the same ‘fatal myopia’ that eventually sunk the Greek Empire, the one where their oligarchic leadership was ‘incapable’ of even conceiving of a society that wasn’t dependent on slavery.

Well, don’t look now but slavery is back…and it’s growing.

What will you do when the ONLY way you will be able to ‘legally’ support your family will be by literally selling yourself in exchange for ‘regular’ meals and habitation and management will decide what constitutes the definition of both ‘fit’ and ‘sufficient’.

Oh, and don’t forget the ‘health’ clause…get sick and your on your own. The whole arrangement rests upon your continued good health!

Because there’s a couple of million other poor slobs just waiting in line to take your place!

Welcome to the future, good citizen!

I doubt many of us will ‘tolerate’ that kind of treatment for very long…

But that’s just my opinion, it’s up to YOU to prove me right!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Trading Liberty for Safety

2012-02-10T13:16:00.000-05:00

Will likely get you dead...but I digress!

Greetings good citizen,

Asia did okay but the rest of the world bled from the eye sockets…which is ominous in itself. If one were possessed of a suspicious mind, they might think the greedy Westerners were funneling their ill-gotten spoils to the East for reaping!

How fucked up will it be that once there, they will waste no time destroying that economy too? (or they will sit there and moan there’s nothing to invest it, which is where this whole shit ball started forty years ago!)

Roll back the clock another forty years we arrive in the same place our grandparents stood (with most people muttering ‘revolution, what revolution? We dumped the Crown and replaced it with something worse!)

Like today:

It all depends, though, on how the euro zone’s economy fares in the months and years ahead. Investors who once criticized countries for not embracing enough austerity to mend tattered balance sheets have recently started to acknowledge that too much austerity is squeezing growth — making it harder, rather than easier, to pay back debts.

And the growth divide that already existed between wealthy northern countries and those along the southern rim has widened even more in the last year while those toiling in what is likely to be a drawn-out recession — Greece and Portugal especially — seem to be creating a third, ultraslow zone in the euro zone.

Those weak economies will weigh on Europe for years to come. They are already helping to weaken growth in Germany and once-robust countries like France, both of which are seeing their exports to other European countries suffer.

Until ‘weak’ becomes ‘the new normal’. In fact, as miserable as it is, our current dismal economic prospects (with numerous sectors still being ‘paid off’ to cover the looting of the West) will be fondly recalled by conservatives as ‘the good old days’.

Which is to point out that there are conservatives today who wax nostalgic for the horrendous economy Reagan created!

Perhaps more puzzling is the leaderless Democrats who long for the ‘boom times’ of the ‘dot-gone’ era under Clinton!

I mean WTF, can’t these people tell they were being played?

Sadly, the answer is no. Back then, people (erroneously) believed the Democratic party was still an independent entity and not the wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate USA it is today.

These days few are deceived by party labels, there is no discernable difference between politicians of either stripe. Sure, Republicans ‘pretend’ to be batshit crazy but Democrats only ‘pretend’ to possess a backbone.

Despite their crazy antics, they both bow and scrape to the chosen few that hold our fate in their hands…if we let them.

Today’s topic was very difficult to decide because there are so many things competing for our attention!

Mr. Krugman provides an admirable slap-down to Mr. Murray’s most recent manipulation of the Overton window!

Then there’s the whole Euro-zone fiasco (where the latest rumor is that THE BANKS are FIRST IN LINE to be paid!) What is the purpose of government again, to protect society or to enforce predatory contracts?

I guess we have arrived at the crux of the ‘government for sale’ conundrum.

Do we sit idly by while those who have ‘purchased’ the justice system use that system to CHEAT US out of everything we’ve spent our whole lives building?

And we have, again, arrived at the point where you ask yourself, what can I do about it?

And the answer comes back, ‘legally, nothing.’

If you catch somebody cheating at cards (or any other game of chance) our ‘moral obligation is NOT to punish them but we are well within those obligations to refuse to play with them in the future…

But in this case we have a different problem. We can’t ‘refuse to play’, the cheats are everywhere, you’re ‘boxed in’.

Now back in the ‘bad old days’ the solution to this pickle was to leave! Pick up stakes and head for the horizon, (which is why you will find humans living in the most inhospitable parts of this planet!)

Can’t pull that one off today though can you? Whole damn planet has become mighty crowded.

This leaves you with just one ’option’ and the bastards who ‘own’ the current system double dog dare you to ‘try it!’

That option is fight.

But you don’t have the stomach for it. Until you become too old to fight back, then they don’t care how you feel about things!

Pity the fools because they have reached a ‘saturation point’ in the number of workers they can ‘profitably employ’.

And now you will have no alternative, you’ll fight whether you want to or not!

In fact they are counting on a majority of you just surrendering…until your learn that those who surrender are summarily executed. (If you survive being shot, it is unlikely you will survive being buried alive!)

I add these grim little details for those of you whose mind doesn’t run along this particular way of thinking.

Understand, the rationale I used was why shoot you twice? It is unlikely you will have the strength (or the balls) to dig yourself out of a mass grave, that only happens in the movies! Most of you will freak out, start hyper-ventilating and croak in a minute or two anyway, a rather hideous death to boot…but what the hell, you gave up, you deserve what happens to you!

Which is to reiterate the old saying; ‘those who surrender their liberty for safety deserve neither!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

False Flag

2012-02-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

In a bad instance of ‘foreshadowing’ the headines are predicting a ‘positive reaction’ to another alleged ‘breakthrough’ in the yet to be settled negotiations over stupefying Greek debt. Which is to say markets around the world are currently down as of this moment.

How does that saying/advice go? Buy the rumor, sell the news?

How sad is it that the inability to distinguish between the two is the quickest path to insolvency?

But this is NOT today’s topic, no.

Today we return to the ongoing False Flag operation to give Anarchy ‘a bad name’.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

In Zerzan’s now defunct magazine Green Anarchy (which survives as a website) he published an article by someone named “Venomous Butterfly” that excoriated the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN). The essay declared that “not only are those [the Zapatistas’] aims not anarchist; they are not even revolutionary.” It also denounced the indigenous movement for “nationalist language,” for asserting the right of people to “alter or modify their form of government” and for having the goals of “work, land, housing, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.” The movement, the article stated, was not worthy of support because it called for “nothing concrete that could not be provided by capitalism.”

Here’s the ‘money quote’ “They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.”

The question, good citizen is if you think this ‘resisting the resisters’ bullshit is a mere ‘coincidence’?

These animals are NOT ANARCHISTS, Anarchy means ‘Rules without rulers’, so who are these ‘hell no, I will not obey’ morons?

They’re fucking Libertarians!

Why doesn’t the corporate owned media correct this, er, ‘misunderstanding’?

The corporate owned media doesn’t want you to even ponder the idea that you are perfectly capable of governing yourself. Anarchy would be a bad thing, a very bad thing for the capitalist.

As we can see from the article, ‘Black Bloc’ Anarchists also happen to be capitalists!

Now, think, think, think…who else happens to be rabidly pro-capitalist and anti everything else?

Who could it be?

Might it be those Republican wannabes, the Libertarians?

In fairness, they only put on their Republican faces when they’re trying to appear ‘respectable’ (and they come off looking like ‘the crazy uncle’ instead!)

True anarchists DO NOT support the exploitation of their fellow humans which means (true) anarchists DO NOT support capitalism BECAUSE it is ‘predatory’!

Anarchists hate ‘hierarchy’ and that’s what attracts the Libbies…they think this is the basis of ‘common ground’ between the militantly Libertarian right and the (largely clueless) anarchist left.

Communism is a hierarchy with the Party on top and the workers on the bottom. Now the commies promised that the Party/State would ‘fade away’…one day.

Took less than 70 years for that pipe dream to be proven false!

Civilization, by necessity, needs order. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to happen on its own!

So even (true) Anarchists ‘accept’ the necessity of ‘the state’, what they reject is the uneven playing field that the ‘usual suspects’ use to seize and then maintain control.

Understand, our ‘Hell no, I will not obey! ~~Anarchists~~ (Libertarians) will suddenly change their tune and become the preachers of conformity they were raised to be!

“Question not your lot in life for it is ‘God’s will’! Who are you to question God?”

(Said the man who claims to speak for God!)

This is another ‘conundrum’, True Anarchists are ‘usually’ atheists (or at least agnostic) I’m willing to bet these ‘Black Bloc’ pretenders all have Christian crosses dangling from gold chains around their blessed necks!

I have no evidence so I’m just speculating here…although it fits, doesn’t it?

Whose head is filled with more nonsense than a ‘believers’?

Not exactly a rewarding task but somebody needs to set the score straight or you’ll all falsely believe that anarchy is a bad thing and, worse, that capitalism is a ‘good thing!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Walk Backwards...

2012-02-08T12:47:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

It’s been a while since I wrote a ‘free-form’ opinion piece on a topic not in the headlines, er, per se.

I watched National Geographic’s ‘Doomsday Preppers’ last night and it was quite a trip.

They took each ‘clan’ as a group and even provided what they were supposedly ‘prepping’ for.

From a ‘casting’ point of view it was a bonanza! From a credibility point of view, not so much.

Although I think one of the, er, ‘statistics’ they flashed in the second episode provides us with a hint as to why the exec’s at Nat’l Geo green lighted such an unlikely project.

More then fifty percent of US citizens (and probably even more ‘Americans’) fear a ‘financial collapse’ in the next twenty-five years!

Which is weird because anybody who has been paying attention already KNOWS the global financial system is totally ‘insolvent’ and has been to the last three years!

The ONLY thing keeping the lights on and the doors open is ‘creative accounting’!

Without those ‘off-balance sheet’ entries, we’d be fucked! (And guess who CAN’T get away with, er, ‘hiding’ their losses? That’s right…got a mirror?)

Did I mention that YOU are being ‘cheated’?

Just something to keep in the back of your mind as you stumble along, trying to get by here in ‘Wonderland’…

Um, to their credit, Nat’l Geo didn’t play ‘favorites’, they ‘dissed’ every prepper’s claims of pending disaster, regardless of, er, ‘plausibility’.

It was also curious to see that of the 8 ‘vignettes’ I watched last night, 5 of them were ‘fiscal mismanagement’ related.

So by ‘simple majority’ MOST ‘preppers’ are worried about the same thing!

(I find that ‘comforting’ because it indicates more people are ‘paying attention’ than the corporate owned media would have you believe!)

Which is neither here nor there. While many of these survivor groups doubled as ‘networks’, survival/personal is pretty much an ‘all you’ proposition. Some of the ‘well prepared’ (people with years of food for dozens of people) have figured the encounter with the occasional stranger into their ‘survival budget’ but most ‘preppers’ were hard pressed to lay enough aside to meet their own needs, even for a little while.

Only one of last night’s ‘preppers’ followed the, er, ‘correct’ path of survival, ‘don’t have anything worth getting killed for’ (just don’t do it!)

It would literally be a ‘waste of good lead’ to shoot this guy for what he had, (and that’s the way to do it!) He is ALREADY ‘living off the land’, surviving on wild edibles!

He’ll be living even better once the bureaucracy that prevents you from picking up nature’s bounty for yourself (without a license) goes away!

If you don’t have a license to fish, hunt or dig clams, you are legally ‘poaching’ and can be locked up for it!

Not that disputes over ‘whose’ (fill in the variety of wildlife) will, er, ‘end’ once civil order collapses…they’ll just be ‘settled’ in a more immediate and absolute manner.

Which is to advocate the ‘buddy system’, never go fishing, hunting, digging alone (unless you’re the stealthiest son of a bitch in the valley!) Always bring a guard/lookout!

Always ‘assume’ someone else thinks what you’ve found is ‘theirs’ and will be willing to kill you to protect it.

This extends, unreasonably enough, to game ‘on the hoof’. Let word get out that you bagged a deer and don’t be surprised when a group of, er, ‘collectors’ show up on your doorstep, looking for a fee (the balance of the meat and, at the very least, the hyde!)

You’ll be able to tell because they will arrive, loudly pronouncing ‘We don’t want any trouble’ which is code for, We came to make trouble for YOU! (PLEASE wait until we have dismounted our loud, rumbling bikes that are intended to scare the shit out of YOU before you start shooting!)

While we’re here it is a good idea to advise your guards to FIRE WITHOUT HESITATION on anyone STUPID enough to try intimidating you with a fucking motorcycle!

You cannot ride a motorcycle and shoot at the same time!

Here’s another tidbit, for the most part, handguns are USELESS if you aren’t literally on top of your target (within twenty feet.) At 75 feet, your just as well off throwing the fucking thing!

And the only weapon you can fire while riding a motorcycle…is a handgun!

Even then you’re still ‘shooting from the hip’ (meaning you’re not taking the time to ‘aim’.) If you hit somebody it is sheer luck!

But enough ‘nonsense’! (although what would one of my posts be if I DIDN’T digress wildly?)

In a word, boring!

Before we got carried away with defensive strategy we were discussing the, er, ‘likelihood’ of financial collapse.

Since all money is funny and our civilization is extremely poorly managed, the ‘trigger’ of a financial collapse will NOT be financial, it will be resource related!

So is it ‘all good’ until we run our of gypsum? (I’m ragging on you here, you know I‘m referring to oil!)

More importantly, will we really be ‘out’ when the managers of our society claim we are, er, ‘short’?

The answer here is NO.

We only just recently passed the estimated ‘half-way’ mark…there is, for now, plenty of oil.

The problem is there soon won’t be. The number of end users is growing exponentially!

How do they ‘fix’ runaway demand on a finite, dwindling resource?

Er, ‘reduce the number of end users?’

Simply enough this would mean pricing oil prohibitively!

But how can you do that without freezing two-thirds of the world’s population to death?

Our entire ‘social model’ is based on ‘cheap abundant energy’ when energy is neither cheap nor abundant, it falls apart, literally collapses!

Very much like the song that tells how the parts of the body are linked by the skeleton, our economy is inseparably linked via energy!

Without energy the entire supply chain literally falls apart.

Knowing this, how wise is/was it to eliminate ‘redundancy’ throughout the supply chain and move to ‘on demand, just in time’ production protocols?

Looks batshit insane if you ask me but unlike our highly compensated MBA’s, I’m looking at the situation from a ‘practical’ point of view and not from a ‘quarterly profit’ perspective.

Did I mention that our civilization is badly mismanaged?

I’ve said this multiple times before and I’ll say it a thousand more times, NONE of this is an ‘accident’! If I were a prosecuting attorney, a ‘murder one conviction’ would be a lead pipe cinch!

There’s ‘pre-meditation’ everywhere you look, so it will be laughable to see the billions of people who are ‘blindsided’ by the coming collapse!

Remember ‘globalization’ was NOT done FOR you, it has been done TO YOU!

We’re in ‘overtime’ here so I’ll try to wrap this up.

Returning to our energy problem and the inability to use ‘price’ to stretch out the energy supply we have another budget problem connected to energy, the cost of producing and harvesting/transporting food.

Since energy is literally ‘dollars’, the higher the cost of energy translates directly into the cost of food! Hyper-inflation results when the cost of living outstrips worker’s purchasing power!

Followed closely by the collapse of civil order…something they are narrowly avoiding in Greece at the moment…

Oh, and if Israel attacks Iran. AND the Iranians close the straits of Hormuz…instant ‘shit soup!

How’s JIT looking for ya now?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Half-time in the USA

2012-02-07T12:08:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets…and we were too until a few minutes ago. Then, inexplicably, the NYSE shot straight up!

It was plus 20 points at last look but where it stops, nobody knows…

(Mostly because the stock market has zero basis in reality [said the man with zero invested])

So the rest of the world is wallowing in Red Ink while the mighty USA stands alone, by itself…inexplicably in the black!

Which leads to what, good citizen? Is it really possible for the USA to ‘stand alone’, (when so much of its economy is imported?)

What do you suppose the actor who portrayed the man with no name is really trying to tell us?

Eastwood, a fiscal conservative who is more liberal on social issues including gay marriage and environmental protections, has mixed with politics before. The former nonpartisan mayor of Carmel, Calif., who supported GOP presidential contender John McCain in 2008, told the Los Angeles Times last November that he can't ever recall voting for a Democrat for president but expressed admiration for California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

On Monday, he told Fox News he is "certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama." "It was meant to be a message about just about job growth and the spirit of America," Eastwood said of the Chrysler ad. "I think all politicians will agree with it. I thought the spirit was OK."

Eastwood's longtime manager Leonard Hirshan told the AP that any stance Eastwood took on the auto bailout "has nothing to do with the commercial." He said the actor donated his fee from the commercial to a charity in Monterey, Calif., near where he lives.

How fucking sad is it good citizen that Mr. Eastwood, a millionaire in his own right, exemplifies precisely the ‘constituency’ the triangulating media writes for?

Fiscally conservative, socially liberal…and (it’s the big one, won’t do to leave it out!) RICH!

Who does that describe, good citizen? (I’ll give you a hint, it sure as fuck isn’t YOU!)

We all understand that nobody ‘singles out’ the rich, instead they refer to them as the, er, ‘fiscally responsible’…

Left to our fevered imaginations is the question of whether or not any ‘fiscally responsible’ individual believes one country (and its worthless currency) can ‘stand alone’ when this shit hit’s the fan?

ATHENS — Despite new evidence of a deteriorating economy, Greece said on Monday that it would cut 15,000 state jobs this year as part of new austerity measures it intends to adopt to secure new debt agreements from international lenders.

Athens is racing to push through economic changes that it hopes will persuade its private sector creditors to grant easier debt repayment terms and will prompt Europe to release 130 billion euros, or $171 billion, in the next round of bailout money it needs to avoid defaulting on bond payments due in March.

Negotiations with its creditors were continuing Monday, even as the austerity measures already in place were making it increasingly difficult for the Greek economy to outrun the country’s mounting debt burden.

It’s that last line that is the ’money quote’ here, good citizen.

It IS already ‘impossible’ for the crippled Greek economy to ‘outrun’ their (mostly imaginary) debt burden.

So what is our grizzled, ‘rugged individual’ (from the previous article) really telling us?

The, er, ‘Half-Time in America’ theme sort of implies that our economy is simply ‘regrouping’. After we rest up a bit we’re going to saddle up again and run those ‘freeloaders’ out of town.

Not ask yourself…who are ‘the freeloaders’?

He sure ain’t talking about the Tea Partiers, is he?

Why hot damn, the ‘freeloaders’ he’s referring to are You and Me!

Wait! I’ve got it all wrong? The article doesn’t say a damn word about ‘shiftless freeloaders’?

Whoa…sorry about that.

So what the hell are we ‘Halfway’ through?

Truth be told, good citizen, we are more than halfway there to becoming a Banana Republic!

And for some bizarre reason, the (rich) man with no name doesn’t care!

A ‘true’ (albeit wealthy) rugged individual admits when he’s licked and owns up to his mistakes…

AND he thinks YOU should too!

[Disclaimer: I am NOT putting Mr. Eastwood on trial, it was a job and he got paid to say what the script told him to say. It is the ‘imagery’ the advertisement portrays and the ideology behind it that are at issue here!]

One more swing at the ‘where is all of this headed’ and then I’ll shut up.

How the FUCK can it be ‘Half-Time in America’ when the global financial system is on the verge of sinking below the waves of financial insolvency?

The fact that is hasn’t already is telling indeed!

What SHOULD it ‘tell’ you?

That you are being CHEATED, BIG TIME!

Wake the fuck up!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fishtown

2012-02-06T11:38:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The stock market opened ‘down' but it’s rising like a bullet (for, again, no apparent reason.) I think they need to cut down on the level of ‘Happy Pills’ in the NYC water supply!

The national ‘paper of record’ has once again wandered off the reservation with stories about communities attempting to ‘re-purpose’ abandoned shopping malls (rather than pointing to what this widespread phenomenon means to the ‘consumer economy’ that has too few customers!)

In the meantime Mr. Krugman continues his crusade against austerity, rightly accusing conservatives of starving those who are already on a forced starvation diet!

He (again rightly) fears that the miniscule (and largely mathematical) ‘improvement’ in unemployment will shift the focus away from job creation.

Ah! But today’s offering is not from the national headlines, the business section or the editorials; Today’s piece comes to us from the Arts section (books to be specific):

Like it or not, the showcased author has held a mirror up to society and here’s what he sees:

Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four “founding virtues” — marriage, industriousness, community and faith — have all but collapsed.

The book says little about the roots of Fishtown’s problems, but in conversation Mr. Murray doesn’t hesitate to name the villain. “The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” he said. “The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.”

It’s an argument familiar from Mr. Murray’s 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” which established him overnight as a major policy intellectual and helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 law overhauling welfare. But in “Coming Apart” Mr. Murray’s recommendations are both more vague and far more ambitious. The first step, he writes, is for the people of Belmont to drop their “nonjudgmentalism” and lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and nondependence: to “preach what they practice,” as Mr. Murray puts it.

Ironically, at the end of this piece, Mr. Murray recants this statement by admitting he prefers NOT telling people what to do…but what are you gonna do?

Libertarianism is full of such ‘double-standards’, ‘non-coercion’ coupled with rigid interpretation and enforcement of ‘the law’ (That YOU pay for out of YOUR pocket!)

And if you ‘can’t afford’ law enforcement (or the other guy can hire more heavily armed thugs than you can)…you lose (and, mind you, none of this has ANYTHING to do with Justice!)

Is Mr. Murray a Libertarian?

That is for you to decide, although I’ll share my own impression which is ‘guilty as charged!’

But I digress, it is the admission at the end of the snippet that one of his prior works lead to the effective dismantling of welfare (and our currently overcrowded prisons, how‘s that for ‘one plus one‘ the media totally missed?) that, er, ‘prejudice’ me against his, er, ‘philosophy’.

Is his ‘premise’ (as it is put forth in his book) ‘sound’?

Absolutely!

God fearing rich folk have all hunkered down inside their insulated bubbles, blithely pretending the, er, ‘less-fortunate’ brought their misfortune upon themselves!

But that hasn’t changed for millennia…(in his defense, Mr. Murray doesn’t claim his observations are ‘new’…) which begs the question ‘why the book?’

And the answer is as simple as to keep these long out-dated ideas current in the public eye.

What does it say about a society when it produces economists who are clueless about the basic tenants of commerce and sociologists that are completely ignorant of the three pillars of civilization?

And, in case you were wondering, it all flows from Equality, it is kept in balance with Justice and only thrives under Peace (which is heavily dependent on equality and justice...just saying...nothing 'new' here.)

Sociologists like Mr. Murray would be the first to protest the ‘equality’ was ‘impossible’ (totally missing the point…it’s EQUAL TREATMENT we’re after, not an even dispersion of talent and luck! As the fucktards are quick to point out!)

Why DO we have economists that ignore the existence of the economic desert and sociologists that don’t understand what ‘equality’ means?

If we had the answer to that one we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re currently in…

And the answer is ‘politics’ good citizen! We have allowed the most basic tenant of society, ‘the common good’ to be ‘politicized’!

This is how we got saddled with an ‘unresponsive’ government because our elected representatives supposedly can’t agree on what ’the common good’ is.

Here’s a suggestion, lets dump the lot and put it up for a vote!

I’ll bet the majority of us can put things back on track in no time at all!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Look Down (the work song.)

2012-02-05T12:52:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

I feel compelled to declare that I harbor no animosity for Ms. Romer personally, it is her, er, profession that I loathe (or more succinctly, how that profession is currently ‘practiced’…if that’s what you want to call it.)

I love Paul Krugman despite the fact he regularly ~~avoids~~ , er, ignores the bigger picture.

Perhaps that is the ‘divide’. Mr. Krugman still displays the ‘old school’ charm of what it means to be a Democrat while Ms. Romer is a prime example of ‘Modern’ Democratic philosophy, those fucking ‘centrist-triangulators’!

Famously paraphrased by Curly of the Three Stooges when he complained; ‘I’m trying to think but nothing happens!’

Puzzled? Perhaps this will clarify matters for you.

JOBS A key argument for encouraging manufacturing is to create jobs and reduce unemployment. Unfortunately, those effects are probably small.

Unemployment today is high, but not because of a decline in manufacturing. That decline has been going on for 30 years — and for most of the 1990s and 2000s, the unemployment rate was less than 6 percent.

Today, we face a profound shortfall of demand. That truly is a terrible market failure, and it warrants government intervention. But we need actions that raise overall demand — like a tax cut for households so they have more take-home pay to spend, more aid to troubled state and local governments, and public investments in infrastructure. These are all things that President Obama has advocated.

A narrow tax cut for manufacturing is unlikely to raise aggregate demand significantly. By making our industrial goods cheaper, it might stimulate foreign demand, but probably not enough to make a dent in our unemployment rate. On the other hand, more aggressive monetary policy that lowered the price of the dollar would stimulate all our exports, and so have far more impact.

I selected this particular article because the title, “Do manufacturers need special treatment” exemplifies just how badly the global economic model is broken.

The above is what I’d refer to as a ‘bonus’.

Let’s begin with the excerpt and what it says to me: It says, don’t listen to me, I’m an idiot!

Lets take erroneous assumption number one:

We have been shedding manufacturing jobs for decades and the unemployment rate has remained ‘on average’ below 6%.

Which is the first ‘idiot statement’ made…what does the ‘average unemployment rate’ spread out over 30 years tell you? Why not back up ten thousands years and drop that bad boy right down to the hundredths column…it’s the SAME THING!

Old guys like me remember the last time unemployment was this bad was back when Reagan took over (and he didn’t give a fuck, nor did he ‘do’ anything about it. Ironically, he pointed to high unemployment and preached that ‘trade protectionism’ was the culprit!

He was going to ‘fix’ the economy by throwing the trade doors wide open with ‘free trade agreements’.

IF we agree that the founding tenant of capitalism is MARKET SHARE then the ‘global destruction’ of domestic industries led to what, good citizen?

Global monopolies! Held aloft by a greatly reduced number of ‘competitors’.

What is the ‘end result’ you may ask?

YOU become an obsolete member of a redundant society that will be driven into extinction.

But we digress…and we’ve drifted quite a ways off topic as well

Um, the next statement is no better than the first. She is spot on about the (formerly masked by credit cards) ‘lack of demand’ problem but totally misses the relationship between the tens of millions of workers that the monopolists have ‘squeezed’ out of the workforce and that same ‘lack of demand’.

I mean fucking Duh! (But that’s what happens when you ‘average’ figures that have no basis in reality in the first place!)

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the global economy IS bankrupt, the only thing keeping it glued together is some extremely ‘creative accounting’…and even that will eventually fail.

And the rest reads like a communist indictment against capitalism!

She falls just short of screaming for The State to ‘rescue us’…which is why the fucking clueless Republicans have been having a field day accusing the ‘Liberals’ of ‘Socialism’, ironically for trying (stupidly) to prevent the collapse of the economy brought on by the ‘global race to the bottom!’ (That the Republicans championed!)

I have made the case, the same case Ms. Romer is making, ironically, that providing ‘special treatment’ for manufacturers would do nothing to improve economic conditions that have been ‘porked’ by monopolists.

But tax cuts for that rarest of beasts, the employed US citizen will have even less positive effect. Our ‘economic desert’ has grown to the point where it can no longer support the number of people living here.

But this is true throughout the ‘Western World’ (as well as the ‘emerging nations’ that are trapped in capitalist economic models…that form the foundation of their political systems as well.

IF you do not directly influence the laws you will live under then you remain at the, er, ‘mercy’ of those who DO get to decide…and two hundred and thirty years of ‘representative democracy’ is enough to inform us quite clearly that this ‘experiment’ has failed…miserably.

In fact, the title of today’s offering comes from the opening tune of the opera of the same name, Les Miserables.

Particularly poignant is the stanza:

Look down, look down, your standing in your grave!

Don’t let others decide for you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Beat the Rich!

2012-02-04T12:40:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Ground Hog’s day marks the ‘middle’ of, the further north you go, a much longer, er, ‘heating season.’

Still, early February remains the ‘half-way mark’ (and if you do the math it’s six weeks until March 21, regardless of what the famous Pennsylvania rodent sees or doesn’t see…)

In the off chance that he doesn’t ‘see his shadow’ the ‘just around the corner’ proclamation still leaves us looking at a big honkin’ window. Could be three weeks, could be five and a half…depends on how far south you live…

Which brings us to the opposite side of the equation. If you live far enough north ‘heating season’ can last until the beginning of June! (Again, regardless of what the rodent sees…)

With the darkening approach of another ice-hard Saturday night in western Maine, the man on the telephone was pleading for help, again. His tank was nearly dry, and he and his disabled wife needed precious heating oil to keep warm. Could Ike help out? Again?

Ike Libby, the co-owner of a small oil company called Hometown Energy, ached for his customer, Robert Hartford. He knew what winter in Maine meant, especially for a retired couple living in a wood-frame house built in the 19th century. But he also knew that the Hartfords already owed him more than $700 for two earlier deliveries.

The oil man said he was very sorry. The customer said he understood. And each was left to grapple with a matter so mundane in Maine, and so vital: the need for heat. For the rest of the weekend, Mr. Libby agonized over his decision, while Mr. Hartford warmed his house with the heat from his electric stove’s four burners.

With nearly half of US households on some variety of ‘food assistance’ it is rather, er, ‘misleading’ to talk about a single struggling home, er, renter in the Boonies of Maine. (The article advises ‘the Hartfords’ moved there a couple of months ago from the Pacific Northwest.)

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have never been economic powerhouses, all three have ‘tourist centric’ economies. If the tourists don’t come, they starve.

So the on-going ‘depression’ has really spread things thin for those who rely on the ‘kindness of strangers’.

Worse, yesterday’s ‘politically motivated’ jobs report isn’t helping matters either.

You can’t ‘massage’ a bad economy away. You can no sooner lie your way to prosperity than you can print your way out of debt!

Yet they are attempting to do both!

Worse, you are supposed to believe their lies while they loot the country for everything they can grab!

(I mean, why lie if there’s nothing in it for you?)

Sure, we are, er, ‘surrounded’ by spineless ‘yes-men’ but the ‘nothing for nothing’ rule still applies.

Yeah, there’s a definite downside of being the ‘bearer of bad tidings’ but that downside multiplies a hundred fold if you are the bearer of a lie!

‘The public trust’ is an oxymoron if there ever was one but the French Revolution teaches us what happens when you, er, ‘disrespect the fate of the common man’…

It is then that you receive schooling in your own mortality.

Most would opine that we need not go that far to effect change (revolution) but ‘some’ would opine that we are already well beyond a remedy of ‘words alone’.

Some (like my humble self) would point to the last Great Depression and complain the reason we suffered from a repeat so soon is directly related to our failure to ‘properly punish’ the miscreants who caused the last rupture!

(Truth be told, good citizen, the criminals who crippled the global economy the last time got away ‘scott-free’, it was ‘assumed’ that the 90% marginal tax rate would serve as sufficient punishment.)

Sadly, they were, er, ‘mistaken’, much to our current chagrin.

Thus the ‘need’ to completely overhaul the system and how it works.

It is also well known that ‘convicting’ a wealthy individual and slapping them in irons is a ‘temporary measure’ at best. If you’ve got enough ‘clout’ you’ll serve a little time in ‘minimum security’ facility and you’ll be ‘pardoned’ by whatever executive (state or national) is departing office.

This, as the old saying goes, ‘will not do!’

Naturally, I belabor the obvious when I point out the ‘necessity’ of cleaning house prior to rebooting the system.

There will be ‘no change’ if we accept a new order designed by the same people who ran the old order into the ground!

We cannot, as a species, afford to lose the battle for basic human rights again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Optimism...unbound

2012-02-03T11:19:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the Dow is up 130 points this morning on news that the economy added a little less than a quarter of a million jobs last month!

Um, I don’t know how closely you’ve been watching the Help Wanted situation, good citizen, but there are NO JOBS out there, not in the paper, not on the net…there are no jobs, nowhere!

So how much you want to bet today’s ‘Happy Talk’ was deduced by the notoriously optimistic (and inevitably WRONG) ‘birth-death model’?

I belabor the obvious when I point out that the nonsense spewed by the CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA is HEAVILY POLITICIZED.

Update: this just in from Jesse's crossroads cafe

But that’s okay good citizen, who are YOU to tell them they’re NUTS?

Even their ‘corrections’ (which come months later, if at all) are, er, heavily ‘massaged’.

The guys who know where to look will have the story by tomorrow. A quarter of a million jobs? I ain’t buying it. If they admitted to kicking a quarter of a million job seekers off of unemployment (this month), that I’d believe!

But I don’t spend a lot of time parsing the fabrications of our self-professed ‘betters’, as it has been proven that the only way to get them to face reality is to kill ‘em!

How unfortunate is it that the sentiment is mutual?

No, When I’m not debunking lies, I’m busy popping the balloons of fancy sent aloft by our politicians to ‘distract us’ from our plight:

In many ways, the proposal is surprising, as few economists now consider manufacturing a potent engine for job growth in the United States. Manufacturers have added about 330,000 jobs in the country in the last two years. But the growth followed three decades of decline , during which companies like automakers and textile companies slashed payrolls by about 7.5 million. That has led many economists to say the recent turnaround might be nothing more than a correction from the depths of the recession. [Naturally, ‘the economists’ are WRONG.]

But the administration argues that big trends — like rising wages in developing countries, falling wages in America and a weaker dollar — have made moving work to or keeping work in the United States a much more viable option. And they say that manufacturers will continue to add jobs domestically, especially with a little help from Washington. [Just like you KNOW there’s a pony under that pile of manure! All you have to do is dig him out…]

“We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back,” Mr. Obama said in his address to Congress. “But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.” [snip]

Those trends have led some companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs in the last few years, a development called on-shoring. General Electric has decided to move production of a water heater to Louisville, Ky., from China, for instance. NCR, a maker of self-service kiosks and automated teller machines, has shifted jobs to Columbus, Ga.

GE, the company that lead the charge in the global race to the bottom, is (for the moment) moving the production line of ‘a water heater’ to Louisville Kentucky (count ‘em, one water heater!)

WTF good citizen!

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that our ‘business leaders’ already know its ‘too late’ to bring our jobs home.

I’ll even go a step further and opine that ‘most of ‘em’ are smart enough to know that they had best hustle overseas and join their capital as they have pretty much ‘worn out their welcome’ here in the land of the ‘fucked and mighty sore about it!’

I don’t use the keyword ‘class war’ on almost every post because I like it or because I think it‘s cool…

Just saying, ya know?

Our jobs aren’t coming home until we slam the trade doors shut and that’s a fact!

The good news is we have more than plenty of ‘labor’ just itching to start building a life of their own!

(Something they’ve been deprived of since THE CONSERVATIVE COCKSUCKERS ‘exported’ their future!)

How ironic is it that those same conservatives are trying to convince today’s kids that it was their parents and social security that are responsible for their bleak prospects?

Which is to opine that the party of ‘one in five’ should NEVER win another election…but this leaves us with the awkward position of there not being anyone else on the playing field.

The current incumbent could have a D tattooed on his forehead and that still wouldn’t transform him into a Democrat!

His accomplishments, as feeble as they are, have been dwarfed by all the things he hasn’t done.

His ‘mandate’ was NOT healthcare, his mandate was JUSTICE!

Maybe pushing Romney Care through Congress was what he had to ‘pay’ Hillary for stepping aside in 2008, but we can only speculate.

Not that there’s an alternative but can we really afford four more years of Dr. Do Nothing?

[I’m sticking to my guns, it is ‘unlikely’ we will survive as a civilization for another four years, we ‘probably’ won’t see/survive another ‘sham election’ due to political unrest alone. The system is obviously broken and the people thirst for justice!]

If it comes down to ‘the corporate way or no way…’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Watching and Waiting

2012-02-02T12:29:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

It’s not particularly productive to review, over and over again, the madness that passes for, er, ‘leadership’ in our two-bit society.

A madness reflected in in the global economy

Here is the ‘situation on the ground’ today:

Despite successful bond auctions on Thursday in France and Spain, investors still harbor a huge amount of uncertainty relating to Europe’s debt crisis, analysts said, so recent economic data from the United States has been a positive.

"The fact that the U.S. is growing has been another source of relief," said Jane Foley, an analyst at Rabobank International. "A disappointing number tomorrow could spark a retrenchment in appetite for risk."

The consensus in the markets was that the American economy generated around 170,000 jobs during January. Though that would be unspectacular for an economy recovering from its worst recession since World War II, the amount of jobs being created would be up from levels seen just a few months ago.

We’re going to tackle this a line at a time (because it definitely needs ‘translating.’)

Successful bond auctions (to themselves) only provides the ‘appearance/illusion’ positive market activity so this is meaningless, like shuffling a deck of cards without dealing any.

Investors have ZERO ‘uncertainty’ regarding the European debt crisis, they KNOW the situation is totally hopeless, the ‘uncertainty’ is centered on the assurances they have been given that the people won’t revolt when the inevitable restructuring deal is presented to them.

Another aspect of this ‘uncertainty’ is centered on the United States and its current ‘reserve currency’ status.

The lack of an alternative is the ONLY factor providing an otherwise empty vessel with ‘the appearance of prosperity.’

The ONLY thing growing in the US is the Fed’s balance sheet, why this should be a ‘relief’ to anyone shall likely remain a mystery.

Perhaps the ‘relief’ comes from the fact that there isn’t ‘blood in the streets’ (yet.)

A ‘disappointing’ number? Is 170,000 anything to be pleased with when the economy needs to add 150,000 jobs EVERY MONTH just to keep up with population growth?

Um, the amount of jobs is ‘up’ from the numbers posted just a few short months ago…

What does the (corporate shill) overlook here?

Um, we could start with this being the THIRD CONSECUTIVE ‘jobless recovery’ in a row, (dating back to 1990.) Should we also point out that the labor force today remains smaller than it was BEFORE the second ‘jobless recovery’?

Would it be ‘nit-picking’ to point out that the bulk of the jobs, er, ‘created’ are both minimum wage AND part-time?

Would it be ‘partisan’ to point out that nearly HALF of all US households are participating in some kind of food assistance program (because, increasingly, their jobs don’t pay them enough to cover their living expenses AND buy food…)

The list goes on and on.

Yet each day the corporate owned media does its best to spin a positive outlook on an increasingly dark future.

More with less does indeed have an ‘end’ good citizen…and it ain’t pretty!

If you’re lucky, the ground won’t come up and hit you while you continue to ‘weigh your options’, such as they are…or aren’t.

The part that’s going to suck about your inevitable ‘face plant’ is that you won’t be ‘flying’ immediately prior to the Earth smacking you in the kisser!

Your ‘bite the dust’ moment will be due to (extreme) hunger combined with a degree of ‘over-exertion’.

You will (inevitably) ignore the hunger far longer than is healthy, causing/resulting in a collapse from exhaustion.

The only thing more difficult than experiencing this personally will be watching it happen to your kids and knowing that it is YOUR fault!

Which is to point out that it is not just the country that is suffering from an acute lack of leadership…the exact same problem ORIGINATES in the home!

YOU are NOT in a position to put a stop to this ‘lunacy/mismanagement’…but you are far from ‘powerless’.

If YOU are not prospering in the current economy then YOU and YOURS have been ‘marked for death’!

And if you don’t think this is a life or death situation, I beg you to think again!

We’re ALREADY in a position where a vast majority of people CAN’T AFFORD to buy food and pay their other expenses…

So what do you suppose is going to happen when the price of oil doubles this summer?

Fuel oil expense will make crops ‘unprofitable’ to cultivate much less harvest, so farmers will cut back on what they sow…resulting in food shortages…which will drive up prices.

Since a lot of the world’s food supply is now global this sort of a ‘cascading collapse’ won’t necessarily start here in the ‘world’s breadbasket’…

More, er, disturbingly the famine won’t quite be ‘global’, nor will farmers themselves be much effected by it (because they sell their produce on the ‘global market’.

No, the famine will be centered here, in the world’s newest Banana Republic and it will be caused directly by ‘currency manipulation’.

How this will occur with the US retaining the world’s reserve currency status defies logic…but so does the Dow hovering in the 12,000 point range.

This is why the ‘everything’s fine’ meme is so disturbing (and why I keep putting that bee in your bonnet!)

If not you, who and if not now, when?

One thing is certain, we can’t wait much longer.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mesmerized...

2012-02-01T12:14:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Let it suffice to say that the destruction of our civilization proceeds ‘on schedule’. When this process will be completed depends on what degree of dysfunction you use to measure the destruction with.

The ‘political’ destruction of our civilization was completed decades ago, the financial destruction is almost complete (although the destruction of our economy is almost a decade behind us…if not for the financial sector the whole place would be nothing more than a smoking crater.)

Thus do we have to deal with stupid headlines like this!

Wall Street Ahead on Manufacturing Sectors

Figures released Wednesday showed that China's manufacturing sector was growing steadily and Europe's was performing better than forecast. That gave investors hope that American manufacturing figures later in the day would show the world's largest economy continued its recovery. [Recovery? What recovery?]

Investors were expected to also focus on the monthly hiring figures from the private payrolls agency ADP that showed a gain of 170,000 jobs. [Every month this figure is all over the map AND they only use it when it's favorable, in case you hadn’t noticed…]

A focus on the United States economy would prove a welcome diversion for some traders from developments in Europe's debt crisis.

And perhaps more disturbing is the ‘persistent disconnect’ that remains embedded in investor’s minds that a collapse of the Euro-Zone will ‘miraculously’ not suck the rest of the world under with it.

Face it good citizen, this is an exercise in ‘Let’s pretend’ writ large (if not HUGE!)

Understand that this morning’s markets opened ‘up’ quite a bit on the above (‘decidedly hopeful’), er, forecast.

You’d think the markets would be considerably ‘less robust’ if they took an honest look at how badly mis-managed the private sector is

Have a gander at this fiasco:

The federal government signaled Tuesday that it was ready to fight to prevent American Airlines from using bankruptcy to shed its pension plans.

While American has not said it intends to force the government to take over its pension plans, Joshua Gotbaum, director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, said he was hoping to get out in front of any such move by the airline. The agency is already operating with a $23 billion deficit and has said it would bear an additional $9 billion loss if American terminated all four of its employees’ plans, which cover 130,000 people.

Last month, American’s parent company, AMR Corporation, said that it was contributing just $6.5 million to the pension plans, far short of the $97 million contribution that it would need to make if it were outside bankruptcy.

The most frightening aspect of this story is that American Airlines is NOT ‘an exception’! Every major multi-national CORPORATION is following the same ‘game plan’ that allows them to divest themselves from any and all obligations to their employees.

AND THE FUCKS USE ‘THE SAVINGS’ TO PAY THEMSELVES BONUSES WITH!

WTF!

Now the public (most of whom will never see a nickel of private pension money) will be stuck holding this odious bag of corporate neglect!

No irony should be lost on how quickly after Nixon opened the doors of trade with (then communist) China that this, er, ‘repository’ for, er, ‘neglected’ corporate obligations was established…

Which serves as a pretty good yardstick when we measure how long corruption has been the rule rather than the exception in Washington DC.

If we ‘rewind’ back to the beginning of the practice of ‘licensing’ business endeavors we’d find that the original purpose of requiring registration was to protect BOTH the public AND the EMPLOYEES from the, um, ‘less than honest’ entrepreneur.

What’s truly bizarre is how things like paid holidays, vacations and healthcare benefits were all, er, ‘extracted’ from employers AFTER the personal income tax rate was raised to 90%.

(Ironically, the logic WAS it’s better to give it to the employees than to hand it over to the government! But now that 'obstacle' has been removed…and we’re (society) right back to where we were before it was put in place!)

No irony should be lost on the fact that since ‘rolling back’ taxes on the wastrels at the top of our society , workers have suffered an endless stream of ‘grab-backs’. Most holidays are now unpaid and vacations are almost ‘extinct’, just as sick time and healthcare benefits have also disappeared!

Not that the ‘job creators’ have denied themselves ‘the good life’.

In fact, a huge part of our economic malaise is due directly to the wealthy being unable to spend it as fast as they, er, ~~steal~~ ‘earn’ it.

Needless to say, if you shrink the economy down to where it only supports the mythical ‘one percent’ (it’s actually considerably less than that!) you’re in for some serious, er, ‘civil unrest’.

How can the stock markets (in the US) be hovering in the 12,700 range in light of how badly mis-managed US corporations are?

Incompetent and over-paid is NOT a recipe for a healthy society…

But (like most everything else) that’s not Their problem, it’s YOURS!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Gulp!

2012-01-31T12:23:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

What a day, my ‘homepage’ is crowing about how stocks are experiencing their best January ever…but apparently they aren’t talking about today, specifically.

Because today stocks are where they were yesterday, in the dumper.

But that’s not the half of it according to Mr. Williams:

No. 414: Hyperinflation Special Report 2012 January 25th, 2012

U.S. Hyperinflationary Great Depression Moves Ever Closer

U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve Effectively Have Destroyed Global Confidence in the U.S. Dollar

Systemic-Solvency and Economic Crises Have Not Abated

Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place;

2014 Remains the Outside Timing for Same MORE…

Makes you want to subscribe, don’t it?

Isn’t that paragraph dire enough? What is Mr. Williams suggesting by adding ‘more’ to the end of that?

With every (Libertarian Idiot) out there screaming about ‘deflation’ why is the righteous Mr. Williams still calling for ‘hyper-inflation’?

The answer to that question rests with the question of how do you ‘keep the peace’ after you’ve irreparably broken the economy?

And that answer is ‘print baby, print!’

And not just greenbacks! We’re talking the whole shebang here, food stamps, unemployment checks and operating expenses for the national educational system.

‘Drop’ any one of those balls and the very next day you will have BLOOD IN THE STREETS!

You’ll KNOW things have gone to hell when there’s a tank idling in your driveway…but not to worry, Punky won’t be there long once he figures out nobody is protecting HIS wife and kids and she’s panicking because there’s a riot going on in front of their house! (and the cops aren’t responding…because their paychecks bounced, you know the rest.)

Punky already knows what his ‘weekend warrior’ CO will tell him if he requests permission to go home and save his wife and kids…so he has to make an ‘executive decision’ on his own…and what the hell, they gave him a tank to baby sit…come in right handy during a riot, wouldn’t it?

Of course, no self-respecting commander would permit his troops to have personal cell phones in their possession during such a critical deployment, that’s why you know what’s going on, Punky used YOUR phone to call home!

He may or may not have hung up when he found out what was going on ‘back at the ranch’…

Probably not, just beat feet out the door, gunned the engine on the tank and tore up your front lawn as he headed down your street towards his house (in another part of the state!)

If not another state altogether, opinions vary as to how ‘smart’ the people leading such an event would be…the consensus is ‘not particularly’.

Unless they laid it out ahead of time, starving certain states while ‘feeding others’ so the local guard could be called up to assist a neighboring state before that state was flushed down the toilet.

Least that’s how I’d do it if I was presented with the task…After half of the states were secure under martial law you could seize the rest without too much force/fight.

California and, ironically (Super Bowl host) Illinois are both riding the razor’s edge of insolvency, both having had their tax bases gutted by thirty years of Republican/ Libertarian rule.

(Which would be to suggest that both states have already been ‘targeted’ for what my be best described as a ‘controlled collapse’.)

But, I digress…

The critical thing Mr. Williams points out is “Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place” which is to say the ‘groundwork has already been laid’.

If that doesn’t spell ‘deliberate’ then I don’t know what does!

Have I mentioned that our society is/has been extremely ‘mismanaged’?

Only once or twice, eh? I think you need to catch up on your reading!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Horse-pucky!

2012-01-30T12:12:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

There must be something to Ilargi’s latest post where he warns of “The report that will Blow up the Euro-zone.”

Because this morning markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets (again)

But the article outlining today’s troubled markets seems to be suffering from schizophrenia:

Wall Street stock indexes opened weakly Monday ahead of a European Union summit as Greece and Germany sparred over budget measures for Athens. [I guess you could call down a 120 ‘weakly’; although eighty years ago this would have been cause to jump out of your 7th story window!]

E.U. leaders were to sign off on a permanent rescue fund for the euro zone and to agree on a balanced budget rule in national legislation. But traders sensed some hesitation.

"Resolution for Greece is now up in the air, and that's causing some concern," said Alan Lancz, president of investment advisory firm Alan B. Lancz & Associates Inc. in Toledo, Ohio. "We could give up the gains we've seen so far this month if there ends up being no progress." [snip (the blogosphere has warned repeatedly that the ‘cure’ for Grecian situation wasn’t large enough, their eviscerated economy simply can‘t afford to pay back what it supposedly owes, it’s as ‘simple’ as that!) this is also where the article dives across the median into the realm of ‘happy talk!]

Consumer spending in the United States was flat in December as households took advantage of the largest rise in income in nine months [a fucking half a percent!] to boost their savings, setting the tone for a slowdown in demand early in 2012. [That’s not the song they were singing in December! Last month they were proclaiming ‘the consumer is back!’, like Christmas had nothing to do with it, idiots!]

Wall Street ended little changed on Friday as investors saw dips in the market as an opportunity to buy into what has been a strong first month of 2012.

Omitted from this report was the additional disclaimer that the Doctors think the insanity may be ‘temporary’…(but what do they know?)

Current market conditions make insanity a ‘prerequisite’ for being an ‘investor’…

Which really doesn’t tell us anything since we long ago determined that the stock markets are and have been, totally divorced from reality.

Which brings us to another disturbing phenomenon…that bar that keeps getting elevated, the bar of ‘shock and awe’.

Markets dropped 700 points (when TARP didn’t go the way they wanted it to) only to recover, ‘within a few hours’.

With the bar ‘set’ at 700, where would they have to go to ‘shock’ the average (which is to say clueless) consumer?

We’d probably say double that would shock most of the clueless (although a repeat of the 700 point drop would likely send most into mental ‘vapor-lock’ [I’m trying to think but nothing happens!] over the ‘real world implications’ of such a dramatic event. (Even though the market is 11,000 points ‘over valued’ and the current 12,000 [+] point valuation is more a reflection of the weakness of our currency than of the strength of our economy!)

Which is why all of this is so disturbing, good citizen. They yank our chains mightily and we still fail to recognize that the ‘joke’ is on us!

Oh how they must howl with laughter over our collective stupidity!

Still, it is a phyrric victory at best…who wants to spend their entire life surrounded by clueless dolts?

Yet this doesn’t stop them from regularly playing the rest of us for stooges!

Even after it stops being, er, ‘amusing‘.

Which is to point out how cathartic calling bullshit on someone can be! If you want to stop the relentless barrage of horse-pucky our politicians keep flinging it’s as simple as crying bull shit when you hear it!

Don’t be shy, speak up! If the bull-shitter (and your typical winger) CAN’T back up what they claim, your charge of Bull Shit stands! (And we ALL win for a change!)

If enough of us stand up to the few (who must privately laugh themselves silly over their claiming the mantle of ‘seriousness’ for themselves) then, maybe, we can turn this disaster around!

He who claims to ‘never joke’, IS a joke! Which is to call them what they are, ‘jokers’.

What the one percenters must find absolutely hilarious is how the rising market (which pays off their politicians) is being touted as an indicator of the ‘return of prosperity’ (albeit, a prosperity no one can see) when the only ones getting fat are our sell-out politicians!

Are these assholes the ‘Masters of Smoke and Mirrors’ or are the rest of us simply ‘too polite’ to shut these grifters down?

Few are ‘fooled’, our standard of living is NOT reflected in the lofty stock market, which has become cause for ‘civil unrest’.

Criminals are a curse on every society but criminals at the helm of a society are intolerable!

And I’d be doing you all a grave disservice if I didn’t point out that this isn’t the first time our society suffered from a rotten and corrupt head.

What you should all marvel over is how rapidly it returned, only fifty years after it ‘pretended’ to go to sleep…although the guilty party themselves reckon it was only forty years…

Which is to say this time ‘we won’t be fooled again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

OWS smear?

2012-01-29T12:28:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The OWS movement has dropped out of sight despite (locally) one of the mildest winters in memory, (and I’m pretty old!)

Yet we have this snippet from today’s NY Times:

Police spokesman Jeff Thomason says most of the arrests came around 8 p.m. That's when police took about 100 protesters into custody as they marched through the city's downtown, with some entering a YMCA building.

About 20 demonstrators were arrested earlier in the afternoon, after police say they threw rocks, bottles and other objects at officers and tore down fencing.

Police say three officers were injured. Officers used tear gas and "flash" grenades on the protesters after they refused to leave.

Um, seriously good citizen, you don’t need to follow the link there are only a couple of more sentences than you see above…but it is worth the trip to see the single photograph that accompanies the article.

And what is ‘prominent’ in this photo of a makeshift barricade?

The ‘circle A’ flag of Anarchists! (Usually Black and Red but this one is Black and White.)

Anarchists come in a kaleidoscope of flavors and the corporate media has yet to accurately report which, er, ‘clic/subgroup’ is causing trouble.

Today’s bunch is a prime example as they have been ‘lumped in’ with the OWS movement!

If there’s one thing we know about the ‘99 percent’ it is that they have remained ‘apolitical’.

Anarchy, as a political movement, has a different problem. It has an ‘image problem’ created by people with more in common with Libertarians than with ‘true’ anarchists.

You see, this subgroup that erroneously believes in ‘no rules’ (A libertarian doctrine) has no relationship to true anarchists, who believe in ’rules without RULERS…BIG fucking difference!

It may puzzle an, er, ‘ignorant’ reader to learn that I am an Anarchist and have composed a list of rules to replace predatory capitalism with.

The public is largely ignorant of what ‘true Anarchy’ is about because it goes against the ’do as I say and not as I do’ style the capitalist favors.

In fact, so, er, ‘threatening’ is this idea of (true) Anarchy that capitalists have spend centuries doing unspeakable acts and laying them at the feet of ‘anarchists’!

Case in point, WWI was laid at the feet of a ‘bomb tossing anarchist’.

Which may have been true, in a political affiliation sense…but ever since and repeatedly the corporate owned media has not missed an opportunity to ‘demonize’ so-called anarchists and Anarchy along with it.

It is disturbing to see supposedly ‘educated individuals’ misuse the term ‘anarchy’ as a synonym for the term ‘chaos’.

Their meanings couldn’t be further apart! (Unless you want to give the gullible public the impression that they mean the same thing…)

Like money, alternative politics receives seriously short shift in our education system…

Ironically, Anarchists will not make the same ‘mistake’. They will insure children are taught all about the evils of ‘more for me’ capitalism and its wicked hand maiden, ‘representative democracy’ which robs you of your choices!

But YOU’VE been ‘raised to believe’ that there is NOTHING superior to our (madly dysfunctional) style of (if they don’t like it we’ll just ram it up their ass) ‘democracy’…a variety our leaders are so fond of that they have even started ‘exporting’ it!

We should all learn to love ‘democracy dispensed from the barrel of a gun’…

Or else!

How about the Arab Spring that has been widely advertised in Western Papers as a ‘cry for democratic freedom!’

I think the people of the world have seen for themselves PRECISELY the kind of results ‘Western Democracy’ produces, so it is highly ‘counter-intuitive’ to posit that they desire to, er, ‘imitate’ it.

How unfortunate is it the we keep butting up against the central premise of (limited) ‘participatory democracy’?

Perhaps a better question would be if you know what, precisely, that central premise is?

That premise is ‘They ( the people in charge) BELIEVE (with all of their hearts) that YOU are STUPID (beyond belief/words)!

That is the ‘central premise’ of (limited participation) ‘representative democracy’.

Because the resulting ‘mess’ is (ever and always) the Representatives fault!

And YOU, (idiot) keep voting for new representatives (HOPING something is going to change (besides the drapes in their office…)

You know what the definition of insanity is, don’t you?

It is doing the same thing, over and over again, each time expecting a different result!

So the REAL question you’ll be faced with this November is…

ARE YOU INSANE?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pardon Me?

2012-01-28T13:29:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

As old as judges themselves, today’s topic will be the slippery slope of ‘pardons’…which may or may not be made public…at the discretion of the, er, ‘co-conspirators’.

Which is to wonder aloud, how much would you be willing to bet W. hasn’t been prosecuted for ‘war crimes’ BECAUSE he already has a ‘pardon’ in his pocket, issued by the sitting ‘jellyfish-in-chief’?

I mean his Dad (H.W.) ‘pardoned’ Reagan for his crimes against the state, so pardoning your predecessor is probably something that comes with the turf…done ’automatically’ on an ‘as needed’ basis.

But it begs the question, what does this say about our justice system?

One beneficiary, Burton Waldon, killed an 8-month-old boy in an alcohol-induced crash in 2001. Mr. Waldon, a high school senior at the time, pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence. He is a member of the prominent Hill Brothers Construction Company family, big-money political donors who give mostly to Republicans, including Mr. Barbour. An uncle of Mr. Waldon, Kenneth W. Hill Sr., sought and received a pardon from President George W. Bush in 2006, erasing a federal income tax conviction.

It is in this paragraph that we see the, er, ‘rationale’ behind the very existence of the, er, ‘executive pardon’…bad things sometimes happen to RICH/well-connected people.

(The understanding is seldom do you find a rich individual who IS NOT also ‘well-connected’…although the ‘soon to be bankrupt’ lottery winner is the only possible exception that comes to mind.)

Thus is it well-known THROUGHOUT HISTORY, that a ‘rich man’ will never see the inside of a jail cell…and, thanks to the rich man’s ‘connections’, he can also have the public record of his, er, ‘misfortune’ sponged clean…

To which I ask, Is THIS ‘Justice’?

You KNOW it’s not…but you can’t argue with (worthless) money, can you?

(This is one of the principal reasons why there will be no way to transfer funds between individuals under A Simple Plan.)

Equally as disturbing to some of you is that you will be judged ‘on your record’ your whole life through. If you’re a ‘miserable bastard’, difficult to get along with and do the absolute minimum required of you, don’t be surprised if you ‘reap what you sow’ come promotion time.

But I digress, we were discussing our badly broken justice system (and I get sidetracked when the opportunity to point out changes presents itself!)

I treat this subject delicately because people have an unfortunate tendency to ‘transfer’, they put themselves in the position of, er, ‘being able’ to buy justice…and it makes them more tolerant of the practice!

A pardon doesn’t make you a ‘better person’ it merely enables you to ‘pass yourself off’ as one.

How ironic is it that people (often the only ones) who venture into the public spotlight (not as ‘pop stars’ but as politicians) have the, er, ‘connections’ to, er, ‘sugar-coat’ their public images.

As we have witnessed, often these people’s private lives are, er, ‘exposed’ by those privy to the existence of such skeletons.

What we don’t know is how susceptible to ‘blackmail’ these people are. Who or what would they betray to keep their secrets, secret?

Because that’s where this sort of bullshit leads to.

It is also not the kind of thing you want ‘hidden’ in a decision maker’s closet.

(This is why this power will no longer rest with ‘select individuals’. Those who must live under the law will vote directly on the law!)

Legislators are TOTALLY UNNECESSARY! (In fact they are an impediment to Liberty!)

YOU cannot be ‘free’ if you are denied your ability to choose!

But again I digress! (Sort of a ‘hobby’ [although others may consider it a ‘fault’] of mine it seems.)

The very first ‘pillar of civilization’ is ‘equality’, the second pillar is Justice…to the point that we expect NOTHING LESS than ‘EQUAL JUSTICE under the law…and this ‘pardon bullshit’ makes a mockery of that!

I admit, it’s ‘nice’ to think that were we prosperous enough, we’d have the ability to ‘sanitize’ our pasts but I’d rather know about somebody’s skeletons than find out about them ‘after the fact’…(usually AFTER you’ve been sold down the river!)

Yet another ‘grievous flaw’ of our current political system.

But let’s back up a step or two and return to the ‘did he or didn’t he’ question of if Mr. Obama pardoned Mr. Bush?

Does the idea itself piss you off?

It should.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Oh, and if you want to alter the course of the current clusterfuck then your ongoing support for ASP would be appreciated.

Step one is to ‘spread the word!’

Debating Capitalism

2012-01-27T11:42:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

While the Dow approaches the 13,000 mark (for absolutely no discernable reason besides ‘inflation’) oil remains over a hundred dollars a barrel and gold just returned to the $1,700 (+) an ounce range.

All pretty good for a busted financial system, wouldn’t you say? Um, actually it is the same badly broken financial system, complete with its propensity for ‘creative accounting’, that has delivered us to the very doorstep of economic collapse.

Combine that with spineless, clueless leadership and you have a perfect recipe for disaster! The (stupid) bastards have no freaking idea which parts to trim and which ones to beef up…so they do NOTHING, pushing us ever closer to the brink.

Yup, that’s right good citizen, they can’t even ‘slow us down’ (without risking a total meltdown…)

So what do you suppose will be the ‘end result’ of this unseemly debate?

If we learned anything from the 1930s, it was that governments cannot shrug their shoulders and watch as their own people are consigned to unemployment. I find it tragic and astonishing that some governments need to learn this lesson again.

Nor should we forget the causes of the current growth and debt crisis as we seek to put our economies on a more sustainable footing.

Both the United States and Britain suffered because their economies were overly reliant on the financial sector’s artificial profits; living standards for the many worsened while the economic rewards skewed to the top 1 percent; a capitalist model encouraged short-term decision-making oriented toward quarterly profits rather than long-term health; and vested interests — from giant banks to media moguls —were deemed too big to fail or too powerful to challenge.

We need to recognize that the trickle-down promise of conservative theorists has turned into a gravity-defying reality in which wealth has flowed upward disproportionately and, too often, undeservedly. To address properly the squeeze in middle-class incomes on both sides of the Atlantic requires fresh thinking from governments about how people train for their working lives and what a living wage should be.

Um, without going into specifics it is pretty obvious Mr. Milliband is totally fucking clueless…although he did nail the main target.

How sad is it good citizen that Ol’ Ed probably thinks all we need to do is hit some imaginary ‘reset switch’ and the system will straighten itself out.

The time to attempt that was BEFORE they allowed their core industries to be off-shored (and the remainder were forced out of business by (artificially) cheap imports.)

Which is to opine that this whole globalization thing really wasn’t given a lot of thought after the up front profitability of cut rate labor was sold.

Now huge economic deserts threaten to swallow Western civilization whole and the only reset button capable of reversing this deadly trend is the ‘dreaded’ (by the corporate media) Trade Protectionism.

A domestic population that is denied the opportunity to participate in the local economy WILL REVOLT…

And THAT’S what the idiots at Davos are ~~shaking in their shoes~~ talking about.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, NONE of these fools are discussing how to fix the current disaster. At best there may be some discussion of how to best ‘effectively suppress’ civil uprisings…along with some strategizing over what to do afterwards.

(How many peasants should you hang to ‘pacify’ the rest? How ironic is it that the answer is NONE?)

How unfortunate is it that all they need do is lift a page from the history books…and repeat the mistakes they find there.

NONE of them are willing to give up their monopolies in exchange for their lives, which is as sad as it is stupid…but once again I will remind you that there is ZERO correlation between wealth and intelligence/wisdom.

I’d take that a step further and opine that you have to be more than a little bit stupid/foolish to pursue enormous wealth at the expense of everyone else…

Think about that one for a while…although a Libertarian will never get it.

(You need be missing a couple of screws to embrace Libertarianism in the first place!)

Which may explain much when taken in the context of our totally mismanaged and utterly screwed up economic situation!

Yes, good citizen, from a ‘screwed up’ point of view there’s probably nobody more pleased that the wheels are about to fly off than those responsible for it happening!

(The broken economy/justice system jeopardizes what they’ve already stolen! The ‘trick’ is to be ‘the owner of record’ when order is restored… )

IF the new system even permits ‘private property’ (and NO sustainable model will.)

But our Davos attendees aren’t seeking ‘workable’ solutions, they are seeking ways to extend their rule (and they’re convinced the answer to this puzzle lies in significantly reducing the, er, ‘surplus population’.)

Which is to belabor the obvious, good citizen, don’t let ANYONE confuse you with a statistic (that they are bent on ‘erasing’!)

Truth be told, good citizen, the one percent is the MOST USELESS segment of our society, in EVERY imaginable way.

Now that it’s ‘game on’ we must do our utmost to ‘eradicate them’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Facts not in evidence...

2012-01-26T13:57:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though the stock markets are being ‘juiced’ again for the upcoming elections…left to our imagination is whether or not the artificial high is being created so it can collapse dramatically a month or so before the election…

Although how that will help any of the specific bozo’s running against the incumbent remains a mystery.

Perhaps it isn’t intended to aid a particular candidate but intended to foster an ‘Anybody but him’ environment…

With that lens in our trusty kaleidoscope, let us have a gander at today’s offering

Another Day of Surreality on Wall Street

OK, let's try and put this into terms that a fifth-grader (or even a Wall Street MBA) might understand.

If the economy is recovering -- or even close to doing so -- why is the Federal Reserve maintaining that short-term interest rates will remain "exceptionally low" until late-2014 -- that is, below the levels that prevailed at the beginning (or even the middle) of every single recovery in the post-war era, as well as below their multi-decade median of five percent?

Why are investors piling into stocks and growing increasingly bullish at a time when the Fed has essentially confirmed that their optimistic assumptions about the economy are not in synch with reality?

If, as Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke says, there is still "enormous" negative equity in U.S. housing and, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner says, "housing finance is still a mess," why did homebuilding stocks today rally more than twice as much as the overall market, and why have they gained nearly 90 percent since October?

I can repeat ‘our financial system is completely broken’ a billion times but if nobody listens…oh fucking well!

Which begs the opposite question, good citizen…what the (F) would you do if the corporate owned media did announce, without elaboration, that our financial system had ‘collapsed’?

Let’s suppose we went a teensy bit further and added that our money (the US dollar) had been stripped of its ‘reserve currency’ status and had been ‘devalued’ by a factor of a thousand (making every existing dollar worth a tenth of a single cent.)

How ‘fucked’ would you be then?

Which is to ask what would your bank balance look like if you shifted the decimal point four places to the left?

Don’t shake your head in disbelief, they knocked 13 zeroes out of Argentina’s monetary base…and we’re only talking four here!

The part that will gnaw on your ass is you didn’t see any four decimal place jump in your standard of living…how the fuck did they settle on four?

Look no further than the (good for nothing) stock markets!

Or would it be more accurate to say the ‘delusionally priced’ stock market?

It is not a ‘coincidence’ that the nations that are in the deepest financial difficulty also have stock valuations that are totally out of whack with reality.

But this is a ‘contrived’ situation, we’re all being ‘gamed’…(although no one is going to find the end result the least bit amusing. I’m sticking to my guns, the bastards are trying to get the herd to thin itself!)

But repeating “the bastards are trying to kill ‘you’” won’t register any better than belaboring the obvious and reminding you constantly that ‘we’re broke’ does…(or doesn’t as the case may be.)

Um, it is also useless to point out that security at Davos is ‘insane’, reflecting how paranoid the ‘silver spoon toting class’ has become…

Not that this actually matters, I strongly suspect the people responsible for the current ‘brink of collapse’ situation have seldom, if ever, ‘bothered’ with Davos (such pandering is beneath them.)

They’d no sooner ‘beg for their lives’ than they’d spare yours!

Which is to say they will not ask for mercy because they will not show any.

Winner take all, straight up!

The word ‘compromise’ (or ‘surrender’ or ‘lose’ for that matter!) isn’t in their dictionary…how sad is it good citizen that these people also ‘believe’ ‘the law’ is whatever they say it is, at the moment they say it.

Their law is for you, not for them!

But I digress (as usual.)

What I hope to impress upon you is that you are being ‘deceived’ (not that there is much you can actually do about it…legally) and to be/remain ‘on guard’.

While the current ‘uncertainty’ is nerve-wracking, your future survival depends on your ability to ‘shrug’ this sort of nonsense off.

It is also important to stress that those of you who are NOT killed outright in the initial chaos (of collapse) will be enslaved (and die under inhumane conditions imposed on you by your so called ‘protectors’.)

You are better off banding together with your neighbors and pooling your meager resources than reporting to an official ‘Aid Station’.

They will become known as the ‘concentration camps’ of the 21st century.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Stated

2012-01-25T12:24:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

You don’t suppose there was any reason for the opening of the Davos conference yesterday ‘coinciding’ with last night’s performance of ‘Barack in Wonderland’ , do you?

Okay, it’s an election year but the fact remains he would have scored a lot more points with the electorate by telling it like it is than he did by simply regurgitating the bullshit the oligarchs have the corporate owned media spew!

But naturally, I expect too much! Reality dictates that the only ‘truth’ discussed last night was the ‘official’ truth, as it is handed down to us by our lords and masters.

Even the ‘Progressive’ take on last night’s speech is more than a little disturbing:

In the final State of the Union message President Barack Obama will deliver this term, he came out swinging against the obstructionism of Republicans in Congress, and spoke to the growing gap between America's rich and poor.

With a delivery that often sounded like he was imploring America to believe in itself again, Obama gave an address that may not have been his most inspirational, but got the job done. He laid out a strong case for his programs and his administration’s efforts to revive the economy, and made the GOP look small and petty at the expense of everyday people.

As any of you who watched last night know, there were two ‘shows’ in progress, one of words and the other of actions…along with many ‘curious’ (as well as telling) facial expressions.

If the Republicans were ‘embarrassed’ by any of the president’s accusations they did a mighty good job of covering it up!

They also demonstrated for the nation their ‘hive mentality’ by rising and (most conspicuously) NOT rising ‘in lock step’ throughout last night’s speech. They did this with such ‘perfect precision’ that they had to have been told ahead of time which individual they were to mimic! (I’m guessing it was Beaner-Boy!)

I mean seriously good citizen, it was exactly like watching the Borg in action!

Okay, we covered the ‘robotic action’ but did you ever see such a collection of people that ALL looked like ‘deer in the headlights’?

And I’m sure we’d all like to know what was going on in Hillary’s head, given her sour puss through most of last night’s speech!

Moving on:

Hearing the Base
The president, it seems, has heard the hew and cry from his base, coming out strong against the banks, and laying the economic devastation he inherited at the feet of his predecessor.

Now how ironic is it, good citizen, that the very same publication this came from announced yesterday that the President was a Democrat with ‘conservative values’?

That his base was not ‘liberal democrats’ but ‘conservative independents’!

Which brings us full circle to the question of just who the fuck are these ‘progressives’ and what, specifically, are they selling?

(Because it is suddenly obvious that there is no such thing as a [genuine] Democrat OR a ‘liberal’ in politics these days!)

The Democrats of FDR era are history good citizen…and they were forced out of politics entirely by the same ‘big money’ that brought us Citizens United!

The broom of the (capitalist) ‘Reagan Revolution’ has swept very clean indeed!

And THIS is what it left behind:

Republicans Bearish on America

It is customary for any president, in delivering this annual speech to a joint session of Congress, to say, somewhere near the top, "the state of our union is strong." Obama held a variation of that line until the end, starting instead with the more tentative, "the state of our union is getting stronger." However, when compared with the GOP response, delivered by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, that was outright cheerleading. Daniels called the state of the union "grave." Not even Herman Cain (you thought he was gone?) went that far in his Tea Party Express response to the state of the union. (Cain simply said the state of the union was "not good.")

How disturbing is it good citizen that these virtual robots have been, er, ‘handed’ the high ground of stating the truth about the economy that THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTROYING?

Well, that was the, er, ‘Progressive’ take on last night’s SOTU address, here’s what the so-called ‘liberal media’ had to say:

Declaring that “we’ve come too far to turn back now,” the president used his final State of the Union address before he faces the voters to showcase the extent to which he will try to contrast his core economic principles with those of his Republican rivals in a time of deep economic uncertainty. While many Americans remain disappointed with the state of the economy and the president’s handling of it, Mr. Obama nonetheless tried to bring into relief the difference between where the country was when he took over and where it is now.

“The state of our union is getting stronger,” he declared in time-honored tradition. “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.” He pointed to renewed hiring by American manufacturers and — borrowing the “built to last” phrase from the auto industry he helped save — he sketched out, albeit vaguely, what he called a blueprint for economic growth in which the wealthy play by the same rules as ordinary Americans.

Republicans challenged Mr. Obama’s assessment of the economy, and asserted that his policies had made the situation worse. But with their own poll numbers diving, Congressional Republicans were subdued in their response to the speech, careful not to boo or seem disrespectful. And the president disputed their claim that he was practicing the politics of division.

You mean last night’s performance could have been worse?

It’s one thing to have yahoo partisans disrupting public events but everyone at last night’s event was there by invitation…and simple logic dictates you wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself or your party on NATIONAL television with childish behavior!

Although it is hard to say which would be more disturbing, their unnatural ‘acting in unison ’ routine or booing and cat-calling ‘on cue’?

I, personally, was freaked out by the robot act, it’s one thing to be bat-shit crazy and quite another be bat-shit crazy AND a mindless robot!

It really makes you wonder just who is on the other end of the remote controls?

Looks like we’re headed into ‘overtime’ good citizen, please accept my apology in advance.

I’d like to begin by pointing out the obvious, that these sons of bitches are purposefully ‘tap dancing on a land mine’.

The global banking system is broken beyond repair…which is why NOTHING has been done about it for almost five years.

This is a ‘ticklish’ issue for someone like me who preaches that money is essentially meaningless.

How can the global banking system be ‘broken’ if all money is ‘funny’?

Here’s a topic I seldom touch upon as it is the ’lynch pin’ of all monetary theory, it is a given that everyone ‘understands’ this…

All money is ‘faith based’, it is your ‘belief’ that it is worth something that gives money its value!

This is why ‘counterfeiting’ is illegal.

If everybody could just ’print what they needed, when they needed it‘, nobody would do squat beyond whatever effort it took to print more money…and in jig time, there wouldn’t be anything left to buy!

Nobody calls these ‘synthetic forms of credit’ money because to admit they were money would be to admit they were counterfeit…and void the whole pile of em at once!

Instead of ‘voiding’ the whole mess (like they should have back in 2008) they let the banks, er, ‘unload’ them on the public via the multiple ‘rescue mechanisms’ establish by the world’s central banks to ‘rescue’ the banks/insurance companies/retirement funds of millions of workers.

And yes, good citizen, this was/is fraud on a massive scale.

There ‘should have been’ (and likely will be) hangings over this…but the ‘rot’ goes all the way up to the top…(how sad is it good citizen that none of us knows where that ‘top’ is anymore?)

So to ‘say’ the economy is recovering is, as we all know, a boldface lie!

Even more fantastic (given the whole OWS movement) was the claim that ‘more education’ could turn an already bankrupt dynamic around!

They have been preaching that exact same LIE since I WAS A KID!

If education was the solution they’ve had more than fifty years to prove it works…and today we’re witnessing the ‘end result’.

Worse, they cried last night because kids these days aren’t pursuing careers in engineering (and they haven’t been for years…because there ARE NO JOBS!)

Why the fuck would you waste your time and accumulate debt you can’t possibly repay (doing the minimum wage job you will eventually sell your soul to get?)

Because some clueless politician told you it was the ‘right thing to do’?

You will do your children a far greater service good citizen if you teach them how to lay traps and more importantly, how to spot them!

The future belongs to the prepared…and increasingly it is looking like the future will belong to the ‘scavenger’ who can outwit the technically advanced but otherwise dim- witted robot.

Which is to say that I found last night’s speech to be ‘disturbing’ on oh so many levels.

We aren’t out of the woods yet good citizen…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Davos!

2012-01-24T12:49:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Did you get your invite to the Davos conference? It should surprise no one that I was passed over again this year…of course, I’d be double screwed if I had to get there on my own…it’s one hell of a swim/walk!

After two consecutive post on the rapaciousness of Employers, we have today’s offering on that annual, global gathering of the ‘one percent’ and they’re lackeys Davos.

What is difficult to determine, good citizen is if the following snippet comes from this year’s conference (which presumably begins today) or if it is from last year:

Others say, however, that this self-flagellation is misguided. Raising taxes on high earners or restricting their pay will do nothing to increase economic growth or to create jobs, said Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel Lucent.

To stimulate sluggish Western economies, he said, policy makers will have to make the tough fiscal choices needed to bring budget deficits into line, increasing business confidence. And in Europe, he said, restrictive employment rules should be loosened to encourage companies to hire.

“If you are standing outside the job market today and you think inequality is the problem, you have an ugly surprise coming,” Mr. Verwaayen said. “If you want to kick the cat, kick the cat. If it makes you feel better, fine. But if the pie is not growing, we’re not going to create jobs.”

Maurice Lévy, chief executive of the advertising company Publicis Groupe, based in Paris, agreed that measures to promote growth were crucial. But Mr. Lévy, one of the signatories of an open letter to the French government calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, said it was only fair, at a time when governments were cutting welfare spending to bring budget deficits into line, that the rich should share the burden.

“When you have this situation of fear, and little hope of getting out of the dark, there is also anger,” Mr. Lévy said. “People see that there is a minority of people who are well-off. This anger should be taken into account by the people who are, if not their target, their preoccupation. We should all be conscious of the money we are receiving for the services we render. We have to be reasonable.”

So, we have the ‘production line slaver’ stuck in the old rut of there’s no increase in the workforce without proportionate ‘growth’ in market activity. (The unsustainable ‘pie’ has to get larger axiom.)

This ignores two ‘truths’, the pie IS getting larger. We humans are multiplying at a record pace! BUT! As I mentioned yesterday, robots don’t need the products they produce.

Let us ignore this ‘hand waving’ that CEO’s perform for public consumption. They KNOW this as well as you do (if you stopped for a moment and thought about it…but you haven’t, have you?)

The second truth is less obvious, IF these mismanaging fucktards DID, er, double their workforce by halving the workday/week, it would cost them in benefits (There IS a way to dial this back to zero, but not under capitalism!)

Because the halving of the workday without an equal reduction in expense would put the remainder of the ‘housing market’ underwater…and there’s the answer to the second problem…but again, it won’t happen under ‘more for me’ capitalism.

In fact, we won’t see hiring on a scale we need to see it until AFTER capitalism is abandoned! CEO’s reap huge bonuses for ‘eliminating’ the ‘expense’ of employees.

They aren’t about to hire them back (unless they think firing them again will generate more bonuses for themselves!)

Which is weird because ‘hire them back’ is exactly what society needs them to do!

We won’t even visit the topic of ‘Are corporate boards that stupid?’ As the answer lies in our own current circumstances!

[Lord yes!]

As long as we live under an ‘extractive’ social model like capitalism, participation will always be predicated upon ‘infinite growth’.

Since we do not have an ‘infinite pie’, infinite growth is ‘impossible’.

Worse, we have probably already exceeded ‘sustainable’ population levels.

Which brings us back to these highly secretive Davos conferences…what do you suppose the ‘Masters of the Universe’ discuss when they have each other’s ear?

Conversely, it would be naïve in the extreme to think they need conferences such as this one to commune with one another!

The reason the public isn’t allowed to see the goings on for themselves is they don’t want you to know just who is in whose pocket!

Most of the proclaimed ‘Masters’ are really just someone else’s ‘sock puppet’.

Firings are rare and exterminations rarer still…but

There’s one wall the press doesn’t dare to knock down…and so it will remain until we establish a ‘not-for profit’ media! (And even such a body would require an ever vigilant watch dog to keep it honest!)

Not that there wouldn’t be those who would go to any length to keep their goals a secret!

Which is to remind you all that even A Simple Plan is neither ‘fool-proof’ nor is it ‘maintenance free’.

As The Who admonishes us in their tune ‘Slip Kick’, there’s no easy way to be free!

Thanks for letting me inside your head…

Don’t you wish those Davos dudes were as forthcoming?

Gegner

Rope or Light Poles?

2012-01-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes the tune is ‘the beat goes on’ (Sonny & Cher, remember?) and so it is, good citizen, that we are offered an unvarnished look at today’s economy

No. 413: December CPI, PPI, Production, Housing Starts, Real Retail Sales
January 19th, 2012

Patterns of Slowing Growth Have Re-Emerged
Inflation from High Oil Prices Still Impacting Broad Economy
2011 Average Annual Consumer Inflation: 3.2% (CPI-U), 3.6% (CPI-W), 10.7% (SGS) 2011 Average Annual Wholesale Inflation: 6.1% (PPI)
Perils of Poor-Quality Inflation Data and Bad Assumptions

Followed by an an encore of yesterday’s disturbing ‘what employers want’ debacle

Many employers, though, say they have little choice. Robert Batterman, a labor lawyer who represents employers, said whether it was the N.F.L. or Sotheby’s, which locked out 43 art handlers in Manhattan last July, “the pendulum has swung too far toward the employees, [says the man who makes his living advising employers how to ‘legally’ break their contracts] and the employers are looking in these tight economic times to get givebacks.” [Which is, make no mistake about it, how the rich get richer! None of them ‘need’ these givebacks, it’s just taking advantage of the economy! Every raise they DON‘T give multiplies their, er, ‘personal bonus!’]

“Employers,” he continued, “are using lockouts because unions are reluctant to do what the employers consider reasonable in terms of compromising. Employers are looking to reset their collective bargaining relations.” [And in many cases they’re doing whatever it takes to ‘bust’ the unions! The assholes cited here have even hired ’replacement workers…something that would have gotten you killed in the old days! Think about that while you enjoy your forty-hour work week!]

After being out of work since Aug. 1, Paul Woinarowicz, a warehouse foreman employed at American Crystal Sugar for 34 years, sees another rationale for lockouts. “It’s just another way of trying to break the union,” said Mr. Woinarowicz, a member of the bakery and confectionery workers union. “People here in the Red River Valley are really mad at American Crystal. It was just like a knife stuck in your heart.”

Because we all KNOW what the next step will be, the plant will close and all of the sugar beets processed here will be shipped to China! And a big ‘fuck you’ to the workers still capable of ‘bargaining’ for a living wage…such as it is these days.

Which brings us to the larger question of ‘are ‘free markets’ really the best way to regulate commerce?

The short answer is no because the free market is ‘incapable’ of justly determining what constitutes a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. There are simply too many variables.

Under A Simple Plan, pay is determined on a needs basis where everyone is provided with a guaranteed ‘living wage’. Not necessarily enough to live like a Rockefeller but you won’t have to dumpster dive or skip two meals a day either. Nor would you have to sit in the dark, shivering in the freezing cold, contemplating your navel until sunrise either…

But if that’s what you like, it could be arranged.

Just don’t try to martyr yourself afterwards on the cross of ‘lost opportunity’, it’s one of the quickest ways there is to get yourself exiled!

(Assuming our descendants are as ‘vigilant’ as we will become…)

Because the exploiter will always be ready to insist that the ‘old ways’ weren’t as bad as the ‘old folks’ make them out to be.

And it only takes one ‘exception’ to completely reverse the process.

Once they gain the ‘right’ to buy and sell again, it’s all ‘downhill’ from there.

We’re back to ‘stick ‘em up’ and ‘fuck you, pay me!’

We are in this clusterfuck we find ourselves in today BECAUSE we belong/tolerate a justice system that is centered NOT on the well-being of the individual but on the ‘sanctity’ of property rights!

It USED TO include the ‘inviolability’ of a contract (this is where old time union organizers thought they had the capitalist cornered but the fucking weasel capitalists can’t be trusted!)

Which leads us back to the current ‘employer/employee’ contract…can the capitalist be trusted?

I think we all know the answer to that one, the answer is a resounding NO!

Property rights do NOTHING to build or preserve a society, much less a civilization. (Which is to point out we may have been doing this for millennia but that only means we’ve been DOING IT WRONG for millennia!)

Which is to say it takes hundreds of thousands of workers/customers to make a single billionaire, and we have a few thousand of them, world wide.

Well, good citizen, automation cuts out the ’customer’ side of the equation, putting more ‘purchasing power’ in the pockets of the owner…BUT this additional or ‘surplus’ income comes at the cost of lost demand!

Robots don’t get paychecks and neither do the people the robots replace…in fact, there are myriad things that the people replaced by robots don’t/can’t do…like pay taxes. (which is PART OF THE REASON our ‘infrastructure’ is falling apart…but not to worry, the don’t intend to replace it in Hong Kong either, they’ll just build new in Africa!)

Which brings us full circle to the president’s ‘jobs program’. The government has a proverbial ’bottomless well’ of cash…but if you print money with abandon, it makes the existing money (in whatever form) worth-less…in both senses of the term.

Which is to point out that we must throw these ‘short-sighted weasels’ out of power (preferably) before there’s nothing left to salvage!

So, yeah, here we are, 4 years after the collapse of the banking system and we have these shit weasel, one percenters locking down domestic factories to extract ‘give backs’ from beleaguered and besieged workers!

Which brings us full circle to the question of ‘What will we run out of first, rope or light poles?’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Caged

2012-01-22T13:19:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Some articles have the effect of waving a red cape at a Bull, it infuriates the animal just as articles like this infuriate me! (although there is some debate as the whether it is the waving motion alone or the color red, since Bulls are supposedly color blind, that incites their ire.)

When this sorry excuse for a human being passed away a few months ago the corporate owned media reacted as though the USA had lost one of its ‘leading lights’ as opposed to one of its greediest psychopaths.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"They could hire 3,000 people overnight. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?"

JENNIFER RIGONI, Apple's worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, on the advantages of using foreign plants.

The suicide rate at Foxconn is an international scandal…is THIS what ‘employers’ want?

Seriously good citizen, this is what the ‘us vs. them’ mindset is leading to! Animals who live on ‘production farms’ working 16 hour shifts for peanuts…and that may well be precisely what/all they get, peanut butter!

The question has disintegrated from ‘what’s fair’ to ‘who’s worth it’…and I’d hate to be the one without a large caliber, high rate of fire weapon in my hands when that question is being decided…

The human anti-exploitation law does what is necessary. It voids the employer/employee contract out of hand (and believe me, it will be tantamount to killing them!)

Nobody can ‘sell’ their labor just as nobody can buy it (for personal gain.)

But (naturally) this isn’t going to happen on its own.

Um, as the ‘Overton Window’ keeps shifting rightward (towards absolute control) the issue of ‘fairness’ is, er, modified into ‘who deserves fairness’?

Increasingly, good citizen, you are not included in these ‘calculations’.

When your humanity is no longer enough to earn you ‘just consideration’ it is time set the forces of revolution into motion.

For verily you and yours will be slaughtered like animals and with just as much ‘consideration’.

You may consider yourself a ‘child of god’ but those who would exterminate you like vermin don’t count you as a child of THEIR god! (Which is why the whole ‘god thing’ sucks…but that’s another can of worms!)

And God is certainly in the ‘drivers seat’ of the Republican nomination process!

What most of you don’t realize is ‘that god’ is the ‘righteous and angry’ god of capitalism!

Here is a god with few children, a ‘chosen few’ as a matter of fact! So few it is ludicrous to think they could win election (which is why we were switched from the one person/one vote method to the one dollar (share)/one vote system like the one used in the corporate boardroom.)

Speaking of ‘buying’ elections, what do you make of Newt’s come from behind victory in South Carolina yesterday?

Again, while we’re on the subject I’d like to remind you that only ‘one in five’ eligible voters self-identify as Republican, it is the alleged ‘independents’ that keeps swinging them over the top. (Read: allows the corporate media to keep ‘stealing’ elections!)

Um, there is no ‘delicate’ way to phrase this because the disturbingly lopsided coverage of this election process tells us something frightening.

What’s ‘up for grabs’ this coming election cycle is who ‘does’ and who ‘does not’ count as human.

The fucktard from Apple says it straight out, would American workers ‘agree’ to live in a ‘dorm’ (pen/cage) and work around the clock for (virtually) nothing?

Just an opinion here but I think everybody who has an Apple product should discard it immediately…and shun all things Apple (especially their stock!)

Why are we suffering from staggering unemployment? Because Rapacious Employers would rather work a few people 16 hours a day, 7 days a week than spread those jobs around for all who need them!

Did I mention our civilization is EXTREMELY mismanaged? (Funny thing about society, you have to 'participate' to be a member!)

Well, this is not an ‘accident’. This is what happens when ‘hooray for me and fuck everybody else capitalists take over!

They don’t give a shit if it sucks for you! That’s your problem…until YOU make it THEIRS!

And I can’t say it any plainer than that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Stand Up

2012-01-21T13:27:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

There are not one but two articles in today’s NY Times insisting Wall Street compensation has ‘fallen’ (for the underlings.)

It seems the top executives are ‘unaffected’ by the, er, ‘laconic performance’ of the world’s stock markets.

The top is getting what they gave themselves last year…whether they deserved it or not.

If you want to call it ‘a show of restraint’, it appears the pool of bonus recipients has been culled, somewhat.

Or at least that’s what they’re telling us. Not that their ‘credibility’ is above reproach or anything…if you know what I’m saying.

As we have all learned, ‘Honesty’ in the financial sector is an extremely ‘relative’ thing.

Because, truth be told good citizen, the global banking system went bankrupt three years ago, and nobody’s figured out how to rebalance the books again.

Because your average billionaire is actually so far in hock they’d make the homeless look wealthy!

It all circles back to ‘what is an asset and who decides how much that asset is worth?’

Right about now bubba it’s all worth squat!

How problematic is it that you won’t ‘doubt’ the value of your money until it takes a wheelbarrow full to buy a loaf of bread.

Of course when your whole paycheck won’t fill your gas tank…that just might convince you that you’re being ‘played’.

Because now we circle back to another factor that is spiraling out of control, what constitutes ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work?’

Is anyone (besides me) asking why bankers are getting bonuses instead of stiff prison terms?

Theft is theft and treason is treason…and the only ones who don’t want to raise the subject are guilty of both!

But this is where you find yourself when the game turns into ‘us against them’.

It is apparent there is a great deal of confusion about what side represents who.

Adding to that confusion is the ‘purposeful vagueness’ surround who is and who is NOT ‘middle class’.

The ‘yardstick’ the corporate owned media uses (but keeps to itself) is a college degree.

Not the possession of one, but if your employment relies on your having a degree.

Thanks to unions, a large swath of the working class ‘mis-identifies’ itself as ‘middle class’.

If your job does NOT require a college degree then you are NOT ‘middle class’ regardless of how much money you make!

Yet if we listen to our (decidedly demented) politicians there are only the poor, the middle class and the rich/‘one percent’.

Which could be regarded as ‘generally true both here in the US and across the rest of what has classically been known as ‘Western Civilization’ (although this is also true of newly capitalistic countries like the former Soviet Union.)

There is no longer a ‘working class’ of any consequence. IF you have a job at all, it is most likely part time (regardless of how many hours you work) and pays something in the neighborhood of minimum wage!

What’s that? Only thirty something? You’d best start socking it away while you’ve still got a ‘regular job’.

The current ‘dynamic’ is that (like China) once you hit thirty you’re too old to keep up with the kids!

So by the time you hit forty you’ll be (whether you want to or not) starting your ‘second career’ (in straight commission sales!)

Worse, it will probably be MLM to boot!

How disturbing will it be to learn that your ‘down line pearl’ is a foreign national?

Just saying, ya know?

Creepy enough that everybody above you is taking a piece of what you bring in, but in order for YOU to make any loot you have to get a bunch of suckers to work for YOU (in an increasingly saturated market!)

Er, did I mention that this ‘Banana Republic’ thing has a life of its own? The only thing you have to do to land you and yours in a Banana Republic is let the fucking criminals keep ripping YOU off.

They don’t care, they’ve got theirs!

It’s not their problem if you’re TOO STUPID to stand up for yourself!

If you won’t lift a finger to save those you love, don’t expect anyone else to do it for you.

Just something to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Left Justified

2012-01-20T12:54:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The right demonizes the government as the entity that, er, ‘prevents’ profitable commerce…the thought being we’d really make a lot more money if we didn’t have to obey all of those ‘intrusive’ governmental regulations…

While the left despises the government for being the ‘play-thing’ of the privileged…

And neither of them are ‘wrong’ (although only the left is ‘justified’ in its disdain…the right’s ire is ‘pretend’ at best and an act at worst.)

Which is to ask how sick is it that the right keeps proposing legislation intended to steal the few rights you have while they simultaneously ‘fail to prosecute’ crimes against society?

Who REALLY gives a fuck about ‘gay marriage’? It’s not even a particularly ‘good deal’ for the gay when it’s all said and done. But the right lead the charge in the ‘defense of marriage’ baloney that followed…after a Massachusetts judge issued a ‘surprise decision’ during the 2004 presidential election cycle…when, ‘coincidentally’ a Massachusetts Senator was in the race for the oval office, running against an extremely unpopular Republican incumbent.

And for the third time in as many elections we ended up with a ‘photo finish’ that was decided by the ‘electoral college’.

Ironically, one thing is currently crystal clear, that we ARE NOT as ‘equally divided’ as the corporate owned media wants us to believe, thanks to the widespread support received by the OWS movement.

What has become increasingly apparent is that our entire ‘political process’ is no longer under our control. The people who pay for the message get to dictate what that message is…

And lately it has become disturbingly clear that we have been lied to and those lies have cost us dearly.

Globalization was supposedly done ‘for us’ but now it is apparent it was done ‘to us’. It was NEVER about ‘lower prices for you’, it was always about higher profits for them!

Higher profits reaped from the benefits they didn’t have to pay their ‘new’ employees!

Wednesday the Internets went dark to protest ‘Chinese Style’ censorship under Republican sponsored legislation. (Ironically, it was the same Republicans who suddenly opposed their own bill, making the Democrats look ‘stupid’…but if we accept that there are no Democrats then the ‘sock puppets’ representing the Democrats are, by definition, er, ‘stupid’.

Today we are being urged to call our State Attorney General’s office to voice our opposition to the OBAMA administration’s latest attempt to railroad a ‘uniform settlement’ through congress that will, literally, legalize theft…if you’re a banker or an investor.

Um, who ARE these, er, ‘morons’ that CALL THEMSELVES ‘democrats’ and who, precisely, do they represent?

What does this sort of nonsense portend for the upcoming presidential election cycle?

Why is this bootlicking coward running ‘unopposed’? (Which is to ignore the fact that his ‘opponents’ from the opposite political party are all ‘bad cartoon characters’!)

Left is right and down is up, right?

This is NOT the state you want your politics to fall into…

YOU are being MANIPULATED, good citizen…and this is NEVER a ‘good thing’.

How do we ‘free’ ourselves from this trap?

How do we ‘sort out’ the truth from the convenient lies?

Sadly, it is not as simple as automatically rejecting the ‘near truth’ of the corporate owned media and accepting, even generally, the assertions of the, er, ‘free internet’. (Which is to point out that there are more than a few ‘sell-outs’ on the ‘net’!)

Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one (and that doesn’t make them right!)

Worse, there is no shortage of ‘dis-information’ out there…and only a little ‘mis-direction’ goes a long way.

We all tend to be prone to making ‘snap judgments’. (The old making up our minds before all of the facts are in.)

It’s staggering to consider all of the mayhem this trait is responsible for, doubly staggering is the amount of regret this has caused.

But that’s ‘the strength’ of the right, you end up fighting yourself so they don’t have to!

It’s like the STUPID ‘fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here’ excuse, how the fuck are all of those dirt poor Muslims supposed to get here, row?

It’s one thing to urge you to action and quite another to keep you from blowing your own foot off!

The fog of war is a terrible thing good citizen and a little ‘mis-direction’ can go a mighty long way!

Which brings us to another of today’s headlines

What do you suppose is up with that? Somehow, I suspect you know what the answer is…

Which brings us back to our original argument, if you take my meaning, along with my assertion that only the left is justified…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bottoming out...

2012-01-19T11:06:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s rant ended with the ‘unemployment crisis’ and today the focus remains on the number one problem facing our deteriorating civilization.

Before we delve into today’s collectively mind-blowing offerings I’d like to take a moment to explore what little is being done to address this civilization destroying phenomenon.

Let’s start where we left off, with clueless Newt and his feigned ‘ignorance’. Newt likes to pretend there are plenty of jobs…all you need to do is ‘ask’ for one.

While this mindset is in keeping with capitalism and capitalistic views, especially the extremely misguided notion that it is up to YOU to make yourself ‘useful’ to the capitalist…

What do you suppose these people did to piss off their capitalist?

WICHITA, Kan. — The crowd gathered at the local headquarters for Boeing was euphoric. The company had just won one of the largest military contracts in history. Thousands of the resulting jobs, Boeing had promised, would be headed here, to the sprawling manufacturing complex where residents have been building airplanes for generations.

“It’s good for Kansas, it’s good for Wichita and it’s a great day to be alive here and to profess victory,” said Senator Pat Roberts, part of the political team that spent a decade battling on behalf of the company. “Every once in a while the good guys win.”

That celebration last February was supposed to confirm this city’s enduring status as the “Air Capital of the World.” But less than a year later, on Jan. 4, Boeing executives solemnly gathered here for another announcement. The jobs would not be arriving after all, they said. Instead, they would shut down all of the company’s local operations by the end of 2013.

Let’s see, we lost 8 MILLION jobs in the six months after the last down turn 3 and a half YEARS AGO. Despite claims to the contrary, NONE of those jobs came back.

In fact, the labor force today is still smaller than it was in 2000! (Never mind that the labor force ‘participation rate’ is at an all time low…)

What you need to understand, good citizen, is our infinitely screwed up economy has been kept ‘afloat’ largely on the back of orders for new aircraft.

While this ‘spin-off’ will (briefly) keep the plant from going dark, the, er, ‘smash and grab’ tactics of, ‘private equity’ (like what recently happened to Twinkie the Kid) pretty much insures that this new kid on the block will choke to death on the debt it has been saddled with.

But wait! There’s even more carnage Newt appears ignorant of!

The Chapter 11 filing was made in United States bankruptcy court in lower Manhattan. Kodak said that its non-American subsidiaries are not part of the filing. [snip]

“Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation,” said Antonio M. Perez, the company’s chief executive, said in a news release. “At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core I.P. assets.” [snip]

Besides potentially aiding in the patent sale, bankruptcy protection could also allow Kodak to shed hundreds of millions of dollars in pension obligations. Kodak said in a filing that it contributed about $245 million to its U.S. pension obligations last year, and that it has been unable to shrink those liabilities to a more manageable level. [WTF!]

I especially dislike that last paragraph which rubs in what a chump these people have been for being ‘loyal employees of the company’.

But that is the culture which is destroying our civilization!

Profits for the investors while we throw the employees (and potential customers) under the bus!

Somehow this is written off as the need to ‘crack a few eggs’ if one desires to make an omelet…

So we have not one but TWO major US employers that are shuttering their US operations (almost 4 years after the start of the Greater Depression…) and then we have gasbags like Gingrich who are going to ‘teach the poor “how to ask for jobs.”; bringing us full circle with the inescapable fact, ‘what jobs’?

Well, maybe they mean these jobs!

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits for the first time plummeted last week to 352,000, the fewest since April 2008, the Labor Department said Thursday. The decline added to evidence that the job market is strengthening.

Weekly applications fell by 50,000, the biggest drop in the seasonally adjusted figure in more than six years. The four-week average, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped to 379,000. That was the second-lowest such figure in more than three years.

When weekly applications fall consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to push down the unemployment rate. A department spokesman cautioned, however, that volatility at this time of year is common.

So, as the ‘private sector’ continues to ship jobs off-shore (to enrich their capitalist owners…AT YOUR EXPENSE!) The public sector (current administration) is running on a ticket of ‘job creation at the public’s expense’.

Rebuilding our nation’s ‘infrastructure’ is to be the ticket to future prosperity…for the few. The rest of us had best get used to speaking another language or figure out a way to survive on a steady diet of rocks.

Like everything else, Banana Republics don’t need much in the way of ‘infrastructure’.

The overlords have plumbing and electricity, the peasants don’t!

You’d have thought we’d seen the end of these stories like Kodak and Boeing with the current ‘hostility’ being pointed at the, er, one percent (which, as I pointed out yesterday, is totally misleading!) and I’d opine that this final ‘bailing out’ of capitalists from the American labor pool will be ‘the end’ of the multi-nationals departing the sinking ship.

The rest have already gone.

So what will our 'uni-party' rulers do for revenue now?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Less than Zero

2012-01-18T17:09:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the stock markets ‘slow start’ this morning (it was doing, er, ‘irrationally well’ by today’s close) was attributed to, er, smaller bank earnings…but, amazingly enough, earnings that still managed to ‘beat expectations’.

Now, how the fuck do you make sense out of that?

The same way you’re supposed to make sense out of this drivel!

Below is a chart showing the majors most likely to get into the 1 percent (excluding majors held by fewer than 50,000 people in 2010 census data). The third column shows the percentage of degree holders with that major who make it into the 1 percent. The fourth column shows the percent of the 1 percent (among college grads) that hold that major. In other words, more than one in 10 people with a pre-med degree make it into the 1 percent, and about 1 in 100 of the 1 percenters with degrees majored in pre-med.

Of course, choice of major is not the only way to increase your chances of reaching the 1 percent, if that is your goal. There is also the sector you choose.

A separate analysis of census data on occupations showed that one in eight lawyers, for example, are in the 1 percent — unless they work for a Wall Street firm, when their chances increase to one in three. Among chief executives, fewer than one in five rank among the 1 percent, but their chances increase if the company produces medical supplies (one in four) or drugs (two in five). Hollywood writers? One in nine are 1 percenters. Television or radio writers? One in 14. Newspaper writers and editors? One in 62.

Is there enough smoke for ya?

What bonehead is trying to point out is that the ‘super rich’ actually comprise considerably less than ‘one percent’ of the population.

So much so that some people who qualify for the top percentage are actually ‘working stiffs.’

Which is to say (shamefully) that the gulf between the very rich and the rest of us is wider than the current 99% vs. the one percent the OWS movement has popularized.

Sadly, the bottom of the top dectile (top 20%) scrapes the upper edge of the federal poverty guidelines!

Just to give you an idea of how badly ‘out of whack’ things have become.

More disturbingly, we remain in no position to do anything about it…so we must watch in horror as our civilization is subjected to the mindless repetition of the ‘smash and grab’ tactics that passes for commerce these days.

Understand, good citizen, this will continue until YOU get up off the sidelines and put a stop to it.

I think I have provided a plethora of information regarding what COULD happen if you continue to ‘sit on your hands’.

You don’t need me to tell you that every day of inaction brings us that much closer to Banana Republicdom.

A place where if you don’t work you don’t eat and there are no jobs…so you will have to steal your food or attempt to kill it on your own…and those rodents are tougher to kill than your Kitty cat makes it look…

But you might also notice that Fluffy doesn’t eat what she/he kills…and it’s probably not a good idea for you to do it either.

But you won’t have a choice if you let this continue, and your ‘elected representatives’ aren’t about to put a stop to it if you fail to force their hand!

It’s easier for them to take the money and look the other way.

More interestingly, we only ‘used to’ have laws against such things…now we don’t.

It will take some getting used to the idea that we DON’T have a legal system anymore.

We have made the inevitable leap from the rule of law to its polar opposite, the rule of man.

And has been proven repeatedly in the past, an unjust society cannot stand. No one is eager to defend injustice.

Those who benefit from injustice feign to draw attention to what they do because they fear retribution. Injustice is acceptable only as long as it remains hidden. Once the victims start to mount up, suddenly, nobody knows nothing.

Well, good citizen, we have us a whole pile of victims due to the injustice of ‘globalization’.

Here the ‘owners of commerce’ steal your job while simultaneously turning you into a ‘captive customer’ for products you used to produce for yourself!

But this is what happens when you allow an individual to ‘own’ (for their own personal profit that which we all need to live.)

We are left with a stark choice, good citizen. Either we put an end to ‘personal income streams’ or kill off the surplus population.

Solution A is outlined in A Simple Plan…and solution B is ‘unthinkable’ (unless you’re some sort of conservative douche bag!)

Did you hear what that Gasbag Gingrich said in South Carolina?

He’s gonna ‘teach the poor to ask for jobs!’

How clueless is this idiot? What jobs is he talking about? How fucked up is it that he doesn’t know the answer himself…like most politicians he has NO FUCKING CLUE how to go about solving the unemployment crisis (without setting off an international incident/world war!)

Because you KNOW if this butt-fucker is thrust upon us (by the corporate owned media) he’s gonna pretend there are ‘plenty of jobs’…(which will IMPLY the unemployed are simply ‘too lazy’ to ask for them.)

I am going to ask you, non-rhetorically, just how ‘angry’ that set of circumstances will make you?

Because it is, as matters currently stand, extremely unlikely that ANYONE will be elected come November…because we won’t be holding elections for some goofy reason or the other…

Elevated terrorist threat…pick one!

But that doesn’t mean Newt (or someone just like him) won’t emerge as our new, er, ‘appointed leader’.

What about it good citizen, if they suddenly announced an ‘emergency change of government’ what they fuck would you ‘do’ about it?

Same thing you always do, eh?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Crunch Time

2012-01-17T13:33:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace, just in case you were wondering.

Not that you’d be able to tell this from the ‘reflective of nothing’ stock markets…which, most bizarrely, are ‘up’. Must have something to do with that ‘fatal myopia’ that nobody’s doing anything about.

Not only are they freakishly short-sighted but they have a nasty case of ‘tunnel vision’ to boot!

(If the lying corporate owned media is to be believed…but that’s a whole other can of worms, isn’t it.)

Under the category of read this one very carefully Mr. Panzer offers us this mind-bender.

The chief market strategist at U.S. Trust Bank of America Private Wealth Management warned against concluding that the relative outperformance of U.S. stocks last year and recent string of strong U.S. economic data mean the country’s equity markets are “decoupling” from the rest of the world.

The U.S. economy may be in decent shape — with strong manufacturing and record exports of more than US$2-trillion in 2011 — but the country is not isolated from what happens in Europe or the rest of the world, Mr. Quinlan said in a note to clients Friday.

“In our view, the ‘decoupling’ chatter is dangerous and misguided, since there are plenty of problems and challenges brewing overseas that will be directly or indirectly channeled back into U.S. financial markets,” he said.

You have to read the whole article to get the gist of it.

Perhaps I should have included the last paragraph of the article to show Mr. Panzer’s point…

But that’s ’fair use’ for you.

Which brings us to another, er, ‘interesting subject’ that I saw floating around the web today.

Apparently some nitwit thought it would be a good idea to submit legislation that essentially revokes our collective ‘freedom of speech’ by imposing Chinese style censorship on the Internet.

One can foresee the double whammy of a Constitutional challenge being slapped down by the Roberts court.

Worse, what do you suppose the odds are that the jellyfish currently in office will refuse to sign it?

Because you can easily see this the same way we in Massachusetts see the seatbelt law, it was voted down four times by a margin of greater than two to one…and we still ended up with a seatbelt law (and no definitive reduction in highway fatalities.)

And let’s not get started on the number of people killed or maimed by fucking ‘airbags’!

Did I mention our society is grossly mismanaged or that the nitwits in charge regularly use the Constitution for toilet paper?

So what are YOU gonna do about it?

Same thing you always do…nothing!

Because YOU’RE not supposed to ‘do’ anything about it…that’s someone else’s job!

And if those people aren’t doing their job then it’s someone else’s job to take care of that…and so on and so forth…until nothing gets done because that person is ‘too high up’ to be touched.

It’s not supposed to work that way but what are you gonna do?

The part that has me scratching my head is where do they keep digging up stooges and chumps to do their bidding? Surely these people must realize they are painting a huge bull’s-eye on themselves (and by extension, their families!)

When the hammer falls, it is going to crush the stooge of the moment flat…and then they’re gonna start hunting down the ones who went before, that should have had the hammer dropped on them…like the nitwit who drafted the legislation that nullifies the rule of law! (AND EVERYONE WHO VOTED IN FAVOR OF IT!)

Which is to opine that it is already ‘too late’ to start worrying if something you say or do is going to get you branded as an ‘Enemy of the State’.

Worse, good citizen, I’d say it’s worse to ‘walk on eggshells’. If somebody tries to stop you from speaking your mind, you should let that son of a bitch have it, right then and there!

This is the real issue good citizen, the stuff revolutions are made of; ‘Are you going to live on your knees or die on your feet?’

It’s crunch time my friends, tomorrow will be too late so you better make up your mind right now just whose side you’re on.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bunk

2012-01-16T14:11:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Monday holidays provide us with back to back Sundays, the markets are closed (here in the US.) The markets that are open elsewhere aren’t doing so well…which should surprise no one.

Considering our globalized form of capitalism is based on the ‘consumer society’, much was made recently in the corporate owned media over the ’strength’ of consumer sales over the holiday period.

Most of us scratched our heads, wondering what planet this impressive news was coming from. Most of us knew the ’year over year’ improvements cited by the media were the result of a significantly smaller field of retailers who captured more ’market share’ because their competitors had perished.

As evidenced in the following report:

No. 412: December Retail Sales, November Trade Balance January 13th, 2012
Make-or-Break Month for Retailers Was Flat-to-Minus,
Both Before and Likely After Adjustment for Inflation

Worse-Than-Expected Retail Sales and Trade Data Should Dampen 4th-Quarter GDP Growth Outlook

What Mr. Williams reports is more in line with the average individual’s everyday experiences. Nobody’s ’bullshit alarm’ goes off when he tells us what we already know, taken as a whole, retail is down because people don’t have the money.

The boss decided to pay himself instead of paying the help, and the world is falling into its own cesspool because of it.

But for some bizarre reason, the corporate owned media doesn’t think you’re interested in learning this…

Or, shall we say, they report this all right but they don’t explain the implications in a way that the average individual will understand what is going on.

How ‘bad’ is this pay yourself first situation becoming?

Ilargi: Obviously, the two groups, those that take out loanshark payday loans to keep a roof over their head, and those that live paycheck to paycheck, overlap each other to a large extent.

Still, what makes it striking is the sheer number of people affected. One million people need emergency loans to keep their families in their homes, while six million households have nothing whatsoever saved for a rainy day.

If we put the average household size at 2.5 people, that means that, out of 60 million living in Britain, 2.5 million are on the verge of losing their homes, and 15 million, or 25% of the population, risk having to cut on their basic needs, food and heating, if they hit even the slightest speedbump.

My head spins somewhat when I try to reconcile this sort of loutish behavior and the admonishment that we must begin to make more concerted efforts in ‘good citizenship’ if we are to turn around the ‘moral decay’ that is destroying our civilization.

Does bonehead think they will stop if we ‘ask then nicely?’ (not Ilargi, some gemoke over on Jesse’s Café American!)

It staggers the mind to see someone accurately zero in on precisely what is wrong, then propose something totally impractical as a solution!

Nothing is going to change until some necks start getting stretched…and if they start stretching the wrong necks, it will be war.

Which is not to even remotely suggest that the guilty will go ‘quietly’.

But if the public perceives that, er, ‘underlings’ are being thrown under the bus in order to placate them…nobody is going to sit still for an obviously ‘superficial fix’.

Especially when nothing changes after the bloodbath.

And that’s the big danger, good citizen. They make a big production out of rounding up the ‘enemies of the state’, execute them and then claim it’s all over!

Which is to point out that it is a two part process, and the first step is to throw out the old process/system…completely.

Then you hunt down the guilty and bring them to Justice…

It is already obvious to us all that there can be no Justice under the old corrupt system.

So if they decide the round up comes first, watch out!

It’s just the criminals trying to cover their tracks.

And no good can come out of that.

I’m going to guess the Brit’s are not able to ‘live free’ like we Americans do and property laws vary considerably from place to place…because the last thing I’d do is take out a ‘payday loan’ to make the mortgage!

I have heard that throughout the Eurozone, property ownership isn’t as widespread as it is here in the US…so the dynamics of a society of renters would be considerably different than they would be for a society of owners…

Even foggier, it appears the global banking system got in trouble buying ‘collateralized’ US mortgage debt.

The ‘re-fi/heloc’ bonanza was, er, ‘restricted’ to the US housing markets.

Because…as I heard it, real estate is too expensive in Europe. Only a handful of people ‘own’, the rest ‘rent’…

Which would create an entirely different dynamic than we have here in the US.

Although the ‘big picture’ doesn’t change, the collapse of either will lead to the collapse of the whole shebang!

Because money is first and foremost…an ‘idea’.

An idea that most of us DON’T agree about…making the whole situation more than a little tenuous…

That said, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Pay!

2012-01-15T13:42:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

I apologize for ‘slouching’ yesterday but it’s not like I charge for this, it’s a labor of love.

And speaking of love, yesterday was my wife’s twin, ‘twins’ birthday so I was out of pocket for their party.

Yes my wife is an identical twin and her twin had twins…but so did her baby sister…and the one thing my wife and I have in common is we both have twin sisters!

(So the answer to the question of “is her twin married to your twin?” is an emphatic no! despite such unions recently becoming legal here in Massachusetts, the issues of time travel and bigamy would still arise. Both of our twins were married to other people before my wife and I ever met.)

This can quickly get downright confusing so let’s abandon ‘Gegner trivia’ right here.

Um, let’s begin with Europe’s credit downgrades that happened late on Friday. Left to our already fried logic circuits is whether or not Mr. Market will interpret this as good news or bad?

The downgrades have already elicited the desired effect of renewed pledges of ‘austerity’ from the, er, ‘victims’…

But the question without answer here good citizen is How low can you go?

And we aren’t talking about the Limbo here, good citizen.

Strangle the government hard enough and, er, ‘essential services’ start falling off the table.

The title of this article is “Incredible teachers agree to keep teaching without pay.”

Naturally, it is the ‘bottom line’ that counts:

Not giving these students stability? Massive cuts in education funding by the state. Poverty—"More than 70 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches." Crumbling school buildings. And with teachers facing their own economic struggles, it's unclear how long they will be able to keep showing up every day having lost their already below-average paychecks, no matter how dedicated to their students they are. When the state abandons students, there's only so much individuals can do to mitigate the damage.

As we can see here, the bottom line tells us that this effort is probably ‘doomed from the start.

Again, good citizen, this article stops short of even speculating as to what will become of these products of a bankrupt school system?

What do you suppose the job prospects will be for kids who couldn’t complete their elementary school education thanks to the off-shoring ‘tax rebels’?

THIS is the ‘bottom line’ of globalization!

THIS is the ugly face of the growing ‘economic desert’ that NO ONE can survive in!

All so A FEW can be ‘rich’.

You have been cheated out of your civilization…so a few could be rich.

And now you will be forced to accept abject destitution for the fleeting ‘benefit’ of low ‘falling prices’.

You know as well as I that prices (as well as wages) CAN’T drop indefinitely…but that’s not what our overpaid CEO's tell us!

Yes good citizen, we find ourselves in a perilous time were too few are paid way too much for what they have no right to…because they ‘bought’ our courts…(fair and square, or so they’ll insist!)

May they keep insisting right up until we open the trap door beneath their feet…because treason is still treason.

And enriching yourself at the public’s expense is nothing but pure treason!

Government, like commerce, is badly broken good citizen…and the people who broke it see no reason to reverse the damage they’ve done.

They are also, er, ‘disinclined’ to stand trial for their crimes (unless they can do so in courts THEY control.)

Of course there would always be the ‘fear’ that their innocence might be reversed by another, er, ‘less biased’ court.

Thus is it my, er, ‘opinion’ that the mission objective would be to make it so that possibility never happens.

Although it is unclear how they intend to ‘protect’ themselves after civilization has been replaced with widespread barbarism?

Perhaps they think they’re ‘up to the job’…

But we digress and there’s a bigger issue at stake here good citizen.

Today it’s some out of they way county in Pennsylvania, tomorrow it WILL BE YOUR local school district!

During the, er, ‘Great Depression’ there were school systems that ‘cancelled’ entire school years because the funds to pay for the schools weren’t there.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that this problem isn’t confined to Pennsylvania or Jefferson county, Alabama!

Not only have ‘fees’ risen steadily over the past 16 years of ‘Republican rule’…(only those who can afford to pay will ‘get’) but ‘fund raisers’ for every conceivable contingency have become the rule rather than the exception!

What are you gonna do when this sort of thing happens to the school district your kids attend?

Move?

Who are you gonna sell your house to…and how long will it be before the town you move to finds itself in the exact same pickle?

I keep screaming ‘mismanagement’ but nobody is paying attention.

I will say again that NONE of this ‘needs to happen’.

The whole crisis is ‘contrived’ intended to ‘loot’ the banking system while killing off as much of the ‘surplus population’ as possible.

I suspect those responsible for setting this juggernaut in motion will live just long enough to regret it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Raising to De-Bait...

2012-01-13T13:46:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

While Asian markets closed up considerably for the week, Europe and the ‘Western Hemisphere’ bled from the eye sockets today…although none of that bleeding is real or consequential.

Despite their best efforts it appears we have survived yet another week…but the fateful year of 2012 isn’t over yet…there’s 50 more weeks to go!

Then there’s the questionable wisdom of tempting fate on Friday the 13th

Although (fish that I can sometimes be) I rose to the bait and jumped into a curious fray:

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not , in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company. [which is still no excuse for its gross mismanagement!]

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Mr. Krugman is correct, the US is NOT a corporation so success in business (as relative as that can be) does not a successful president make.

We can take the (over) venerated (and recently departed) Mr. Jobs as an example.

In a move that many of his admirers call ‘genius’, he used a ‘contract manufacturer’ to actually produce Apple’s technological wonders…

By, er, ‘massive coincidence’ this very same contractor has been plagued with an abnormally high suicide rate.

Only ‘Jobs apologists’ deny a connection.

And, truly, it is ‘unfair’ to point at that single blemish and tar him as a ‘poor leader’, after all, he did make a handful of people fabulously wealthy! (And that alone has proven enough to win him a permanent spot among the ranks of ‘the saints of capitalism’!)

This points to a yawning, er, ‘character flaw’ in the American mythos, that ‘successful individualism’ is not only ‘enough’, but that it is enough for all!

The ‘failures’ of the countless millions (capitalist point of view) have resulted in the grinding poverty that is destroying our civilization today.

Do we really need men like Steve Jobs (or Mitt Romney, for that matter) running things when they both owe their ‘success’ (such as it is) to the disaster they have created?

Yes good citizen, that’s right, this mess is THEIR fault.

Although they would both be quick to point a finger at their ‘investors’ (who both would claim they did it all for!)

Nor is there any irony in the fact that both Mitt and Steve easily qualify as ‘one percenters’…but I don’t think either makes it into the more exclusive ‘one TENTH of one percent club’.

That’s where the ‘lions share’ of everything disappears into and it is from there that the tragic decisions are made that have destroyed the global economy.

Which presents the very frightening thought that this whack job is fucking with us just to prove he/she can!

Isn’t that how it goes good citizen, money talks and bullshit walks?

Then why is it so ‘inconceivable’ that the ‘money masters’ have a master that they all take orders from?

Even mobsters bow to a ‘pecking order’ (even if they dispute their own rank within the, er, ‘organization’.)

And how ironic is it that it is usually wealth that determines this pecking order rather than, er, ‘muscle’? (But that has more to do with cleverness being more ‘advantageous’ than strength…in most cases.)

Still, the question folds back upon itself, if not an ‘executive president’ then who(m)?

Well, we’re all partial to our own solutions and I’ll be the first to admit that I DID NOT make this one up…I merely ‘lifted’ it from the most long-lived society our species has ever known…the Native Americans.

we begin with the question: "What did it take to become the chief?"

Two prime requisites were strength AND wisdom. The tribe would not follow a weakling any more than it would (willingly) follow a moron.

But there was a second step…anyone up for the job had to ‘prove’ they were up to the task by accomplishing a variety of ‘tests’ designed to reveal their ‘character’.

Which is to point out there are a million ways to solve a problem but it is how you go about it that tells us ‘who you are’.

Um, it is the only ‘tele-play’ (pilot for a t.v. series) I’ve ever written and it finished in the top ten of the (only) writing competition I entered it in. (I haven’t bothered circulating it more widely due to the sensitive political nature of the material…which is to admit it would NEVER get a ‘green light’ under our decidedly corrupt socio-economic system. Contrary to popular belief, there is a considerable effort expended to maintain the fiction that what we have is ‘as good as it gets, which is really quite pathetic!)

Which is to say given the importance of this process to the nation, it is extremely likely that the event(s) would be televised…sort of ‘redefining’ reality TV.

It sort of goes without saying that if you fold like a cardboard box under a spotlight, it is, er, ‘unlikely’ you would make a satisfactory leader, considering every thing you do is public!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Preoccupied?

2012-01-12T10:59:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are up slightly after trading sideways for the past three days…and I have absolutely no friggin’ clue what to make out of that.

So we shall turn our attention to this little tidbit that provides some follow-up on the more or less defunct OWS ‘movement’.

The security threat is very real here. At least 30 percent of the crowd is a mix of chronically homeless, drug-addicted people, some of whom suffer from "psychological issues," as several protesters put it delicately. Among other rules, the pastor has demanded that the Occupiers station at least one mental health expert "within easy reach" of the church every night.

Even some of the church dwellers themselves are fed up with their fellow pew mates. Chris Allen, 36, is working on a backup plan in case they get kicked out. "I feel people are messing up the church and we're not gonna have it much longer, so I'm worried about putting money in my pocket," said Allen, an unemployed construction worker from Long Island who lives here with his wife. "Because when it snows and I have nowhere to go, I'm not gonna be stuck on the streets like everyone else for being idiots."

Who is allowed to stay at the church is a source of contention and perpetual infighting. If you're not on the official list kept by Occupy organizers, you're not allowed inside. But it's unclear what distinguishes the general populace from an Occupier.

One night in December, police officers were called to the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew when people who weren't on the list came to the door and refused to leave. "I was turned away one night in the cold and rain," said David Everitt-Carlson, a 55-year-old unemployed former advertising executive who lived in a tee-pee at Zuccotti Park. "And I slept at Grand Central Station. I found a place behind a Christmas decoration."

The ‘kiddies’ in the movement were reabsorbed (for the most part) back into their former living arrangements with their parents, as we can see here.

The ‘remains’ of the movement, the ‘hardcore’ occupiers appear to have had no place else to go.

Not that there’s any shame in this, they are the detritus of social system that no longer has a productive use for them…it is NOT their fault.

And they number in the tens of millions! (Placing a significant strain on the rest of society.)

Who is this set of circumstances more stressful for?

It may be a ‘nuisance’ to the relative caring for these ‘abandoned people’ but it is far more stressful for the people who have no choice but to accept this, er, charity that they want no part of.

But them damn few, they NEED to be RICH! and tens of millions of people living in a gutter don’t mean a damn thing to ‘em!

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an Army pack. Now, the military is for suckers from the laboring classes, whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich toward the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"

Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5 million birthday party , believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: "You have to have skin in the game. I'm not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system." But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues; by 2007, the last "normal" economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950; by 2007, they had fallen to 14.4 percent. Who has skin in the game now?

As we can see, the ‘statistics’ can be twisted to support whatever argument you’re trying to make…but the people in the streets, they’re real.

How ironic is it that Mr. Schwarzman is correct, those he so callously refers to as ‘rabble’ SHOULD have ‘skin in the game’…but assholes like him won’t hire them!

It is somewhat ironic that assholes like Mr. Schwarzman have people who do nothing but make sure that they don’t have even one more person on his payroll than is absolutely necessary…which is truly ironic all by itself!

But let us return to the ‘point’ of this particular article, have the ‘truly wealthy’ already, er, ‘withdrawn’ from (and this is a pretty loose fitting adjective) normal society?

Which is in itself a rhetorical question because the rich have ALWAYS lived apart from the…er, ‘rabble’ (perhaps more commonly known as 'the hired help'…)

Worse, good citizen, it only takes a tiny bit of wealthy for people to start thinking they’re ‘better’ than the rest of us.

What do you think makes up the Republican base?

That said, shit rolls downhill…

The difference between them and us is at least we have enough sense to not eat it!

But I am unable to conclude this piece here so bear with me for a while longer…

If we posit that the ‘center’ of the OWS movement is a long overdue protest by those, er, ‘displaced’ by globalization then the ‘occupy’ piece of the puzzle was only phase one. The Homeless have been ‘camping out’ in public spaces for decades now and it hasn’t done them a single lick of good!

The next phase…(and it will likely get you ‘disappeared’ if you try it) will be to shut down our imported economy by crippling the seaports.

Coupled with the, er, ‘spanking’ our lying media by knocking out large swaths of the communications network. It won’t be until people are forced to decide that they will free themselves from their ‘electronic babysitters’ (to take part in the time honored tradition of burning and looting!)

They’ll ‘Barbados’ you for sure for pulling their ‘security blanket’ off of the sleeping sheep…and I use the ancient term Barbados to demonstrate that there is nothing ‘new’ about ‘extraordinary rendition’.

The ‘mistake’ good citizen lies in thinking it can’t happen to YOU!

You can bet the rebellious Irish never saw that one coming…

But hey, Barbados is nice this time of year, no?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Twinkie the Kid...

2012-01-11T11:43:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

I strongly suspect the source of the coming apocalypse was revealed this morning!

I hasten to add that the possibility never crossed my mind, even in my wildest flights of imagination…(and most of you know how ‘wild’ those can get!)

What, pray tell, will become the font of all horror? What event will bring Western Civilization crashing down in a way near impossible to mitigate?

Read it and weep, good citizen: ‘Twinkie the kid’ has filed for bankruptcy

The company, which has assets of roughly $1 billion, has been struggling under the weight of a debt load of about $860 million and soaring expenses tied to its labor force. Hostess has up to 100,000 creditors, and its chief unsecured creditors are labor unions and pension funds that represent the company’s employees, according to the Chapter 11 petition filed in United States Bankruptcy Court in lower Manhattan.

“We remain hopeful that we can reach an agreement that will allow us to amend our labor contracts so that we can emerge from Chapter 11 as a highly competitive company that provides secure jobs for our employees,” the company’s president and chief executive, Brian J. Driscoll, said in a statement. The statement added that Hostess did not anticipate disruptions to its normal sale of baked goods.

Soaring expenses…TIED TO ITS LABOR FORCE?

Twinkies (Hostess brand) is OLDER THAN DIRT, how the fuck can LABOR COSTS suddenly be driving them out of business?

One thing is obvious, the name of the ‘parent company’ has changed…so it looks like Mr. Driscoll and associates might be guilty of making a poor business deal…which is to say they paid too damn much for the company!

Now they can’t charge the customer more for the product in a ‘down’ economy…nor can they alter the recipe without ruining the product…so what does that leave?

They have to cut back on employees!

And what shows up in their bankruptcy filing? Do they tell the truth and admit ‘We SUCK at this business thing, we paid too much for the company and now we can’t afford to pay the help ( and, heaven forbid we could NEVER consider paying ourselves less, it’s the reason we bought a company instead of working for one!)

Well, good citizen…Twinkies (which has experienced a variety of problems over the past dozen or so years) isn’t about to ‘disappear’…the Twinkie ‘shortages’ that resulted in Twinkie hoarding are a testament to that.

The mother company may be doomed but Twinkie the kid will continue to ride!

In one form or another…

Not even feckless capitalism can slay the mighty snack cake! (although ‘peak energy’ threatens to confine them to being a ‘local phenomenon’.)

But seriously, good citizen, this truly is another example of how badly mismanaged our civilization IS…and ‘tense’ is important here because the perps would argue that our society is only beginning to show signs of mismanagement, a common occurrence when economic signposts are obscured.

When the truth of the matter is mismanagement is what causes economic signposts to become obscure! (And therefore ‘misinterpreted!’)

Um, a beast of my own creation, I’m afraid…I’ll bet some of you think I’m being sarcastic, don’t you?

It is not Twinkies (all by themselves) that threatens to tear down Western civilization but the brand of ‘cowboy capitalism’ on display here that will knock us into our own cesspool!

Which is to belabor the obvious, stability is a product of the operating environment, the more unstable your operating environment, the less ‘reliable’ things will be.

And I’m sure most of you have noticed the recent spike in, er, ‘planned obsolescence’.

That is directly attributable to the current ‘unstable’ operating environment.

Slash, hack and burn whatever you can and then loot what isn’t nailed down…then make for the horizon!

I’m willing to bet Twinkie the kid isn’t the only ‘endangered icon’ out there, given the level of ‘instability’ out there.

Um, I should caution you that ‘instability’ is a self-solving problem, the default setting for civilization is virtual stasis.

Which makes it no less ironic that all of the instability in today’s environment is due to the status quo struggling mightily to keep things from changing (but change is long overdue!)

One thing is certain, change will come…left up to us is whether ‘change’ will move us forward or if it throws us backwards…

And this is a decision that YOU will make.

Will you fight for a better future or will you sit on your hands and allow your children to be exterminated before your weeping eyes?

What are you going to do?

It is likely you haven’t even considered this yet…mostly because you’ve been trained to believe that you have no choice.

It is important for you to realize that you ALWAYS have a choice…and choosing not to decide is in fact, a choice!

Your decision not to fight proves them right, that you don’t deserve to live!

Don’t prove them right!

United we stand, divided they win!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Double Take

2012-01-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

I was about halfway through with today’s post when the word processor decided to close without warning…and this time it didn’t recover even part of what I had already written…

But enough about my petty troubles, there are, as they say, bigger things to fret about.

Fortunately, today’s post is sans links…because today’s commentary is a take off of yesterday’s post, where I pointed out that what the media reported would start bordering on the, er, ‘fantastic’!

I’ll try to recapture as much as I can from the original.

Starting with the pledge to end both the Iraq and Afghan conflicts has led to a renewed beating of the war drums over Iran’s ‘nuclear ambitions’.

Understand, good citizen, we didn’t bat an eyelash when Pakistan developed the A-bomb nor did we discuss invading India when they skipped the A-bomb entirely and suddenly produced an H-bomb (somewhat suspicious if you ask me!)

So why are we hell bent on, er, ‘sanctioning’ Iran? Because Israel doesn’t like them?

Now we come to the fact nobody discusses…how we GAVE Israel the bomb and thumbed our noses at the rest of the Middle East!

Naturally, you can only marvel over the conservatives, er ‘tenacity’ over the Iran issue. If we didn’t know better we might be mislead into believing that ‘wars of choice’ was the Republican version of a ‘jobs program’!

If you can’t find something productive to do then let the military turn ‘em into cannon fodder, we all know how much the conservatives love their ~~cannon fodder~~ troops!

Even more, er, bizarre is how the conservatives have been distancing themselves from their pro-globalization voting records…although good ol’ Mitt made quite the gaff yesterday with his comment about how much he liked being able to fire the ‘hired help’…

It’s just what every ‘working American’ wants in a leader!

Is there any irony in the fact that we are currently unable to ‘fire’ our politicians?

There’s a big WTF right there!

Perhaps we’d have better luck using the ‘traditional’ sense of the word?

Witches, politicians…there really isn’t any difference, is there?

But I digress and today’s marvels are somewhat lengthy!

Next up we had conservative wunderkind David Brooks remarking on the same topic I raised yesterday only from the conservative side of the fence…

He asks why ‘liberals’ appear to be ‘out of ideas’?

Methinks David is of the impression that the public remains unaware that the Democratic party has been defunct since 1968.

What ‘Liberals’ you talking about there Dave?

There haven’t been any ‘liberals’ in politics since we landed on the moon!

And the really big ‘take away’ that the so-called progressives studiously ignore is how OWS let the tiger out of the bag when they told both parties to fuck off in no uncertain terms!

The public KNOWS we have become a ‘one party’ state. The R and the D have become meaningless because regardless of ‘party affiliation’, they all take their orders for the same people!

And those people have already demonstrated their hatred of us!

Worse, they consider the rest of us ‘squatters’ on ‘their land’…

But once again I digress…there’s more!

Newt Gingrich received a $5 MILLION dollar check from the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader…

And people wonder why nobody trusts the media?

This in a time when it is becoming increasingly apparent that our government is ‘bought and paid for’ by those with more than they deserve!

I personally don’t give Newt a chance in hell of becoming the Republican nominee…but this time last election cycle I might have offered the same opinion about Mr. Obama…

Who is, shamefully, running ‘unchallenged’…which is, I suspect, unprecedented, given his unpopularity.

This will become the, er, dilemma of the 2012 election, one where it is clear you no longer have any choice, either way the ‘conservative agenda’ wins.

Wouldn’t be so bad if it was just about bragging rights but these bastards want to exterminate the rest of us!

They took over the 1 in 5 conservative party because conservatives actually believe in stupid shit like there really is a ‘surplus population’!

Um, sadly this is a poor rendition of the original…I was really on a roll (almost good enough to get me ‘disappeared!’)

That said, I captured the spirit of the original piece, even if I didn’t execute it quite as elegantly as I did the first time!

I wonder if we will see things start coming to a head when people realize they won’t be given a ‘choice’ this coming November?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Re-treads

2012-01-09T11:57:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

In a bizarre twist, US markets opened ‘up’ while European markets suddenly tanked…again, for no apparent reason.

To opine that the stock markets tell us nothing would be an understatement. Closer to the truth is its usefulness as a hammer with which to crush (or reward) legislation under consideration by the local national government.

So the markets being ‘up’ means (in our case) Wall Street is happy with the results its bought and paid for lackeys have produced (which explains why market performance is so often out of synch with reality!)

Legislation Wall Street doesn’t like causes the markets to sink, sending politicians into ‘panic mode’ as worried congressional staffs field calls from angry constituent/investors more worried about their personal bottom lines than the condition of the society that they will spend those funds in…

Which brings us full circle to yet another of my much beaten ‘hobby-horses’ our badly broken government and our inability to fix it.

Again, the linked article merely raises awareness of a long ignored problem. Once money became the primary focus of politics, the Democrats got caught flat-footed and were easily taken completely out of the picture!

Since NOBODY has ever admitted that the Democratic Party went belly-up decades ago the, er, ‘business friendly’ conservatives (basically Libertarians) have been pretending to be Democrats (a move that hasn’t done anybody any favors…)

And who, by the way, are these people who call themselves ‘progressives’?

As last week’s presidential signing of the law that officially scrapped the US justice system indicates, they sure as fuck aren’t Democrats!

By ‘deduction’ good citizen, this leaves the, er, ‘conservatives’ running things ‘unopposed’.

So just who are these clueless ‘sock puppets’ anyway?

Actors, mostly.

And politics have become, not to belabor the obvious good citizen, ALL about the MONEY!

Understand, it is all about ‘meaningless money’ (which speaks volumes about ‘why’ our/the world’s economy is fucked up!)

Money has but limited usefulness in society, when it is, ‘mismanaged’, society itself crumbles!

A process that has accelerated since the, er, ‘opposition’ has been taken out of the picture.

Why do you suppose, good citizen, the so-called Democrats have NOT selected anyone to run against a very unpopular incumbent?

And make no mistake about it, ‘Do Nothing/Roll over and play dead, Obama’ is NOT popular enough to win re-election…EXCEPT that the wing nuts running against him are totally repulsive!

At the end of the day good citizen, the ‘choices’ we are given are worse than no choice at all…because they amount to the same thing!

Corporate ‘myopia’ has taken over our political system…and we must take it back if there is any hope of saving civilization!

Perhaps more urgent is the fact that this isn’t going to happen ‘by itself’…left to its own devices, the inexorable march ‘rightward’ will proceed, unhindered, until society dies of stagnation!

(I’m tempted but I won’t go there…)

Not that I believe our civilization can be, er, ‘saved’.

The capitalist model will, er, ‘most likely’ die, er, ‘naturally’ with the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system playing itself out until the ‘bag’ is completely empty.

THEN we can start to, er, ‘rebuild’.

(There is a certain amount of debate over which would come first, would we run out of resources because the cost to produce them becomes unreasonable or would money go completely ‘funny’, forcing ‘in-kind’ trading to rise again…it’s not clear what form the ‘end of capitalism’ will take but it will likely be a combination of both.)

Anyway, returning to the original topic once again, what are we going to do about our, er, ‘One Party’ political system?

We can’t vote for change because the ‘One Party’ controls the ballot box as well as the media…(always a sure sign of corruption!)

You can follow that thought to the next logical step, what dos it say about a society when its media is TOTALLY DEPENDENT upon the business community for its support?

Subscription revenues barely cover the cost of paper and ink…and then there is the ‘salary’ of the new staff/press operators to consider.

Advertiser driven news isn’t, by definition, conducive to ‘editorial freedom’.

There’s another disturbing ‘loop’ here that most of you can follow on your own. The, er, ‘high cost’ of politics comes from ‘advertising’. Politicians have to raise enormous sums to ‘advertise’ for voters.

How ‘free’ are you feeling now?

Um, I have opined before about how badly broken our nation is, in that respect this post is a ‘re-tread’ (but at this point in the game, most of them are.)

One thing we can all be confident of is when crunch time comes, we’ll all get out there and do what needs to be done.

That said, it will be interesting to see what rises from the ashes…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Escape!

2012-01-08T13:19:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

There are certain indicators that tell me we are approaching the end of the, er, ‘peaceful transition period’, if you posit, as I do, that the election of Tricky Dick Nixon and the subsequent Reagan Revolution was more than just a major, er, ‘political adjustment’ in this country.

I know I am not alone when I tell you that the Nixon presidency marks the beginning of current ‘the Imperial president’…and what others have termed ‘the American Empire’.

Why bother rehashing history?

Because it is instrumental toward understanding how we got where we are today.

Here’s a snapshot of just where that is

No. 411: December Employment and Unemployment January 6th, 2012

Seasonal-Adjustment Problems Spiked Jobs Growth,
Seasonal-Adjustment Revisions Artificially Lowered Unemployment Rates

December Jobs Reading Remained Well Below Pre-2007 and Pre-2001 Recession Levels

December Unemployment: 8.5% (U.3), 15.2% (U.6), 22.4% (SGS)

Money Supply M3 Annual Growth Tops 3.0% for First Time in 28 Months

FLASH UPDATE: December Payroll Seasonal-Adjustment Problem January 6th, 2012

Seasonal-Adjustment Problem Inflated December’s 200,000 Payroll Gain by 42,000

Certain aspects of ‘the new normal’ have become so universally accepted that people don’t question them…and that is what makes positive change so difficult.

Because certain ‘memes’ appeal to your own sense of greed and thirst for revenge otherwise repellant outcomes become cherished ‘hopes for the future’.

If you ever hit that damn lottery are you ever going to rub their snooty noses in it!

Being the third day of beating this particular drum, I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing what you already knew, that the 200,000 ‘gamed and temporary’ jobs DID NOT ‘save the economy’.

And this is another of the ‘signs’ that tell me the, er, ‘end’ is near.

Which is to point out that the end of life as we once knew it will be marked by a media that is totally divorced from reality. People will start disappearing and the media won’t say anything…even when highly visible people simply, er, ‘vanish’.

Yes good citizen, under a totally corrupt environment, even celebrity is no protection!

And if you don’t have a ‘private army’ at your command, nobody’s going to risk their ass to spring you either.

Yup, mark your calendars good citizen! 2012 will mark the beginning of ‘the end of Western civilization’ although no irony should be lost on the fact that its collapse is due to the exact same factors that have brought down every other, er, ‘empire’ before it.

The ‘wildcard’, good citizen, is how long will the period of ‘barbarism’ (after the collapse) last?

Naturally, that all, er, ‘depends’.

Will the, er, (totally fucking bonkers) usurpers turn our nuclear stock pile on us to, er, ‘ensure’ their flight from justice or will we dodge that bullet?

Depends on how, er, ‘secure’ the ‘fail-safes’ are…

I guess this is where we will see if our founding fathers, er, ‘faith’ in men, ‘both good and true’ was well founded…or not.

I’m predicting a ‘mixed’ result…with the ones who don’t fire being the ones whose targets would yield the least loss of life.

But that is still in the yet to be determined future.

Although, one of the factors we should all find troubling is the total lack of any, er, ‘alternative’ game plan being promoted, even underground.

The now vanished OWS did nothing more than polarize public opinion against the, er, ‘one percent’…(when the top ten percent is just as guilty!)

Of course the leaders of the OWS movement are in fact the children of the top ten percent…and it really wouldn’t do to see mommy and daddy headed for the gallows.

But I digress…

Let us shift mental gears here back to the original topic the monopolization of the global economy

If I were to ‘pick a nit’ with Ilargi it would be over his cumbersome terminology. He waxes poetic about ‘decentralization’ while attempting to sway the reader against the consolidation of market share that is monopolism.

But, you say potato and I say potatoe…same difference (to you or me but the damn Indian English dictionary used by spell check flags it!)

Oh well.

The, er, most pressing problem before us at the moment is how the criminal bankers plan to escape prosecution while keeping as much of their ’loot’ as they can…

We’ll find out soon enough.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Politics or False Advertising?

2012-01-07T16:04:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Top headline on today’s NY Times is how the, er, ‘inflated’ holiday hiring augers a reawakening for the US economy.

Ironically, this is all being attributed to an up tick in ‘online sales’ which is pretty much completely driven by Credit Cards

There currently is no data available regarding how much of online business was conducted with credit/debit cards and how much was purchased with gift cards…

As I pointed out previously…and as has been hinted at by several financial sites, a large part of the, er, ‘collapse’ of the financial sector (not that you’d ever know it with them showering themselves with billions of dollars worth of ‘bonuses’) is defaults on both credit card debt as well as heloc’s/2nd mortgages.

So what is behind this latest ‘surge’ in online sales that has driven a spike in hiring by America’s major delivery services?

While you ponder that, peruse this:

As shoppers felt more confident about their finances and shopped more online, credit card usage rose after three years of major cutbacks in credit card use, a study by the America's Research Group showed.

"January post-holiday sales are expected to plunge to some of the lowest levels in years, thanks to a surge in credit card spending over the Christmas season," said America's Research Group Chairman Britt Beemer.

Beemer said credit card usage this year was up around 25 percent over last year.
"Now that those credit card bills are hitting mailboxes," shoppers will cut back in a very significant way relative to January and February of the last few years," Beemer said.

That said, the retailing sector was higher today, so I guess the "smart money" knows something we don't.

Or do they?

So, no pay increases in the past DECADE…leading to ‘tame’ inflation (at least according to the manipulators of official statistics more commonly known as lies.)

Why the fuck anyone would believe that the US consumer is ‘back’?

Sometime you have to wonder just how far this belief in the fantastic extends.

The next thing you know they’ll be telling us that all of this is THE WILL of some omnipotent being!

Oh…wait a minute…

I guess if you swallow one lie, what’s one more…and then another.

Apparently there’s no need to stop as long as you’re willing to eat shit indefinitely…and the assumption is you will rather than repudiate your guaranteed spot in the glorious ever-after!

(Even more bizarre than this is how many of you simply refuse to, er, ‘decide’. You won’t accept the bullshit BUT the jury is still out as far as ‘spirit in the sky’ is concerned. You’d hate to pass up that deluxe bachelor pad/condo just steps from the beach/lake/river/unicorn ranch/etc.)

But I digress…

Which is to say I think I’ve made my point about the, er, ‘unreliability’ of people with, er, ‘faulty belief systems’.

Er, not for nothing, the, er, ‘fantastic nature’ of some of our images connected with the ‘afterlife’ speaks volumes about our general dissatisfaction with our current plane of existence…

How ironic is it that it is up to us to make this life better.

The good news right now is mixed with the bad news…SOME of us succeed in finding heaven on earth.

The bad news part is these assholes turn your existence into hell on earth so they can have all of theirs and yours too!

Which is to point out that heaven on earth isn’t achievable on a practical level BUT it doesn’t have to suck out loud either!

We could all have it ‘pretty damn good’ if we just learned to be content with ‘our fair share’.

Why don’t we have it ‘pretty darn good' right here and now?

Mismanagement.

The ‘system’ isn’t designed to provide a uniform level of comfort for all participants. It is designed to reward those who grab whatever isn’t nailed down for themselves.

And like our ‘fantasy afterlife’, the greedy have no conception of how much is ‘enough’.

Odd how we start off examining the deceptive advertising of the self-interested and we end up parsing how blind greed affects overall prosperity!

How incredible is it that the top ten percent constitutes 80 percent of what passes for our entire economy, good citizen?

How did we end up in this warped and twisted place, all the while being assured by those who were supposed to protect us that all was well?

There’s stupid and there’s treason. How sad is it that stupid can’t see the treason?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Democracy Now...

2012-01-06T11:34:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

One of the, er, ‘problems’ of being a revolutionary is the competition. Believe it or not, there are many, er, ‘alternatives to capitalism’ out there…

Unfortunately, most of ‘em are not alternatives at all but the exact same shit with different, er, ‘rules’

For example:

America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible?

January 3, 2012

“Black Monday,” September 19, 1977, was the day 34 years ago when the shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets of their decaying Midwestern hometown. No local, state or federal programs offered significant help. Steelworkers called training programs “funeral insurance”: they led nowhere since there were no other jobs available. Inspired by a young steelworker, an ecumenical religious coalition put forward a plan for community-worker ownership of the giant mill. The plan captured widespread media attention, the support of numerous Democrats and Republicans (including the conservative governor of the state at the time), and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration. [snip]

The developmental trajectory from Youngstown to today illustrates what might be called “forced institutional innovation”—a process that, once underway, also suggests further possibilities for larger-scale and more refined development both within Ohio and elsewhere—especially as many other parts of the nation now experience the massive job losses and community decay that hit Ohio and other rustbelt states three decades ago. Critically, all involve new ways to give concrete meaning to the idea of democratizing capital.

Did ‘democratizing’ the company help it to survive?

That’s not what these pictures show

Which is not to say that they don’t have other facilities still in operation, but this is what a web search yielded.

Maybe maintaining a strong web presence isn’t foremost on the mind of the worker/owner.

Maybe they’re too busy thinking about the fuck job of being very silent, er, ‘partners’ in a company that owes its survival to the politics of globalization?

I admit to not reading beyond the first page of today’s offering and maybe there’s ‘full disclosure’ in there somewhere…but the first page sure reads like we could save our entire economy if we just ‘democratized’ capitalism!

If we made all of the workers ‘shareowners’ then they would all have a stake in the company’s future…and maybe they’d work harder and be more careful (which would boost company profits, thank you very much!)

Yeah, the capitalists LOVE giving away tiny shares of the company…hell, it’s ‘free’ to them!

That said, most people are completely clueless as to how ‘corporate democracy’ works.

Let’s fix that! First, you are issued ‘shares’ of the company and it is those shares that carry your ‘voting rights’.

Unlike our political system, under corporate democracy, one share equals one vote…so the more shares you own, the more your vote, er, ‘counts’.

Now, just like our political system, what you get to vote on is already decided for you by the ‘directors’ of the company.

SOME companies have by-laws that permit share-owner initiated ballot items but if you start circulating a petition to round up enough votes to put an issue on the ballot, chances are good you will be terminated before you can vote your handful of shares.

And understand this good citizen, for every share they ‘give away’ they give themselves two!

So you get to vote ‘your’ shares along the predetermined lines the company’s directors ‘recommend’…

Which is pretty much the same thing that happens when you step into the voting booth to find the media’s candidates lined up under their party’s designation.

All of the ‘deciding’ has been done for you…but you didn’t go out in the freezing cold to NOT vote, so you hold your nose and pick one!

Not that they don’t have their ways of fixing the outcome…they do.

But now everybody knows you can’t trust the ballot box, which turns the next election into a real interesting can of worms!

But I digress and time/space is running short.

‘Democratizing’ the workplace is NOT a solution much less an ‘alternative’ to capitalism.

In order to ‘fix’ our economy (both globally and locally) we need to put an end to ‘income streams’.

The term ’profit’ has to be redefined from what the owner ’nets’ to what society reaps in exchange for the effort expended!

There are too many worthwhile things that need doing that can’t be done because ’it is not profitable’ and we can start with the proper disposal of waste as the lead example!

So, back to the original question…can there be an ‘America after Capitalism?’

Oddly, the answer is, if we don’t stop capitalism in its tracks TODAY, there won’t be an America (or anything else) in the not too distant future.

How’s about them apples?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Ordinary

2012-01-05T12:27:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are down again on (surprise!) renewed fears over the collapse of the Euro-zone!

I mean, ‘who knew’?

The oddball part is tomorrow they will pretend it’s not happening again and the markets will rise again…for absolutely NO discernable reason.

But then there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense going on in the, er, ‘business world’ these days…a world that is becoming increasingly less distinguishable from a carnival with each passing day.

Only tangentially related to current events, we can only wonder what flushed this well-beaten hobby horse back into the public arena?

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

WASHINGTON — Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.

Trust me good citizen, no where in this article will you find the necessity of ‘moving up’ questioned.

That said, isn’t there something wrong with this picture from the get-go?

Isn’t the whole 1% phenomenon inherently ‘wrong’ in itself?

Why isn’t the corporate owned media asking the ‘right’ questions?

Could this be because the people who are, er, ‘favored’ by these wrong-headed policies also own the media?

How about ‘right in one’?

Yes good citizen, the media perpetuates these obvious ‘myths’ because they are used to justify that which is unjustifiable and undesirable.

The myths hide nothing. They carefully explain how ‘right place converged with the right time/stuff’ to achieve the desired result.

Ironically, this also explains why, er, ‘upward mobility’ is such a rare thing.

Ben Franklin would be Ben who? if he attempted to start his media empire today, just as Henry Ford (even with an Ivy League degree) would find ‘no takers’ for his now antiquated ideas in the modern world.

Which is to point out the obvious, there is no ‘prize’ for coming in ‘second’…

However, there is a considerable ‘penalty’…and THAT should not be.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the question of ‘mobility’ exists solely to justify the unjustifiable!

Just as there has never been an ‘equitable’ answer to the puzzle known as a ‘fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’, how much compensation does (and let’s not scrimp here) ‘genius’ deserve?

Understand good citizen, people who are far from geniuses are regularly rewarded with more than they can spend (mostly to prevent the, er, ‘undeserving’ from getting it.)

Are bankers ‘worth’ their multi-million dollar ‘bonuses’?

Is any irony lost on the fact that the only people who think so are the people the bankers work for? (Ahem! And that WOULDN’T be YOU, small fry!)

Understand, banking is a ‘non-productive’ activity (even activities such as ‘creative accounting’ are, in the end, ‘counter-productive’.)

The idea that a few of us, er, ‘deserve’ to have more money than we can spend is patently ridiculous…yet many subscribe to the idea!

Worse, the best ‘justification’ for this perversion is ‘why not’?

Well, good citizen…take your fucking blinders off and drink it in because the real reasons ‘why not’ are all around you!

The world is a cesspool and the reason why has been staring you in the face for this entire article!

So ‘a few’ could be rich!

Funny, this is the identical catch phrase used to sell, er, ‘limited capitalism’ to the Chinese.

Well, they weren’t lying…a (very fucking few) got rich…the rest just didn’t have the ‘right stuff’!

Understand…nobody can tell us what that ‘right stuff’ is…the most they’ll admit to is ‘they know it when they see it’…

But can they really (when 99% of the time the ‘right stuff’ is found at the bottom of a smoking gun barrel?

Um, if you’ve read A Simple Plan then you know I don’t subscribe to the ‘equal pay’ nonsense often spouted by communists.

A simple plan is a ‘meritocracy’ with generous provisions made for the, er, ‘ordinary’…because when it’s all said and done, an ‘ordinary world’ is just fine with me!

No irony should be spared on the fact that the shit hole we’ve been saddled with is often made off to be ‘extraordinary’ when it is in fact beyond sub-par…

You need only open your eyes to see the truth in this.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tilt!

2012-01-04T12:53:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

We all know the corporate owned media, er, ‘manipulates’ the information it provides us to ensure it has just the right amount of spin on it. Too much and you won’t believe it but not enough and you might just detect that something is amiss.

And you have to admit, the fuckers are good at what they do, despite the clownish appearance of some of the stuff they are forced to deliver…and that’s another important thing to keep in mind, the default setting is to not tell you ANYTHING. If something is said at all it is because saying nothing would be worse.

Thus do they often say stupid, nonsensical things in order to avoid saying nothing…

But every once in a while even the best ‘slip’. Certain details shake loose that prove nothing by themselves but ‘point’ in a particular direction…

And that’s what I think I have uncovered today…but you already know I’m a few fries shy of a Happy Meal!

So it could be something and it could be nothing…

If I’m right, we’ll know either way sooner than any of us suspects!

Today started off typically enough with this story that provides ‘evidence to the contrary’ to yesterday’s inexplicable market rally:

For four decades, US real per capita disposable income has risen at ~20% a decade. For the average working man, that is a doubling of disposable income in a typical working life. The last 5 1/2 years, however, have seen no change whatsoever - the worst performance in at least half a century.

Naturally, I stumbled upon the, er, ‘evidence’ next…but it was something that happened YESTERDAY that made it click together: (so the following is from yesterday’s SAR)

From Wikipedia: The Constitution does not authorize the President to use signing statements to circumvent any validly enacted Congressional Laws, nor does it authorize him to declare he will disobey such laws (or parts thereof). When a bill is presented to the President, the Constitution (Art. II) allows him only three choices: do nothing, sign the bill, or (if he disapproves of the bill) veto it in its entirety.

Obama’s use of signing statements has clearly shown his willingness to continue the George W. Bush legacy– not only of torture and illegal detainment, but in the dangerous trend of de facto rule by “executive fiat.” Worse, such signing statements put in place a precedent for future presidents to follow– or expand upon.

Further, Barack Obama has continued to backslide on his campaign promise not to use signing statements and executive orders to circumnavigate legislation signed into law. RELATED (Feb. 2010): Obama Breaks Yet Another Key Campaign Promise on Executive Orders, Signing Statements

Is anyone ‘surprised’ that ‘Uncle Tom’ signed this odious piece of legislation…intended to rob any who disagree with the status quo of their rights by denying them a trial?

The Constitutional Lawyer I voted for never would have done this…but this nigga did.

Then we have this article this is what leads me to think things are going to fall apart in pretty short order:

These are serious offenses. But it becomes even worse if JPM afterwards sought to withhold the stolen funds and cover up the transactions, impeding an official investigation. And then their legal maneuvering afterwards to cut the customer interests in the courts is of course beneath contempt.

Nasty business indeed. I wonder how long the Obama Administration and the Congress are going to cover this up. I am sure the details are known to the regulators already.

Am I making mountains out of molehills?

Probably…but you have to admit these are mighty ‘ballsy moves’ being made by the status quo and it’s happening right under our (largely unsuspecting) noses.

If we take each case individually they are all easily dismissed. The stock market being up 250 points one day only to be down 50 the next can be brushed off as ‘animal spirits’.

Um, Il Duce’s signing away of our constitutional rights can easily be dismissed as not wanting to appear ‘weak on defense’…(or weak between the ears/knees, pick one.)

Perhaps this is merely ‘the price you pay’ for being a puppet…let someone else pull the strings and history will still point the finger of shame at YOU!

The question without answer is, once all is said and done, was it worth it?

I suspect the public ‘fails to appreciate’ the true significance of ‘selectively suspend able’ rights.

Perhaps this is another incidence where I am giving the public more credit than it deserves.

We shall see…because yesterday, good citizen, the ‘true rulers’ of this capitalist clusterfuck, the ‘Royal wannabes’ if you will, declared war upon the 99%!

And if it is war they want, then it is war they shall have!

Happy New Year, good citizen!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Brief post script: The rule of law is predicated upon ‘equality’. Once you start deciding who, er, ‘deserves’ the protection of the law and who doesn’t, the ‘rule of law’ goes right out the window and you’re left with the ‘do as I say and not as I do’ situation.

As of yesterday, the rule of law ‘legally’ ceased to exist here in the USA…and Gegner is NOT a Lawyer.

Let’s see how this turn of events plays out on the world stage? (Now that we are officially a lawless, rouge nation.)

Final bit of advice…don’t let them take you alive.

Spotless Minds

2012-01-03T10:48:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

First day back and the markets are up 250 points at the open! How’s that for ‘reckless, baseless optimism?’

Um, because something more disturbing caught my eye first we are going to have to execute a sharp left here and return to the nonsense markets later.

What caught my eye this morning is neither new or news yet it is another disturbing example of the mismanagement regularly displayed by the politically powerful (Ironically proving how ‘unfit’ for power they truly are.)

There is broad agreement on the left, right and center that $450 billion in cuts over a decade — the amount that the White House and Pentagon agreed to last summer — is acceptable. That is about 8 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget. But there is intense debate about an additional $500 billion in cuts that may have to be made if Congress follows through with deeper reductions.

Mr. Panetta and defense hawks say a reduction of $1 trillion, about 17 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget, would be ruinous to national security. Democrats and a few Republicans say that it would be painful but manageable; they add that there were steeper military cuts after the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

“Even at a trillion dollars, this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw military budgets in the Clinton White House and is now a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “It would still be the world’s most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves.”

It is this last paragraph I find most disturbing…we have indeed slashed military ‘infrastructure’ across the nation. To the point where the word most commonly associated with military base these days is ‘abandoned’.

It’s like living in the sickest of the industrialized nations and learning we spend the most on medicine (which is obviously doing us no good.)

We spend more than the rest of the world COMBINED on our military and it took ten years to, er…I dunno, we can hardly call it a ‘win’ and the ‘bad guys’ are still there so what was the point of being over there again?

Ten years and a trillion dollars for ‘nothing’…well, not exactly nothing. They did mange to cripple a hundred thousand or so of our volunteers while they were playing invade the peaceful brown people and slaughter ‘em!

But, naturally I digress.

Why we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on our global military is a mystery.

Who is going to ‘invade’ a nuclear superpower, one capable of wiping any foreign power completely off the map at the push of a button?

Only the chimera that haunt the fevered minds of the conservative hawks…who stand ever vigilant, ready to defend us against non-existent threats anytime or anywhere!

So damaging were the relentless raids of the marauders that our psyches have never recovered…and the fuckers play us by pretending the next attack could come at any moment!

That attack, good citizen, is never coming again…the marauders no longer exist.

Oh, but they’ll be back…once conditions favor them again! (Like when defense budgets are limited to what an individual can afford…)

How sad is it good citizen that we currently have a handful of people that can ,er, ‘afford’ personal protection of a higher caliber than that provided to the average individual?

Which is to say once the Banana Republic is firmly entrenched, your only ally will be the gun in your hands.

Anyway, it’s time to say ‘right face’ and return to the first disturbing development I dropped at the open.

On Wall Street, Renewed Optimism for Deal-Making
By EVELYN M. RUSLI

[Jim Wilson/The New York TimesKinder Morgan’s Rockies Express pipeline runs from Colorado to Ohio. The company’s $36.2 billion deal for the El Paso Corporation was one of the largest in 2011.]

Before Europe’s debt crisis flared anew last summer, rattling markets and choking off a revival in mergers and acquisitions, huge corporate cash piles and cheap debt had fostered hopes that deal-making would recover strongly last year.

In the first half of 2011, the dollar volume of announced mergers worldwide neared its highest levels since the financial crisis. But that momentum proved fragile as deal volume tumbled 19 percent, to about $1.1 trillion, in the second half of 2011, compared with the same period the year before, according to according to Thomson Reuters data.

Now, with stock and credit markets steadier, deal makers are growing confident that 2012 will be better for business. Not only do they point to cheap financing and the large amounts of cash on corporate balance sheets, but they say that companies that have already cut costs may decide that they need to make acquisitions to drive growth in the face of a tepid economy.

Notice how nobody is interested in solving the ‘tepid economy’ problem?

What is their response to the mismanagement that is ‘globalization’?

Buy up more ‘market share!’ that’s how you ‘grow’ in a shrinking economy!

Okay, time to go ‘screaming off the Reservation’ (again!)

This is the THIRD ‘jobless recovery’ good citizen, the labor force today is SMALLER than it was in 2000 AND THEIR RESPONSE IS TO BUY MORE MARKET SHARE!!!

Guess who’s the ‘fuckee’ in this decidedly shitty deal?

Do you THINK you can fix this with the BALLOT BOX (that you obviously have zero control over)?

AAAaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh! (the scream of mental anguish!)

What puzzles me is what your reaction will be when the totally contrived ‘famine’ hits?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cyanamid Rain

2012-01-02T12:26:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to ‘the beginning of the end’ if you make any connection to the Mayan calendar thingy…

I’m probably being ‘picky’ when I note that our solar system’s ‘orbit’ around the Milky Way takes roughly a quarter of a million* years so their 5,000 year start to finish appears to be a bit ‘off’.

I appreciate much of the data was destroyed before it could be studied, there may be another reason why the Mayan’s believe you won’t need the last fortnight of this years calendar.

Whatever…

While definitely not being a member of the ‘serious people’s club’ (better known as the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind club!) we have , er, bigger problems to contend with.

Once again, today’s offering only touches the edge of today’s topic

When those at the top of the corporate pyramid are this tone-deaf and lacking in any sense of public responsibility, we are in treacherous waters.

“The biggest danger to America is that the people in the financial sector and corporate leadership convey no awareness of what is needed to create a coherent and prosperous society,” economist Rob Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, told AlterNet. “Leadership is not simply about how much money one makes.”

Many dollars. Very little sense. Ultimately, hoarding everything at the top is not sustainable, and bankers like Dimon will end up destroying the very society that makes their enormous wealth possible. If we let them.

To-wit: The Masters of the Universe know we are powerless to stop them from, er, ‘robbing us back to the stone age’…nobody is debating this…WHOEVER, they depend upon the existence/enforcement of certain, er, ‘standards of behavior’ as much as we do.

So why are these retards ‘pretending’ that their double standard will hold?

They KNOW it won’t!

Um, and it is foolish to think that they ‘don’t care’. Stealing as much as they have stolen is completely pointless if they end up incapable of holding onto it!

Thus do I keep encountering rather disturbing theories about what they’re up to and why…

I am still of the opinion that (in the US) the current form of government will, er, ‘collapse’ (the ‘pressure’ to bring criminals to justice will become too intense and the corruption is so pervasive that there will be a defacto ‘coup’ [likely military] to, er, ‘maintain order’.)

No one will be surprised to see that the key figures will remain unchanged…(and predominantly conservative…which will make beaucoup trouble for their, er, ‘supporters’.)

It remains to be seen if this coup is pulled off by the military acting, er, ‘independently’ or if it will be a ‘reaction’ to a Conservative ‘walk-out’.

And as we have seen recently, I highly doubt the military will assume control to, er, ‘uphold’ the Constitution’.

(Most conservatives would like to use the Constitution for toilet paper!)

But I digress!

I am not saying we will see this during the course of this year (but it wouldn’t surprise me.) I bring it up because that is the direction things seem to be going in…and the traitors among us are suddenly anxious to, er, ‘cover their asses’.

If they don’t pull off a major shift in the status quo they WILL be prosecuted for their crimes…and, as irrational as it may sound, some have been ‘promised’ that they will not stand trial.

Now who could/would promise anyone (in a free society) ‘exemption from prosecution’?

Wouldn’t that person have to be ‘king’ to pull that one off?

Which is to opine that the, er, ‘game’ these assholes are playing has been carried more than a bit too far!

Oh well, the damage is done.

All that remains will be implementing a system that will prevent this sort of thing from happening again in 50 years!

This is why I favor the ‘elimination’ of legislators. The ability to alter (never mind make up as you go along) the nation’s laws is more dangerous to the individual’s freedom than Cyanamid rain (otherwise known as superglue.)

You are instantly ‘stuck’ with whatever the despot dreams up, despite their, er, ‘good intentions’.

(I never said I was any good at whipping up analogies on a moments notice…good thing part of my, er, ‘purpose’ here is to provide the occasional grin or two!)

Even if my sense of humor is somewhat twisted…

So, it’s the ‘beginning of the end’ (even if you aren’t a Mayan!)

I don’t expect it to be a ‘Happy’ New Year in the traditional sense by any stretch of the imagination…although we can ‘take heart’ once the death spiral has been arrested!

But we’re still left with the question of ‘when’?

Until that answer makes itself apparent…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Under the ever so awkward 'this is embarrassing' category I had previously misstated the time it takes the solar system to orbit the galactic center by an order of magnitude.

How ironic that on the very day I misstate such a thing the actual number is broadcast on the Science channel that very same night!

Unfortunately for us all my staff is too lazy to fact check what it thinks it already knows...I stand abashed.

Me First!

2012-01-01T12:56:00.002-05:00

Happy New Years, good citizen!

Does it piss you off that the crooked bastards running this recycled manure operation are already pretending that the ‘turning of the page’ is all it’s going to take to put everything right?

How disturbing is it good citizen that that nothing (of substance) has changed?

Observe:

A Year of Me-Firsts, and of Lessons Relearned

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: December 31, 2011

LIVE and learn. And well we should, given that 2011 was packed with teachable moments.

Some of this stuff we already knew. Like the fact that banks love the perks that come with being too big to fail. They will lobby shamelessly to hang on to their riskiest businesses and stay perilously large. No surprise, really. A heads-we-win, tails-the-taxpayers-lose model has a lot going for it, at least for executives atop these institutions.

Here’s another lesson we didn’t need to relearn: Penalties levied on corporate miscreants, and the legal bills they rack up defending themselves, never come out of their own pockets. Insurance policies and shareholders wind up paying.

Another win for the me-firsters.

While Ms. Morgenson’s first shot lands smack between their eyes, her remaining shots also hit their mark…leaving one that much more galled over our collective inability to do anything about it.

If it’s this easy to dig up the evidence, then why is nobody being prosecuted?

Understand good citizen, as far as the one percent is concerned, we’re all ‘slackers’.

‘Overzealous’ law enforcement is a two-edged sword. The tendency is for it to catch the honest players in the gray areas so that the process is halted…er, ‘prematurely’.

But we aren’t talking ‘one time’ offenders here…and it is these ‘serial criminals’ who are behind throwing the prosecutors under the bus!

Weird how the guilty escape prosecution by calling the search for justice a ‘witch hunt’.

This is why it is imperative that we alter the game itself so the guilty get theirs regardless.

Like the outlaws all know, there are some things ‘worse than death.’

Take watching your hard won spoils literally ‘evaporate’ before your eyes and being powerless to stop it for example!

Who said the payback ain’t a bitch!

Let ‘em call their high priced political operatives; they’re all ‘unemployed’ (and likely facing the gallows to boot!) Let’ em call the (now defunct) law firms (who engineered this whole fiasco)…the silence will be deafening!

Which is to admit right up front that it is indeed ‘unlikely’ we will succeed in prosecuting all of the guilty parties involved…but we can say with a high degree of confidence that they will ALL be put ‘out of business’!

AND, we can also say with an equally high degree of confidence that those who slipped the hangman’s noose WILL find themselves EXILED in short order.

They’re obsessive compulsive, they literally can’t help themselves…but, ironically, society’s new reply to this is lifted directly from the Capitalist playbook…

“If you can’t play by the rules it’s not our problem, it’s YOURS!

How close are we to righteous retribution? good citizen?

Er, this COULD BE a ‘massive coincidence’…but the timing was ‘impeccable’!

January 01, 2012 — PERU, Ill. (AP) — A large fire broke out at a massive former Peru clock factory as revelers were ringing in the new year, drawing firefighters from surrounding northern Illinois communities to help out and leading to the mandatory evacuation of residents from nearby homes early Sunday.

The fire at the former Westclox clock complex, a city landmark that covers a two-by-four-block stretch of downtown Peru and encompasses several buildings, including some converted into working shops and businesses, began around the time people began counting down the seconds to 2012, Gary Eccles, an engineer with the city's fire department, told The Associated Press. [snip]

The National Park Service in 2007 deemed the building eligible for the National Registry of Historic Places "because of its significant contributions to the social and economic development of Peru and the nation," the newspaper reported.

Um, one can only wonder about the ‘effectiveness’ of burning down facilities in the middle of the economic desert that nobody gives a shit about.

But it does produce a ‘headache’ for an insurance company somewhere…and if they keep burning (and I’m predicting they will, just as the ‘car fires’ across Los Angeles will, er, ‘graduate’ to more ‘property damage intensive’ items.)

And I’m clear on the other side of the country…just saying, ya know?

Of course, there’s a rather fine line between ‘predicting’ and ‘enciting’

What I’m calling predicting is someone else’s idea of ‘advocating’…thus are we once again bitten by that gnarly beast known as ‘the imprecision of human speech.’

That said, I’ll shut up and wish you success in the New Year, regardless of what ‘yardstick’ you use to measure it!

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Interesting New Year!

2011-12-31T11:55:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Well, here we are again, another year older and not a single wit wiser (not to mention that most of us are a good deal poorer…)

The NY Times tells us that Wall Street finished the year pretty much in the same place it started yet Mr. Williams of Shadow stats fame provides us with this indisputable data

No. 410: Special Commentary, GAAP-Based 2011 U.S. Financial Data
December 28th, 2011

Actual 2011 Federal Deficit Topped $5.0 Trillion

U.S. Government Debt and Obligations Top $80 Trillion

Long-Term U.S. Insolvency/Hyperinflation Remain Virtual Certainty

As usual, the, er, ‘disturbing’ portion of the commentary has been served up last.

Yes good citizen, despite strident claims to the contrary, the very real threat of ‘Hyper-inflation’ continues to haunts us.

Libertarians like Mish Shedlock still point to ‘deflation’ as the devil haunting our tracks yet there has NEVER, (like not even once) been an instance where prices dropped so low that commerce ceased to function.

But that’s a ‘misleading’ description of deflation…

What these ‘serious people’ are warning us of is the ‘drying up’ of credit!

The thinking here is you simply won’t have the money to purchase staples AT ANY PRICE.

This decidedly twisted way of viewing things ignores the same factor ‘gold bugs’ routinely ignore.

The ONLY reason people pay the ‘asking price’ for anything is because it is cheaper than the price of simply taking it.

Right now, as in at this very second, the blunted and stubby ‘arm of the law’ is likely to reach out and slap you should you decide to take the more ‘economical route’ while shopping.

But in the not too distant future you will become the law…more disturbingly, EVERYBODY will become their own personal ‘law enforcement’ unit.

And there will be no, er, ‘arbiters’ of right and wrong…the winners of these disputes will be the quickest on the draw (as well as the most ruthless in ‘target selection’.)

Did I mention ‘Happy New Year’ yet?

I didn’t think so, despite it already being declared that 2011 was a ‘bad year’…

Funny we are only hearing this now, at the end of the first year where they stopped claiming there was an (imaginary) recovery underway!

Oh, and that it was not merely ‘billions’ pumped into the fraudulent banking system but trillions!

Conservatives were upset enough over the 700 billion that their last sitting president tossed at the banks. Where is their outrage at this figure mushrooming by a factor of 35?

More disturbingly, this was done by a conservative central bank head!

(But, naturally, that has nothing to do with anything…)

Which draws us back to our original topic…which was the inevitable collapse of the global financial system.

What? You didn’t get that out of Mr. Williams brief commentary?

Like my humble self, Mr. Williams is unable to provide us with the ‘exact date’ (although I’ll stick my neck out and predict it will happen before next summer! A ‘prediction’ that has absolutely nothing to so with the Mayan long count calendar.)

Those bold enough to click through the ‘adult content’ firewall should hold few illusions about how the world operates and who is in charge of it.

But I’m ‘projecting’ again, am I not?

What I admire the most about you, gentle reader, is that you are no fool!

Thanks for keeping it real!

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you an ‘interesting’ New Year…and it’s always interesting if you know what you’re looking at!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

There and back again...

2011-12-29T12:10:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Apparently the thinking is you have to be unemployed to even go looking for the ‘help wanted’ listings…and believe me when I tell you, you have to really ‘hunt’ for them in the only place they don’t ‘back up’ (in your local newspaper. Online job postings are eternal in our capitalist fuck you, pay me ethic.)

So a lower level of new claims tells us what?

Only that they are done throwing people out the nearest window…for now.

And, traditionally, it is considered ‘poor taste’ to jettison the baggage during the holiday season.

The only useful thing to come out of ‘A Christmas Carol’ is a palpable fear that the three ghosts wait to this day to ‘treat’ their next victim…

And at least some of these would be ‘Scrooges’ might be reluctant to relive the tyrannies of Christmas past…nor would they be eager to preview what the Spirit of Christmas yet to come may reveal!

So the answer is ‘no’, a reduction in lay-offs during the ‘Holiday Season’ is actually fairly ‘typical’.

Making it difficult to classify this offering. One thing is certain, it is definitely ‘Happy Talk’…

US unemployment claims rise after steady declines

December 29, 2011 — WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits rose last week after three weeks of declines to a level consistent with modest gains in hiring.

But broader trend over the past month suggests job growth could pick up in the new year. Weekly applications increased by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 381,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Still, the four-week average, a less volatile measure, dropped for the fourth straight week to 375,000. That's the lowest level since June 2008.

Applications generally must fall below 375,000 — consistently — to signal that hiring is strong enough to reduce the unemployment rate. While layoffs have fallen sharply since the recession officially ended two and a half years ago, many companies have been slow to add jobs.

Still, hiring has improved in recent months. Employers have added an average of 143,000 net jobs a month from September through November. That's almost double the average for the previous three months.

There is NO CORRELATION between falling new claims and ‘rising’ anything!

Worse, they have the workforce figures so distorted that is masks 50% of the unemployed!

Why do they do this?

If the public were aware of how badly capitalism is failing they would DEMAND a replacement!

But the working public is, er, ‘unaware’ of their good fortune (and nobody dares to point it out.)

Sure, they hear how lucky they are to have a job all the time…what they don’t know is there are more than six workers for every job in global marketplace!

Only a handful of these jobs require prior experience in the given field. A couple of weeks of ‘hands on’ in most jobs is enough to fill 99% of ALL job requirements…kinda adding mightily to the ‘lucky’ factor. (In many cases you COULD be replaced by a chimp! The only thing saving your sorry ass is chimps can‘t talk.)

Naturally, there is another factor that doesn’t garner much attention in the press and oddly they aren’t trying to keep it secret and that’s the constant consolidation of market share around the globe.

That is how they keep their figures rising when every thing else is falling.

There’s a slightly larger overall market (driven solely by population growth) while there is a steady decline in the number of ‘competitors’ for what markets remain.

This is yet another way to disguise the corrosive effects of globalization and its perverted cousin, the global race to the bottom.

Sadly, if people were paying attention, they might have noticed that the one percent has stolen their children’s future (and left an economic wasteland in its place.)

Ironically, as we are soon to relearn, ‘redundancy is GOOD!’

In an energy scarce future 6,000 mile long supply chains will be unthinkable and sole sourcing will become a defacto crime!

Nobody can live in an ‘economic desert’ nor should anyone be forced to try…(IF they’re not a criminals!)

In a ‘sustainable’ future all supply lines will be as short as possible. If quality considerations dictate that only a certain type of resource is suitable, then those products will be produced as close as practical to that source.

Shipping stuff half way around the planet and back was never a ‘practical’ idea. The bastards who deliberately destroyed our economy (s) knew that (although China is notoriously ‘resource poor’…)

I’m guessing the plan is to secure sources closer to China as the pressure to shorten supply lines builds.

And that may well be the trigger we continue to squeeze, good citizen.

As the cost of shipping goods half-way around the planet and back again becomes prohibitive, the ‘problem’ of being unable to make it ourselves will truly become ‘our problem’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cracked skulls

2011-12-28T12:49:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are down…it appears they have run out of (fabricated) ‘good news’. Um despite markets being down oil is back over $100 a barrel and we can only wonder what this portends.

I’d opine this will be part of the ‘bag of tricks’ they’re holding in reserve for when the grand jury starts inquiring about, er, ‘irregularities’.

Which is to say we are NOT running out of oil (yet), we have merely exhausted the easy to reach and refine stuff.

The ‘problem’ we are facing is the exponentially increasing number of ‘end-users’, in that respect the oil that remains will not last long.

So the price increases we have seen are, at the moment, more indicative of the added expense to refine than of a supply shortage.

Shift mental gears with me as we explore the machinations of the guilty as they lose there struggle to avoid prosecution.

Often times I use the link provided by CKM but it was his commentary that inspired my selection of today’s piece. (The bullet titled ‘Borrowed’)

I wanted to provide credit where (to me) credit is truly due.

Borrowed: Here's a middle of the road set of predictions for 2012's economic, political and social adventures. Pessimism abounds. And that's among the optimists. I'd only add that things can appear deceptively close. Social upheaval may take some time. Wall Street bankers and their European cousins can kick the can a few more times before we all end up in the gutter. All the bad stuff will probably happen ,just not as quickly as some expect.

As you can observe, it is the last line that catches your attention.

Why haven’t half of the ‘bad things’ that are going to happen not happened yet?

In some cases the answer is they have…but the event was successfully camouflaged by the corporate owned media, in other cases we can only assume the public hasn’t gotten riled up enough to go head to head with the authorities.

But, as CK opines, the bad stuff WILL happen…just not as soon as you think…and by the time they ADMIT a majority of the general public no longer supports the current government…but the corporate owned media will continue to downplay this aspect of what, by then, will be open revolt.

Anyway, unmentioned by CKM is the ‘being held in reserve’ aspect of many of the trauma’s the criminals intend to inflict upon a stunned public.

Worse, if public outrage erupts in, er, ‘impromptu executions’ the criminals may ‘pull the trigger’ early to buy themselves more ‘run away time’.

Now, if you don’t think they have any ammo, think again!

These shiftless bastards have the power (and, in my opinion, the intent) to scuttle the entire global banking system on a moments notice.

Now turn your thoughts toward the dimwits YOU report to…

Not exactly your ’outside the box’ thinkers, are they?

Worse, they most often can be found clinging to the box, muttering the instructions to themselves like that alone would somehow correct the problem all by itself.

This is what dooms us good citizen, suffering the incompetent to maintain their grip on power.

Once these people find themselves on their own they will keep doing what they’ve always done, hoping against hope that it will (miraculously) work just one more time!

There’s a rather insidious reason why most command hierarchies are packed with incompetents, it is done to insure AGAINST ‘independent action’…

In fact they PREFER people who call to verify EVERYTHING before they commit to anything. It may be annoying BUT it dramatically reduces ‘unpleasant surprises’.

It also serves the useful purpose of guaranteeing total chaos once the information flow these ‘stuffed shirts’ are so reliant on ceases.

What’s that? You have a ‘competent boss’?

How much ‘latitude’ does he have in the decision-making process? Usually the competent are relegated to jobs where their latitude is very limited.

He may enjoy ‘total control’ over his immediate workforce and he also has the freedom to execute assignments as he sees fit…but he probably doesn’t have ‘budget autonomy’, he’s told what he can spend, when…and on what.

Likewise, he knows just how far he can fudge his expense report. It may ‘Look Like’ he’s running his own show but the reality is he’s on a ‘short leash’.

When the bastards ‘pull the trigger’ guys with enough moxie to make decisions on their own will be ‘dismissed’ without notice…or severance for that matter.

Which is to point out that the situation will be mighty desperate by then, almost every light post will have a criminal swinging from it.

And it won’t be a big stretch to connect the missing order givers from the resultant chaos…but it is a necessary evil, a purge that MUST happen.

Which only goes to show you that there ain’t no ‘peaceful’ (or easy) way to remake a civilization.

Shamefully, I have to admit that in order to remake the world, cracking a few skulls is unavoidable!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Clearance Sale!

2011-12-27T12:02:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

It appears the market tickers are out of whack (but how do we tell?) They had the date right but the clock indicated it was already 2:35 in the afternoon! (and this was before the open!)

But that is not today’s topic, today’s offering comes to us straight from the headlines of today’s NY Times

Naturally, whenever you see a ‘this isn’t new or news’ item, we are compelled to ask why this and why now?

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

Well, ‘the divide‘, which has been growing steadily for the past few decades, has become more stark partly because the rich have indeed been getting richer and mostly because the poor have been getting considerably poorer.

Worse, the ‘bar’ for entry into the, er, ‘public arena’ has also risen at an alarming rate. The merely ‘well-to-do’ can no longer, er, ‘afford’ to mount a campaign, much less buy a seat on an influential committee if elected!

Politics have indeed long been the preserve of the ‘idle rich’.

Thus has ‘leadership’ been lacking for so long.

To give you an idea of how bad it has gotten good citizen, Connecticut has long enjoyed the status of having the highest per capita income of any state in the nation…but not anymore.

Recently it has come to light that there is a place where the per capita income dwarfs that of Connecticut…but it’s not a state!

So this, er, disparity may have existed for quite some time…

Can you guess which, er, ‘district’ has snatched the crown from Connecticut, home of hedge fund Billionaires and other Wall Street tycoons?

Correct good citizen, the enchanted district that contains ‘K Street’ has snatched the crown from the desert state of Connecticut.

What Connecticut isn’t in a desert?

The fuck it ain’t!

The biggest employer in the state is Stop & Shop!

Not that the rich give a shit about that! They don’t do their own grocery shopping…

Unlike the vast majority of us…although these days, more and more of us are purchasing our necessities from the local dollar store!

Makes you wonder what places like Stop & Shop are going to do when we are all reduced to buying pet food with our food stamps?

But it stands to reason that we’ll all have bigger things to worry about if it comes to that.

So, we have rich politicians AND a ‘leaderless’ world…how the fuck did that happen?

Aren’t the wealthy ‘natural leaders’?

Apparently not.

Doing what’s good for you often involves doing what’s not so good for a bunch of other people…but you aren’t gonna stay rich if you aren’t willing to, er, ‘crack a few ~~skulls~~, I mean eggs!

So we return to the very limited pool our politicians are drawn from. Sure, on occasion some rich bastard will stake a poor man’s run for office but this is done as a ‘spoiler’, it is not done out of any sense of civic pride or a genuine desire for ‘honest government’ (despite robust claims to the contrary.)

It might fairly be said that the current incumbent is a fair example of this ‘spoiler’ in action. Give the public what they want but then tie his hands behind his back once he’s in office!

This tactic has made the public wary of what is now viewed as a ‘puppet government’, the ballot box has never been more suspect than it is today.

Which returns us to our original question…why point to corrupt politicians now?

Are they trying to focus our attention on the futility of changing anything while politicians and the system used to elect them are on sale cheap?

Or are they attempting to ‘deflect’ some of the hostility currently aimed at the financial community by pointing at their ‘enablers’?

There can be no doubt that our legislators are just as guilty as the finance boys…who are just as guilty as those who employ them!

Which only re-enforces my cry that we need to redefine the term criminal.

Justice disappears when criminals get to decide what is and what isn’t ‘just’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sameness

2011-12-26T11:28:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Despite my gloomiest prognostications it seems we have survived yet another year (with our communications grid intact, many will ‘survive’ the collapse of civilization brought on by the collapse of global banking.)

So when I say we survived, I mean our ability to personally share our observations survived.

When we are plunged into a world of rumors and hearsay we will long for the days when the Corporate media at least colluded regarding what the ‘official lie’ was. My first novel is centered on what living in this type of ‘informational void’ would be like.

(Jeez, take a day off and your focus goes straight to hell!)

Anyway, it is coming up on time to reflect on the year almost past, and what a year it has been.

Once again a war has ended (but a military ‘presence’ will likely persist for decades.)

It is perhaps more remarkable to comment on the multitude of things that DIDN’T happen.

Let’s start with after four years of political frustration, the alleged winners of the last presidential election have failed to recruit a stronger candidate…although, pathetically, the so-called ‘opposition’ continues to suffer from a curious mixture of schizophrenia and failure to launch…

Then there’s the ‘elephant in the room’ of a failed economy that nobody has done anything to correct…(except throw trillions in ‘free money’ at the banking system…which the shameless bastards turn around and use to award themselves billions in ‘bonuses’.)

Perhaps the root of this dilemma lies with the concept of when a bonus is due…someone needs to stand up and patiently explain to the bankers that it isn’t proper to reward failure/incompetence.

Naturally, it is difficult (if not impossible) to explain anything to the ‘Masters of the Universe’…

Sadly, this is a beast of the 1%’s making…

When ‘bonuses’ are in fact ‘hush money’ it certainly makes things look bad…but such is the level of decay in our society.

And speaking of which, nothing has been done to reverse the debilitating effects of globalization, a, er, ‘policy/methodology’ that ONLY BENEFIT’S THE OWNERS OF COMMERCE!

This variety of ‘stick ‘em up’ capitalism MUST stop or our civilization will be utterly destroyed!

And the above phrase is not intended to imply that a ‘benign’ form of capitalism even exists, all capitalism is predatory!

It is amazing to me that nobody acknowledges that the ‘true profit’ of commerce is life itself! Equating everything in dollars and cents is both meaningless as it is useless!

What needs to be done will still need to be done regardless of if anyone pays you to do it.

Worse, are those who use price as a barrier to responsible behavior!

We have no money to pay teachers but there is plenty of money to fight senseless, er, ‘police actions’ that cost the taxpayers trillions while not making us even a tiny bit ‘safer’.

There is no money to pay workers a living wage (which would boost the overall economy) but price is no object when it comes to a security apparatus that tracks our every move…

And this isn’t a problem that is ‘exclusive’ to the US…

The misappropriation of there being NO funds to improve society but unlimited funds to oppress it is a recipe for revolution…

And THAT good citizen is something else that HASN’T changed!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Holiday mystery

2011-12-24T12:34:00.001-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow tacked on more than 400 points this week as the collapse of the Euro-zone disappeared from public notice (thanks to the corporate owned media.)

(Advertising is supposed to HELP sales! So warnings of eminent financial collapse are somewhat counter-productive to that goal…)

How sad is it that the public consciousness resembles that of an infant in situations like this? To a baby, you literally ‘disappear’ whenever you leave their line of sight. You’d think we would outgrow this physics problem as we age but no. If a given topic drops out of the news cycle we have a disturbing tendency to ‘automatically assume’ the problem has, er, ‘disappeared’/gone away.

How, er, ‘shocked’ will people be when the Euro-crisis returns, still in full blossom after the beginning of the New Year?

More, er, ‘mystifying’ is the sudden reappearance of ‘Happy Talk’ as we close out the year just past.

We were headed for a face-plant just a month ago…now (and for no discernable reason) we are being bombarded with reports of ‘green ~~shits~~ shoots’ popping up economy wide.

Admittedly, many of these reports actually forewarn of ‘bad news’ but they are being reported in the best possible light!

Yes, the ship is still sinking…but the angle the ship is listing as it sinks provides for near perfect sun tanning!

Or the reports go to the other extreme as Mr. Williams so effectively debunks:

No. 409: Revised GDP, November Durable Goods, New Home Sales December 23rd, 2011

GDI Indicates No U.S. Economic Growth in Either Second- or Third-Quarter

2011 Durable Goods Orders and New Home Sales Show Stagnation

Treasury Releases 2011 GAAP-Based Financial Report on U.S. Government More ...

No. 408: November Housing Starts and Existing Home Sales December 21st, 2011

3.5 Million Home Sales Just Disappeared
Housing Starts Still Bottom Bouncing More ...

No. 407: November CPI, PPI, Real Retail Sales Industrial Production December 16th, 2011

Consumer Financial Distress Hampered Retail Sales and Production

Nonsensical Hype Over Regularly Mis-Adjusted Jobless Claims

High Oil Prices Still Inflating Broad Economy November’s Annual Inflation: 3.4% (CPI-U), 3.8% (CPI-W), 11.0% (SGS)

Gold Remains the Ultimate Hedge

Um, considering how we are all prone to react to the last item we have read I will once again ’opine’ that gold isn’t worth the powder to blow it to kingdom come!

You can neither eat it, wear it (to keep you warm) nor fashion weapons from it. Besides being corrosion resistant (and relatively scarce) it is otherwise useless.

Guess what? Once the ‘paper currencies’ gold is valued in collapse, the value of gold itself essentially drops to zero!

What are you going to trade it for and more importantly, with whom?

Anybody (stupid enough) to actually want heavy yellow metal that needs 24/7 protection is likely just as inclined to kill you for it than to trade something of value for it…which is, sadly, how most gold changes hands.

One owner cheats/murders the other…over essentially useless yellow ore!

But I digress…save but to caution you that should you happen upon a cache of gold in your travels, you’re better off ignoring it…life is too precious!

Unless your hoard of followers wants to spend hours of their otherwise uneventful lives fighting off assorted pirates and sneaks, keeping the cache ‘safe’ until an overwhelming force arrives to relieve you of the responsibility…

Just saying, ya know?

It is amazing sometimes how deeply engrained certain myths become in a society.

Especially those surrounding wealth and power.

What a bonanza for a religion to brainwash the people into thinking it was ‘their’ god that chose/ ‘sent’ the people’s leader!

We can only wonder how many civilizations regretted accumulating large caches of gold that in turn , er, ‘lured’ large armies to lay waste to their cities?

The Roman Legions traveled (and conquered) the known world for ‘plunder’.

It is utterly ironic this was done over an essentially useless mineral.

‘Shiny’ isn’t something you want to die for but countless million have!

As we can see, the ‘statistics’ without the spin are pretty bleak.

Just because ‘new claims’ for unemployment are falling doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean that the job market is improving!

They are, in fact, two separate factors, totally unrelated to one another!

(And yes, I know you knew that but it makes me feel better belaboring the obvious, which I do constantly.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Er, Happy Holidays, folks!

In Your Best Interests...

2011-12-23T12:38:00.005-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

As the end of the year looms larger we find ourselves stuck in an overly optimistic rut. Who want to contemplate the unraveling of civilization at this time of year?

Thus today’s narrative is pretty much the same as yesterday’s.

A spate of better-than-expected economic reports has spurred growing talk of a U.S. recovery. In fact, many observers are convinced that the post-crisis low is in, and that it's onward and upward from here. One problem with this view, however, is that some of the data we are getting is not all that accurate, as I noted in "More of Less." Perhaps more importantly, the headline statistics don't necessarily tell the whole story (as I alluded to in "Thinking Like a Bull"). This seems particularly true when it comes to getting an accurate read on supply-and-demand, which ultimately determines future economic trends. In many areas of the economy, there is a large overhang of prospective supply that can quickly come to market if things suddenly perk up. Such a dynamic tends to keep a lid on prices and turnover, nipping nascent recoveries in the bud. The following reports highlight four markets in particular where growth-stumping supply lurks in the shadows:

I suspect most of us are inclined to chalk up investor’s ‘irrational exuberance’ as a ‘side-effect’ of Holiday merry-making.

Perhaps they honestly believe that driving the markets higher is the only thing needed to lift the sagging spirits of the outsourced, rousing them to go out and ‘spend like it was 1999 again!’

The gaping hole in the above line of, er, ‘fantasy’ is that investors are ‘rational’.

Anyone who thinks the investing community is ‘rational’ needs THEIR head examined!

Although I would stop just short of giving Wall Street a pass by reason of insanity…

Bump and Stump are totally aware of what they’re doing despite their whole-hearted belief in the War on Christmas.

Which is to point out that you can be ‘fully immersed’ in a fantasy and still behave rationally.

There are numerous historical precedents…

And Historians will point to the one that currently envelops Western society as one of the most glaring examples, driven by deep rooted denial.

Which brings us to another disturbing subject, the level of denial necessary to keep us functioning under the strains of a collapsing society.

You have to swallow all of your hopes and aspirations, accepting hopelessness in their place just for starters!

You have already accepted that YOU will NOT succeed, that the most you can hope for is to hold onto what you currently have.

Since few of us ever bother to perform a simple, honest inventory of our blessings, some of you have a rather inflated idea of what you currently possess.

All so someone else can be rich.

Sadly that is the part most people overlook, their efforts do the purchasers of their labor more good than they do for themselves.

And all your money won’t another second buy!

How stark a light does that cast upon the fragile web of lies that make up most of our existence?

Ironically, perfection is merely a matter of shifting the goalposts in the proper direction.

Something that a Simple Plan strives to do.

It just struck me that our collective ‘major malfunction’ is that YOU DON’T KNOW what is ‘good for you’, so you believe what someone else tells you! (regardless of how implausible it is!)

You ‘buy into the lie’ because your parents did, because it was ‘safer’ than the truth.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the worst offenders as far as this ‘collective ignorance’ goes are the followers of Adam Smith!

They are taught to believe that ‘accumulating money’ is THE ONLY THING NECESSARY to satisfy their ‘rational self-interests’…

But they don’t control money’s value nor do they control the value of what money will and won’t buy!!!

Only a few get to play at that level and those few have the rest of us ‘by the shorthairs!’

Just another little something to contemplate when your eggnog saturated noggin starts to spin out of control.

Oh, and in case you didn’t pick up on it back there, you (as well as the collective ‘we’) are so tantalizingly close to waking up and shifting the goalposts back towards the correct direction that it’s absolutely mind-boggling!

Understand good citizen, your ‘best interests’ lie in a world where all things ARE equal and ‘justice for all’ insures that nobody takes advantage of you because ‘the law’ permits it.

So good citizen, do you know what is in your best interests?

If you do then you know going along with the current bullshit isn’t it.

And if you’re honest you know it doesn’t lie some imaginary, non-existent, make-believe past that only exists in a conservative's imagination.

It lies in a future where a united humanity takes its rightful place among the stars!

None of us will ever see it if we can’t get beyond this ‘me first’ bullshit!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Chumped

2011-12-22T12:43:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are up this morning in the usual game of ‘hot potato’ the media uses to keep track of the economy.

If you wonder ‘who is buying is this whacko market’ it is most likely YOU.

You are still contributing to your retirement account, aren’t you?

Could it be that only the top 5% is responsible for the erratic action in the stock markets over the past 5 years?

They’re probably the only ones (still) contributing to a retirement plan after everybody else got burned by the fraud that was Enron.

Speaking of fraud, what’s up with this bull shit?

Or more pointedly, what the fuck are these morons smoking?

At stake is about $150 billion, the bulk of which would go to middle-class families and the unemployed. If Congress does not pass the measures, economists say, it would significantly weaken growth from already-damped levels anticipated early in the new year.

“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a slowdown over the course of next year,” Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told reporters last week. “Not only do we have the European crisis spilling over and hurting U.S. trade and confidence,” he said, but the United States economy also faces “homegrown shocks.”

There are two reasons for the renewed pessimism. First, economists say that temporary trends increased growth in the fourth quarter and may not continue into next year. Second, the economy faces significant headwinds in 2012: some from Europe’s long-lingering sovereign debt crisis, and some from domestic cutbacks beyond the control of President Obama, whose campaign would like to point to a brightening economic picture, not a darkening one. Even the Federal Reserve is predicting that the unemployment rate will remain around 8.6 percent by the time voters go to the polls in November.

Hard to say good citizen which ‘variety’ of happy talk I find more offensive, articles like this that admit up front the figures are ‘distorted’ (and therefore useless) or the type that is totally baseless (which is to say ‘an opinion’, at best.)

Just because YOU’RE, er, ‘Happy’ doesn’t mean it will make me happy too!

(This is even less likely if you were ‘paid’ to share your ‘happy thoughts’ and those happy thoughts first had to ‘pass muster’ with a clueless editor!)

We’re all supposed to be, er, ‘relieved’ that new claims for unemployment have finally stopped rising.

And most of us would agree ‘it’s about time!’

But if the last two ‘jobless recoveries’ are any indication it only means we have, for the moment, caught up with an ever descending ‘floor’.

Why do I say ‘ever descending’? Because they are still off-shoring jobs, that’s what happens when you keep writing new free trade agreements.

Which is to ask, ‘Why do YOU think the (so-called) experts believe the recent spate of economic ‘good news’ is a ‘false dawn’?

Little did Japan suspect when it opined the ‘Business is war’ that they’d end up losing to the capitalists (again.)

Once again the Corporate owned media ignores the FACT that the labor force today is smaller than it was in 2000.

But they probably don’t want to have to explain how THAT happened…

Remember, Globalization = Good (for the owners of product manufacturers, not for consumers!) The ‘cost savings’ come entirely from what they DON’T pay the employees!

Trade Protectionism = Bad (Because it frees up an otherwise captive audience!)

Which is to point out heaven help us all if we ever discover another planet capable of supporting our species or how the ‘expense’ of space travel will become trivial compared to the benefits ‘raped’ from a helpless consumer!

How useful is it to our oppressors that our media is subservient and our people are, er, ‘gullible’?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the so-called experts are the ones whose elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top!

Worse, most of them are told what to think/believe.

Which explains why most people’s eyes glaze over the moment they are told they are about to hear ‘expert testimony’.

There is only one ‘expert’ and even he is a work of ‘fiction’.

And the TV just confirmed the above statement, the Dow, as of noon-time, is up 41 points.

Although that certain fictions do have beneficial aspects to them…

So, good citizen…you KNOW this isn’t ‘over’ by a long shot, in that respect, the, er, ‘experts’ are right.

The latest batch of heavily massaged data is meaningless as far as what comes next is concerned.

And what IS coming next, good citizen as we pass the one year mark in the Mayan calendar countdown to destruction?

It’s still a little to ‘muddy’ to tell with any certainty if I’ll still be predicting the end this time next year.

So far the infamous ‘they’ have kept it glued together better than anyone would have thought. (extending unemployment for a record 99 weeks went a long ways towards making this possible!)

But we are approaching the fourth year of an economy almost entirely supported by the ‘public teat’…how much longer will we be able to ‘tread water’?

Ironically the answer is ‘infinitely’ if they can only dig up a justification to keep paying unemployment benefits forever!

(Remember, all money is, in the final analysis, ‘funny’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(Post script: Okay, I can’t leave you hanging with an ‘all money is funny’ but the system is going to collapse anyway without providing a reason.

Ironically, it all comes back to the ‘chump factor’. Why work if you can get the milk for free, right?

BUT, if nobody works there won’t be anything to ‘get’, so how do you, er, ‘justify’ an environment where only a few carry the rest of us?

Do we make ‘work’ the sole domain of criminals [meaning only lawbreakers are required to work?] That isn’t a good idea because most criminals turn outlaw for the reason that it is a lot less ‘work’ for a far greater ‘reward’.

Extending unemployment ‘indefinitely’ would create a logjam of people trying NOT to be ‘chumped’.

If MOST people got there’s for nothing, those who were constrained to putting up with the boss’s useless grief a dozen hours a day would cease putting in the necessary effort, causing production AND quality to fall precipitously.

This is why under A Simple Plan EVERYBODY is guaranteed a job, because we ALL bear the load, ‘equally’. [And if you don’t want to, you will be left ‘on the outside looking in’ which is another way of saying ‘exiled’.]

That said, we are only just beginning to see the effects of ultra-extended unemployment can have on those, er, ‘lucky’ enough to hold onto their jobs…

Or are they the chumps?

Time will tell.

Instant Recovery

2011-12-21T12:17:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

As one might have expected, today’s markets aren’t anywhere near as ‘robust’ as yesterdays. Seems almost ALL of the ‘month over month’ gain in the housing market was ‘rentals’ (which aren’t the same kind of ‘economic driver’ that single family homes are.)

Silly (nearly 400 point) ‘mistake’, eh?

How sad is it that Wall Street is too chicken shit to come out and admit yesterday’s rally was purely a show of support for the Tea Party?

Because if the sleaze-balls DID admit that they drove up their personal wealth by 400 points over the scuttling of the middle class tax cut, Manhattan would be a cinder this morning.

Better the ‘fairy tale’ about housing…

But wait! Is that another ‘green shoot’ popping up over there?

Stock Buybacks Rise for 9th Consecutive Quarter

BOSTON (AP) — America's biggest corporations continued to spend more money on stock repurchases in the third quarter, with buybacks rising 49 percent compared with a year ago.

Standard & Poor's on Wednesday said stock repurchases by companies in the S&P 500 totaled $118 billion in the July-September period. That's up from nearly $80 billion in last year's third quarter. Buybacks also rose compared with this year's second quarter.

Exxon Mobil Corp. was the company that spent the most on buybacks at $5.5 billion.
Buybacks have increased each quarter since the second quarter of 2009, when the financial crisis sent buyback spending down to $24 billion.

Buybacks reward investors by increasing the value of remaining shares, and per-share earnings results. Shares are taken off the market, and earnings are divided among fewer shares.

How’s that for an ‘economic recovery’ without investing a cent or increasing the labor force? All you have to do is reduce the number of outstanding shares and you’re instantly ‘profitable’!

This tactic also produces marvelous CEO bonuses too!

I need not detail the ‘red flag danger’ this presents to our floundering civilization. It is exemplary of the False economy the ‘one percent’ has been passing off as ‘proof of prosperity’ for decades now.

An economy built on ‘creative accounting’ will collapse…eventually.

And the bad news is, we have arrived at that tipping point, the one where all of the lies become transparent.

Perhaps we can belabor the obvious and invoke that old ‘third time is the charm’ axiom as it appears the third consecutive ‘jobless recovery’ is trying to tell us something.

Which is to point out that after the bastards shrink government down to the size where it can be drown in a bathtub…there will be nobody around to defend you.

And guess who is the next one in line for the ‘bathtub treatment’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

It's A Miracle!

2011-12-20T23:47:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen…

May I begin with a mighty WTF happened on Wall Street yesterday? Bad enough we all suspect these robbers of making it up as they go along without the they’re throwing it in our faces!

Although, I strongly suspect yesterday’s ‘inexplicable’ rally was Wall Street signaling their ‘approval’ of the House Tea Party Republican’s efforts to torpedo the so-called ‘middle class tax cut’.

I mean they really turned the old ‘excuse shirt’ inside out scrounging up rationalizations for the unimaginable.

Many analysts also noted that wild swings were a predictable feature of the end of the year as managers balanced under-performing elements in their portfolios at a time of low trading volume. And even after an impasse over extending a payroll tax cut was announced Tuesday in Washington, the markets held on to their gains.

“The market just seems to have no memory from one day to the next,” Mr. Flam said. “To drive a move of this magnitude, you would expect there to be some sort of resolution on the bigger-picture issues.”

Even more ‘humorous’ (with a ten year overhang in the housing market) was the, er, ‘assertion’ that the because ‘housing starts’ were ‘up’…

Naturally, building more houses in an environment where nobody is buying them is, er, sheer stupidity more commonly associated with being ‘optimistic beyond belief.’

This is ‘Flipper’ paying all outdoors for a foreclosed property only to find out nobody can afford to rent it off of him.

We have a name for idiots like that…we call them bankrupt.

BUT you’re supposed to believe these so-called investors are acting ‘rationally’!

Worse, you’re supposed to think the fucking economy is ‘on the mend’…

Don’t you wonder what happened to all of those ‘green shoots’ from three years ago?

When you know as well as I that absolutely nothing has been done to straighten out the economy.

Which is something else that was rolling around in the back of my mind today…

It’s been a while since I provided an outline of A Simple Plan.

In order to ‘fix’ the current predatory system we must first, er, ‘catalog’ what’s broken.

The biggest problem is the legal system, it is totally fubar BECAUSE it is ‘for profit’.

This is a glaring problem that nobody (in a position of power) acknowledges.

Without equality there can be no justice and without justice there can be no peace (and without peace there can be no prosperity!)

So if we are to achieve an approximation of equality the first thing to fix is the legal system and that entails everything from the courts to the government.

No more elections and by default, no more legislators (although we will still ‘vote’.) No more ‘judges’ as the laws will remain simple and few.

There’s more to it but you get the general idea and that is to place the laws we all must live under beyond the reach of the self-interested.

No legislators to be bought off means no more ‘self-exempting’ and no more bending the rules to fit the desired outcome.

Then there’s the, er, ‘purpose of civilization’ issue.

Did we band together to build a better life for ALL mankind or just the few greedy bastards that claim to ‘own’ what belongs to all of us?

What does the ‘one percent’ say? They say the US was founded on the principle of ‘the protection of property rights’.

This, unsurprisingly, is in direct conflict with the notion that this planet belongs to ALL of us.

Um, if we continue down this path then there are ‘owners’ and the rest of us, half ‘hired help and the rest are just useful idiots/squatters.

Um, NOBODY can produce a ‘genuine’ bill of sale from either ‘spirit in the sky’ or the next best thing, Mother Nature.

Ironically, ALL ‘bills of sale’ are traced back to this King or that Emperor, who had no more right to the land than the current, er, owners.

Isn’t it time we cut the bullshit and drop the ownership crap?

And why would we abandon ‘ownership?’

To straighten out the economy, of course!

End ‘private ownership’ and the resultant ‘income streams’ stop.

Which creates the ‘approximate equality’ we’re shooting for.

We all work and we all have the ability to support ourselves…which is more than we have now!

If you can’t make yourself ‘useful’ under ‘Fuck you, pay me’ capitalism it’s your problem!

Under A Simple Plan your ‘job’ is guaranteed. You’ll only work a few hours a day OR a few days a week as there are more workers than jobs, thus we will ‘share’ what labor there is while building a better life for us all.

Better, your ‘membership’ in society will be real (and valued!)

Since nobody can ‘line their pockets’ at your expense anymore, most of the necessities of life will be yours ‘free’.

Why won’t EVERYTHING be free?

Because there isn’t enough of EVERYTHING to go around (And not everybody WANTS the same things!)

You’ll be well paid for what you do BUT when you ‘spend’ your money, nobody gets it. It is simply erased.

Same thing happens when you die, you don’t ‘leave’ anything behind…your accumulated wealth is simply erased after you die.

Everybody makes their own way under A Simple Plan but under the plan EVERYBODY enjoys cradle to the grave security.

WITHOUT the ‘flim-flam fuckery’ like what happened in today’s stock markets!

A Simple Plan, an idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Second Thing to Go...

2011-12-20T11:24:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

I haven’t even looked at the stock markets this morning (and you know neither one of us is any worse the wear for it.) In fact, this is another one of those ‘once you find the right subject, the search stops…cold’ situations.

Er, the article itself only points to the topic I wish to discuss and most of the time ‘close enough’ is as good as it gets.

From fellow Doomsday author (yes good citizen, I have two [fiction] novels to my credit, both are themed on the collapse but I don’t use this site to promote them.) Mr. Panzer, we have this series of snippets:

"U.S. Economic Growth Seen Brighter into 2012" (Reuters)
The economy has probably picked up speed in the last few months and will grow moderately in 2012, staving off the need for additional stimulus from the Federal Reserve, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday.

The euro zone's sovereign debt crisis is one of the biggest threats to growth next year as economists fear credit lines may freeze up. But the odds of the United States sliding into another recession were seen unchanged from last month.
Er, maybe not.

"UN Issues Dire Warning About World Economy" (Voice of America)
The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development says the outlook for the world economy is very bleak. UNCTAD warns Europe is facing a full-fledged recession next year, and the best the United States and Japan can look forward to is a period of stagnation.

"OECD Detects World Economy Slowing Down" (Agence France-Presse)
PARIS — Leading indicators all point to a slowdown in the world's major developed economies, the OECD said on Monday.

The composite index of leading indicators, designed to highlight turning points in performance, "point to a slowdown in economic activity in all major economies but with some variation" in individual countries, it said in a regular monthly report for December.

(Follow the link to read the rest…)

What we have here are a series of indicators that tell us the now 4 year old ‘economic downturn’ is getting worse instead of better.

Naturally, you already know this and you even have a good idea as to why…because nobody has done anything to correct the imbalances that brought the downturn upon us.
A few of you have even given the ‘why is this’ end of the puzzle a deal of consideration…but you didn’t like where it was going/taking you.

Worse, the ’justifications’ for this insane jihad against humanity is as simple as ‘maintaining power’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the responsible party doesn’t need to personally ‘soil their hands’ with the defacto murder of millions, all they need to do is give their minions the nod and the ‘wannabes’ will take care of the rest.

But I digress.

What is the topic I’d like to bring to your attention today?

The ever popular LCD good citizen, the reason we do what we do (despite most of us taking it for granted…which isn’t necessarily ‘a bad thing’.)

Survival.

Some of you realize that the big guy down the street has ‘taken over’ the local watering hole and he’s started to put ‘the squeeze’ on some of the poorer, weaker users.

In some cases he just ‘turned his back’ (closed down the local plant) and walked away.

(No irony should be lost on the fact that this little act of treason was sanctioned by the US Supreme Court.)

It is situations like this that we are hit in the head with just how ‘delicate’ our link to survival really is.

You can’t just pick up your spear and head down to the local watering hole to wait for dinner to show up…because SOME IDIOT ‘owns’ the watering hole! (And he’ll have the cops throw your ass out!

Sadly, ‘the cops’ will likely grab you before you get there and grill you about being licensed (for the spear and to hunt…anything!)

Worse, heading for the ‘wilderness’ to take care of business won’t solve your problem either. As soon as some reports hearing shots fired, the cops in the boondocks will come sniffing around, asking the very same questions.

Ironically, the only ones who get a (semi) ‘free pass’ on the hunting thing are Native Americans. BUT they can only hunt ‘on the Reservation’ and wildlife isn’t stupid.

Which is to point out that it was only a brief period of time before there was NO game on the reservation.

Wildlife was ‘smart enough’ not to go there.

Well, you get the point. Besides, if it weren’t for the, er, ‘ranching’ of desirable species there wouldn’t be enough to go around.

Which should worry you all by itself.

Because the ‘end game’ will center on famine.

The ~~first~~, er second thing to collapse will be the supply lines, the first thing to collapse will be the ‘value’ of money. (Which is to say the ‘value of money’ will fall into ‘doubt’, it is this ‘uncertainty’ that will cause supply lines to collapse.)

Understand good citizen, once the supply lines collapse the ONLY thing you will have to eat is whatever you can chase down and kill with a stick…as grim as that might seem.

To the ‘plus side’, this will more or less ‘instantly’ solve the problems our politicians are unable to address as Mr./Ms. ’Fuck you, pay me’ are told what they’ve been long overdue to hear…and that would be ‘go pound!’

Unfortunately, that will come as a small consolation when the worthless bastards are getting what they actually want, a vast reduction in the threat to their power.

When the biggest threat is due to their own mismanagement of the planet’s resources.

Ironically, you won’t be too keen to address this critical problem when your chasing down your next meal with a stick as you’ll be more than a little ‘pre-occupied’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Season of Peace

2011-12-19T12:28:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Asian markets bled from the eye sockets overnight and their European counterparts followed suit…but (as usual) no sooner did the sun rise over Manhattan (to shine on ‘God’s country’) did the markets miraculously reverse direction.

For, once again, absolutely no reason.

But wait, the ‘investors’ among us march to the beat a ‘different drummer’; could this morning’s ‘rally’ be attributed to the joy they feel over there now being one less dictator ~~on the payroll~~ to worry about?

Since there truly is nothing for investors to take stock in, they are, by necessity, reduced to betting on the outcome of these ‘regime changes’.

But this is meaningless for the rest of us, back in the land of reality we have bigger problems to ponder.

There was an economic, er, ‘downturn’ after the US Civil war that lasted until the turn of the century.

While the parallels are ‘remarkable’, I personally ‘disagree’ with this, er, ‘rosy’ assessment that all will be well come 2031...

First, depressions can last a very long time, and when their origins are in a debt bubble they should be measured in decades not years. For a century or more, depressions have been relatively short, sharp episodes. They are like having a tooth pulled, rather than a chronic sickness — painful, but over quite quickly. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the U.K., for example, this is already the longest recession since records began — in the sense that output is still below its 2008 peak. It is more enduring than the depression of the 1930s. That is true of many other countries, as well. If, as seems likely, Europe, and perhaps the U.S., slips back into recession in 2012, it will be clear to everyone we are witnessing something far longer than the conventional economic textbooks allow for.

Second, this depression is structural. The Long Depression of the 19th century had its roots in financial speculation, technological change, and the arrival of a massive new player in the global economy. Our current depression likewise has its roots in three huge crises coming together at the same time. We have a debt bubble that had been building up over three decade and which burst spectacularly in 2008. The dollar is in long-term decline as a reserve currency, and as the anchor for the global monetary system, but there is still not much sign of what will replace it. And in the euro, the biggest single economic bloc has created the most dysfunctional monetary system in human history, threatening financial collapses on an unprecedented scale. Think of it as the world economy’s suffering a heart attack, then a stroke, then getting picked up by an ambulance that crashes on the way to the hospital — it is hardly surprising the patient isn’t in good shape.

Three, it’s uneven. The Long Depression of the 19th century was a sustained period of lower growth compared with what came before and what came afterward. Germany, for example, grew 4.3% annually between 1850 and 1873 and then at 4.1% between 1896 and 1913. But in the Long Depression years, it only managed a growth rate of just over 2% a year. It was similar in other countries. The markets remained volatile, with repeated booms and busts, regularly collapsing back into recession. They did grow occasionally, just as Japan has sometimes grown in what is now its second decade of slump. But the growth is never sustained.

Yes good citizen, now Japan slips back into view. Two decades of economic stagnation and instead of pulling the number two economy in the world out of its funk, the rest of the world has slipped to join it in the economic quagmire of globalization.

Yet for some unknown reason…(like being instructed to specifically avoid mentioning it) both the (corporate owned) media and (corporate sanctioned) economists have failed to even nod in the general direction of the ‘Elephant in the room’.

Perhaps it is the Western predilection for ‘neat’ endings but you’ll note that the ‘end of the century’ has been reason enough to throw caution to the wind, creating monstrous economic cesspools that last until the middle of the next century…

But this time things have gone too far (and I’m pointing at ‘peak energy’!)

For many this would have been unthinkable only a few months ago. They had been cautioned and warned repeatedly, but chose to trust the financial system. And now they are suffering loss and anxiety, frozen assets, and the misappropriation of their wealth.

How more plainly can it be said? The US financial system as it now stands cannot be trusted to observe even the most basic property rights as it continues to unravel from a long standing culture of fraud.

Get your money as far away from Wall Street as is possible. And if you want to own gold and silver, take delivery and store it in a secure private facility outside the fractional reserve system.

What does this brazen level of criminality have to do with ‘peak energy’?

Like all ‘end times’ scenarios, it fosters a WTF environment that is totally out of touch with, er, ’consequences’.

Worse, what do you do to someone that has come right out and told you, ’go ahead and kill me, we’re all gonna die anyway?’

Which, naturally, is one hundred percent incorrect.

In all scenarios (save the comet strike that brings on another ice age) there will be (human) ‘survivors’.

And it is likely there will be millions of survivors of an economic collapse despite the criminals worst efforts. (And you’d better believe they are trying to kill as many of us off as they can!)

Why people doubt this fact blows my mind.

Think about the current ‘deal’ these very same people, er, ‘offer’ you. You either accept their money and their shitty working conditions or you try to make it ‘on your own’. (But lately you are being told 'we don't need you' so you'd best not piss off mommy and daddy or you'll got straight to the following:)

This entails competing for scarce seats at soup kitchens, beds at shelters and (if your big enough,) first dibs on what gets tossed into the dumpsters of our wasteful ‘hospitality’ industry.

There simply isn’t enough ‘wildlife’ to live off of, nor could you effectively cook it without running afoul of local law enforcement on those occasions when you did ‘get lucky‘.

In fact, refusing to work for their money becomes a perpetual exercise in avoiding ‘run-ins’ with local law enforcement.

Now, consider these facts and tell me honestly that these people DON’T ‘want you dead’?

Here, in the ‘Season of Peace’, take some time to fully appreciate the predatory behavior of those who call themselves our ‘betters’…

Those who richly deserve to have their world brought crashing down around their ears!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Follow the Leader

2011-12-18T12:04:00.004-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Sort of on a deadline this morning with the Holiday season upon us and our social obligations piling up, I’ll be ‘partying’ most of the day.

So as I browsed this morning’s mail, a story about OWS caught my eye…

And it started me thinking just who are these people?

In an excellent article by Digby (of Hullabaloo fame) she notes that most US citizens are beyond ready to go ‘toe to toe’ with the One Percent (and their blue-uniformed minions)

Needless to say, the freedom part is literally compromised by decisions to legalize indefinite detention without trial, but for the purposes of this discussion, it's the groceries that are causing the problem --- or rather lack thereof. The Democrats are simply not responding to the immediate concerns of a majority of Americans. Even health care, which is a great anxiety producing issue, is still fraught with confusion (although its early benefits are beginning to register a bit.) The more immediate issues of a foreclosure fraud crisis and all the problems associated with it, unemployment and job insecurity and massive numbers falling into poverty while the wealthy pig out (and whine about it) is what has people up in arms. They need government to deliver some groceries and the government is instead putting them on a diet.

Conservatives don't believe in delivering groceries, of course. When they aren't stealing the milk money and handing it out to their rich friends to pay back their donations, they're indifferent at best. It's liberals who are supposed to deliver at times like this and instead of doing that they are cutting deals to shrink the existing, tattered safety net in the future in order to keep the economy from sinking further in the present. (It's not all their fault, but being ineffectual doesn't rally the troops.)

What Digby is trying to say here is our grandparents didn’t ‘negotiate’ the New Deal, they DEMANDED IT…

And if they DIDN’T get what they wanted, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ‘hell to pay’

Let’s turn the clock back 70 years and ask if the ‘Greatest Generation’ would have sat around twiddling their thumbs while the CRIMINALS in Congress colluded with one another to draft the heinous ‘arrest on suspicion and detain indefinitely without a trial’ legislation?

No, they’d have SHUT THIS NATION DOWN COLD!

FULL SCREECHING STOP!

So who are these namby-pamby milquetoasts that don’t dare stand up to obvious criminals?

(The OWS crew is obviously not included in that group, they’ve shown their courage, despite their, er, ‘caution’.)

I suspect the OWS movement has been ‘tolerated’ because the bulk of its constituents aren’t who we think they are…most of them are the children of the 20 percent…the top twenty percent.

Which also explains their, er, ‘soft-pedaling’. They don’t want to make trouble for their well-off parents.

In case any of you thought this ‘we are the 99%’ bullshit was actually going somewhere…

It’s not.

But not to worry, the ‘troops’ are coming home…to the land of the jobless.

How do you suppose THAT’S going to work out?

All things being even good citizen, civilization itself is only 9 meals deep…think about it?

3 days isn’t a long time.

Left for us to ponder is whether or not THEY are going to force a ‘stand-off’ or if we will?

Especially when the trick is not to be the first one to ‘blink’.

You can bet most of the 1 percent is already well provisioned for an extended stand off.

It is the vast majority of ‘the working poor’ that live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck.

The ‘strategy’, such as it is, is based on the ‘supposition’ that a majority of the poor will prey upon each other before they attempt to take on a hardened, well-defended bunker…more colloquially called a ‘compound’ these days.

Where leadership exists there will be less ‘internal predation’, A good leader will keep his troops focused on ’high value’ targets; this is the ‘weak link’ in the management’s planning.

And despite evidence to the contrary, there is no shortage of competent leadership among the rank and file…it is ironic that commerce has no use for such people!

It also provides proof to the contrary that commerce would ‘shut down’ without their, er, ‘expert guidance’ (when anyone will tell you the shop never runs smoother than when the owner is out of town!)

It truly is frightening how dramatic the improvement can be.

But that’s another subject altogether.

Where were we?

Oh yeah, who are these ‘wimps’ and why do they call themselves Democrats?

I’ve already opined on the topic so I will not bore you by repeating myself…

Which is to say I only bring it up because the subject is too important to be allowed to fade into the background.

Without competent leadership our civilization is doomed!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Criminals Escape Justice!

2011-12-17T12:24:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Apparently yesterday morning’s market rally ‘ran out of steam’ before the trading day ended.

For those of you who could, quite literally, ‘care less’, this bouncing around in the markets is nothing more than meaningless ‘eyewash’, intended to give the rubes a sense that the contrived valuations have SOME foundation in reality…

Let me assure you, good citizen, they do not.

But you knew that! A factor that places you on considerably more stable ground than the average conservative…although that’s not saying much, is it? (You could believe the Earth was flat and still be better ‘grounded’ than your typical conservative!)

Thus are we prone to wonder (once again) just who is the target of this exercise in belaboring the obvious

With its elegant marble floors, ornately carved wooden ceiling and flattering lighting, the central meeting point of Italy’s Lower House is arguably one of the most beautiful political arenas in the world.

But in recent weeks, Italians have come to view those who frequent the hall — known as the Transatlantico and modeled on the great room of an ocean liner — as a pampered elite, as sheltered from the global economic turbulence as the palazzo’s inner courtyard.

On Friday, the month-old government of Prime Minister Mario Monti easily won a confidence vote on a $40 billion set of austerity measures, including tax increases, changes to the pension system and some growth incentives, with 495 votes to 88. After the vote, the prime minister told lawmakers that Italy was at “maximum risk.” He added, “A lot is at stake; we cannot permit ourselves to live the way we did before.” He said that much would depend “on our capacity to present ourselves as united and credible before the markets.”

Don’t you love it when politicians vote for themselves/ideas? What the fuck does a show of hands by the same set of chiselers prove…consensus among thieves?

Does anyone else wonder if Mario has a mouse in his pocket? Who is this ‘we’ he refers to? He most definitely isn’t talking about himself!

Why is it that these ‘elected representatives’ consistently keep missing the main point?

What is that ‘main point’, you ask?

Naturally, the ‘main point’ is ‘the job they were elected to do’

No, not make new laws, ENFORCE THE ONES WE ALREADY HAVE!

But no…in an amazing demonstration of ‘myopia’, they apparently consider themselves ‘lawmakers’, enforcing the law is someone else’s job.

(Thus have the criminals gone ‘unprosecuted’, lo these many years/decades…globally.)

Perhaps more interest is the ‘universality’ of this particular article.

While Italy’s may be particularly nice, the ‘halls of power’ are ‘plush’ pretty much wherever you go.

Which brings us to the ‘disconnect’ most citizens (rightly) make between their pleading politicians and themselves.

“You aren’t gonna suffer even a little, I’m the one that’s fucked!”

Case in point is this proposed ‘lock ‘em up on a whim and let ‘em rot' legislation.

The only known ‘safeguard’ against this abominable legislation is to be a Congressman/Senator (who are automatically exempt from ALL of their own laws!)

Your ‘get out of detention free’ card remains your Senate/Congressional ID.

Don’t have one? Tough! Looks like you’re going ‘bye-bye’.

I’m going to guess an expired badge from either house will continue to function, if only out of ‘professional courtesy’.

Although the cops are keenly aware of who is and is not a ‘player’.

The only thing the ID protects you from is being randomly detained (forever.) If a warrant with your name on it is issued, then all bets are off.

Which is to acknowledge that our ‘posturing politicians’ are on an understandably ‘short leash’…which is why they behave as they do.

It may LOOK ‘illogical’ to you or me but it is perfectly ‘logical’ to them!

It is not the slightest bit ironic that the current landscape of governments around the globe EXACTLY RESEMBLES what it would look like if CRIMINALS hijacked the world’s governments!

Which is to point out that criminals have indeed been ‘in charge’ for a rather long time. Look at Bush’s highly illegal invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The public still marvels that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was done after the pretenses used to justify the invasion of both were PROVEN FALSE!

Naturally, that was just a ‘warning shot’ good citizen.

It was the local bully whispering in your ear (as his Neanderthal buddies kept you pinned to the ground) ‘What are YOU gonna do about it, huh?’

Well, what ARE you gonna do about it?

The problem with ‘Lumpy’ is there are only a handful of them…and he knows it.

For the moment he’s moping the floors with you and yours.

What you don’t see is that nervous sweat on his lip, that tells you that he is frantically trying to figure out where he and his crew is going to go where nobody will ever find them.

And the answer is, ‘Criminal Island’ (Lumpy is not that smart, he got where he is today via brutality alone.)

Although he is smart enough to realize his second big problem is figuring out a way to prevent the people he has screwed over from nuking Criminal Island off the face of the earth.

Well, that’s where the ‘throwing civilization into its own cesspool' part comes in (a.k.a. the plan to collapse the global supply chain.)

MOST people will be too busy saving their own ass to be bothered with chasing criminals and their political minions around. Nothing like a little widespread chaos to keep you occupied while the bad guys make their escape!

It’s a disturbing little puzzle, good citizen and it’s just as ‘plausible’ (actually more so) than the ‘random incompetence’ explanation offered by the criminal owned media.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

War Declared!

2011-12-16T12:03:00.000-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you end up doing a ‘me too’ story but, naturally, nobody will write this article from my ‘point of view’.

So buckle up good citizen We’re going in!

Indefinite detention will now be law, not some emergency measure that history will judge to have been a mistake made in a crisis. It is a well thought out codification of certain views that have become commonplace in American society --- that "terrorists" (to be defined by whomever sits in the White House) are not to be allowed the due process allowed to other human beings because our government just *knows* they are so dangerous we cannot even take the chance that they won't be found guilty. That turns the rule of law on its head.

Digby provides us with a rather poignant snapshot of the nearly ten years Jose Padilla has been, er, ‘entombed’ by an unaccountable military/government.

Left to our imagination is the question of ‘what if they decided to, er, exterminate you, would they need anyone’s approval?’

Hell, would they even be required to TELL anyone?

Understand good citizen, your so-called ‘representatives’ are going to vote on this ’bipartisan’ piece of garbage without ever consulting you…and the abomination currently occupying the White House has already refused to veto this vile legislation that will allow bureaucrats the power to instantly create ‘non-persons’.

Not only is this a clear ‘declaration of war’ against the citizens of the US, these idiots just declared war on the bulk of mankind!

We can only take comfort in the fact that the punishment will fit the crime…

But not until millions suffer ‘indeterminate detention’ without even know what they’ve been accused of or by whom.

No irony should be lost on the fact that this is how ‘ancient royalty’ conducted business.

Does this mean we will we soon be ‘treated’ to the return of ‘courtly behavior’ (at the behest of a few barely closeted ‘royal wannabes’?)

Narcissism IS a psychiatric condition good citizen, largely due to the destructive tendencies it fosters within its victims.

If only we were so lucky as to have that tendency confined to the victim pining away with a mirror in hand…but no! Often the opposite is true, it is the narcissist that wreaks revenge on those ‘not as beautiful’ as they are.

And how can we tell there’s a narcissist behind this plot? A Narcissist KNOWS they’re sick and that their ideas are not ‘socially acceptable’…thus do they cling to the ‘cloak of anonymity.’

So our last president was a ‘cheerleader’ and this one used to moonlight as a model…what does that say about either of them, psychologically speaking?

But that’s just the icing on the cake…the impetus behind this ‘imprison at will’ legislation is being driven by something even murkier, something that wants to break down the very foundations of society itself…

Mostly so they won’t be hunted down and exterminated themselves.

Which brings us full circle to the downside of playing with ‘Overton Windows’.

Are the criminals really trying to provoke an ‘overreaction’ in the public psyche with this kind of overreaching legislation?

More disturbingly, what ‘middle ground’ are they really shooting at?

Will it end up being a considerable lowering of the bar as far as who is or isn’t a ‘terrorist’ or are we more likely to end up with stiffer sentencing requirements for ‘terrorist linked’ activities?

Flipping this entire terrorist rock over good citizen we arrive face to face with the fact that our patriot forefathers were, in fact, ‘terrorists’ as far as the British monarchy was concerned.

Yez good citizen, one man’s ‘freedom fighter’ is another man’s terrorist!

Which rolls the clock back ten years when ‘the cheerleader’ started the ‘global war on terra’!

Which isn’t nearly as fucked up as our legislature voting (in our names) to go along with it!

More, er, ‘distressing’ is how, even with these facts in evidence, the so-called Democrats have not A.) withdrawn their endorsement from the incumbent or B.) chosen a challenger to run against him!

I mean WTF good citizen!

What the hell does it take?

They’ve already assaulted the citizens protesting government, er, ‘inaction’ against Wall Street across the nation.

How much you want to bet everybody ‘arrested’ in one of those protests will turn up on a list of terrorists once this evil legislation passes?

Our prisons are already overflowing….so much so that ‘real’ criminals are being released because the state (s) can’t ‘safely’ incarcerate them.

So where will they, er, ‘house’ these newly discovered ‘terrorists’?

Why in those brand, spankin’ new, ‘for profit’ Haliburton detention centers, of course!

Is it just me good citizen or is the Crazy Train starting to look downright ‘demented’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Slipping into darkness...

2011-12-15T13:01:00.002-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

Needless to say, the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace. In a surprising display of ‘market panic‘, both gold and its liquid equivalent, oil dropped considerably yesterday. Jesse of Crossroads Café opines that the sell-off (in gold) is being driven by margin calls linked to the, er, ‘collapse’ of the Euro-zone.

So…what’s happening in the Western half of western civilization?

Do you really want to know? Sure looks like the same old, same old

Bat-shit whacko Republicans are holding our government hostage to their demands that programs intended to help the needy are ‘unfunded’ so they can pass even MORE tax breaks to the very people who need them least!:

The day began with Mr. Reid sparring with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, on the Senate floor, with Mr. Reid expressing bafflement over Mr. McConnell’s refusal to let the Senate vote on the House payroll tax bill that passed earlier in the week.

Mr. Reid wants to quickly vote the bill down because while it would extend a cut in Social Security payroll taxes for 160 million workers, it also eases the way for an oil pipeline opposed by environmental groups, blocks certain air pollution rules, freezes the pay of many federal employees through 2013, increases some Medicare premiums, and greatly reduces unemployment benefits and adds a host of new rules for receiving them.

Mr. McConnell said he would not permit a quick vote on the measure until the spending agreement was passed in the Senate.

For their part, Senate Democratic leaders met with President Obama at the White House and resolved to prepare a new offer that would exclude their earlier plan to pay for the payroll tax holiday with a surcharge on incomes over $1 million, seeking savings instead from a variety of federal programs, with many of the cuts culled from the failed bipartisan committee’s list of things both sides agree upon.

What is becoming increasingly incredible to me is that anyone (in their right mind) actually votes Republican…

But your typical ‘dyed in the wool’ republican doesn’t follow the hi-jinx of the modern republican party. As far as they’re concerned, Ike is still a contender (and by extension, those running today hold Ike‘s ideals dear.)

Which is to belabor the obvious; ‘your typical’ republican is so ‘out of touch’ with reality that they are indeed a hazard to both themselves AND society!

Sadly, we know the ‘true story’, the Party of one-in-five is kept viable by the corporate owned media and the upper 20% of the pay distribution.

Understand good citizen, these are the same people that brought us this disaster

“We don’t put official paperwork in the trash,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson, at the meeting at the American Embassy in Baghdad.

The documents were piled in military trailers and hauled to the junkyard by an Iraqi contractor who was trying to sell off the surplus from American bases, the junkyard attendant said. The attendant said he had no idea what any of the documents were about, only that they were important to the Americans.

He said that over the course of several weeks he had burned dozens and dozens of binders, turning more untold stories about the war into ash.

“What can we do with them?” the attendant said. “These things are worthless to us, but we understand they are important and it is better to burn them to protect the Americans. If they are leaving, it must mean their work here is done.”

So good citizen, will the UN zip in there and scoop them up so they can conduct a formal investigation into ‘war crimes’ or has that ship already sailed?

Pardon my sarcasm good citizen but once again we are confronted with the ‘scale’ of the corrosion that is decimating our civilization.

The global justice system, like the global economy, is corrupt beyond salvation. Both must be scrapped entirely and replaced with a new, equitable system.

The ‘trick’ is making sure the, er, ‘usual suspects’ don’t become the arbiters of what is ‘equitable’.

Because they think the current arrangement is perfectly ‘equitable’…from a ‘who deserves what’ point of view…

Understand good citizen, a majority of Republicans BELIEVE the rest of us are a waste of perfectly good toilet paper!

What is wrong with this nation that one in five are STUPID enough to PUBLICLY admit this?

Hard to say, good citizen…but it looks like it might be contagious (from a political leadership point of view)

Last year, there were as many as 180,000 outbursts of what sociologists here describe as “mass incidents”: strikes, sit-ins, rallies and violent clashes that have mushroomed alongside China’s breakneck economic expansion. Government figures from the mid-1990s put the number of such episodes at fewer than 10,000.

“People don’t have sufficient faith in legal procedures or the media and feel they have no redress when bad things are done to them,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who studies Chinese social trends.

Some protests are prompted by worsening pollution, claims of unpaid wages or police brutality. A major source of unrest, including in Wukan, is the seizure of land by well-connected private developers or government officials, which involves forced evictions for meager compensation.

More than just unalloyed greed, these seizures are supported by local governments that have come to rely on proceeds of land sales and development to pay for day-to-day operations.

[In an effort to save your wrists from carpal tunnel and your poor eyes from screen glare I omitted yet another link to an article about the ‘one way street’ so-called ‘free trade agreements’ are.] (China has raised it’s tariff on US motor vehicles…)

Um, back to the last article…

Sort of looks familiar, doesn’t it?

You get shit on and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it.

Um, it’s time we turn that around, don’t you think, good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Drowning in an Ocean of Debt

2011-12-14T11:38:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

It was a toss up yesterday between this story and the one on politics I decided to run with.

It seems I do quite a few of these ‘what the fuck have you been smoking’ pieces, but the ‘headline’ caught my eye…

Retail sales rise for sixth straight month

Then there were the the two photographs that accompany the article…

Is it just me or is that a ‘genuine’ alligator bag by her feet?

More demand has helped boost hiring. Employers added a net total of 120,000 jobs last month. The economy has generated 100,000 or more jobs five months in a row — the first time that has happened since April 2006.

Still, many economists question how long consumers can continue increasing their spending without more jobs and higher pay. Unemployment remains high, and inflation-adjusted incomes shrank in the July-September quarter.

Consumers might also have to cut back on spending if Congress doesn't extend a Social Security tax cut or emergency federal unemployment benefits. Both expire at the end of this year. The Social Security tax this year boosted take-home pay for the average family by $1,000.

It is also interesting to note how the entire article seems to lose its ‘overly optimistic’ tone it starts off with by the end of the piece. (The above paragraphs are from the END of the article.)

So, retail sales are up for the past six straight months…hmmn…what do you suppose could be causing That?

Could it be the same thing that is holding the rest of this clusterfuck in place…‘creative accounting’? (Pumping up prices while denying inflation by calling the end result ‘growth’!)

No doubt about it good citizen, the upper 20% are doing just fine…the further up the ladder you go, the ‘finer’ it gets!

And yes good citizen, the top 20 percent IS large enough to show up on the economic scales. In fact they are driving what is being passed off as ‘growth’ (be it over last month or last year, the article doesn’t tell us.)

And many of these ‘what the fuck have you been smoking?’ articles are guilty of precisely this…er, ‘lie of omission’.

They fail to accurately answer the question: compared to what?

People are getting fatigued by the perpetual reports of green shoots that nobody else can see!

The labor force is smaller today than it was in 2001...but somehow our corrupt media doesn’t think that is, er, ‘newsworthy’.

More disturbing good citizen is how the stock market keeps rising while the overall situation continues to deteriorate.

This tells us what, precisely?

Not that stocks are getting ‘more valuable’, it tells us that our money is becoming ‘less valuable!’

And still nobody does anything to prosecute the fraudsters!

The question without answer is how long can you tread water?

You’re being drown in an ocean of debt, mostly for the privilege of staying alive…and that shouldn’t be!

Then there’s the case of doing what needs doing.

Currently the fraudsters are protected by the Blue Line, that one in a thousand that earns their paycheck from our taxes.

Now, they despise the fraudsters as much as we do…but how do you arrest the guy who cuts your paycheck?

Oh, they’ll do it all right…but not until they throw their shields on the ground and take the side of those they were originally sworn to protect.

Some of them anyway. Some of them are too far gone. They’ve been on the take for so long that they have come to believe it is the way things ought to be.

They KNOW it is not how things ‘should be’ but they like the lives they’re living just fine, thank you. And if being ‘flexible’ provides them and their families with a ‘better life’ then they won’t see the need to ‘do things differently’.

Even as their former ‘benefactors’ swing from the nearest light post alongside their immediate supervisor, they still believe the ‘Blue Wall’ will protect them.

But the Blue Wall is riddled with holes and the thirst for Justice will bring forth a zeal not seen since the last crusade!

Which is to point out it likely WON’T be your ‘brother officers’ that do you in…it will be your own relatives!

The same people you sneered at for slaving away at menial private sector jobs!

The very same people you suspected of laughing at you behind your back for taking a ‘joke job’ in the public sector.

You think people ‘didn’t notice’ when you looked the other way? They noticed…and they remember.

Did you ever consider the consequences of looking the other way?

Here’s a small sample of what went down while YOU were ‘twiddling your thumbs’!

Report: Child Homelessness Up 33% in 3 Years" (USA Today)

One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing Tuesday.

"This is an absurdly high number," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the center. "What we have new in 2010 is the effects of a man-made disaster caused by the economic recession. … We are seeing extreme budget cuts, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing."

Without equality there can be no justice, without justice there can be no peace and without peace there can be no prosperity.

Which is to remind you if you want justice it starts with equality and not with ‘turning a blind eye’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Sad State of Modern Politics

2011-12-13T12:28:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

As one might expect, the state of politics is no better than the state of the economy.

Yet some believe that with the ‘right’ (and I do mean RIGHT and not ‘synonymous with correct’) leadership this whole disaster can be, er, averted.

No irony should be lost on the fact that these people don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. (They vote Republican solely because ‘that’s who they are’…)

Sadly, this is what happens when you apply a ‘Damn the torpedoes’ psychology to EVERYTHING, thereby eradicating the fine line between brave and STUPID!)

Yes, while there are those who naively believe the ‘right candidate’ is capable of ‘fixing’ everything, there exists an even, er, ‘dimmer’ subset of the electorate that has no idea anything is even amiss.

So much the better for the politicians/criminals…

Which brings us to today’s offering , an exercise in seeking an ‘elect-able’ candidate after the failure of both political parties.

The basic pitch of Americans Elect goes like this: We’ll go through the expensive and time-consuming process of getting ballot access in all 50 states. Then we’ll hold an online convention in June in which any registered voter can participate. Participants will nominate a presidential ticket including one Democrat and one Republican who will then enter the general election fray.

Here’s what the group is not so upfront about: It’s fueled by millions of dollars of secret money, there is a group of wealthy, well-connected board members who have control over Americans Elect’s nominating process, and the group has myriad links to Wall Street.

Americans Elect has been getting periodic bursts of support from prominent commentators.

We are ‘led to believe’ that this new variant on the now Libertarian dominated ‘sniff test’ is NOT led/funded by, er, ‘progressives’.

In fact the ‘strange’ part of the whole exercise is the, er, ‘focus’ on keeping the two party ‘charade’ intact! (If we’re all in this ‘together’ good citizen then WHO is ‘the opposition’?)

So WHO is behind this, er, ‘search for a suitable puppet?’

You don’t suppose it is the same people who hijacked the electoral process in the first place, do you?

I mean, who else could it be?

Then there’s the flipside of this coin, one that I have raised a few times before, the quandary of electing an honest player into an already corrupt game.

Without the, er, ‘support’ of the courts there is no way our ‘honest man’ can clean up, much less prosecute the corrupt.

This is similar to the bizarre Republican victory in the House, just in time to block legislation that would, er, punish the financial sector.

I mean Bubba, they’ve already ‘tipped their hand’, do they have to beat you over the head with it too?

So, what should the ‘winner’ of this popularity contest do?

If they had any ‘integrity’ at all, he/she would tell them to go fuck themselves!

Anyone with half a brain would!

Political puppets have extremely short life spans…it’s a ‘credibility thing’.

They run on promising to take this or that currently popular action, knowing their campaign contributors are paying him/her to DO precisely the opposite!

While those who ‘control’ electoral politics also control the media (which is how they ‘insure’ that the ‘right’ candidate, er, wins) people will stop believing the charade if a ‘spent’ candidate keeps winning re-election.

This is the downside of rigging the ballot box, if you don’t do it carefully, you WILL breed a revolt!

Case in point; here we are, less than a dozen election cycles since they started ‘fixing’ elections and they’ve succeeded in destroying the credibility of BOTH parties…so now they’re hunting for an ‘elect-able’ candidate…

WTF good citizen, WTF!

If we were to ‘assume the best’ and take it on faith that this is the efforts of a ‘concerned’ citizens group, interested in keeping our ‘two party system’ alive < sarcasm on >(Because it has ‘worked so well’ for the past two hundred years…)< sarcasm off > we’d still be faced with the ‘already corrupt system’ conundrum, making the whole exercise one in futility.

While this Alternet article also questions the ‘motives’ behind this sinister ploy it doesn’t take the extra step and ask ‘who wins if this succeeds?’

It sure as hell won’t be YOU!

Which is certainly a sign that it is once again time to embark on a, er, campaign for a New Deal.

Only this time we won’t stop until we get a total makeover…like the one laid out in A Simple Plan…

No, not the Movie or the Rock band…the PLAN that is posted here on this website!

It is our first best hope…to the point that we can’t afford to not make it a reality!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Back Flip

2011-12-12T11:42:00.003-05:00

Greetings good citizen,

The NYSE opened ‘in the dink’ again this morning (but as close as anyone can tell, it doesn’t mean Jack.)

Probably the hell of it, good citizen. When push comes to shove, none of it actually ‘means’ anything.

The current crisis is due to a couple of too rich to know better, ‘fuck you, pay me types’ that the courts are, er, ‘unwilling’ to tell ’em to go piss up a bent rope!

Yeah, when your legal system turns feral, the whole shootin’ match goes sour!

Ironically, the only thing that will drag the survivors back to the negotiating table is a last ditch effort to restore order to a world gone mad!

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘eye for an eye’ horseshit doesn’t end until you’re both dead? (If there’s no legal system that is prepared to intervene.)

In yet another ‘telltale’ that our bought and paid for government has let the legal establishment run amuck, the government has proven totally incapable of safeguarding your investments.

Now you’re really reliant on ‘men, both good and true’ to save your sorry ass.

Understand that these fictional ‘men’ were NOT elected to do their job. The ones you DID elect are the ones responsible for the absence of law enforcement in the financial market place.

“It was just a teeny political favor the bankers asked for…it doesn’t affect you…unless you’ve got an IRA or a 401k…then you’re fucked!”

But best not to go down that path. If you start looking around and observe all of the things that are going against you it is likely you’ll go ‘postal’. (At the very least you will understand why others sometimes ‘crack under the stress’…or you’ll marvel that it doesn’t happen more often!)

Anyway, you know it’s gonna be a ‘slow news day’ when Mr. Krugman returns to the issue of the Plutocracy and the need to ‘rescue’ democracy from it.

To which I would respond if you are prevented from voting directly upon the issues, you do NOT live in a Democracy!

If the ONLY choice you get to make is who will vote in your name without EVER consulting you, you are NOT a ‘member of a democracy’.

Even by the textbook definition of the word.

Rule BY some of the people FOR the rest of us is much closer to Monarchy than anything else.

Worse, it is a defacto ‘dictatorship of the entrenched.’

But this is yet another ‘pissing contest’ that will remain ‘winnerless’

And speaking of exercises in futility

We have this ‘empty declaration’ from the, er, ‘president’ of China:

With anemic economic expansion in Europe and America, there is even more pressure on China, the world's second-biggest economy, to boost consumption at home.
Mr. Hu said on Sunday that Beijing was serious about pursuing balance in its trade policy, adding that it would bring opportunities to countries around the world.

"We will view expansion of imports as an important way to change the development mode of foreign trade," he said at a speech at the Great Hall of the People.
"We will work hard to promote a balanced international balance of payments. We will not deliberately pursue a trade surplus."

Naturally, it is that last bit about ’not deliberately pursuing a trade surplus’ that gives us something to ponder.

What do you suppose Mr. Hu’s worst nightmare looks like?

You can bet he share’s the same one the boys of Wall Street keep having…the rope doesn’t break their neck and they’re going to strangle to death before someone can free them!

Why would Mr. Hu share Wall Street’s nightmares of ‘punishment gone awry?’

Imagine tens of millions of Chinese workers thrown off the job when Western economies start reversing the effects of the ‘economic desert’ created by the ‘global race to the bottom’?

Undetermined at this time is whether or not the equipment necessary to manufacture the items will return with the work…probably not.

Yes, it will not go well for Mr. Hu if the ‘economic miracle’ that made a handful of capitalists unbelievably rich suddenly turns sour.
He may even be thinking he’ll be ‘lucky’ if all that happens is that long walk off of a short pier.

There are worse things than death…

Unfortunately for Mr. Hu, I don’t see an alternative to the Chinese economy hitting the wall like a dog that runs full tilt and reaches the end of its chain.

You just know that the chain isn’t gonna snap or get pulled out of its mooring, the dog is gonna do a back flip…the ’hard way’.

The good news is that the dog almost always survives this…

However the master sometimes isn’t so lucky…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner