Pillar 2

Greetings good citizen,

There were too many competing items for yesterday’s spot and I did what I do ‘best’ (because I do it so often!) I digressed.

So it’s back to our primer on the pillars of A Simple Plan.

The second pillar is Justice, as many of you know (more interestingly, many of you would be content if this single pillar was all there was.

But, and it may be my twisted mind that thinks this way, I don’t think Justice is possible without Equality. Part of the reason I rank Equality number one is everything starts with it.

Seems a bit priggish to talk about equality and justice in a society that has abandoned both but that sinking feeling in your gut is due to angst…

It’s your angst as you watch the society you live in sink into barbarism.

A Simple Plan lays out how to restore the kind of ‘equality’ necessary to get the economy functioning…‘normally’.

It also lays out how to restore the Justice system.

Put on your galoshes good citizen, it’s time to jump down the rabbit hole we call ‘Justice’.

Let’s start with a ‘blanket approach’ and theorize that most of us have an ‘inner sense’ of what justice is and when it is achieved.

Sadly, most of us confuse justice with revenge.

This is where our current justice system has been sabotaged. The jury is ignored and the judge decides guilt, innocence and punishment.

Why does nobody get prosecuted for ‘White Collar Crime’? Because the judge won’t issue a warrant or even an investigation.

Why won’t the judge do this? Because it’s not what they’re paid to do…by their capitalist benefactors that is.

Judgy plays the same game he sees/believes everybody else in his position plays, he does what’s ‘good’ for HIM.

If he fails to investigate (but ‘comes into’ a ‘lucky’ stock pick by turning a ‘blind eye) fair dinkum!
Under A Simple Plan there are no judges. (Besides being nothing to bribe them with, sort of a ‘redundant solution’…)

Does our ‘lack of judges’ automatically fix our justice system?

Of course not…we have the daunting task of redefining the term ‘criminal’ ahead of us.’

Understand good citizen crimes under capitalism are quite different that crime under A Simple Plan.

The capitalist didn’t give a fig for ‘human rights’ where we ‘humanists’ care about them more than we care about MONEY!

Which is to point out another major difference between capitalism and its alternatives. In capitalism almost all crime is money centered, under A Simple Plan most crime will be people centered.

Ironically, theft will remain a huge problem after cash becomes a historic relic.

Then there’s the issue of punishment.

We have witnessed, under capitalism, the escalation of punishment (mostly the elimination of due process and legal protections against torture, preformed ‘unilaterally’ by the One Percent…or as the founders liked to call them the ‘owners’ of the land!

Which is to belabor the obvious, anyone who ‘idolizes’ the ‘founding principles’ of this nation is an elitist pig!

As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, the central pillar of the US government is this: Let those who OWN the land, RULE the land!

Since you and I weren’t here when these predators were dividing up the nation among themselves, we missed out on our chance to own a ‘voting share’.

Those shares were all gone shortly after the revolution ended. (And continued to be gobbled up by the same people who had helped themselves to the original ‘pie’ when new regions ‘joined’ the Union…)

But I digress.

Which is to point out that the History books tell us one thing while history itself tells us an entirely different story.

SO how do we become the just and humane society we hope to evolve into if we don’t adopt a ‘humane’ system of punishment?

Yes, good citizen Exile was developed as that ‘humane’ system. Often the most fitting punishment is to let the criminal who doesn’t appreciate the rules to live as they wish without those rules.

But we need not let these selfish people disrupt social cohesion with their blatant disregard for the most basic courtesy. Want to behave ‘like an animal’? Then go live with the animals!

Which, unfortunately for you, will be others just like you!

So what will get you exiled? Mostly theft and coercion…although theft is pretty stupid in a society where you can’t sell anything to anybody (because nobody has money they can give YOU…but that doesn’t mean they won’t try!)

The other thing that will get you ‘barred’ from society (and the gene pool) is treason.

Of course, treachery, which is commonplace today, will be illegal under A Simple Plan because treason will be ‘redefined’.

It is common today to ‘mis-represent’ things or situations only to later claim you were ‘mis-understood’.

While sometimes the ‘mis-understanding’ is genuine, other times the ‘fraud’ is intentional.

This willingness to harm others for personal gain is a nasty trait

Will your kids get exiled for YOUR crimes?

Only if they do as you did.

No one would be punished out of hand (or through ‘association’) under a ‘just society’…but if your tend to be ‘twisted’ a certain way then the odds start to tip against you.

Honestly, I think we are all the ‘product’ of the society we were raised in. Raise a child with tolerance and forbearance and you will produce a solid citizen who appreciates AND values the benefits of civil society, not just some of them but ALL of them.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Accountable

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

In the meantime, to consider stories such as this one anything more than ‘jaw-boning’ is a tragic error.

TOP NEWS
As Worries Ebb, Small Investors Propel Markets
By NATHANIEL POPPER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still feeling ‘optimistic’, Bunky?

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

And it looks like they got me again.

The question is did they get you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which tells you what, good citizen?

It’s time to hold management accountable.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Problem, What Problem?

Greetings good citizen,

It turns out if you keep playing with the web address tool you can eventually get something it will accept…which is why the ‘new’ (firewall-less) site is not Civics 101 but Civics 202.

A Simple Plan remains behind the firewall for the moment while I let the new site ‘come up to speed’.

How ironic is it that A Simple Plan has twice the number of Russian readers than it has US?

They have seen the worst of both (economic operating systems) and are more open minded than the typical ‘patriotic’ US citizen.

Well, I’m going to see how the new site ‘draws’ before I open up the ‘main attraction.’

Those who have been ‘told’ they already live ‘in paradise’ are oddly resistant to new ideas, even new ideas that ‘fix’ long standing injustices in the old ways…

But we really start walking the tightrope when we get into determining ‘what is ‘injustice’ and ‘who decides’.

It is a mystery to no one that the One Percent decide, they are the sole arbiters of ‘what is just’

It is their viewpoint that YOU are incapable of understanding what it’s like to be them, you aren’t ‘smart’ enough (probably how wealth and brains came to be equated when they have nothing to do with one another!)

So what are to make of our first headline?

A Bold Dissenter at the Fed, Hoping His Doubts Are Wrong
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in Virginia, has warned that the central bank’s efforts to stimulate growth are ineffective.

Economix Blog: The Great Dissenters

One need not be the president of a Federal Reserve Bank to realize (5 years after the fact) that the Fed’s ‘stimulus’ has had zero impact on ‘growth’. But that would be missing the whole point of calling the exercise ‘stimulus’.

What the Fed has been doing has nothing to do with ‘stimulating’ the global economy, what the Fed has done is to stabilize a badly broken global banking system.

How sad is it good citizen that despite trillions pumped in (and billions leaking out as ‘bonuses’) it is still broken beyond repair!

So what are we to make of this Fed President’s assertion?

He’s correct, but what are they supposed to do?

Cut off the stimulus and the global banking system collapses, pretty much immediately.

In a related story we are asked how ‘credible’ this situation is:

James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.

Bank Hacking Was the Work of Iranians, Officials Say
By NICOLE PERLROTH and QUENTIN HARDY

The skill required to execute the attacks convinced American officials that Iran was behind them, likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

After being, er, ‘hoodwinked’ into a ten year long war by one desk of ‘the office for strategic studies’ chasing imaginary ‘Weapons of Mass destruction’ (for which no one was ever prosecuted, by the way.)

We are now being presented with ‘Quid Pro Quo’; we levied sanctions on Tehran so they ‘retaliated’ by hacking the (decidedly corrupt) US banking system…

With all of the chicanery going on in the TBTF banking network, how the heck can they tell? (It was ‘hacked’ and not outright theft or fraud?)

Short answer, they can’t!

For our next trick:

Former Analyst Cooperates in Insider Trading Case
By PETER LATTMAN 9:57 AM ET

Wesley Wang, a former analyst at SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge fund, has given federal agents the names of about 20 people that he said engaged in insider trading.

Or ‘touche’ as they say in fencing!

Of course ‘one incident’ isn’t proof that our whole financial network is corrupt…but it’s been more than one incident, in fact it’s been a long string of them ever since Saint Ronnie (Reagan) ‘privatized’ the healthcare system, unleashing a juggernaut!

Fund Titans Battle Over Herbalife
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 29 minutes ago

Daniel S. Loeb’s Third Point disclosed that it had acquired more than 8.2 percent of the nutritional supplements company. That puts him at odds with his friend, William A. Ackman.

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘titans of capitalism’ have been reduced to squaring off over control of a MLM network?

Well, as they say, you just can’t make this stuff up. That said, how’s that future looking to you now?

HSBC Sale of $9.4 Billion Ping An Stake in Jeopardy
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER 57 minutes ago

The British bank HSBC’s bid to sell its stake in China’s Ping An group is in jeopardy after China Development Bank decided not to finance a large part of the transaction.

Um, not for nothing but 9 billion balloons is still a lot of cake even in these days when everything is measured in billions (millions are for pikers.) Worse, I’ve never heard of the Ping An group (but I’m going to assume it’s not the guys who make the popular brand of golf clubs…although I might be wrong!)

And speaking of trouble from across the Pacific:

A 787 had to be towed back to the gate Tuesday in Boston because of a fuel leak. On Monday, a parked 787 caught on fire.
Dreamliner Is Troubled by Questions About Safety
By JAD MOUAWAD 5:34 AM ET

All Nippon Airways canceled a domestic flight on Wednesday after a computer on board a 787 Dreamliner erroneously showed problems with the aircraft’s brakes.

Capitalism at its finest! Buyer BEWARE!!!

Once again we see the folly of ‘sold to the lowest bidder’ when it comes to producing complex objects that must work in harmony with one another!

The Dreamliner was 3 YEARS behind schedule due to the inability of the engineers to deal with problems continents away. Sometimes ‘tele-conferencing’ just doesn’t cut it.
But hey that’s capitalism for ya, if the product doesn’t float/fly it’s not management’s fault, they aren’t engineers!

Um, does anyone else have a problem with this?

I have no need to fly…and for that I am grateful!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dogs and Foxes

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s Business headlines remind me of the old joke, ‘What’s the difference between a Dog and a Fox?’

The answer is another famous quip…Budweiser doesn’t brew enough to drink her pretty…by the time I get that drunk I pass out.

Which is to refer us to another tired cliché…the one about putting lipstick on a pig.

Let’s get parsing, shall we?

HSBC to Apologize at Senate Hearing
By MARK SCOTT and NEIL GOUGH 49 minutes ago

HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, will apologize to American authorities next week for failing to prevent potential money laundering activities from taking place at the bank, according to an internal memo.

Remorse somehow never quite goes far enough…and we can all appreciate that what they’re ‘sorry’ about is not what they did, but getting caught doing it.

So how much you want to bet the ‘usual outcome’ will be the end result?

If ANYTHING happens at all it will be a small fine and a slap on the wrist (with a wet noodle.)

Sidebar, I was bringing in the mail yesterday and I noticed the postage stamps now read ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ with the added subtext ‘forever’ underneath and I couldn’t help but wonder if the stamps were foreign…

Euro Watch
Glimmers of Hope Fail to Lift European Markets
By STEPHEN CASTLE 9:27 AM ET

European industrial production rebounded unexpectedly and Italy's short-term borrowing costs dropped, but the mood remained fragile.

Spain’s Leader Plans New Austerity Steps as Miners Clash With Police
Italy’s Leader Calls Economic Efforts a ‘Very Tough War’
Weak U.S. and European Economies Weigh on Asia

Industrial production ‘rebounded unexpectedly’…once again we are faced with the question of ‘degrees’ or as they say ‘define rebound’?

Usually this ‘variation’ in the data turns out to be a math error but if the error is favorable they will run with it to see if they can’t improve ‘market psychology’.

I will once again remind you that facts don’t matter, it’s all about ‘perception’.

It’s the old ‘spoonful of sugar’ routine minus the Mary Poppins song and dance bit. As you will note, they’re ‘selling’ austerity over there.

Wall Street Opens Lower
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 36 minutes ago

Shares fell despite better-than-expected data on unemployment claims.

U.S. Jobless Claims Plunge to Lowest in 4 Years 9:30 AM ET

If you keep making right turns you will eventually return to your original course…and yes good citizen, it was the fourth consecutive ‘down day’ for the NYSE that made the question of the difference between a dog and a fox pop into my head.

And the rest sort of followed that initial mental hiccup.

We all know that falling claims have nothing to do with the actual unemployment climate.

There are no jobs nor will there be any for as long as the global race to the bottom, driven by ‘more with less’, ends.

Fear of Year-End Fiscal Stalemate May Be Having Effect Now
By REBECCA BERG

Economists say uncertainty over tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect at the end of 2012 could be cutting into economic growth already.

Graphic: Measuring Uncertainty Over U.S. Policy

We all KNOW what’s going to happen after November and we’re ‘bracing for impact’.

After the elections oil/energy prices are going to climb through the roof and stay there. It’s happened every time right after the run up to the elections end.

How unfortunate is it that we elect our leaders just before Winter sets in?

The Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, has said that additional action should not be taken lightly.
Fed Is Torn on Tipping Point for Action
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

An account of the June policy meeting shows concern over slow growth was weighed against uncertainty about the consequences of new intervention.

How many ways can you say, ‘We don’t have any ammo left?’

The question is how long can they keep up the charade and the answer is…not much longer.

U.S. Trade Deficit Declines in May
Funny how if you don’t sell the last load of imported bullshit you don’t need to import as much next time…and the ‘Trade deficit’ magically declines as a result! (fucktards)

Scott Zaremba, owner of Phillips 66 in Lawrence, Kan., which has begun offering regular cars fuel that is 15 percent ethanol.

In Kansas, Stronger Mix of Ethanol
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Ethanol makers want to offer a blend of fuel that is 15 percent ethanol rather than 10 percent. At a Phillips 66 station in Lawrence, Kan., E15 is catching on.

Perhaps more pointedly is how none of the farmers in Kansas own a fucking lawnmower (that ethanol is destroying!)

Great for corn farmers receiving huge subsidies…sucks for everyone else…besides the disturbing implications of stepping up the production of food into fuel, definitely not ‘sustainable’…not that the fucking capitalist cares.

So will tomorrow answer the question of ‘what’s the difference between a dog and a fox? When the stock market inexplicably rises…for no apparent reason except ripping the rest of us off?

When stocks appreciate for no apparent reason YOU lose. What you’re seeing is the ‘depreciation’ of your purchasing power. While the already wealthy unjustly enrich themselves further.

If we don’t put a stop to this blatant robbery we will all find ourselves well and truly.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pigs & Ducks III

Greetings good citizen,

News of the collapse of our civilization has now reached the corporate owned media, just to give you an idea of how far gone the situation is.

Observe this headline plucked from this morning’s business section:

Economic Scene
The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption
By EDUARDO PORTER

The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans, and trust in big business overall is declining. We should be alarmed.

DealBook: Assessing the Chances for Criminal Charges

“Eddie” is correct, you’d have to search far and wide to find someone this news, er, ‘shocks’.

We’re all used to it by now.

Worse, we also read what the ‘infamous they’ are prepared to do about it if any of us should call them on their decidedly criminal behavior.

Don’t gather in large ‘unarmed’ groups, you’re just making it easier for the Drones.

We all know our ‘civil disobedience’ will be punished far more severely than how their criminal actions will be dealt with…

Which brings us to the last line in today’s offering.

What do you think the chances are of ‘justice’ being done?

The consensus is ‘slim to none’.

All the have to do is claim ‘everybody is doing it’ and they’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a chicken feed sized fine.

That’s what blows most people’s mind…who said Crime doesn’t pay? Steal a billion and they ‘fine’ you a couple of million! (But you get to keep the billion…and you ‘walk’!)

WTF!

Um, good thing there aren’t billions just laying around waiting to be stolen or everybody would be doing it!

Sure beats the bag out of busting your ass every day for a paycheck you can’t live on!

But stealing billions isn’t an ‘everyman’ sort of crime, is it?

You need to be born into that kind of money, Making the crime that much more heinous.

Bobo is already ‘rich’ (comparatively speaking) but he’s ‘light-fingered’ anyway.

What do you do with a wealthy criminal?

I recommend (public) hanging but hey, I’m not a judge.

They used to hang criminals publicly for its ‘deterrent’ value…although I doubt it actually entered the criminal’s mind that THEY’D ever get caught (especially the ‘privileged criminal’.)

All they have to do is whisper the magic word and all charges against them are ‘dropped’, hell, go high enough and all traces that they were even suspected of a crime vanish as well.

But that’s not how it works for YOU.

If they want you bad enough (depending on how desperate they are for a scapegoat) you’re going down even if you’ve never stolen so much as a paperclip in your entire life!

Given those two ‘constants’ good citizen, what do you suppose the prospects are that anyone will be ‘prosecuted’ for robbing investors?

Isn’t the first test ‘how can they tell?’

Of course I am referring to how there is no ‘rational basis’ for determining the value of a given stock…but if we take that to the next level there also isn’t a rational basis for determining the value of money either!

It’s all a matter of ‘opinion’.

And somehow the opinion of the weirdo has prevailed lately.

Which is why nobody is ‘surprised’ that our entire system of commerce is ‘untrustworthy’.

But fear not good citizen, barter is making a strong come back!

Soon you will be able to trade ‘directly’ for your wants and needs, so you’ll know right then and there EXACTLY what you’ve got.

If you have nothing of ‘value’ to trade then you won’t be able to buy or sell.

And that’s going to kick the shit out of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ supply line.

They won’t be able to ‘re-supply’ if they are unable to pay for their inputs ‘in kind’.

When the bottom falls out beneath money it will be because of its original failing…nobody knows the answer to the question of how many ducks equal a pig…or how many pigs equal a duck (If the pigs are small and the ducks are large!)

Leading us back to our original conundrum.

If a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then why isn’t a buck a buck?

(Because bankers are corrupt…)

Thanks for letting me insider your head,

Gegner

Criminals Escape Justice!

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

Evidence under the radar

Greetings good citizen,

As constant reader knows I frequently warn of the dangers of social collapse.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the surest signs of eminent danger are indistinguishable from, er, ‘criminal activity’.

Which is to say evidence of collapse is omnipresent but it is being reported as ‘criminal activity’ rather than ‘social desperation’.

Here are just a few examples:

"Rustling Costs Ranchers Millions in Poor Economy"

checked on his livestock and found a ghoulish scene: Piles of entrails from two Black angus calves he says thieves gutted "like they were deer." They made off with the meat and another 400-pound calf in a heist he estimated cost him $1,800.

"Gosh, times are tough, and maybe people are truly starving and just need the meat," he said. "But it's shocking. I can't believe people can stoop that low."

"Pharmacy Robberies on Rise as Addicts Turn to Guns"

Two armed robberies were enough. So he stopped stocking the drug. And he posted signs to tell everyone -- especially desperate addicts -- "We don't carry OxyContin!"

He thought the signs were helping -- until last month, when a man wearing a mask entered the pharmacy with a sawed-off shotgun.

He jumped over the counter, told three employees and a customer to get on the floor, and tied their hands. Then he left with money and more than $12,000 worth of prescription drugs, including other narcotic painkillers.

"Thieves Stealing Pickup Truck Tailgates"

reports that six times in six months crooks have taken the tailgates off pickup trucks in parking lots in Oswego. They can actually go for a decent chunk of cash. They sell for $4,000 new but the "hot" tailgates can go for $600-$700 and the crooks are still making decent change.

Most of these are real yawners compared to other events lurking at the edges of civilization…until you insert yourself and your stuff/personal safety into the picture.

YOU ‘could have been one of the customers tied up on the floor in that drug store heist…it could also be YOU as the one who discovers the family pet’s gutted remains on the edge of your property. (Today it’s cows but tomorrow, ‘meat is meat’..and as the author of ‘The Road’ points out, some humans aren’t that ‘fussy’ as to where their meat comes from.)

Which is to say it’s only a matter of time before ‘monsters’ make the news.

The distinguishing factor is that these ‘zombies’ won’t just be ‘undead’, they’ll be downright certifiable too!

So slaughtering one of these ‘opportunists’ won’t be ‘murder’, considering what they had planned for you…

But I digress, and rather morbidly at that.

Let us return to the signs that our economy is on the verge of collapse

Bankers have an odd-sounding problem these days: they are awash in cash.

Droves of consumers and businesses unnerved by the lurching markets have been taking their money out of risky investments and socking it away in bank accounts, where it does little to stimulate the economy.

Though financial institutions are not yet turning away customers at the door, they are trying to discourage some depositors from parking that cash with them. With fewer attractive lending and investment options for that money, it is harder for the banks to turn it around for a healthy profit.

During the ‘alleged recovery’ it was the vaults full of cash that were used as ‘proof’ the economy was on the mend.

In fact, the banks have been ‘sitting’ on heaps of…money since BEFORE the crisis struck!

If we roll the clock back to the 1970’s we’d see the exact same phenomenon. Too much money chasing too little opportunity.

What do you suppose was the cause of that?

Too much capacity (like right now?)

Capitalism is RETARDED because it puts the focus on growth rather than sustainability.

But the short term needs of the few have long outweighed the long term needs of the many. And when the two factors collided, the few steamrolled the many with stolen money.

It really is as simple as that.

Worse, the solution set is just as simple…although it involves invoking our 2nd amendment rights rather than our first.

Why are the banks loaded with cash while the streets are filled with the homeless?

Obvious answer = mismanagement.

Second question: Which of our, er, ‘constitutional rights’ will allow us with the surest method of correcting said mismanagement?

The ballot box or the weapons locker?

It’s time to decide just whose hand is going to be on the trigger…

Will it be yours or will it belong to those who created this untenable situation?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lack of Empathy...

Greetings good citizen,

If only they’d announce the exact date they plan on, er, ‘dismantling’ civilization we’d all be better prepared…but I suspect that would defeat the purpose of driving us into our own cesspool, wouldn’t it?

Today’s Gems come to us courtesy of the ever so eloquent site Some Assembly Required (my favorite ‘aggregator’.)

When the web goes dark, CKM will be the person/website I miss most.

But I digress, let us examine some excerpts to illustrate my point:

A More Perfect Union: A plethora of financial commentators are finally catching on to the fact that Europe's problem is not debt or fiscal irresponsibility, or even those lazy Greeks, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Italians... The problem is the trade balances, or rather the trade imbalances among the member nations. If a nation runs a negative trade balance (negative current account) it must borrow the difference in order to pay the bills. If the Eurozone was one big happy fiscal nation, like these United States, then the 'states' wouldn't have this problem. Sure, the US runs a deficit with the world at large, but nobody gets excited that Pennsylvania has an imbalance with Iowa. Either they gotta fuse, or dismember the euro.

Since ‘trade balances’ are directly proportional to the ‘quality of life’ in a given , er, ‘place’, can exporting jobs while importing goods that used to be made locally be ‘economically sound?’

Short answer, no.

So the sudden ‘realization’ that globalization plays a much larger role in economic inequality is really only ‘half’ of the battle, isn’t it?

Or perhaps it is more accurate to point out that now that they know what the problem is, it SHOULD point them in the direction of the solution…right?

Maybe that’s where the ‘assembly’ part comes in…(or at least that’s how I assembled it.)

And since I’m always preaching about the dangers of ‘cascading systemic collapse’, articles such as this one really hit home:

Women and Children First: The order in which your city is likely to cut things in order to balance the budget without any of those horrid increased taxes is: Fire/lay off the people who provide the services. Cancel infrastructure repairs and improvements. Close the parks, pools, libraries, animal shelters, rec centers. Collect the garbage less often. “Modify” the health care benefits of city employees. Reduce public safety spending, close fire stations, cut police patrols. “Modify” pension benefits. Cut public health services. Cut spending on schools.

Left to our imagination is what will happen when energy becomes too expensive/scarce to heat public buildings?

Worse, good citizen…what will happen to prices when it comes time to ‘offset’ rising energy costs in the ‘private sector’?

Homeowners will be faced with ‘Heat or Eat’ AND how much will you kick in to keep Johnny in the classroom (in the dead of winter?)

Hell, some parents are already being tapped for a share of the bus ride!

How long will it be before you are asked to ‘stay on the line’ so the 911 operator can get your credit card information?

Locally, good citizen, in the course of the last seven days we have had the convenience store around the corner robbed, A local restaurant owner was murdered (again suspected robbery) and last night my wife got pulled over because she was driving the same color vehicle that was reported fleeing the scene of a liquor store robbery in a neighboring town!

These are all ‘signs’ of social desperation AND this is usually a ‘sleepy’ part of nowhere…most of the time the local rag has zero as far as local crime/police activity reports.

When something DOES happen, usually it is something mundane such as an expired registration or the occasional DWI, not murder and robbery…and never three in the same week!

Worse, in places where such events ARE everyday occurrences, they are also ‘non-news’, sure they all make the paper (often buried pretty deep) because people who live in ‘high crime’ areas don’t like being reminded of it.

Finally in a related story we have:

Annual Checkup: Health insurance went up 9% last year. A family of four now pays $15,073 a year for insurance that pays only some of the costs of being sick. Try that on WalMart minimum wage. Explain to me again why we don't have, don't want, single payer national healthcare.

Yes, good citizen…places that have ‘single payer’ health care spend significantly less (per capita) on health care while enjoying somewhat better outcomes from that health care…but Reagan didn’t ‘privatize’ health care to make it ‘more efficient’.

He did in to provide investors an alternative to investing in the infrastructure of what is soon to become a Banana Republic…

Sadly, investors quickly ran out of ‘alternative investments’ and have since dedicated themselves to destroying our civilization so they could ‘enrich’ themselves…and they ‘justify’ this by branding us as ‘sheep’.

Some of them are even clueless enough to say these things to our faces…it is only a matter of time until one of these incautious dolts is DISMEMBERED for their (social) ‘insensitivity’.

Which is to add that ‘lack of empathy’ can manifest itself in many ways…sometimes fatally.

Watch yourselves out there!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hell in a bucket...

Greetings good citizen,

‘Hell in a bucket’ is proceeding apace if you peruse the local court docket. I notice there is an upsurge in prosecutions for petty theft, locally anyway.

So, is theft like cockroaches, for every one you see prosecuted there are a thousand more that go unapprehended and a thousand more (each) that go unreported?

That’s a lot of theft good citizen and while we’re on the subject of court dockets I’d like to address what appears to be the single largest/most popular ‘crime’ of the current times…

Unregistered/uninsured, driving after your license has been revoked/suspended…

While DWI runs a close second, continuing to drive without, er, ‘paying’ has become a very popular pass time, definitely bigger than baseball!

Aside from the fact that the cops only bag a tiny percentage of these ‘offenders’ we have to pause for a moment and ask if life hasn’t become ‘too expensive’ for the majority of us…

You do, on occasion, see the rare ‘I forgot’ type where the only listed violation is an expired inspection sticker…but ‘usually’ it is a ‘full boat’. No sticker, no registration and no insurance with more than a few having a suspended/revoked license too boot!

Life’s ‘big three’ ain’t cheap and there is only one factor you can, er, control…what you put in your mouth.

The roof over your head and wheels under your ass can quickly chew up the average paycheck with very little left over.

Worse, it is ‘impossible’ in most metro areas to do all three on the Federal minimum wage. (Even with a ‘free’ automobile. Repairs on anything you can get for free are more than enough to put you on a perpetual ‘starvation diet’.)

The barely street legal shitbox is the payday lender’s wet dream!

More people are driven (literally!) into destitution trying to keep shitboxes on the road.

And we haven’t even factored in registering or insuring said shitbox!

Why do we subject ourselves to this? No wheels = no job!

A situation that isn’t getting any better as the ‘economic desert’ continues to expand at an accelerating pace…


Uncle Tom isn’t helping his prospects for re-election by cheerleading the ‘persistently invisible’ recovery either.

Which, naturally, leads to the subject of why the government seems incapable of dealing with this train wreck of an economy?

And the answer is the people they take their marching orders from don’t want it fixed!

The already rich will throw our entire civilization under the bus to fatten their worthless bank accounts…

Actually, that’s not right…this isn’t about money and they know it…it’s about power.

Those whose power relies on fossil fuels need to ‘stretch out’ the supply so their power will last a while longer…and they don’t give a fuck who freezes or starves to death in the process.

We’re dealing with psychopaths here, the same kind of psychopaths who cut down the last palm tree (large enough to make an ocean going canoe out of) on Easter Island to roll their fucking statue to the coast!

Be VERY careful of who you bow to…they just might be nuts!

Ironically the statues survive to this day, their civilization, on the other hand, is toast.

And guess who is headed in the same direction? (For pretty much the same reasons…)

We are long overdue for a change in the way things are run. As a species we can no longer tolerate the leadership of those who think the only thing that matters is their own selfish desires/whims!

This is the ‘bottom line of every post I create…THERE IS A ‘BETTER WAY’ and we can start down that path tomorrow!

I don’t propose this for me, I propose it for ‘us’.

Disturbingly, Marx didn’t devise communism ‘for himself’ either. He attacked the wrong issue and society suffered…his bad.

Communism, like capitalism is ‘money based’…A Simple Plan is law based.

The common ownership of the means of production is meaningless as long as the ‘self interested’ continue to make the laws…


Worse, the formation of a ‘party’ at the outset turned an inclusive arrangement into an ‘Us vs. Them’ proposition…there are no ‘parties’ under A Simple Plan (and forming one will get you exiled!)

It’s not about ‘no rules’ it’s about ‘no rulers’!

I shouldn’t be too surprised that most of you ‘don’t get it’…neither the Greeks nor the Romans could conceive of a society without slaves…

So maybe its just me that’s messed up…but I kind of doubt it.

If we made slavery ‘voluntary’ I’d be it would be the world’s shortest que! Just behind the line for voluntary castration…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Get the Hell out of Dodge!

Greetings good citizen,

After yesterday’s, er, ‘stellar’ performance, today’s markets couldn’t get out of their own way…which isn’t particularly surprising.

You see, I’m not the only one who has serious misgivings about the, er, ‘soundness’ of today’s financial markets. As I have stated before, only a fool would risk their own money in today’s extremely, er, ‘gamed/rigged’ markets.

Worse good citizen…what we’re seeing…what’s being ‘passed off’ as market activity is actually nothing more than the ‘remote control’ machinations of the big trading desks, playing with public funds.

Why isn’t anyone raising a stink? Well, technically, this isn’t illegal.

Um, once again this is another ‘unsettling’ instance of Ilargi and I ‘channeling’ one another…

[Hattip: The Automatic Earth]

January 4 2010: Get the hell out of Dodge

Ilargi: Right, Americans and their economy. Well, it's an ideal situation, isn’t it? Every marketeer’s wet dream. That is, through appealing to people's need and desire for hope and good tidings, you succeed in making them believe that they will benefit from the very things that hurt them more than anything else in the world. You have them convinced that black is white. This is what the US government, media, and big industry are pulling off, and since they do it so well, nary a soul is any the wiser for it. You use their very own cash to deceive them, by boosting markets for a while, which makes them believe the future is rosy, and you can use the resulting economic lull to take as much of their wealth as you can possibly carry.

All it takes to convey the positive message and image are rising stock markets and still bad but slightly less awful unemployment and housing numbers. That’s how desperate people are for their hope. They’ll believe just about anything. They don’t even want to know that these somewhat positive numbers have been bought with their own money. That banks haven't tumbled yet simply and only because their losses have been transferred to public accounts.

And you've got to give it to the marketeers: it's not yet 100% sure that the US economy will crash, and all hope asks for is a 1% window. At least theoretically, the US can still get out from underneath its debt yoke. It would probably have to grow its economy by over 10% or so for the next three decades or so, which is, to put it mildly, not bleeding likely, but it's not 100% impossible. Play your story line the right way, hand them some words they can believe in who are so eager to believe, and the people will let you rob them blind in broad daylight. And give you an encouraging smile and pat on the back for working so hard while you're at it.

There is no better way to summarize the year we just left behind, 2009, nor the way 2010 has started. And it's brilliant.

It's of course nothing new that once inside the government, you can get to play with lots of other people's money, but still, for those that run these games and marketing campaigns it must have been a profound Aha-Erlebnis, a Eureka moment, when they realized there really wasn't any restriction that would force them to stop when the average US citizen's balance sheet read zero. That that was just the beginning, and taking control of the government effectively means you can push the average US citizens' balance sheet into breathtakingly deep negative territory, nobody has even pointed out a limit yet, so deep that you can plunge Americans into far greater debt than they will ever be able to pay off in their entire lives, just by assuming control of the government. America as a bottomless pit. As long as they don't notice it, or don’t recognize it for what it is, and as long as you tell them it’s for their own good, you can keep at it for quite a while. Need a higher debt ceiling? Congress will never vote you down, because the show must go on. And if you can't be bothered with Congress, there's always Christmas Eve.

And whether it’s the fact that about one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card (on top of the many millions who get only a $200-$300 monthly unemployment benefit), or whether it's the Christmas Eve move to free Fannie and Freddie from all monetary constraints, or the recent measures to prevent an apparently expected and feared run on money market funds from materializing, all of it fits one and the same playbook. If you choose to not understand that, and instead focus on another fleeting high on Wall Street, I would by now be mighty tempted to say that you are welcome to what you got coming.

You can sell a president through an effective marketing campaign. You can also sell his policies the same way. Neither the man nor the measures need truthfully be anything like the image you paint of them, no more than a car or a detergent need anything but a feel-good recognition factor. Both the person and the acts only need to resemble as much as possible what people would like them to be. The best liar wins. The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing…if you can fake that, you've got it made, said Groucho. That’s not some sort of accident, it's what the country was built on.

And they only need to do it for as long as it takes to move all gambling debt magically off the books of the players and onto the national public balance sheet. Then when the loot has been loaded into the get-away planes, trains and automobiles, they will get the hell out of Dodge and slip away like so many thieves in the night as literally as they can. Après ça, le deluge.

Hopefully it is clear how Ilargi ‘echoes’ the sentiments I voiced in last night’s piece. We, the public, are being systematically ‘ripped off’ because the safeguards against such an unlikely event have been defeated.

Uh, here we enter the world of speculation…because we are left to wrestle with the idea of what can be gained by robbing a bankrupt nation?

Then we have the other side of the same blade…that which was stolen can easily be ‘de-monetized’, negating the loss. This move will definitely, er, ‘rile up’ our creditors but if the choice is ‘half a loaf vs. nothing’ they should be willing to be reasonable.

So, in order for the ‘rip-off’ to be successful (even temporarily) SOMEONE has to stay behind to insure that what has been stolen remains ‘money good’ until it can be converted into an asset that can’t be (easily) ‘de-monetized’.

At the end of the day it’s all about ‘the greater fool’ and it will ultimately hinge upon ‘retribution’.

Will ‘society’ pay the price or will the perps get punished? Interestingly enough, the answer is likely a mixed bag. The ‘disruption’ of the financial network will inflict huge losses upon the fabric of society, which in turn will punish those responsible through the law of unintended consequences.

Which is to say the foolish perps will lose far more than they gain…but so will everyone else.

Share the pain…it’s not nearly as ‘amusing’ as it seems…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

South of the Border

Greetings good citizen,

Really haven’t heard much about the coup in Honduras recently, there were a few threats by the deposed, democratically elected president to return to Honduras to serve out his term of office

In case you’re curious, we’re about to see how that’s working out.

Just in case you’ve forgotten what happened and who was involved here’s a little refresher of ‘what’s gone before’…

Launch a Military Coup, Hire a High-Power PR Firm and Represent Democracy!

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 12:39 PM on September 28, 2009.

I notice the major papers are now referring to the perpetrators of the military coup in Honduras as the "de facto" government. Quite a benign frame.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative, right-wing elements in Honduras and the United States -- including, according to reports swirling around Latin America, bloody veteran hands from Reagan's dirty wars, like Otto Reich -- had been laying the groundwork for deposing President Manuel Zelaya for several years.

Roberto Micheletti's coup government has done a fine job spinning away the fact that this was the kind of military coup that has been anything but par-for-the-course in recent years in an overwhelmingly democratic Latin America. They've done it with savvy lobbying and PR. Historian Greg Grandin wrote about debating former Clinton confidant Lanny Davis, now a lobbyist representing the coup government, among others:

The Honduras coup occurred on June 28, when soldiers working on behalf of a the small group of business and political elites who now control the country, kidnapped democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile.

Since then, the military-backed regime of Roberto Micheletti has argued to the world that it was acting constitutionally, even though nearly every country in Latin America, along with the European Union, isn't buying it.

Only in the U.S. is there a debate as to whether the Micheletti government is legal -- largely thanks to the lobbying efforts of Davis.

Not only is there debate in the U.S., it is surreal; consider right-wing lunatic Dana Rohrbacher's recent post on The Hill's blog arguing that through a right-wing military coup a "crisis was averted and the constitutional democracy in Honduras was preserved." [CG picked up on this and used it in one of his radio shows after Limbaugh jumped on that bandwagon!]

Expect much more of the same kind of nonsense in the immediate future:

The de facto government of Honduras that ousted President Manuel Zelaya has hired a well-known public relations firm to bolster its image in Washington.

According to Justice Department documents, the Honduran government signed Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates to a four-month contract worth more than $290,000. Filed on Sept. 18 with Justice by the public relations firm, the documents say the company will “advance the level of communication, awareness and media/policy maker attention about the political situation in Honduras.” [I guess one never knows when diplomacy alone won’t do…naturally, it’s pretty damn difficult to field diplomats when nobody recognizes the legitimacy of your government…]

The contract comes as the crisis in the Central American country has flared up again. Zelaya, who was exiled to Costa Rica by the Honduran military, has slipped back into the country to try to reclaim his position as president. He has taken shelter with family members in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, threatened with arrest if he leaves its grounds.

And how's that "democracy" working out? Well ...

The de facto government shut down two broadcasters on Monday and prevented a demonstration in support of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, as sweeping restrictions on civil liberties took effect.

Masked police agents were perched from the windows of a television station, and soldiers formed a barricade around the headquarters of a radio station here after the government shut them down indefinitely.

The police closed off both sides of the street where several hundred demonstrators gathered Monday morning, effectively preventing them from starting their march. The protesters drifted away as it became clear that the march would not take place.

The other government measures, announced late Sunday, prohibit unauthorized public meetings and allow the police to arrest anyone deemed to be a threat.

Geez good citizen, what gives? Did Alternet suddenly turn into a subsidiary of Red State? Why do you suppose Alternet felt compelled to reveal that a Clinton crony is up to his neck in the ‘conservative coup’ in Honduras?

Could it be because the cost of remaining mum would only make things worse? You can bet your bottom dollar the RWNM would have a real party pointing out the ‘Clinton connection’ as well as any attempts to ‘cover it up’.

But what does this ‘prove’? It doesn’t prove anything but it sure as hell is mighty damning evidence that the Democratic Party has been, er, ‘compromised’ by the conservatives. Why the hell do you suppose Rush was calling for a Hillary vs. McCain ‘face off’ almost two years before the 2008 election and roughly a year before Hillary announced her intention to run…

Why did Rush make such a pairing using a (then) ‘freshman’ senator from a district she only recently adopted?

Is there a 2 + 2 here connecting the Obama administration (which is loaded with Clinton administration ‘throwbacks’, many who are personally responsible for the current financial meltdown) resulting in the abysmal performance to date?

‘Coincidence’ perhaps?

I don’t think so…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The 'Whackosphere'?

Greetings good citizen,

I need to get around more! Just when I thought I was the only ‘kook’ out there, lo and behold don’t I stumble across a kindred soul! Okay, he’s got an edge when it comes to knowing what he’s talking about, having actually worked on The Street, BUT, he’s the first pundit I’ve encountered other than myself that calls what’s going on a ‘criminal deception’.

This is going to be an ‘easy’ post for me as I only have one quibble with what Mr. Adler has to say, and I’ll save that for when you get there.

Without further adieu, we arrive at tonight’s offering [Hat tip: The Automatic Earth]

Forbes Polls the Wackosphere and Gets An Earful
by Lee Adler

The editors of Forbes have asked me to give them my economic forecast for the next year (cough, cough, guffaw). Don’t be impressed. They sent the same email to the whole financial wackosphere. I assume that their purpose, as with the entire financial infomercial media, is to poke fun at us wackos so as to minimize their own horrendous shortcomings as financial journalists.

OK, so I’ll give them an answer since they were nice enough to ask. But let me preface this for those of you who don’t know me by saying that I’m not an economist, thank goodness. What an embarrassment that would be. My educational background is in accounting (undergrad) and psychology (grad ). My professional career over the past 22 years has been spent mostly in real estate and financial market analytics. So I’ve had some exposure to the real economy and the financial economy.

I’ve had a particular interest throughout my life in manias and their aftermath. I’m a self taught technical analyst (aren’t we all), having first become interested in the art of TA at the ripe old age of 13 when I was introduced to point and figure charting. What I have learned about liquidity analysis, an area in which I specialize, has been through independent research, observation and study. My ideas are not polluted by the shibboleths of formal education. My interest in manias brought me back to my current job as an independent self-employed professional analyst and web publisher in 2000 when I founded Capitalstool.com. I founded The Wall Street Examiner in 2004.

In my late 20s I worked for several years as a sell side technical analyst for a couple of institutional boutique firms on Wall Street. Let’s just say that the Street and I did not mix.

I had morals.

While working on the Street in the early 1980s, thanks to reading people like Joe Granville, Richard Ney (The Wall Street Jungle), and Charles Mackay (Extraordinary Popular Delusions, etc.) I realized that the financial media was nothing more than the marketing arm of the Wall Street retail distribution network. Wall Street’s job is to distribute paper and transfer wealth from the many to the few, including, most importantly, itself. The media’s job is to transmit the sales pitch.

The financial infomercial media plays a crucial and integral role in that system, providing a platform for Wall Street’s professional shills to reach the masses. It is the greatest manipulative system in the world since Goebbels, mastering the art of repeating the Big Lie to perfection. When a shill comes on CNBC and says buy XYZ, his in house traders are the ones doing the selling.

One of the Big Lies is that the stock market discounts the future. We’ve had a big rally, so the economy must be about to get a lot better, so the story goes. But the truth is that the stock market is nothing more than a liquidity meter. It measures a very particular type of liquidity. It mostly measures how much cash is burning a hole in the pockets of the dealer community.

Right now, thanks to the Fed, the dealer community, particularly the Fed’s Primary Dealers who dominate not only the Treasury market but the stock market as well, are rolling in oceans of cash, pumped directly to them by the Fed. They are using most of it to pay down debt by selling much of their questionable assets to the Fed, particularly mortgage debt and corporate debt, but they are using some of it to manipulate stocks higher. They do that because, one, it’s easy for them to do it, and two, because it’s much easier to get the suckers, oops, I mean the buy side institutions, to take the other side of the trade when prices are rising.

So as long as the Fed pumps this cash to them, stock prices will go up. It has nothing to do with the economy. It has nothing to do with discounting the future. The idea that stock prices discount the future is ridiculous. Stock markets are comprised of people, or at least the people who wrote the computer programs that do most of the millisecond trading that dominates price action. People, by and large, are not very good at predicting the future. That’s especially true of economists, pundits, and most of all, portfolio managers, whose only real interest is in not doing anything different than what the majority of portfolio managers are doing. How in the world can a portfolio manager properly manage money when one of the mandates of the industry is to stay fully invested. The best they can hope for is to do better than their peers. They can do nothing to protect your assets in the event of systemic collapse, such as we are now facing.

In continuing to spread the lies this time around, the media helps to insure that for the foreseeable future there will be no recovery from this economic and financial mess. The media continues to feature the same people telling the same idiotic stories, pursuing the same tried and true practices of distributing insider stock, especially their own, at high prices to the masses. The cash goes right from our pockets to the pockets of the financiers, with the media getting a huge cut in the process. They are co conspirators in a massive criminal scheme, some of it legal, some of it not, to separate people from their money.

This time they did it a little too well, and therein lies a problem for the economy. Few have any money left to transfer. The Fed and Treasury have set up a scam over the past year to make it look as if there’s still money, but what they have actually done is to transfer risk from the private sector to the public sector, in other words us, current and future generations of US taxpayers. In the process they’ve pumped a couple of trillion of new government debt into the economy and the markets over the past couple of months making it look as though everything is gonna be all right.

All right.

All ri-i-ight.

But it’s not gonna be all right. In fact, things are getting worse as we speak, and they will continue to get worse for the short term, the intermediate term, and the long term– for as long as the same people are in charge who caused this mess in the first place; for as long as the media continues to give a platform to those same people who were responsible for all the–let’s call them what the are–crimes– that put us where we are. For as long as those in power in Washington give those same people the same power they have always had, rather than punishing them for their “mistakes”, we are going to be in this mess.

So now we have transferred trillions of bad debt, some of it completely worthless paper, on to the books of the Fed and the Federal Government. What can the outcome possibly be? Ultimately default? Devaluation? Hyperinflation? Slow motion economic collapse such as that which is currently under way? Even finally the collapse of government and society? Anything is possible, given how insane these policies are and how clueless our policy makers have been and continue to be. [Here’s my sole quibble: he is much kinder to ‘elected officials’ than they deserve. They would have to be truly stupid for the clueless claim to be valid. They’re ‘in on it’ too.]

For example, the government has committed to take on $1.45 trillion of mortgage debt in various forms. In most cases the equity has been wiped out. There’s no margin of safety in those mortgages. The government will lose countless billions on its investments. We, the people, will somehow have to pay for that. Meanwhile, the financiers in the middle of the mess in the first place are still there. If they’re not still running the show, they’ve run off somewhere with the billions that they have skimmed and scammed off the top.

Now the media reports that, gee! the government is actually making money from the investments it has made in bailing out the banks. But the Fed and the Government are just playing the same game the banks played, reporting the “operating profit” while not reporting the mushrooming mountain of bad debt on their books. This is the very same garbage that got us here in the first place, except now the government is taking a page from the banks and financial institutions that mastered the art of hiding bad debt. It’s sickening, but no one in the mainstream media questions it.

Where are the real journalists? Not working for the mainstream media, that’s for sure. They’re still giving a free pass to the power brokers.

Forbes has asked me what data I like to look at. One of the things I featured just today in one of my reports to subscribers is Federal tax collections so far in August. They were down 13% versus last August to date. July was down less than 6% year to year. Where are the green shoots? The government has disbursed $227 billion more into the economy this month than it did at the same point last August. And yet tax collections continue to collapse, indicating that economic activity is doing likewise.

One of the problems is that zero interest rates forces both people and businesses to liquidate principle in order to pay the bills. So the capital pie shrinks. A shrinking capital base means shrinking income. Shrinking income means that people will need to liquidate even more capital. The system collapses in a chain reaction.

Government programs have done nothing to change that. They’ve masked the degenerative process for a time with all that spending, but they’ve done it only by adding more debt to the government’s balance sheet. At the same time, debt in the private sector, and hence money, is being destroyed. We see it in all manner of lending statistics, from bank loans, to mortgage credit, to commercial paper. And we see it in the rising tide of mortgage defaults. People can’t pay or won’t pay. So they don’t. This is what’s backing our “money”.

Meanwhile lending institutions and now the government pretend that the losses don’t exist, reporting unbelievably, that the money supply hasn’t collapsed along with everything else. They have no choice. They have to keep the con going, lest there be one final, fatal run on the banks and/or the money market funds.

The Fed’s zero interest rate policy is causing the very contraction it is seeking to avoid because it does not allow anyone to earn a fair and reasonable return on their investments. In order to pay the bills people and business must liquidate assets. At the same time, they are desperately trying to pay off debt. So the pie shrinks and money disappears.

The media is fond of saying that no one in the mainstream saw this coming except Roubini. How stupid is this? The media is the sole decision-maker about who we get to pay attention to. If they feature only liars and fools, then of course it will seem that no one saw this coming. And they feature almost entirely liars, fools, and criminal manipulators.

Let’s consider who got this right in addition to Roubini. How about Professors Case and Shiller, and Niall Ferguson. How about Nassim Taleb. What about Warren Buffet’s warnings about derivatives? How about George Soros? Jimmy Rodgers?

What about Ron Paul, whose warnings fell on deaf ears for years. Congressional hearings? Ron Paul? Oops, time to cut to a commercial!

What about Doug Noland of the Prudent Bear Funds’ Credit Bubble Bulletin who has correctly been chronicling and forecasting this mess for a decade. What about Bill Fleckenstein and David Tice, and Peter Shiff? What about John Hussman? What about Robert Prechter? Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning? Mark Faber? What about Martin Weiss? There were many more like them. Why did we almost never see these guys on the tube or in print. And why, when we did see them, was the usual purpose to ridicule and harass them?

Because the media was and is a co-conspirator, witting or unwitting, with the Wall Street criminal distribution machine. The media is populated by conformist morons, too fat and lazy, too coddled by their Wall Street sponsors to be bothered by anything so mundane as to search for the truth. I mean, it’s not like it was hard to find.

What about all those guys in the wackosphere like my colleague Russ Winter, or Mike Shedlock, or even me for goodness sakes? I know I don’t count because only a few thousand people have ever heard of me, and half of them only know me as Dr. Stepan N. Stool. But there were dozens, if not hundreds, of bloggers who saw this coming for years. I was far from alone.

What about all the thousands of ordinary people who have participated on our message boards down through the years? They knew. But again, the media decides what the public gets to see and hear. The media decided that the “Cassandras” were only to be featured on occasion as objects of ridicule. And now that the economic data has stopped going down for a couple of months and the stock market has been going up, they are once again the subject of scorn.

Then there’s the 5,000 people surveyed by the Conference Board every month. Look at how many of them had soured on things in 2006 and 2007, versus their level of optimism in 1999 and 2000.

A whole lot of ordinary people “got it.” Only the mainstream infomercial media didn’t get it, because they are, after all, on the payroll of the Wall Street Mob.

The fact is that the economy is not getting better. It is not healing. Nothing goes down in a straight line, especially when a government throws a couple trillion in debt at it. But those trillions are not endless. The kindness of strangers, namely foreign central banks who buy that debt, is not without limit. The time will come when the government will not be able to float more debt to pay off the existing debt, when the burden of paying back these wildly reckless bets will fall directly on the back of the US taxpayer.

We are facing a crisis much greater than any we have faced so far. The Fed will not continue to pump cash into the pockets of the Primary Dealers indefinitely as they have been doing since March. When that cash gusher stops, or even slows, the stock market will again collapse. It simply cannot be sustained at these levels without that subsidy.

As for the economy, over the next year, it will get worse, for all the reasons enumerated above. How much worse, I have no clue. I’m not an economist, thank goodness. What an embarrassment that would be. Obviously they have no clue either. They pretend. That’s all. They missed the biggest collapse in the last 75 years. Knowing what’s likely to happen is not their job. Their job is to talk a good game so that Wall Street can continue its game.

Ripping off the rest of us.

So Good Night, and Good Luck.

You’re going to need it.

Stay up to date with the machinations of the Fed, Treasury, and foreign central banks in the US market in the Fed Report in the Professional Edition, Money Liquidity, and Real Estate Package. Try it risk free for 30 days. Don’t miss another day. Get the research and analysis you need to understand these critical forces. Be prepared. Stay ahead of the herd. Click this link and get in RIGHT NOW!

I, naturally, did not write this piece but I could have! Seldom do you encounter such frankness or conviction when expressing their views…but that’s why we are labeled ‘whackos’. Views that don’t conform with those expressed by the MSM are by default, whacko.

Even when the garbage they package as the truth is fabricated from whole cloth and lacks even a shred of supporting evidence…

What Mr. Adler expresses here is as close to the actual truth as you’re going to find good citizen…short of a signed confession by the White House financial team.

I’ll ‘shut up’ now so you can absorb the full impact of what this article has to say.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Criminal Behavior

Greetings good citizen,

Eight weeks from today, those of us that live in what is considered the ‘northern’ part of the nation will see the return of cold weather in earnest. While the summer isn’t over, New England has yet to string three 90-degree days together, qualifying as a genuine ‘heat wave’.

To add insult to injury, I have a tree on my property that has yet to fail to turn colors for my birthday, which is at the end of August…yes, good citizen, a mere three weeks away.

The flip side of this is the flannel sheets stayed on our bed until mid-June this year, but we had a wretched, wet Spring.

Why this sudden concern about the weather? It’s bad enough living somewhere that you spend six months out of the year bundled up like an Eskimo, fortunately, most of us have homes that allow us to escape the relentless cold.

Sadly, the operative words here are ‘most of us’. Massachusetts, like many northern states, imposes a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures between November and April.

But if you can’t afford heating fuel, having a roof over your head is small comfort.

What am I drawing your attention to here? The 1.5 million people that will exhaust their unemployment benefits by the first of the year, which coincides with the ‘dead’ of winter.

While we do have a ‘permanent’ homeless population, most do not ‘stick around’ these frigid areas once cold weather shows up in earnest.

Leaving us to wonder where these people go?

And that, good citizen, is the topic of tonight’s offering

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: August 8, 2009

IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”


The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.

For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization — one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.

Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you’re in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”

By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.

Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you’re littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking “overly anxious” in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police “can force you to stop just to investigate why you don’t want to talk to them.” And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children’s Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.

Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing.

Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prison-like, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.”

But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.”

To her tremendous credit, not only does Ms. Ehrenreich ‘talk the talk” but she has also ‘walked the walk’.

That said, it is important not to lose sight of the forest for all of those trees. What is the co-relation between poverty and criminality? Are all ‘poor people’ criminals? Or, more succinctly, are they criminals waiting to happen?

More disturbingly, there are now a huge number of folks walking that ‘jagged line’, who are but a single paycheck away from destitution, criminality or both.

Worse, if this report is correct and poverty has jumped from 10% of the population to almost thirty percent then social collapse is almost a certainty.

Don’t misinterpret that last statement, we aren’t talking about 70% of the population being ‘reasonably prosperous’ while thirty percent can barely keep their heads above water. The actual values are much closer to eighty percent that are barely getting by while only the remaining twenty percent has either the resources or connections that will ‘save’ them from destitution/criminality.

One need only look at the ‘income distribution’ to see that this is true.

This is the house that ‘capitalism’ built, look upon its works and weep.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Off the Reseration (again)

Greetings good citizen,

Continuing with the theme that if you look hard enough you an find someone who agrees with you, allow me to introduce someone who practically channels me …

I know I posted first today so the similarities in our points of view are more than a little eerie.

Um, the similarities of which I speak are in the ‘conclusion’ of this piece, just as mine are in yesterday’s offering.

No, I didn’t write about housing.

But we both beat up on the so-called ‘pros’ in the financial markets…

We both expressed our doubts about ‘economic recovery’…

And while I wasn’t as ‘articulate’ as Ilagi, we both expressed the view that the crisis is more than just a financial downturn, it is a crisis of confidence caused by what will come to be known as the ‘crime of the century’.

Ilargi: Although it's under threat of being swamped by tons and tons of rotting shoots, the most interesting number today, for me, probably comes from Dean Baker, who has this statement about US real estate:

Housing equity continues to be destroyed at the rate of $400 billion a month ....


What intrigues me about this, of course, is how it rhymes with Nouriel Roubini, Paul Kasriel, Henry Blodget plus a whole slew of anonymous economists hired by a spin bureau with great media access, who all came out today proclaiming recovery is here, or at least it'll be here before the end of the year. If US homeowners, who also double as consumers, and as such bear responsibility for over 70% of US GDP, lose $1333 per capita every month, or $15.996 per year, or $63.984 per nuclear family, where for all the mothers of all the prophets in history, or so I wonder, will that recovery originate?

Now, I know that man cannot live by home (or home-made bread) alone, that there is more to the economy than real estate and mortgages, but if on average a family needs to earn over $60.000 just in order to not fall even deeper into the debt trap, while at the same time every single month over 600.000 jobs are lost that are crucially needed to pay for just that play-even scenario, I’m starting to have some serious questions about that recovery. Come to think of it and while we’re at it, I also get serious doubts as to the reasons why these folks say these things to begin with. It makes no sense to me, that much is clear.

As far as I can see, the best thing that they can possibly envision, and that would still be greenshootingly delusional, is for houses to lose 10% per year instead of 15%, and for the US to shed 500.000 jobs instead of 600.000. It’s of course challenging at times to state the obvious in the face of all the oh-so-pretty predictions, but that’s fine, I just play the numbers in my head and hope to be wrong. After all, if I’m right, my own world will steeply degrade with everyone else's. But I'm not wrong, and all these voices are not right. I know, that means calling a lot of respected economists out as dulled drillbits, but so be it. The numbers don't lie. The government, the banks and the economists do.

Why are we still listening to these people? All they do is just erase from the field all considerations concerning anything serious. Economics is politics, and economists merely function to justify whatever political model they happen to serve in their respective nations and regimes.

We are in the middle of a crisis. Which has to do with money. And so we're all thrown into the hands of a bunch of people how pose as scientists, even though their field demonstrably fails in even the most basic requirements to be recognized as such. Economists cannot solve this crisis. First, they have no proven models, they only have theories that could fail as easily as they could succeed, and that's already handing them leeway. Second, and I return to what I've said many times before, this is not a financial or economical crisis, and neither should nor can therefore be solved by economists.

We are being eaten up alive by an all-out all-encompassing societal crisis. It's not about money. It's about you, and your families and friends, and ultimately about survival. Forget about recovery. You'll never get back to what you once had. And knowing that, accepting that, it's time to celebrate life as it will be, to make the best of what is, not of what was or could have been.

Smoking green shoots doesn’t seem to me to be the best way to do that. What we are in is not something we would ever have chosen, but here we are. And for once it's accurate to say that nothing will ever be the same. There's no way back, no recovery. And we're going to have the work the land real long and real hard before it rewards us with anything green.

Okay, maybe I’m just a tad more optimistic than this guy but that’s because I have an answer to our problems and he doesn’t.

I have to admire Ilargi because he comes out and says something I’ve only hinted at…because I fear most of you won’t believe it.

This crisis isn’t about money, it’s about ‘control’.
They could very easily pay us more and the ‘crisis’ would (at least temporarily) disappear.

I say temporarily because there is no such thing as a sustainable debt driven social model.

That which has gone before is indeed gone since we live in the perpetual ‘now’.

The root of the crisis exists in ‘overpaying’ for that which is our birthright. We have ‘allowed’ some humans to charge us for what they have no right to claim as their own.

Well good citizen, the time has come to put those greedy individuals in their place…those who do not value the benefits of civil society shall have those benefits withdrawn from them!

The greedy that charge us for every little thing do not bring us the world as we know it, the workers do! Without the workers there is nothing!

It is time for the worker to regain their rightful place in our society. It is time to enforce the rule that only labor earns one a place at the table and not some frivolous claim of ownership but the act of creation the provides one with ‘membership’.

We do what we do because it needs doing and money is only useful as it makes it possible to focus on what we do well so we aren’t forced to do everything ourselves!

Money is a tool, not an objective in itself!

Those who have ‘pirated’ society for their own benefit have ‘bastardized’ money so they don’t have to contribute to the common good!

Money is no longer a ‘means of exchange’ but the means of control.

Investors are a parasite to be purged and not the ‘champions of freedom’ they make their lazy asses out to be!

The audacity of defining themselves as ‘indispensable’ while the only thing they contribute to society is a paycheck that they steal from you in the first place!

This is criminal! And criminals have no place within civil society.

The sun will continue to rise, the crops will continue to grow and the factories will continue to produce whether someone ‘owns’ them or not.

I find it astounding that with so many willing, clever hands that we have failed to banish want from our society…but we have allowed greed to rule us and the greedy care not for the welfare of those that do society’s heavy lifting! (While doing none themselves.)
Hand in hand with this misguided belief (and they do believe it) is the notion that we’re too ‘stupid’ to take care of business ourselves. What reinforces this ‘belief’ is the fact they are allowed to get away with their criminal behavior!

No irony should be lost on the fact that this is due to their control of society’s legal apparatus.

We have been indoctrinated to do as we’re told and nothing more or nothing less if we don’t want trouble. This applies double for the legal community.

This ‘blind obedience’ to the ‘boss’ has murdered any semblance of personal sovereignty we may have had outside the workplace.

Worse, our inability to question (never mind fire) the boss puts us in the often untenable situation of ‘do and like it or you’re fired!’

It is this brand of unswerving loyalty that has turned us all into the slaves of the monied class.

Since they cut our paychecks, we have to do as they say…or we’re out of a job.

This is no way to run a society…especially when the end result is a hollowed out economy, which forms the basis for a class war.

Does ‘someone’ need to be in charge? Definitely…but that someone (those someones) have to be constrained by the same rules as everyone else is, something that clearly isn’t happening now.

So the question facing us is an ancient one, the rule of law or the rule of man?

Once again this issue will be decided by the willingness to fight for freedom.

If the will does not exist then neither will freedom exist.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner