Led by Charlatains

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

Step one.) A People’s Bank
One area where this logic can be seen at work is in the financial industry. At the height of the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of the banks seemed possible. It was a moment, President Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The president opted for a soft bailout, but that was not the only possible decision.

Banking is ‘personal’ yet the capitalists have turned it into a ‘profit center’ (for themselves) by forcing the rest of us to pay outrageous prices for what we can’t do without.

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on:

Step Two.) Move to Universal Healthcare

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

Cost pressures are also building up—and, critically, in ways that will continue to undermine U.S. corporations facing global competitors, forcing them to seek new solutions. The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that healthcare costs will go up from the 2010 level of 17.5 percent of GDP to 19.6 percent in 2019. It has long been clear that over the long-haul cost pressures are ultimately likely to force development of some form of single-payer system —the only serious way to deal with the underlying problem.

Again, under a ‘sane’ system, healthcare would be FREE, but that’s not what dummy is proposing here, is it?

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

But anyway:

Step Three.) Build Community Wealth

“Social enterprises” that undertake businesses in order to support specific social missions now increasingly comprise what is sometimes called a "fourth sector” (different from the government, business and non-profit sectors). Roughly 4,500 not-for-profit community development corporations are largely devoted to housing development. There are now also more than 10,000 businesses owned in whole or part by their employees; nearly 3 million more individuals are involved in these enterprises than are members of private sector unions. Another 130 million Americans are members of various urban, agricultural and credit union cooperatives. In many cities, “land trusts” are underway using an institutional form of nonprofit or municipal ownership that develops and maintains low- and moderate-income housing.

I find myself speechless with the utter ‘blindness’ the above bullet point displays. We’re talking ‘whales and tic tacs’ here! All I have to say is see my initial ‘mantra’ and hold that up to this (capitalism saving) proposal!

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

But I digress:

Step Four.) Leverage City Assets [!!]

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

Rope-a-dope has the whole situation wrong! The only reason the capitalists ‘gave away’ free internet and in some cases free electricity was to boost the sale of portables and hand helds!

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

Next!

Step Five.) Organize for the Long Haul

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

Follow the link to the main article…

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

And lastly…

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

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

If I could only remember where I put that magic wand…

What is this guy smokin’?

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

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

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

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Seriously?

Greetings good citizen,

Sunday night and I’m just getting around to posting…because it snowed, then it rained and then is snowed again…and then the whole shebang froze, making for a miserable clean up.

But my frostbitten backside really gets burning when the ‘disarm-niks’ sit on their high horse, claiming mass murder ‘doesn’t happen’ in cultures that have banned guns.

Naturally these assholes ignore the bombings that replaced the gun attacks.

And if the One Percent decided they wanted us, er, ‘defenseless’ we wouldn’t be talking about their ‘right’ to instruct their lapdogs to collect all of the registered guns, we’d be talking about how long it would take for them to criminalize the ‘unexplained loss’ of a weapon.

Because that’s what ‘bans’ do, they create criminals.

Let’s see what zipperhead has to offer regarding the ‘impossibility’ of tougher weapons legislation as we wonder what side of the political fence ‘Fair Vote’ rides on… Aren’t the Republicans overly concerned with ‘stolen elections’?

Why America Can't Pass Gun Control
Hint: It's not the NRA or a gun-loving culture.
December 24, 2012 |

This article originally appeared at The Atlantic.

The horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the latest grisly episode in what has become a muted debate in the United States: what to do about gun violence and well-armed mass murderers. But we will make a prediction: Even in the face of this national tragedy, President Obama will have little success enacting substantive gun control.

Here's why: Obama can read the political map as well as anyone, and he knows that, just as in the past after previous brutal tragedies, the politics of gun control rest on complicated terrain. Many gun control advocates blame the lack of policy action on America's gun-loving culture and the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA), but that's too simplistic. Already in the wake of the Newtown carnage we have seen aslew of pundits drawing the wrong conclusions, just as they have after previous tragedies.

Sure, Americans like their guns more than other nations, but polls often have shown majority of Americans wanting more gun control, with two-thirds calling for more regulation following the Columbine massacre in 1999. But the political system - including the Democratic Party -- has failed to respond. And it's not because Democrats and Obama are afraid of the NRA's deep pockets, as so many pundits are wrongly concluding. Quite the contrary, the NRA has money because it is powerful, not the other way around. And the NRA is powerful because it is clever at working the clunky architecture of our political system, which gives immense clout to a tiny slice of swing voters in a handful of congressional districts. [snip]

[About the author:]

Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is a political writer, cofounder of FairVote and former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation. Besides Alternet, his articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Ms., Sierra, American Prospect, Truthdig and many others, and he has quoted and interviewed by media around the world, including the BBC, Democracy Now, C-Span, Fox News, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Sirius and many others.

Robert Richie is the executive director of FairVote.

At the end of the day this has NOTHING to do with guns. The shooters in every case didn’t do what they did BECAUSE ‘they could get their hands on guns!’

They did what they did because they had a problem with how they were being treated and saw no other way draw attention to the matter.

EVENTUALLY (because it almost happened this last time…until buttheads like Steve Hill turned up, pointing in the wrong direction, as usual.)

And what almost happened this time? We ALMOST acknowledged that the common thread between the massacres and that was the desperation a sense of nothing left to lose by the perpetrators.

Adam Lanska went into that school knowing ahead of time he was going to blow himself away, making him no different than a suicide bomber.

And, as usual, these ‘desperadoes’ are dismissed as ‘loner lunatics’. Isolated cases that won’t happen again…until next time.

How bad does it have to get good citizen, we are barely making it a month without some new incident of somebody ‘going postal’ because they’ve had enough (of being treated like they are human debris.)

Yeah, it’s pretty sick to be using this type of social backwash to hype my own agenda but don’t you think it’s beyond time for a change?

And I mean real change and not Obamaesque ‘lip service’.

It is only a matter of time before you (or worse, someone you love) becomes capitalism’s ‘collateral damage’.

When a ticking timebomb set off by a capitalist socio-path blows your world away, what are YOU going to go after, the tool the perp used OR THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the longer they ignore this the worse it has become…

And just think this is the DAY BEFORE New Years Eve!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The King's Speech

Greetings good citizen,

Just five more shopping days ‘til 12/21/12! Make sure you get your ‘End of Days’ gifts early…you wouldn’t want to find yourself ‘left behind’.

But all joking aside the stock market continues to (as the neocons put it) ‘make its own reality’ as stock prices rise in defiance of reality on the ground.

Be that as it may, I think we finally have an answer to the niggling question of what’s the ‘common thread’ behind all of these shooting rampages?

And while the President (to his credit) went on national TV last night and promised to do ‘everything in his power’ to change things…how much change do you think the president can make?

Sadly I strongly suspect his speech is the only thing we’ll get.

The ‘hope of change’ is going to have to sustain us for now.

The newly re-elected president offered few specifics about how he planned to proceed, saying only that he will engage with law enforcement, mental health professionals, parents and educators in the coming weeks. Just days after the shooting at an elementary school, Obama is already facing pressure from fellow Democrats and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to tackle gun control legislation, a contentious issue he avoided as he sought a second term.

But Friday's shooting, which left 20 children and eight adults dead, appears to have spurred some soul-searching by Obama, who told Connecticut's governor that Friday was the most difficult day of his presidency. Speaking to families of the victims and first responders, Obama said Sunday that he had been reflecting on whether the country was doing enough to give its children "the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose."

"And if we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We're not doing enough, and we will have to change," Obama said. Sunday marked the fourth time in Obama's presidency that he has traveled to a community shaken by a mass shooting. Just this summer, he made a similar visit to Aurora, Colo., where a dozen people were killed in a movie theater attack.

What’s next ‘bomb control?’ (Once gun control is proven ‘ineffective’…)

And that’s the sad reality good citizen, take away the guns and the ‘disenfranchised’ will be forced to kick their game up a notch…and that means bombs.

Do you REALLY want to trade guns for bombs? Because the problems this gruesome phenomenon represents isn’t going to ‘go away’ just because you took the law abidings ability to defend themselves away?

As this article (miraculously) alludes to, this is NOT a gun issue, legislation to outlaw guns would be just as effective as outlawing insanity! It won’t work.

You want to stop mass murder? Take away the murderer’s reason to act out!

It is finally becoming apparent precisely what all of these ‘kids’ have in common…kids with their ‘whole lives’ ahead of them.

But what if all you saw was a future without hope, being a debt slave until the day you dropped…and if you DON’T agree to play that game the alternative is how many bugs can you catch (‘hopefully’ without having to use yourself as bait?)

Yup, one thing we can credit our school system with is their success in pounding the message ‘you’re on your own’ into our young people’s brains.

Worse, they all come from homes that have seen their parents struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads…and the kids think ‘if my parents can’t do it then how the heck am I going to make it?

And they arrive at their own conclusion.

How fucking sad is it that the kids are usually right?

Worse, that they decide suicide is the only way out.

As a 'parting shot' what do you suppose these people’s kids are learning?

For Spaniards, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck
By SUZANNE DALEY

With Spain’s ongoing economic crisis leaving local governments in debt and businesses struggling, workers sometimes have to resort to legal measures simply to be paid.

Will they grow up hating a tax-starved government or will they loathe themselves for not being ‘higher born’?

Because, ironically, these poor kids see the government and not the tax dodging wealthy as the problem.

The kids are too young to realize that the problem stems from the lawyers of the wealthy taking those unpaid tax dollars for themselves.

Did I mention our entire (global) legal system is totally fubar?

Well, last night’s announcement was indeed as outstanding as it was awe inspiring…too sad that it is also ‘as good as it gets.’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sustainability

Greetings good citizen,

For the third time this week I feel compelled to take AlterNet to the woodshed for (this time) ‘over-complicating’ what already exists!

Will the existing structures have to change? Yes, but we can take our time! Part of the ‘beauty’ of A Simple Plan is it DOES NOT attempt to ‘remake’ a failed world from scratch, overnight.

It takes what we already have and applies a different set of rules, the processes don’t change right away, nor do they have to.

Maybe the tree huggers will have a problem with that but Rome wasn’t built in a day so converting to ‘sustainable practices’ will probably take a while…(remember, How Long is a Chinaman!)

Worse, good citizen, they start off claiming capitalism is dead then they go right back to advocating unsustainable capitalistic principles and policies!

Ironically, most of these schemes share capitalism's biggest flaw, which is its inherent reliance on growth. As a business owner, it's very hard to say, "We're big enough now. Let's stop here." (Though some, like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, have done just that.) Most businesses have competitors who, if they're allowed to get bigger than you, will swallow you whole. If you don't stay big enough to compete, you don't survive -- and since the competitors are facing the same imperative, the race can never really end.

As noted, this kind of constant growth simply isn't sustainable on a finite planet. People will always trade -- it's an essential human activity -- but going forward, we need small-scale businesses that can stay happy and healthy without being pushed to grow. Worker ownership doesn't really address this problem, though relocalization, which roots businesses deeply in their own local markets, limiting their reach beyond those boundaries, may provide one natural brake on growth.

For many large and necessary enterprises (utilities; essential centralized manufacturing; big, capital-intensive tech industries; and so on) public ownership may be the only way to ensure that they grow no bigger than they need to be to fulfill their mission. If there are other solutions that will allow us to have complex enterprises minus the growth imperative, they're still lurking out beyond the horizon.

Read my words (because you can’t see my lips!) Share = Good, Own = Bad!

These idiots can’t seem to escape the artificial construct of ‘ownership’, it’s NOT ‘yours’ so get the fuck over yourself, Damn it!

And if you CAN’T abide by the need to ‘share’ what there is, we have a special place for you where you will be ‘free’ to accumulate all your little heart desires. (Not that there’s a lot there to accumulate, they don’t call ‘em the Bad Lands for nothin’.)

Think you’re gonna be the ‘big fish in a little pond?’ Think again, grabbing as much as you can for yourself is another way to secure a one way trip to ‘Me-ville!’

So don’t ‘obsess’ about the ‘competition’ because there WON’T BE ANY!

Commerce will no longer exist to enrich the ignorant sons of bitches that claim to ‘own’ it, commerce will exist to serve all humanity! The number one goal of sustainable society is to ERADICATE POVERTY!

A fact that appears to be MISSING from AlterNet’s, er, ‘proposal’ and something you’re NEVER going to see under capitalism.

I will once again point out that there is NO LACK of things that need doing, that is why A Simple Plan guarantees 100% employment (by literally ‘eliminating’ the ‘employer’!)

How fucking sad is it good citizen that capitalism RELIES on a certain level of poverty to keep the rest of the population ‘motivated’?

If one were to read the article with a critical eye one would see that these so-called ‘architects of the future’ sneer at the idea of ‘localization’ (and then proceed to distort it out of all proportion!)

I again ‘belabor the obvious’ when I point out that resources are not ‘evenly distributed’ around the planet, and that simple fact will, er, ‘dictate’ what a particular locality focuses on.

It is also ‘simplistic’ in the extreme to even allude to the idea of any locality being a ‘one trick pony’.

There will be a lot of ‘duplication’ but almost no ‘competition’ because the purpose of commerce is NOT to ‘compete’ but to ‘serve’!

I believe I have made it abundantly clear that our civilization, such as it is, is extremely mismanaged.

We do all of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Now that there are more of us we must stop being so wasteful…and we also need to put the brakes on the damn multiplying!

Because it is becoming apparent that Mother Nature has already stepped in to correct this phenomenon.

Which is not to say she didn’t have some ‘help’ from some seriously mis-guided and more than a little deranged, er, ‘elites’.

Almost ALL married couples in Western societies are in ‘fertility programs’!

And their offspring are, er, ‘weaker’ than those conceived ‘naturally’.

But not to worry, after the kill-off kids will go back to having kids younger than they do now…should solve the problem. (Or so the seriously deranged seem to think…)

But that’s another ‘landmine’ our species is tap-dancing on without realizing it…and we can thank the ‘corporate owned media’ for our ignorance.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

War

Greetings good citizen,

The world’s stock markets are selling off, the typical ‘profit-taking’ that we should all be used to by now.

And guess what today’s top headline on the NY Times is?

Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior Iranian leadership, and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict.

Yet these specialists continue their work, saying that any insight on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis carry out a strike — and what the American position will be if they do.

Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices

War with Iran…

Can you believe it good citizen? We have been ‘at war’ in the Middle East for the past 25 years good citizen and the clueless motherfuckers want to go again!

And WHY do we want to attack the followers of the Ayatollah this time?

Same reason as last time, Israel is ‘scared’.

The last dozen years (which just recently sparked a massacre due to ‘multiple deployments) are winding down and all of a sudden the prospects of a ‘nuclear armed’ Iran is ‘scaring’ a country that doesn’t even share a border with Iran!

So I ask you good citizen, just how STUPID is the average American if they believe the leadership of Iran has suddenly become ‘suicidal’?

Because that’s the story you’re supposed to be buying, good citizen! That the Iranians, (being Moslems) are ‘too fanatical’ to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Yet who is it that has repeatedly attacked it’s Arab neighbors and currently ‘occupies’ much of their territory as a ‘safety measure’ (while treating the original inhabitants of the region like second class citizens?

Why it is the same nation that is claiming to feel ‘threatened’. (It is also the same nation that has ‘access to’ US nuclear weapons stored on their territory…)

This is the ‘ally’ we are being asked to deploy US blood and treasure to ‘defend’?

We (as well as the Israelis) should be asking just how valuable their ‘friendship’ will be once the Middle East exhausts it’s exportable oil supply?

Some might even opine that such, er, ‘military adventurism’ is spurred by the prospects of the Arab world closing down the export spigot ‘early’.

As I have stated repeatedly, much of what is today known as the Western World would become ‘uninhabitable’ for much of the calendar year without a steady supply of cheap and abundant energy.

Let’s dial down the rhetoric a few notches, shall we?

The Israelis are no more frightened of Iran obtaining nuclear arms than we are. MAD still holds sway across much of the civilized world.

Which is to point out there is a far greater danger of Iran being nuked by US than the other way around!

Given the, er, ‘uncertain quality’ of US leadership, I’d suggest that Israel keep one eye fixed over its shoulder as well!

The scoundrels in charge appear willing to throw anybody ‘under the bus’ if they can turn the resulting situation to their personal advantage…

See, this is one of the, er, ‘difficulties’ that surround the global collapse of the ‘rule of law’.

Without the ‘safeguards’ the rule of law provides it all comes down to ‘who do you trust’?

Like they say, if you sit down at a poker table and you don’t know who the mark is…chances are its you!

Which would be okay if you were all ‘equally as vulnerable’ but we all know that’s not how it works.

First they gang up on you and bleed you, not quite dry but you’re hurting because you didn’t see it coming.

Then they set upon you again and now you’re in too deep. You can’t pay what you owe and all of a sudden your ‘old friends’ don’t return your calls anymore…

The truly disturbing part is there are a thousand guys just like you…and just like you, half of ‘em will end up getting ‘sacrificed’…because the others gotta eat, you know!

And when they’re all wise to the game, then what?

Now you CAN’T trust anybody and the whole ball of wax just falls apart.

Which is to point out that’s there’s nothing you can do.

Destroy the ‘rule of law’ and you ultimately destroy the ‘bond of trust’.

And once the bond of trust is destroyed, the whole game comes to a screeching halt.

Now the problem is what to you do for the next thirty or forty years while you wait for people to forget that they CAN’T TRUST NOBODY?

We’ll see.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Incompetent

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday the markets lost no time in surging straight past the 13,000 point barrier, and pushed the NASDAQ to a new record high, on the alleged ‘strength’ of the retail sales report (which was mostly driven by inflation!)

Not that there is anything (beyond agitating for a congressional investigation into the matter) you can do about ‘blatant fraud’ in the financial markets.

Under the category of ‘really now?’ we have this little tidbit to kick off today’s offering:

ON THIS DAY

On March 14, 1900, Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act.

Honestly, good citizen, how many of you thought we were on the ‘Gold Standard’ from the get go? (I know I was under that impression.)

Well, the ‘Gold Standard’ only lasted ‘til 1972 when it was abandoned for an ‘anything goes’, er, can’t quite bring myself to call it a ‘system’, because it isn’t. So I guess anything goes is going to have to stand alone!

Um, you don’t need me to admonish you not to be misled; these new ‘record highs’ are as meaningless as the previous ones were as neither had any relationship with real world economic performance. All of this is only ‘eyewash’ for the economically feeble minded!

On a more, er, ‘sensitive’ topic, it is tough for an Eeyore like me to start bashing (and this isn’t the first time) the team who is supposedly on the same side I’m on…although there is no ‘connection’ between (progressive) liberals and Anarchists, thus the ‘ideological differences’.

While we’re here, there is also absolutely zero connection between (true) Anarchists and those asshole Libertarians who mistake ‘rules without rulers’ to mean ‘no rules’ whatsoever!

But I digress, it is not the Libertarians I’m kicking in the shins today, it’s the so-called ‘progressives’

Apparently the have been ‘toeing the company line’ for far too long!

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?

Yes, Susie makes an excellent reference to ‘the search for excellence’ thinking that is behind the misguided management practices we see today but it seems she doesn’t have a firm grip on the scope of the unemployment situation.

And what will have to be done to ‘realign’ the economy!

It is ‘unsurprising’ to see progressives locked onto the old 40-hour workweek (while totally ignoring the fact that there aren’t enough 40-hour jobs to go around to make even half of our society, er, ‘viable’.)

In order to cut the workweek in half and double the workforce we would need to halve the average living expense in the process! (Under my proposal (A Simple Plan) that involves ‘wiping out’ the Real Estate market, it’s ‘artificial’ anyway.)

I also ‘wipe out’ the entire financial sector but there are other reasons behind that move.

Again, while we’re here, explaining things, I also ‘re-purpose’ commerce to its ‘original goal’ of meeting the needs of society (as opposed to merely ‘enriching its owners’!)

So yeah, the only way to ‘solve’ the unemployment crisis is to cut the work week/day in half…So why are the dimwit progressives stuck on a ‘forty hour schedule’?

Well, we live in a ‘forty hour’ economy (Which is also a grave ‘mis-perception’, a perfect example of ‘middle class myopia’!)

Which brings us full circle to another decidedly disturbing ‘elephant in the room’,

Who stands for the workers and where the hell are they?

Understand good citizen, that the ‘middle class-knowledge worker’ does NOT consider themselves a ‘worker’, they think of themselves as ‘professionals’ who provide a ‘service’.

It is bullshit like this that has caused the ‘working class’ to disappear from the public lexicon!

There are the ‘poor’ (which are generally acknowledged to be the former ‘working class’) there is the ‘middle class’ (who consider themselves the ‘professional next door’) and there are the ‘rich’ who those middle class professionals all work for (even in retail!)

Is it any wonder our nation doesn’t work, all of the workers have been ‘wiped out’!

Which you and I both know isn’t true. There are still plenty of hardworking people keeping the lights burning and making the trains run on schedule.

How fucking sad is it that these hard working people don’t have ANY political support in the current government?

Just another thing to chew on while you’re trying to figure out if you’re a worker or not…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Critical Thinking Skills...

Greetings good citizen,

I sometimes despair that there are so few ‘viable’ alternatives to the failed system we are currently saddled with.

It is only in retrospect that we have learned that capitalism has NEVER worked and only thrived due to the collusion of the few it benefited.

(As we are witnessing, the only thing holding it together was avoidance of the massive train wreck switching to another system would cause.)

Perhaps the most distressing of all of these proposed ‘alternatives’ is the plethora of ‘half measures’ that don’t take into account the true nature of the problem.

Take this tripe for example.

Rushkoff also raises points worth considering, particularly for those of us trying to articulate, in the wake of massive failures of the economic system we've lived our whole lives with, some sort of alternative to the cycle of boom, bust, bailout.

He argues that perhaps we're going about it backward when we call for jobs, that maybe it's not a bad thing that technology is replacing workers, and points out that actually, we do produce enough food and “stuff” to support the country and even the world—that, in fact, we produce too much “stuff.”

He alternately harkens back to a past before jobs, when many people worked for themselves on a subsistence level, and forward to a future where we are all busy making games and books and communicating with one another from behind computer screens, with the hours we have to work dwindling.

Like most ‘half-measures’ Bobo leaves the details to ‘take care of themselves’. Worse, this half-wit doesn’t possess the presence of mind to focus on the crux of the problem, which is where a solution can be found.

Constant Reader knows where I place that crux (we don’t have a money problem, we have a legal problem, big time!)

It is the laws that need to be changed…and until they do, nothing will change!

Your kids starving to death? Sorry, nothing we can do, helping you (or you helping yourself to what you need) is against the law!

Yes good citizen, fuck you, pay me capitalism is ‘centered’ on property rights NOT the ‘common good’ (which empty -headed Libertarians routinely dismiss as being exploitive.)

So what the fuck is the thinking behind a future where only some people contribute?

Where’s the justice in that?

Which is to ask ’who the fuck thinks THAT is a ’good idea’?’

While A Simple Plan mandates 100% employment as ‘the price of citizenship’, detractors would question the sanity behind essentially quadrupling the commute.

Well, as we build a more sustainable future, working where you live will become the rule rather than the exception it has become today.

If you commute at all you will use your feet as the preferred mode of transportation.

Going anywhere else you’ll probably take the choo-choo (or a dirigible.) If your travel plans take you across one of the world’s oceans it is more likely safer to take a sailing ship.

Yes, we will ‘sacrifice’ supersonic speed for ‘fuel efficiency’.

Hopefully, slowing things down a couple of notches will give us all more time to think things over.

Everybody (even the ‘handicapped’) will be provided with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in society…and that means ‘jobs for everyone!’.

You WILL do your part, even if it is only for a couple of hours a day or a couple of days per week.

Which is to point out there’s no lack of things that need doing, it is capitalism which prevents them from being done!

People are already aware that they can no longer ‘breed like minks’ and that is the true danger of building ‘utopia’.

Which is to say that there are still ‘hard choices’ to be faced, that part doesn’t go away.

I strongly suspect only a ’hooray for me and fuck everyone else Libertarian’ is capable of conceiving of a future where not working (and thereby not participating in society) is an option.

It is uncertain which disturbs me more, the lack of critical think on display here or the fact that THIS ASSHOLE gets a national forum to air his nonsense in!

Oh fucking well…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Movie Review

Greetings good citizen,

Tonight’s piece is 95% Movie Review combined with some unparalleled social insight that doesn’t really kick in until page two…so if you tuned out before then, you missed the good stuff entirely.

Not having seen either flick I’ll have to bow to Mr. Rich’s judgement but that said, there’s a lot of truth to the expression that tells us how art often imitates life.

Probably why my screenplays will never see themselves interpreted either on stage or screen. The people who pay for such things are somewhat sensitive about the type of material they will fund. (Although I’ve seen dreck get funded so it isn’t ‘quality’ that drives the decision-making process out there under the ‘brain cloud’ over LA.)

Seems to be ‘ego’ if you ask me…some reasonably insecure ones at that.

One of the tight-ropes that I refuse to walk is cardinal rule number one, don’t write anything that will directly offend the money.

Almost all of my screenplays skewer either the rich thieves or ridicule how money is worshiped by society.

But enough about me, let’s move on to that damn liberal media and how Mr. Obama is trying to make himself into Bill Clinton, the best Republican president we’ve had in a hundred years!

Allegedly, the upcoming State of the Union Address will focus on establishing Mr. Obama’s bona fides as a true blue ‘centrist’.

Now I ask you good citizen, what do we call someone who bends over backwards to, er, ‘help’ Big Business (while bending the workers/voters over and stuffing them like a Thanksgiving turkey) for those same commercial lions?

Isn’t the word for that kind of behavior Republican?

Did dipshit make a ‘mistake’ and run under the wrong political party?

Um, not necessarily, we didn’t get where we are today without a lot of willing cooperation from the party formerly known as the Democrats.

Isn’t that the one thing that everybody (who draws a paycheck) in this country is upset about, how the ‘owner/investor class’ keeps getting tax breaks and investment incentives and NOT FUCKING ONE OF THEM IS INVESTING IN THE USA!

Am I dismissing the achievements of Mr. Zuckerberg?

Actually, yes, yes I am.

It is a damn dismal development when Wall Street hails the further advancement of Big Brother as a major commercial accomplishment.

But that only goes to show you just how ‘bankrupt’ our society has become…but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

They’re about to let the hollowed out shell of our former nation collapse under its own weight and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop it.

Worse, chances are good you won’t even know it happened, that’s how bad things have become.

This is how ‘the end’ appears to sneak up on you. You CAN see it coming IF you are willing to accept the idea that collapse is eminent.

The more interesting exercise will be in how long it takes for the rest of our society to wake up to the fact that they have been abandoned?

That’s the final step good citizen, the ‘artificial calm’ that has prevailed since our social model collapsed three years ago will disintegrate once ‘the guiding hand’ leaves the building.

Understand, ‘collapse’ will not be a ‘local event’, it will cascade around the globe.

And guess who will be waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces?

Yup, the same idiots who wrecked our civilization in the first place.

The ‘wild card’ here citizen is where will YOU be?

Will you be shivering in the cold, waiting for your master’s guiding hand to lead you back to your pathetic life? Or will you be united with your neighbors, waiting to finally bring these uncivilized slobs to justice?

The choice, quite naturally, is yours.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Conservative Logic...

Greetings good citizen,

Let’s put ‘oblivion’ on hold for the time being (it will be here soon enough.)

Which is not to say we are going to put a stop to ‘crazy talk’ because there’s plenty of that masquerading as ‘sane commentary’ in the MSM.

Let’s start with our ‘usual’ dose of schizophrenia, shall we? As recently as Yesterday the markets tacked on almost 200 points. This was ‘attributed to’ the (barely perceptible) ‘uptick’ in service sector employment. A mere few hundredths of a single percent good citizen and our stock markets went absolutely NUTS!

So what’s the ‘buzz’ today? Retailers project that they won’t be hiring much seasonal help this year…somewhat reinforcing predictions of yet another ‘poor’ holiday season.

Needless to say the markets are ‘flat’ on this news…

So what the hell was yesterday all about?

Truth be told good citizen, if it weren’t for the activity of the big trading desks themselves, the stock market would be ‘flat-line’.

Moving on, I read some conservative pundit who was bemoaning the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, like making the rich even richer has done such wonders for the US economy! WTF is wrong with these people?

Don’t they understand that NO AMOUNT of money is going to make the US more attractive to invest in as long as the ‘cheaper elsewhere’ fiction persists?

Apparently, nothing goes up top…which is sort of a ‘hallmark’ of conservatism.

Well, here we have another fine example of bullet proof conservative logic…

Sadly good citizen, this brings us to the chicken or the egg conundrum.

What the fuck is the point of extending more credit when people can’t pay for what they’ve already borrowed?

You know what endless ‘rolling’ leads to don’t you? It leads to debt that will NEVER be repaid!

It turns the ‘fuck you, pay me’ scheme into just the ‘fuck you (stupid)’ part.

If you’re dumb enough to let me keep ‘rolling over’ my debt, I’m never going to pay you!

THAT’S what the ‘oughts’ were about!

Guess what the ‘only way out’ is?

That's right, Jubilee!

Cuz, bizarrely, if you ‘prosecuted’ all of the people who took advantage of the situation (a situation that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.) You would also be able to address your ‘surplus population problem at the same time…except who is going to build (never mind pay for) all of those prisons?

Are you beginning to see the ‘scope’ of the problem good citizen?

This is ‘mis-management’ writ large, nay ‘writ colossal’!

Who ever ‘approved’ this wanted, nay, WAS BEGGING FOR a crisis!

(One can only assume the ‘infamous they’ arrived at the same conclusion their ideological opponents reached long ago; there is no way to use capitalism to ‘save’ capitalism.)

So they faced their second choice, to serve in heaven or to rule over hell?

Sadly, they have chosen the latter.

I’ll stop here because I promised not to go there at the beginning of this piece…

It is curious how many of our thought experiments conclude in ‘oblivion’.

If you thought the ride had been ‘interesting’ up ‘til now, wait!

It’s going to get a lot more than ‘interesting’…trust me!

Some of these pieces are surprisingly short but there really isn’t anything else useful to say on the subject other than to point out the obvious, that ‘conservative logic’ is an oxymoron.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Silly Talk!

Greetings good citizen,

There are normal people and there are economists. Perhaps economists perpetually get it wrong because they owe their existence, their entire profession, to supporting the unsupportable. Like the song says, ‘you’re economic theory makes no sense…’ [Sting: Dream of the Blue Turtles: “We work the Black Seam together”.]

Thus should no irony be lost on the fact that tonight’s offering was proposed by a card carrying ‘economist’…although faithful readers will recognize that they read this proposal here first.

Truth be told good citizen, it was not the proposal itself that drew my eye, it was the question “Why was Wall Street ‘saved’” that sparked my interest!

You know the answer to that, don’t you good citizen. (And if you don’t it only proves you’re too young to be thinking about retirement…)

Yessiree BOB! It all comes down to that Promise made to us by St. Ronnie that we would all retire millionaires if we’d just open up a stock IRA and ‘manage our own money’!

[What fucktard didn’t mention is you have to watch your money 24/7 and this still doesn’t protect you from the reckless actions of the ‘plan administrator’. For thirty years we have been pouring money into our IRA’s and the ‘average’ IRA has less than $50,000 in it today. Pretty far cry from a million bucks, ain’t it?]

Bottom line, good citizen is Wall Street was ‘saved’ so all of those ‘retirement accounts’ (all of the money most of these people had to their name) didn’t, er, ‘vanish’. If the account still exists, that preserved ‘hope’ that its contents could be salvaged.

What this really did was it prevented millions of disillusioned people from torching everything in their path…for now.

Sidebar again: it appears we are into the third straight day of global market declines…which really shouldn’t alarm anybody because we all know that stock prices are WAY overvalued…

Sadly, when stock prices once again ‘coincide’ with reality, the world will be a very different place.

If there are any such things as ‘stocks’ in the future…

Don’t Fix Wall Street, Create a New Economy

Congress shouldn't tweak the greed-driven Wall Street machine, it should create a new financial system that answers to communities. [STOP right there! Of all the phrases Bobo could have used, a ‘new economy’ is the poorest choice because it implies that we will somehow ‘escape’ the constraints Nature places upon us that ALWAYS provide the basis for any economic model. Some may call this ‘quibbling’ but rest assured good citizen, there will be very little ‘new’ in a ‘sustainable economic model’. The best that can be hoped for is a boatload of ‘different’.]

Financial reform is the Congressional political issue of the month. [?] Democrats say their bill will place essential controls on Wall Street to prevent abuse and a repeat of the financial crash. [And they know this how?] Republicans say it will encourage further Wall Street risk-taking by giving the big banks a guarantee of a future taxpayer bailout if reckless decisions trigger another financial crash. [And who was in office during the first bailout? Oh yeah, but he (suddenly) wasn’t a ‘real’ conservative! WTF!]

Each party would have us believe that its side has the better answer about how to prevent another financial collapse, limit future taxpayer exposure, and protect consumers from financial fraud. These are good objectives, but their focus is fixing Wall Street. [To head off rioting by Boomers nearing retirement…which is to point out this WASN’T an ‘accident’/coincidence]

No one in official circles seems to be asking the more fundamental question: “How do we create a financial services sector that directs money where it is needed: toward creating living wage jobs that provide essential goods and services for all Americans in ways consistent with a healthy environment?” [Because none of these weasels are being paid to address this issue! They’re being paid to stick their fingers in the dyke while the perps make their ‘getaway’.] Fixing Wall Street, as we presently know it, will do little, if anything, to achieve what should be our real purpose. Since the September 2008 financial collapse, Wall Street has conclusively demonstrated that it is concerned only for its own profits and bonuses.

Thanks to the taxpayer bailout and a constant flow of nearly free credit to the big banks from the Federal Reserve, Wall Street is once again reporting record profits and bonuses. Main Street, which has received far more modest public support, has not been so quick to recover from the effects of the crisis: high unemployment, low wages, consumer debt, bankruptcies, and foreclosures. It is a stunning contrast not lost on the properly outraged American public. [Until the Mercs can be moved into position, people might be astounded as to how little ‘resistance’ they would face if they attacked Wall Street…cops have pension funds too!]

Meanwhile Wall Street power brokers resist even modest financial reforms that might prevent a repeat of the collapse. After all, they have little reason to be concerned—they've rigged the system to assure that no matter how risky their actions, they will still get their bonuses and taxpayers will pick up the bill. This is a destructive system beyond repair. [No shit!]

Generally, Republicans believe that “too big to fail” Wall Street banks should have been left to collapse as a self-corrective act of market discipline. [This is why they ‘bailed ‘em out’!] Democrats would rather forestall another collapse by placing appropriate restraints on Wall Street excesses. [If only it wouldn’t hurt their prospects for re-election!] On one level, I’m sympathetic to both sides of this particular debate. Another bailout is not acceptable; banks that engage in overly risky behavior should fail; [Take that a step further, ‘For Profit Banking’ should NOT exist…period!] and we need strong government action to forestall a financial crash potentially far more devastating than the one that happened in September 2008. [What do you suppose the chances are of ‘strong government action’ when these self-centered ‘peckerheads’ can’t find common cause with one another?]

Neither side, however, is addressing the essential need to replace the Wall Street casino with a new financial system, one designed to provide essential financial services to the Main Street economies we depend upon to meet our daily need for jobs and essential goods and services like food, shelter, water, waste disposal, education, and public safety. [Ironically, this ‘refocusing’ on the ‘true purpose’ of commerce/government is ‘automatic’, it happens by itself once the ability to ‘interfere’ has been removed…and our current economic troubles are the end result of massive ‘interference’ BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR!]

Wall Street is a world of pure finance in the business of using money to make money—by whatever means—for people who have money. Any contribution to the production of real goods and services is purely an incidental byproduct.

Wall Street, in its current incarnation, has no interest in providing true financial services, except as instruments of predatory extraction. In the name of financial innovation, its institutions have perfected the arts of financial speculation, inflating asset bubbles, stripping corporate assets, predatory lending (usury), risk shifting, leveraging, and creating debt pyramids—none of which serves any beneficial public purpose. Rather than being fixed or restricted, most of Wall Street should be shut down. The institutions of a new service-oriented financial system could more efficiently and beneficially fulfill the essential financial functions that Wall Street now controls. [Here is the ‘elephant in the room’ good citizen, who paid the lobbyists to ‘de-regulate’ the commercial sector? Geez, that would be the private sector, wouldn’t it? The same private sector that made you ‘redundant’ and shipped your job off to Timbuktu! (To be done by people they don’t have to pay a living wage or benefits to…)]

Such a system cannot be created simply by restoring the regulations that once kept Wall Street’s tendency toward concentration and fraud in check. The system is now corrupt beyond repair. [Might have read that here first too!] A new system of financial services institutions designed to serve and be accountable to the people of place-based Main Street economies must be built from the bottom up.

The money system is to the modern economic system what the circulatory system is to the body. Where blood flows freely, the body’s cells flourish. Where blood flow is restricted, they become anemic and may die. Real resources follow the money, so we must design the financial system to put the money where it will produce the greatest living-wealth benefit. [Missing from this statement is ‘for the greatest number of people AND future generations, otherwise you end up ‘raping the planet for a buck in your pocket today.] Complicated though the details may be, the broad outline of what this means in practical terms is simple common sense.

Wall Street thrives and Main Street struggles because Wall Street controls the money flow. If you are a vulture speculator pushing the state of California toward bankruptcy by short selling California state government bonds, the Wall Street banks are there to be sure you have access to enough cheap money to make a big killing. If you are a Main Street entrepreneur serving real needs in your local economy, you’re forced to borrow against your credit card at predatory interest rates. This is the money system that Congress is debating how best to stabilize. [Um, the ‘real needs’ of the community should not become an individual’s ‘income stream’, that is how we got into this mess in the first place!]

A proper service-oriented financial sector will feature a decentralized system of local banks and credit unions, mostly organized as nonprofits and cooperatives, that hold local deposits, clear transactions, and provide credit to productive local businesses and home buyers at fair interest rates. In this system, state and local governments would not be facing bankruptcy, because they would capitalize and operate their own banks to issue themselves credit for beneficial public projects. [Did I mention that economists are idiots, even when they mean well? How they can come so close to the real problem and yet still fail to solve it remains a mystery! This clown dances right up to it and he still gets it wrong!]

At a national level, a Federal Reserve captive to Wall Street banking interests is currently giving the largest Wall Street banks interest-free loans that they in turn loan to the federal government at 3 percent interest to cover the federal deficits created by the bailout of these same Wall Street banks. Rather than using the bailout money to provide credit to Main Street businesses, the Wall Street banks have used it to pay record executive bonuses and dividends, grow even larger through mergers and acquisitions, and bet against the bonds that governments have issued to cover costs of bank bailouts and economic stimulus. None of this serves a beneficial public purpose.

Imagine how differently the economic recovery would be playing out if the federal government had taken over failing Wall Street banks and restructured them as locally owned, independent community banks and credit unions. [?] Imagine further that it had taken over the Federal Reserve and issued itself interest-free credit, not to fund Wall Street bank bailouts, but rather to fund adequate stimulus programs that create living wage jobs in the Main Street economy—jobs doing work that meets real needs. [Um, somebody’s been dipping into the ‘happy dust’, Wall Street or its owners aren’t interested in any of that. The whole crisis can be summed up as ‘regulatory failure’ (that isn’t going to fix itself!)] That money would now be flowing back into local banks as deposits and savings, which these banks would then lend back into their communities. [Needless exploitation] Main Street would be thriving, and Wall Street speculators would be the ones receiving foreclosure notices and hoping their unemployment benefits don’t run out before they find a new job. [Unrepentant Wall Streeters would be invited to take a long walk to prove their theoretical ‘self-sufficiency’.]

Current efforts by Washington politicians to limit the excesses of dysfunctional, predatory, and destructive Wall Street institutions may be well intentioned, but they are seriously misguided. The proper goal is not to avoid another Wall Street collapse, it is to replace Wall Street with a new money system designed to provide honest and efficient financial services to the Main Street economies that create real wealth.

David Korten is a former economist with USAID, author of "When Corporations Rule the World," and an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.

Have you stopped laughing yet?

How clueless do you have to be to come up with something like this? It literally puts ‘happy talk’ to shame!

He’s got the right idea but he sure is going about it from the wrong direction!

Which is to point out you have a far better chance of finding a snowball in hell than you do of ever being faced with Mr. Korten’s proposals…or mine for that matter.

But in my defense, I do base my proposals as ‘post’ revolt/collapse institutions and not as replacements for existing social structures the current owners don’t consider ‘broken’ or in need of replacement.

Anyway…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Spin Machine revs up...

Greetings good citizen,

Just how ‘responsible’ is Wall Street for destroying the world’s economy? Like last night’s rhetorical question about the phantom recovery, it depends on who you ask.

As one might expect, Wall Street holds itself harmless as far as the financial meltdown is concerned. They didn’t make anybody participate in the games that they controlled the rules of and had sole access to, if you/the investing public was too stupid to steer clear of dubious financial instruments and reckless insurance schemes, what are they obliged to do about it?

Which is pretty cavalier, considering they are the only game in town…but that begs a different question, doesn’t it good citizen? Should we allow anyone to ‘gamble’ with the future of civilization…considering what’s at stake?

Does the prosperity of the individual ‘outweigh’ the safety of society? If we look at the financial markets, it would sure seem that way.

Understand, good citizen, some would object to my ‘lumping together’ private fortunes with the common good…but where do those private fortunes originate? From our ‘common inheritance’, a fact those entrusted with preserving that legacy often forget.

Thus do we come face to face with Wall Street’s Spin Game

Wall Street’s Spin Game
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: November 21, 2009

Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, the bank to bash on a resurgent Wall Street, is receiving a lot of advice lately, and it’s not just about money.

Sitting before an audience of 300 at the Metropolitan Club of New York on Tuesday, he spoke with barely disguised disdain in his voice about the work of the image consultants, reputation experts and public relations advisors who are beating a path to his door, and to the doors of other Wall Street banks vilified for their profits and million-dollar bonuses at a time of continuing economic pain. [What needs saying right here at the outset good citizen is don’t think for a minute that this piece isn’t the product of the same ‘spin doctors’ who are laboring desperately to prevent a potential bloodbath.]

“Some people come in and say, ‘You are doing too much. Don’t say another word.’ Other people say we should get on the talk shows,” said Mr. Blankfein (as he was awarded the distinction of C.E.O. of the Year by a magazine for corporate directors.) [Left to your imagination is whether or not Mr. Blankfein’s ‘award’ makes him a saint in the eyes of the business community? Maybe its just me but CEO of the year being bestowed on Wall Street’s highest paid chief executive is not exactly the thing ‘saints’ are made of…despite the fact that this is the same man who just recently claimed to be doing ‘God’s work’…]

A few years ago, Wall Street would have cared less for such artifice — it was enough that the Masters of the Universe were wildly successful; their success spoke for itself. But politics and the bottom line have energized the relationship between these New York institutions of money and spin, as banks see the need to calm the rage directed toward them and confront a public relations problem that has seemed in recent weeks to be spiraling out of control. [What did they expect, announcing record profits and projecting enormous bonuses after the taxpayers have been exposed to trillions in losses…WTF?]

Just last week, Goldman announced that it would spend $500 million to help thousands of small businesses recover from the recession. At the same time, Mr. Blankfein acknowledged that Goldman had made mistakes. “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,” he said. ”We apologize.” [Um, let’s assume for a moment that this 500 million dollars isn’t going to be ‘an investment’ (which they would have made anyway) or a loan. Are we honestly expected to believe they are going to ‘give’ this money away, out of the kindness of their heart and their deep and abiding concern for the welfare of society? Understand this is less than 5% of this year’s ‘bonus pool’, which makes the whole charade a ‘token gesture’, considering how much money the taxpayer is on the hook for because of Goldman and their peers reckless actions. As I mentioned before, that figure is in trillions, not millions.]

But is that enough? And, if it isn’t, what will be? Examples of the public’s anger at Wall Street are legion. Last month, a couple of thousand protesters marched on the American Bankers Association’s annual conference in Chicago brandishing cut-outs of bank C.E.O.s. [Aw gee, those nasty ‘paycheck paupers’ were mocking the Masters of the Universe! How dare they! Naturally, that’s not what this is about. What these spin doctors are trying to avoid is the spontaneous outbreak of ‘neck-tie parties’, the kind involving a slip-knot with 13 loops.]

As the Chicago demonstration made clear, the image problems aren’t confined to Goldman and could have a cost. Wall Street banks are under regulatory pressure, and come election time, if unemployment is still above 10 percent and Wall Street is still paying itself big bonuses, lawmakers’ who have done nothing so far wrath might force broader pay curbs, tougher restrictions on what banks can do, or even a break up of the biggest banks.

They are already losing business because of their toxic reputations. One recent Goldman deal, for instance, to buy cheap assets from Fannie Mae, the hobbled mortgage lender, was blocked by the Treasury because it couldn’t be seen to be helping Wall Street benefit once again from the crisis. Critics say the negative media chatter is dragging on their share price. [Um, Goldman shares are doing just fine, thank you…but if you think Goldman is losing money ‘unfairly’ due to poor press, then maybe you’ll feel some sympathy…]

Now, the main securities industry trade organization has hired Brunswick, a powerhouse public relations firm, to burnish the banks’ image, and banks are urging their staffs to cut down on conspicuous consumption and are canceling Christmas parties in an attempt to turn the reputational tide. [Sadly, if the company is unwilling to foot the tab for a holiday bash, ‘The Masters of the Universe’ will ‘step up to the plate’ and use their bonus checks to throw their own party! And if the ‘riff-raff’ don’t like it, tough!]

It is a tough brief, even for Manhattan’s skilled public relations industry. Last week, New York State’s comptroller reported that Wall Street profits this year are on track to exceed the record set at the height of the credit bubble. So what to do? Here are some suggestions about making the unloved Masters of the Universe loveable again.

Be humble: Apologize and say thank you.

The quickest way for the banks to redeem themselves could be to admit they played a role in the crisis and that their survival depended on taxpayer money. [Sadly, this doesn’t ‘jive’ well with million dollar bonus checks while the rest of the economy is suffering a major meltdown! There is no way to reconcile the two. What these criminal organizations are calling ‘profits’ are actually accounting gimmicks, the profits these bonuses are based upon don’t exist!]

Several public relations executives pointed to John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, as an example of a banker wisely getting in front of the problem early. It was Mr. Mack who offered a full-throated mea culpa at a Congressional hearing last February for his bank’s role in fueling the crisis. “We are sorry for it,” he told lawmakers. [Um, perhaps it’s easier to admit guilt when your next move is to step down, as John Mack did. I don’t think the rest of these twinkies are ready pull their hats out of the till just yet.]

One public relations executive, who does not work for Mr. Mack and who asked not to be identified for fear it could hurt his relationships with other bankers, said: “They have done the best job of anybody of navigating the crisis.” Not every bank has been willing to apologize even though “maintaining otherwise manifestly contradicts the reality that most people see,” according to Stephen Davis, executive director at the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at Yale University. [Um, what else would you expect a paid schill to say, especially an ‘unidentified’ one?]

Goldman’s apology, for instance, was a grudging start but it may not be enough. “They should be taking advertisements, they should hold seminars, news conferences,” said Howard J. Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Associates, who argues for a more effusive mea culpa. “This is a time for gratitude and attitude. One letter to the editor, one news conference, one speech does not make an image.” [It’s a perfectly ‘reasonable’ suggestion, too bad the public is sick of seeing corporate America literally getting away with murder and not getting so much as a reprimand or an easily affordable fine…like the 500 million dollar ‘giveaway’ to small business.]

Give Back Some Money.

Donating money to a worthwhile cause is another way of soothing public outrage. [If you happen to be the recipient of that money, otherwise it is seen as a ‘dodge’. Often it is usually revealed that the recipient just happened to be a pet cause close to the decision maker AND the fucks take a huge ‘charitable deduction’ off their taxes…so you have another ‘empty gesture’.]

But there is the risk that such a strategy will be seen as a transparent ploy to buy off public opinion. Goldman’s donation was only about 3 percent of the $16.7 billion the bank has so far set aside this year for its bonus pool. The bankers may have to give up more yet — and not only by writing a check. [Especially checks for a tiny fraction of the damage they caused.]

“They need to give back and make a real impact — public education, health care, after school programs,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “These guys have brilliant staff. They should make it mandatory for their people to do voluntary work big time.”

Show you create real products that benefit people. [Ha! That’s one class ‘A’ tall order since most financial products turned out to be toxic!]

The crisis revealed what some people had long suspected: that quite a lot of the whiz-bang financial engineering that Wall Street relied on for profits was worthless.

According to Richard Edelman, a leading New York public relations executive, one of the best things Wall Street could do now is clearly “explain how you make your money and why your business model makes sense for a stakeholder society.” [I think we’d all like to hear that one, we could use a good laugh!]

If they can demonstrate in vivid terms the real role they play in the economy — by helping companies borrow money to grow and create jobs, for example — they might also justify their profits and pay. [How many of you spotted the flaw in that proposal right off the bat? That’s right, the chiseling fuckers AREN’T helping domestic businesses to borrow money and create jobs, they’re the ones driving business off-shore!
Unless I’m the one who missed the point here and these PR men are actually trying to get the Wall Street bankers killed!]

Says Travis Larson of Financial Dynamics in Washington: “It is clear how sports stars are judged, and everyone knows how Bill Gates makes his money because you can see the software. Investment banks need a new metric for success.” [Because making pension funds ‘disappear’ only helps the banks, not the investors.]

Cut Pay.

Even then, the most likely way to win back sympathy may be to do what the Masters of the Universe would probably hate the most, which is pay themselves less.

At the moment, that doesn’t appear likely. Six of the top American bank holding companies set aside $112 billion for salaries and bonuses in the first nine months, according to New York’s comptroller. If profits continue, bonuses could exceed the $162 billion paid in 2007 — the year before the financial crisis hit stock markets. The banks are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. [Not only are there fewer players but there is much less activity, so where the hell is this money coming from if it isn’t coming from their own toxic financial instruments?]

Still, some banks are making changes to the way they pay their employees. Credit Suisse, the big Swiss bank, intends to tie bonuses to a specific financial measure and effectively claw back payouts if the bank’s fortunes dim. But the move will not necessarily reduce compensation there.

Forget about it — it will go away.

In the end, though, should banks really care? Maybe the current storm will indeed blow over. [Ironically, our entire economic system is doomed, it is only a matter of time until money collapses and the value of everything falls into doubt, creating widespread chaos.]

Even so, bad reputations can potentially have real costs. The beating in the court of public opinion demoralizes staff, distracts senior executives and can hurt a bank’s ability to hire. [There is indeed an interesting dynamic at work here. If the banking profession becomes synonymous with ‘sleeze-balls’ then nobody will trust them and the entire industry will collapse...and it may already be too late.]

Franz Paasche, a reputations specialist at Communications Consulting Worldwide in New York, argues that a bad reputation can also harm a company’s ability to fight for what it wants in Washington. [That’s a somewhat ‘spurious’ claim as the bankers ‘own’ Washington. If they want that relationship to retain value then they are going to have to clean up their act because Washington has only a modestly smaller bull’s-eye painted on it. It’s a toss-up right now as to which will burn first, Wall Street or DC, but they will go in succession, first one and then the other.]

“Reputation has value and strong reputations create permissions to grow and prosper,” he said. As Wall Street banks’ reputations sink, “they are losing the more active seat at the table in discussions about policy.” [Although you’d be hard pressed to prove that statement, given how the new administration has failed miserably at reining in the banking industry…]

If the government did take wider measures against the banks, it would leave a very different Wall Street. There would be less swagger to those Masters of the Universe. But perhaps only then would the rest of us finally be able to love them.

Did I mention that this was a ‘PR’ piece? There isn’t anything ‘credible’ in it that would be useful in swaying public opinion, especially that portion of he public being hounded by agents of the unbelievably unforgiving banking sector.

For that alone the banking sector is facing ‘an eye for an eye’ type retribution. People don’t readily forgive having their entire lives uprooted due to circumstances beyond their control.

We’ve heard one side of the ‘blame game’ but it takes two to tango and the banking sector is the one that makes the rules!

I don’t think the public is going to be able to ‘forgive and forget’ here because this thing is far from over.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A Leap of Faith...

Greetings good citizen,

I’m glad I’m not the only one wrestling with tonight’s topic although, truth be told, I doubt many are ever troubled by the demons of ‘self-examination’.

If you never question ‘conventional wisdom’ then whatever challenges your worldview is simply discarded as a ‘superfluous curiosity’…interesting but meaningless.

Conversely, challenging one’s worldview too vigorously leads to a place few can tolerate for very long…those barren, windswept plains of truth.

But fear not good citizen for such a forbidding tableau is not tonight’s destination…

A Priori versus Empirical Reasoning and Practical Decision-Making

[Purloined from: Jesse’s Crossroads Café ]

"In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." Eric Hoffer


A Priori:

from Latin, literally "from the former." Reasoning that starts from accepted first principles or facts requiring no proof or foundation, being a self-evident assumption to the true believer

Empirical:

a. Relying on or derived from observation or experiment: empirical results that supported the hypothesis. b. Verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment: empirical laws. 2. Guided by practical experience and not theory,

A Priori reasoning is often associated with religion and other belief systems, because it is 'top down' reasoning from a given, accepted fact that is judged to be self-evident and sufficient in itself. So for example, if one believes in an all-powerful and loving God, one can start making logical deductions from that first principle.

Empirical reasoning is often associated with the 'scientific method.' This is reasoning from the "bottom up" based on data, evidence and replicable experimentation and demonstrable relationships. Empirical reasoning can only take one so far, and generally follows the pattern of hypothesis - proof - re-examination - new hypothesis based on new data or insights.

In Economics, it never ceases to amaze how quickly people gravitate towards a priori reasoning once they have become wedded to a belief in an idea, a trading system, a school of thought, or a cult of personality.

If I believe, for example, that deflation is inevitable, no matter what else, then I will selectively choose data to support this view, even if unconsciously, and evaluate all information in the light of deflation as a given outcome, accept that which supports my belief, and rejecting or diminishing in significance the contrary data.

One can make the same case, for example, for those that believe that hyperinflation is an inevitable outcome in the near term. Or those who believe in the infalliblity of a particular trading system such as Elliot Waves, or some favorite indicator.

In less lofty terms, it is what we call a prejudice, although that term has become too specifically associated with racism in the modern world. It is literally a prejudging of situations, and fitting them all into a common pattern no matter what.

Sometimes the lengths to which true believers will go to hold on to their opinions becomes almost funny, if it is not so often accompanied by ad hominem attacks and rather nasty, immature behaviour when the true believer becomes cornered by reality. Or the tragedy of genuine loss when believers are led into folly and the consequences of their errors.

How funny is it, for example, to see a noted pundit keep drawing lines in the sand for the maximum price appreciation of a commodity like gold, and having to change them every year, ignoring past failures and pretending as though they have not been wrong, not daring to acknowledge their failure and attempting to explain it, to at least integrate it into their system in some credible manner. [This isn’t confined to economics, you can witness this across the ‘belief spectrum’ from religion to politics…]

There is always an alternate count, always the oddly possible but highly improbable excuse or rationale for their own mistaken belief, to avoid admitting that they or their system are imperfect, that they do not know the future with any certainty.

One can believe in something that might eventually become true, but for the wrong reasons. The 'belief' part is accepting the truth before any rational evidence would lead one to accept it logically. It really depends on the odds, and whether they get 'lucky.' People are therefore fooled by chance.

This, by the way, is the problem I have had with some of the adherents to the Monetarist and Austrian schools of economics, among others gathered in schools. They believe something, and are inclined at times to twist the data to support their pre-dispositions and claims, and reduce objections or alternate views to caricatures that are not correct on close examination by the unbiased mind.

A scientific approach is to assess what is, rather than what we would like things to be, and to draw conclusions carefully from it, calculating probabilities when the evidence does not support a single outcome, and a willingness to accept new data and act on it when it appears, even if it appears contrary to a current working hypothesis.

This does not mean it is wrong to carefully examine evidence that seems to be 'on the tails' of our existing body of knowledge, to see if an adaptation of the hypothesis is all that is required.

Why is this important to us here in this forum?

Because belief is in the realm of the spiritual and the philosophical. Even a statement like "it is self-evident that all men are created equal" is clearly an appeal to a philosophical stance.

Finance, business, trading are not worthy of belief excepting for the ethical implications of behaviour that is contingent on all realms of human endeavor, depending on what one believes.

So, in trading, one should try to avoid becoming a 'true believer' in one idea or person or system. They are all likely to be flawed, and will very often blind the believer to the reality of the situation, so that they can lose impressive amounts of money fruitlessly following a belief that has no validity in their particular case.

In other words, no one knows the future for certain. There are always probabilities involved in every situation, every outcome. Some are more easily discerned than others, but they tend to be in the long and short term trends. [There are no ‘absolutes’, trends can be observed and outcomes predicted based on those observations but this isn’t ‘fortune telling’, this is ‘cause and effect’.]

People naturally tend to carve the 'hits' or successful predictions based on their system or belief in marble, and write the 'misses' in sand. They tend to fool themselves as a portion of the belief in what they think must be true. It is a natural, but potentially deadly, behaviour.

In religion, faith alone can lead one to do outlandish things as in the South Seas cargo cults. So there is the thought in the western tradition that one relies on faith and reason together. But of course reason can only take one so far, and then one is faced with what Kierkegaard called 'the leap of faith.'

One might be willing to 'lose money' for the sake of righteousness by refusing to engage in unethical behaviour in their business activity. But foolish is the person who loses money because they have put their faith in human error, in party politics, in groupthink, and profane beliefs.

On an almost daily basis I see otherwise intelligent people making this mistake, and Wall Street takes advantage of it, to the max. I have made this mistake in the past. Overcoming it is one of the great steps towards becoming a successful trading and maintaining a balanced life of the material and the spirit. We render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but what is God's is God's.

When the leap of faith is applied to the deployment of a trading account it is too often results in a leap off a cliff. When faith is misplaced in an ideology such as naturally efficient, self-regulating markets, or state planned command economies, it can take whole nations into the abyss.

It’s a tough topic to keep ‘focused’ because it applies so broadly to so many aspects of both commercial as well as spiritual endeavors.

For example, this is the third summer in a row that I’ve predicted ‘blood in the streets’ and once again the ‘public’ has made a liar out of me. If we were to ‘split hairs’ the blood has indeed been spilled, just not on the scale predicted.

Yes, surprisingly enough things haven’t gotten ‘desperate’ yet (although I find myself wondering just how much more desperate they can get before it blows like a powder keg…and I guess that’s where the ‘unknown’ comes in, that random trigger event that starts the fire nobody can extinguish.

Do I feel ‘guilty’ or is anyone ‘disappointed’ that I’ve been wrong so far? I’d admit to being relieved, because once that line is crossed, it’s ‘on’ until its finished.

Worse, it may be ‘on’ right now, but like a lot of things, the infamous ‘they’ have successfully kept it in the background for the time being.

Remember the ‘news’ is whatever they say it is…nothing more and nothing less. If they say it ain’t happening, then for all intents and purposes, it isn’t….just look at the fuckin’ stock market and tell me the media isn’t ‘manipulating’ what you ‘believe’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No inflation, Ha!

Greetings good citizen,

As you ought to know by now, I am troubled good citizen. The dollar has once again started its downhill run, which should surprise no one.

What troubles me good citizen is how some very respectable names in the field of economics are in denial that printing money causes inflation…whether it circulates or not!

Why? Because printing new money ‘dilutes’ the value of existing money. The same thing occurs when a company issues ‘more’ stock, it dilutes the value of the stock already issued/sold.

So when you print up money that has no ‘corresponding new wealth’ backing it up, all money of that kind in existence becomes um, less valuable.

This reduces purchasing power meaning it take more money to purchase the same quantity of goods…whether the ‘newly printed money’ sits in a bank vault or if it is circulating through the economy

This is why a dollar in 1913 is only worth 3 cents today…because there is more money in circulation today without a corresponding increase in the wealth necessary to support its value.

Strangely, both dollar bills will (still) get you a hundred pennies, the difference lies in what those hundred pennies will buy you.

In 1913 those hundred pennies would get you a hundred gumballs, today it will get you four.

So what do you think 18 trillion ‘new’ dollars are going to do to your ‘purchasing power’?

Notice the ‘price at the pump’ lately? Miles driven have fallen for 16 straight months yet the price of gasoline is rising…what do YOU suppose is causing that?

How about the cost of a box of pasta? It’s not so long ago that pasta was four boxes for a dollar, now it’s a buck a box! What was that again about ‘deflation’?

You are, sadly, dealing with a pack of lying, cheating scum…and there ain’t a fucking thing you can do about it!

Because, bizarrely, the good for nothing government won’t prosecute these thieves…because the government is ‘in cahoots’ with these thieves!

Prices go up, you’re handed a line of BS about some kind of shortage and the next thing you know, you are working for less! Which is to say you are getting paid the same but it buys less…and there isn’t anything you can do about that either!

Well, actually, there is something you can do but you can’t do it alone.

Not that you are alone in having your pocket picked.

Better, we are a ‘species’ of ‘joiners’…even if that trait has been surpressed lately. In times of trouble ‘joining’ an organization intended to combat the problem becomes very attractive…but the organization MUST be effective!

The organizations of the past faded away when they became, um, useless wastes of time and effort.

Looking at our present situation, there could hardly be a better time to form a network of ‘committees of correspondence’…just like they did during the original revolution.

It all starts with organization, communicating ideas across the entire nation to create a network of resistance to the criminal acts being forced upon us without our consent.

Together we can fix this mess.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

P.S.

If starting a committee of correspondence is appealing to you, hit the ‘follow’ button on this blog.