Shame on You!

Greetings good citizen,

I received a rather bizarre e-mail yesterday inviting me to attend an economics ‘summer school’ in Italy.

Five Nobel Laureates will teach the class in English, so the Italian setting is merely to make the surroundings more…’realistic’ (While not currently in the headlines, Italy is one of the PIIGS in case anyone was wondering why they spelled pig with two i’s.)

How ‘appropriate’ that these five, er, ‘nitwits’ expound upon their economic theories in a country that likely practiced (and definitely suffered) from them?

Which brings us to yet another long neglected hobby horse…the one that each of these ‘Nobel Laureates’ needs to have hammered into their squeany little heads…

(Sing it choir!)

ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

(Now give me an Amen!)

Hallelujah!

(Where the heck is MY Nobel Prize?)

Yes good citizen, I would ‘opine’ that you don’t know squat about economics if you turn a blind eye to this most basic of economic facts.

(Apparently my opinion is worthless to the rabid capitalists who hand out Nobel Prizes.)

Neither YOU (nor anyone else) can live in an ‘economic wasteland’.

That’s why the ‘global economy’ is in the tank (and it going to stay there until it gets ‘re-balanced’.)

Somehow these, er, ‘gentlemen’ believe this problem is going to solve itself. (and it very well might…however, the fabric of society can only take so much tearing before it shreds completely.)

Which is to ‘opine’ that IF society is ‘left to its own devices’ the fabric of civilization will be ‘obliterated’.

How complete will the destruction be?

Total (barring last minute intervention…which may or may not be successful.)

Sort of boggles the mind to see who’s still drinking the Kool-Aid after all these years.

Considering how lethal that stuff is you have to be amazed that they’re still lining up to down a shot or three!

But that’s all part of another ‘self-correcting’ genetic defect, the tendency to trust people who don’t have your best interests at heart.

Add in the ‘stupid factor’ and we find an endless line of potential Kool-Aid drinkers!

What Kool-Aid is that, you ask?

It’s the kind that blinds you to the existence of the ‘economic desert’.

“There are plenty of jobs out there! You’re just not trying hard enough.”

Yeah, the hundred million unemployed are just a figment of your imagination, especially considering how they ‘don’t want to work’…(which is right next to deciding you no longer want to live…but conservo-whackos will swallow anything regardless of how jagged the hooks are.)

How sad is it good citizen that these facts are also being ignored by the (alleged) alternative media thus our current political dialog is centered on NOT trimming the military budget?

Mighty sad.

Even more disturbing is this headline from today’s NY Times:

White House Tactic for C.I.A. Bid Holds Back Drone Memos
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

The administration may deny Senate Democrats information on targeted killings but tell Republicans more about a militant attack in Libya to win confirmation for John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director.

Um, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Obama run as a Democrat?

WTF is going on here?

Seriously good citizen, how far gone is our situation?

It’s looking mighty tough to me…but who cares what I think, surely not the rabid capitalists!

Which makes me ask, just who has to live among these animals?

Why, (by gum) YOU DO!

And if you don’t do something to help yourself (hint, it all starts with the politicians) then shame on you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Class confusion...

Greetings good citizen,

Were someone to ask you what you thought (believed) your ‘class membership’ was, how would you answer?

Tragically, many of you would mistakenly identify yourself as ‘middle class’, hell that’s the catch phrase all of the politicians use…(so it must be true!)

If you’re homeless you MIGHT suck it up and admit to being ‘poor’ (not that this helps or proves anything, circumstances change all of the time.)

Unsurprisingly, there is just as much confusion/mis-identification when it comes to accurately classifying the ‘upper classes!

Life Among the Plutocrats -- What Unimaginable Wealth Does to a Person
They control our politics, shape our societies, outsource our jobs.

January 4, 2013 |

Reviewed:Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, by Chrystia Freeland (Doubleday, Canada 2012)

Last year the Occupy movement brought the subject of inequality into public debate, and especially the inequality between those of us in the 99 per cent and the happy few in the one per cent. But Chrystia Freeland has been studying the happy few for years, and has spent many hours talking with some of their most famous and powerful members.

The result is a book full of surprises and insights. Today's plutocrats are the latest variation on an old theme, and at the same time they're strikingly new in many ways.

Societies have supported plutocratic classes at least since ancient Rome, and the Gilded Age of the US after the Civil War presaged our own: A rising class of self-made men, imaginative exploiters of new technology and wider trade. Then it was the telegraph and the railroad; now it's the internet and the container ship.

So, now we have ‘plutocrats’ being (mis) identified by their tychoonish traits rather then their inherited and very much ‘entrenched wealth’.

So Joe Bootstrapper is a ‘plutocrat’ (which is antithetical to the term ‘self-made man’.)

It is not my intention to kick the author in the shins for abusing a term, I regularly do it myself.

My point, such as it is, is how muddy the waters of ‘class’ have become. Most people ‘self-identify’ as being ‘middle class’ whether they are or they aren’t.

Like I said, you only ‘might’ get a homeless person to admit to being poor, just as you’d be equally as hard-pressed to get a ‘well-born’ individual to admit he was a ‘plutocrat’.

S/He’ll readily admit to being ‘upper class’ but vehemently deny being a ‘One Percenter’ (given the amount of bad press associated with the term recently.)

While the real fox in the hen house is the ONE TENTH of One Percent!

What do we call them (besides peckerheads) if not ‘plutocrats’?

Most would agree that ‘plutocrat’ is pretty much interchangable with ‘oligarch’ as both terms exemplify entrenched wealth AND power…both political and legal…(such as it is.)

Perhaps it is my personal conviction that ‘all money is funny’ that is giving me this quaint ‘comprehension problem’…

While money has often been equated in the ignorant person’s mind with power, money is actually meaningless. Tens of trillions of it can be whipped up instantly with the stroke of a pen! (Our failed banking industry has proven that by ‘conjuring’ a quadrillion dollars US into existence out of thin air!)

Just because the bought and paid for corporate owned media ignores this doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Nope, the ‘real problem’ is our house is burning down around us and while we all know this, nobody is doing anything to put the fire out…

Soon all that will be left are ashes…and memories.

Why is this seeming unthinkable thing happening?

Could it be because we have surrounded ourselves with traitors (who are in it for themselves) and our so-called ‘academics’ don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground?

How stunningly stupid is it that the ‘smartest guys in the room’ are running around with their hair on fire?

Re-directing once again, I am compelled to ask how we can expect to solve the problem if we can’t agree on the cause?

The OWS movement put the One Percent into the crosshairs…but failed to pull the trigger.

Now we have works like this one attempting to muddy the waters by calling innovators ‘plutocrats’ simply because they’re rich…

Mr. Zuckerburg is ‘rich’ but he’s hardly the ‘menace to society’ most of his ‘cousins’ at Harvard are.

In fact you have to wonder just how successful Facebook would have been if it hadn’t gotten its start in the ‘plutocracy’ (entrenched climate of wealth and power) that IS Harvard?

Money does not a ‘plutocrat’ make.

In the end it’s about old family ties and the ability to bend reality to your liking that makes one a ‘plutocrat/oligarch’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Counsel

Greetings good citizen,

Only eleven more shopping days until the end of the world as we know it! While the stations owned by Fox News are still trying to make a story about bit of cosmic weirdness left behind by a long defunct civilization, others have written off the doomsday predictions when tangible proof of inevitable doom failed to materialize over the summer.

Not that said ‘doom’ isn’t going to happen! We are hurtling towards a disaster that can’t be seen with a telescope or measured with a seismograph yet it will destroy our civilization just as surely as it has destroyed every (human) society before ours.

Which is to point out that even the Mayan predictions of eminent doom are expected to be ‘survivable’, the question, as always is what will rise from the ashes?

And for some fucked up reason, people keep letting the ‘opportunists’ take the reins…and down the same old path we run!

Um, since we are at the tail end of what passes for ‘civil society’ the following is an incomplete picture of how we got to where we are:

The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one hour?

1. The super-rich are stealing our fair share of productivity. The U.S. economy is enormously productive. Since 1947, the amount of goods and services we produce per hour of labor has risen by nearly 300 percent. That's because as a nation, we blend together a potent mix of effort, skills, technology and organizational capacities.

2. Americans really want a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. First, virtually all Americans greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in our economy today. They had no idea how extreme the U.S. wealth distribution really is -- which goes to show you what a good job the super-rich have done in mis-educating us.

Second, when asked to construct an ideal distribution of income, 92 percent of Americans preferred radically more equality – on a par with the social democratic state of Sweden! What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the respondent was a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wanted more economic fairness.

3. Everything we hear about government debt is wrong. Right now, the biggest target of public mis-education is the government debt debate. And the biggest spender on the mis-education of the American public is billionaire Pete Peterson.

4. We are under-taxed, not over-taxed. The super-rich want us to believe that taxes are too high and that those taxes are harming job creation and economic growth. It's a fabrication.

5. Government jobs are just as good as private sector jobs. Another major con job concerns the attack on public employees. The greedy rich are trying to pit public and private sector workers against each other in large part because public employees still seem to have benefits the rest of us have lost (and they have unions…

6. Wall Street needs to be shrunk (until we can drown it in a bathtub.) The function of finance is simple: moving our savings into productive investments. By doing so, money supposedly moves to where it will do the most good for our economy. This function is considered so simple that most economics textbooks ignore Wall Street entirely.

Does anyone else see the irony in the use of Grover Norquist’s famous quip about government being applied by the writer, who is a champion of ‘saving’ predatory capitalism from the scrap yard of history (where it belongs.)

Perhaps not and perhaps it is this same blindness to hypocrisy that dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But I digress.

These bullet points do not constitute the whole article and my removing them from the main body of the text has likely altered their intended meaning.

Suits me fine, maybe not so much if we were to ask the writer…

Whatever.

The main thrust of this article is mis-information that is foist upon the rest of us by a ‘for profit’ media (which we need to do away with ASAP!)

Here’s a case where we see the problem but are powerless to fix it because of our ‘attachment’ to money.

It’s going to be more fucked up when we’re all starving to death thanks to ‘insufficient funds’ (which actually has nothing to do with nothing…except perhaps gross mismanagement.)

Which brings us full circle with the selective blindness thing, that which we see but choose to ‘ignore’.

Casting into doubt the assertion that ‘ignorance can be fixed’ (sometimes people don’t want to be ‘cured’.)

How about you good citizen? You are wise enough to seek counsel beyond your peer group…what you do with that counsel is entirely up to you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner