We COULD NOT do worse (even if we tried!)

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the rushing over the edge and falling off part is over, we’re at the hitting the ground and shattering into a zillion pieces mode.

Ironically, still in impossibly slow motion.

Naturally, this is not the ‘remarkable’ part of the puzzle, what has everybody scratching their heads is how those who are SUPPOSED TO BE ‘taking care’ of the problem continue to pretend it will work itself out.

At what point, good citizen do we recognize the we could do a far superior job ourselves?

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and a member of the deficit-reduction panel, has repeatedly said he has no intention of letting such cuts occur. Some House members said they were being urged by military contractors and others in their districts to avert such reductions.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, said the attempt to undo the triggers “reflects a total lack of seriousness.” Adding that such efforts would not be successful, he said they were “the result of people trying to escape the fundamental choices before us, and one of those choices is whether or not we are willing to end special interest tax breaks to pay for defense.” The White House is also highly unlikely to approve such actions. The president is averse to the military cuts, but saw the threat of them as a way to pressure Republicans to reach a deal. “There is more fear this time,” Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, said about the anxiety being expressed by military contractors in his district. Mr. Brooks said he voted against the debt-ceiling legislation because of the possibility of deep Pentagon cuts.

Under the debt-ceiling budget agreement, members of the joint committee, evenly divided between the parties, have until Nov. 23 to recommend ways to reduce budget deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. Both houses are supposed to vote on the package by Dec. 23. If no legislation is enacted, the government would automatically cut almost $500 billion from military spending, with an equal amount from nonmilitary programs, between 2013 and 2021.

Are these asshole managing the affairs of the nation or are they protecting the interests of their campaign contributors?

How can the ‘Party of No’ rail against ‘government waste’ with one breath and defend a grotesquely bloated military budget with the next?

A military that makes no secret of its imperialistic motives…

Like I have pointed out before, good citizen, this isn’t being done FOR you, it’s being done TO you!

Why else would a Republic of equals employ ‘soldiers of fortune?’ (a ’free nation’ already has all the soldiers it needs…what‘s wrong with this picture?)

Perhaps we should let Mr. Williams tell us

No. 397: October Employment and Unemployment November 4th, 2011
Monthly Payroll and Unemployment Changes Were Not Statistically Meaningful October Payroll Employment Not Only Was 6.5 Million Below the Pre-2007 Recession High,  But Also Was 1.0 Million Below the Pre-2001 Recession High October Unemployment: 9.0% (U.3), 16.2% (U.6), 22.9% (SGS) Annual Growth in October Money Supply M3 Held at About 2.6%

I don’t know about you good citizen but I find the labor force still being below the 2001 level the most disturbing.

We didn’t hit the 6 billion mark in human population until 2000…making last week’s announcement of hitting 7 billion that much more disturbing…

And nothing is being done about that either…or is it?

There are two choices when it comes to dealing with the population problem…depending on how you view the problem itself.

One is to ’manage’ a sustainable economy and the other involves ’balancing’ labor with consumers.

Currently, the focus is on insuring there are enough strong backs and weak minds to keep the lights on and the water running, damn the ’cost’…which is why ’nothing’ is being ’fixed’.

This is the identical mentality that ‘cannot conceive’ of a society without slaves…

These are the ‘mental defectives’ currently in charge.

This is the mindset that isn’t interested in ‘solving’ the problem as much as they want things to ‘work like they’re supposed to’, regardless of how difficult/impossible that makes life for the rest of us.

Um, just to make my point, the ‘shrinking to fit’ method of dealing with the economy is EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

The ‘question’ this raises is just who is considered ‘redundant’ (and thus disposable.)

There are MILLIONS of workers over fifty who will NEVER enter the workforce again (at least on a ‘meaningful level’.)

This sort of sucks when you have to be (minimum) 62 to draw social security, leaves quite the gap that, once again, THE INDIVIDUAL is expected to bridge the best they can!

But what would you expect from the ‘if your paycheck doesn’t crack your nut IT’S YOUR PROBLEM crowd?

How do these assholes intend to ‘deal’ with the mortgage crisis? By making all future mortgage loans ‘full recourse’!

WTF!

To the point, good citizen.

Our society/civilization is deeply ‘mismanaged’ by the same people who fail to appreciate that their continued liberty relies almost totally on a ‘stable’ society.

We can do better…the problem, naturally, is who gets to define ‘better’?

That is why I have laid out A Simple Plan for all to see (and what you see is what you get, there are NO ‘hidden agendas’ lurking underneath.)

Which is to say if someone comes along claiming to support A Simple Plan but then claims the ‘cashless’ aspect of it is unworkable…hang them…they are a lying thieves.

A Simple Plan is holistic with ALL of the parts interlocking to create the larger whole…half measures WILL NOT WORK!

There should be (by now) enough ‘copies’ of A Simple Plan (I developed it twenty years ago) to keep the self-interested honest…but it wouldn’t hurt if you saved a copy to your hard drive, preferably the copy here on this blog as it is the most current revision.

Search for it in the archives…if you can’t find it let me know, I’ll post it again.

Understand good citizen, we are facing the same circumstances our grandparents faced precisely because they failed to ‘fix’ the problem when they had the chance.

This time will be different.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Irrelevant

Greetings good citizen,

I wanted to start off today’s post with yesterday’s market results but, bizarrely, they’ve been ‘zeroed’ for some reason…

Which sort of segues nicely with today’s ‘theme’… what theme is that, you may ask?

Read on:

"Terror... often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking."

Stephen King

Big up day for the metals.

I do not care for their synchronicity with stocks. So many assets are now correlated to a global reflationary event, and the markets are overly sensitive to headlines. That makes these markets highly dangerous.

What is happening with MF Global and the US futures markets is a disgrace. But hypocrisy and betrayal are the temper of the times.

"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Interesting words, hypocrisy and betrayal…even more interesting ‘in context’.

As we learned in yesterday’s 'Update' the Greek Prime Minister is intimate with both terms…and he somehow thinks the dark cloak corporate interests hide behind will be extended to ‘protect’ his Premier-ship. It may be ‘in their interests’ to do so but the effectiveness of such a move is very doubtful, considering ‘public sentiment’ at the given moment.

Just as Wall Street continues to cast nervous glances at the OWS movement…

The question nobody is prepared to answer is ‘what comes next’?

Certain aspects of the media is showering largely undeserved accolades upon the intrepid protesters while other have nothing but scorn…although, predictably, the biggest ‘danger’ to the OWS movement is already taking hold, inertia is grinding the movement into irrelevance.

It’s great to make a stink and raise ‘awareness’….although truth be told only the most sheltered were ‘ignorant’ of the issues facing today’s youth/labor force.

If all you’re gonna do is ‘inconvenience’ civil authorities for a few weeks, don’t pretend to be surprised when nothing changes.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if ‘protests’ worked, there would be protests 24/7, along with exactly what that implies, political gridlock!

If all you had to do was cry foul and march around city hall/palace a couple of times, we’d still be living under a monarchy!

Oh, would that it were that we could use the ballot box to ‘vote’ ourselves a better socio-economic model!

And if this really was the democracy they claim it to be, we could!

Except for the ‘vote fixing’ thing.

Vote for something the self-interested don’t like and you automatically get a ‘rigged’ election…not unlike Bush pushing Gore off the ballot in Florida…

Look at what THAT got us ( the new 24/7 ‘security state’!)

But that was then and this is now…

I guess I’d best introduce today’s second offering

Still Sliding: Although I've written a number of posts over the past five years chronicling America's relentless slide from leader of the free world to leading banana republic -- see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here -- it isn't hard to find fresh material with each passing day.

For example, as is typical of those failed Latin American republics we keep trying to emulate, the rich keep finding ways to get richer --

Um, unlike Mr. Panzer, I can legitimately point to ALL of my posts when making the same claim.

This entire blog is about the death spiral of the western economy and the web of lies this nation (and as a result, most of the rest of the world) was founded upon.

No irony should be lost on the fact that most nations, maimed, crippled or crazy, point at the original US constitution as the ‘inspiration’ for their own ‘founding documents’.

Now take a quick glance around the world and tell me, 'What’s wrong with this picture?'

The ‘take away’ here is it doesn’t matter how ‘magnificent’ your founding prose is, it was meant to be ignored most of the time.

Take a good look at your own ‘Constitutional Rights’ good citizen…look at how those you’ve delegated to defend them (and by extension, you) have done their job…

Fucking disgusting, isn’t it?

Time to open up the Rabbit Hole again; Ain’t NOTHING gonna get fixed until WE fix it, the BULLSHIT won’t STOP until WE STOP IT!

Cold weather is coming and the dying is about to begin.

Time to get off your dead ass and do something!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Economic Underdogs...

Greetings good citizen,

In yet another display of outrageous cognitive dissonance, the world’s stock markets continue to soar despite the fact that the global economy is tanking faster then they can bail out the banks.

But (and they’ll never admit this) appearances matter more than reality.

That’s the only reason why markets ‘soar’ for no discernable cause.

As I have admitted multiple times, the stock markets are the only ‘barometer’ of economic well-being we have, however, the ‘reliability’ of this indicator leaves much to be desired.

Mr. Bernanke forecast that the economy was, er, recovering…albeit, slowly. He even went as far as to admit it would be too slow to help the millions of unemployed, dipping the future in a dank pool of wretched uncertainty.

To what, precisely, good citizen, should we attribute this unfortunate turn of events to?

Was it the banking crisis where we all learned we were broke (due to decades of being underpaid?)

No, it wasn’t.

Then why, for the third recession in a row (although truth be told, the workers of this nation haven’t recovered from the shithouse deal that was the Reagan Economy)have we only recovered 'on paper'?

Seriously good citizen, when the US’s number one export is the paper our imports are wrapped in! What does that tell you about the state of the 'global economy'?

If anyone can afford to strut on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur during the meeting on Thursday and Friday, it should be the fast-growing developing countries, especially China, but also India, Russia and Brazil. The balance of power has shifted so rapidly that Europe is now asking them for money, and they are in a stronger position to push their views on trade rules and other issues.

But the leaders of the big emerging economic powers of the world are not likely to be crowing. Not only do they face vulnerabilities of their own, like worrisome levels of inflation in China, but they also do not want to see their best customers struggle economically, especially when another crucial outlet for their exports — the United States — is also suffering.

“China is going to be in a pretty good position,” said Uri Dadush, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “But don’t interpret that to mean that China is happy with all this. China is part of the world economy.”

You don’t suppose that Mr. Dadush has a talent for ‘understatement’, do you?

The Chinese (worker) not only sees the exact same thing the 99% are complaining about over here but they too feel ‘victimized’ by the sudden sweep of ‘privatization’ that has forced expenses on them faster then their pay can/will rise!

But that’s capitalism for you…

What’s, er, ‘disturbing’ is how long the Chinese Communists will sit still for the exact same conditions their grandparents revolted against in 1949?

I’ll go the extra step here and point out that ‘China’ ISN’T to blame here, the fucking capitalist pigs that shipped their operations to China are!

Yes, good citizen, once again, responsibility for the collapse of Western civilization rests squarely with the .01%

Probably doesn’t hurt to mention that this isn’t the first time they’ve driven the global economy to the edge…

Although, this time it really is ‘different’.

The recent ‘landmark’ of our being joined by the 7 BILLIONTH human on the planet only deepens my conviction that this contrived collapse is indeed ‘deliberate’.

Then there’s the ‘Peak Oil’ and the ‘Population Bomb’ to consider. Note how ‘global warming’ has crowded out other serious issues.

Worse, the ‘attitude’ still prevails that there is ‘plenty’ of energy out there…but this is incorrect, we have used up all of the ‘easy to recover’ stuff as of the middle of last decade, that’s why the ‘oil sands’ (as well as oil prices) are moving forward!

To put this disaster in the making into perspective, the only reason we haven’t suffered a global famine (yet) is due to, er, ‘farm automation’ (that is powered by oil.) When the price gets stiff for a gallon of gas what do you suppose they will do, cultivate less acreage or charge more for food?

Let’s not forget the ‘default’ setting…“I’ve got mine, fuck them!”
And no, I am not being ‘funny’ I’ve actually heard capitalists say this!

Worse, if you confront them they back right down…and mutter ‘fuckin’ liberal’ behind your back, but that’s capitalism for ya!

It’s long past time we looked at who was in the driver’s seat, we all know the score.

Yesterday’s General Strike is being heralded as a success and we can only hope it is the first of many more to come…

It will be interesting to see how the nearly dead unions react when the only people defying the general strike are union workers?

Which is another example of ‘mismanagement’. We can see what FDR was up to but it turned into the ‘weak link’ that unraveled the New Deal.

Unions NOT striking ‘in sympathy’ with each other has hurt the cause of labor big time. We can only marvel at why it took nearly 50 years until people stood up to this stupid legislation!

What remains to be seen is whether or not this is the ‘tip of the spear’ or a ‘fluke’…

Time will indeed tell, good citizen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Update: It seems we aren't the only country with 'spineless politicians', Greece's Papandrous has reneged on putting the proposed economic bailout up for a public referendum vote...

So far this move has, as one might expect, increased calls for him and his government to 'step-down'.

They said this could end his administration and it's beginning to look like the infamous 'they' were right!

Will his government survive the week or do the bankers 'have his back'?

Broken Social Contract

Greetings good citizen,

The distant pounding of the drums tells us that global financial system is about to collapse, resulting in the chaos I have already described many times.

(From the you walk into a store and nothing has a price tag, curious, you grab the item you came in for and walk it to the counter, the, er, proprietor picks up the phone and asks for a quote, price and delivery, on the item in question…)

[He can’t sell it to you if he doesn’t know how much it is going to cost him to replace…]

I sincerely appreciate how difficult it is to keep one’s eye on the ball when there are so many factors ‘in play’, literally, all of the time.

But that won’t prevent me from dragging out another tired old hobby horse of mine that has been absent from these pages for at least a couple of years now (although the topic is touched upon, tangentially, in almost every essay I post.)

What topic would that be, good citizen?

Why it’s the ‘Broken Social contract’!

Loosely put, the social contract contains the conventions that prevent us from killing one another on sight…so you can see what happens when it gets ‘broken’.

This will devolve into a novel if we were to spell out all of the conditions of the social contract and discuss why they are broken.

It would make you all smarter but not a single wit wiser.

Suffice to say the social contract exists because killing everyone on sight is terribly counterproductive and life is hard enough without any more enemies/competitors.

And it is the ‘competitor’ end of the diagram that brings us to why the contract is broken.

How many of you had your minds leap to ‘global wage arbitrage’ when you read the keyword ‘competition’?

Well, you’re on the right track, good citizen. The (now expired) social contract says, “I’ll leave you to your business as long as you don’t prevent me from going about mine.”

Up until a hundred years ago, good citizen, 98% of us were farmers (that’s why all of this ‘self-sufficiency’ NONSENSE plays so well today.)

You grew your own food and you raised and traded the livestock you ate. Usually you cultivated a ‘cash crop’ (or two, depending on how much land/ambition you had.)

But farming, hunting and fishing WERE your ‘full time’ occupations. Your time was yours and you spent it ‘as needed’.

Not so in our ‘modern’ world.

If you can’t produce huge quantities of food with extreme efficiency, you can’t ‘make a living’ farming. You may be able to keep the family fed but if you can’t scrape up the tax money you aren’t going to own the farm very long.

Why do you suppose that is, good citizen?

How many of you leapt to the ‘captive market’ theory?

I didn’t think you would.

Why would those who control the government be interested in driving others off of their land?

If you can’t grow your own food then YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY MINE!

These days good citizen, 99% of us are sitting in that leaky canoe.

Which is not to give the false impression that EVERYBODY once had their own patch of turf they used to farm themselves. There were a great many who merely ‘worked’ on larger farms…another bit of the capitalist’s favorite game known as ‘fuck-fuck’, meaning, of course, that you were fucked regardless of what you did.

Worse, good citizen, is the extremely false impression (created by the corporate funded media) that this arrangement was somehow ‘benevolent’, done out of the ‘kindness’ of the overlords hearts, it was not!

They benefited from it mightily!

Yet we have this example of our broken social contract

Why pay ‘unemployment benefits’ at all?

Remember, civilization is only 9 meals deep…cut off people’s access to food and you only have a couple of days before you have full scale riots on your hands.

Occupy Wall Street is a ‘demonstration’. Most of us have never witnessed a ‘true’ riot.

The 'Irresponsible government’ label that fruit-loops here is trying to hang on this is false:

Because “emergency” and extended-benefit benefits are paid to people only when they have exhausted the normal benefits, the fraction shown in the chart is a measure of how much unemployment benefits are paid pursuant to unemployment insurance rule changes, as opposed to payments that occur merely because more people were losing their jobs.

If we assume, merely for simplicity, that the expansions had no effect on the number of people unemployed or on the length of time they were employed, then setting “emergency” and extended-benefit payments to zero as they were in 2007 would have cut total unemployment insurance benefit payments by the fraction shown in the chart. In this case, it appears that the unemployment insurance program is at least twice as generous as it was in 2007, thanks to the federal changes in benefit rules.

The unemployment insurance program is a good example of how federal government spending has grown and how tough it will be to bring it back to pre-recession levels. People are now used to having well more than one year’s unemployment benefits available to them, and politicians will have a lot of trouble asking them to make do with just 13 weeks.

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Mind you, this piece WAS NOT taken from the ‘op/ed section’ of the NY Times but the business section.

Anyway, Zippydick, (who, coincidentally, isn’t unemployed) is calling for an end to ‘reckless’ government spending…(and you know he’d be the first one to condemn cuts to the military budget because you know what a disastrous effect THAT would have on unemployment!)

The ‘real reason’ they don’t cut extended benefits is because it is an easy way to get people to pawn weapons bought during more prosperous times.

Funny that they’d stoop to pauperizing them first but it takes what it takes…

And they knew going in the ‘hardcore’ will never give up their weapons, so the tactic was just to disarm the disarm-able.

Which is to say that since benefits can’t go on ‘indefinitely’, the riots will begin any day now.

As it is they’ve staved off ‘D-day’ for a year longer than anyone thought possible…so when they do pull the plug, most people will be surprised.
Tell the truth good citizen, you seriously think we’ve ‘dodged the bullet’, don’t you?

Which is merely a testament to the power of the media.

I’ve got news for you good citizen, the collapse of civilization WILL NOT BE TELEVISED!

The news room itself could be on fire and they’d just go off the air without a word of explanation.

They exist to perpetuate the myth, NOT to keep you ‘informed’.

Which is to say you’re gonna feel mighty stupid once this is over but don’t beat yourself up too much, fresh starts always come at a steep price.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Panic on Wall Street (again!)

Greetings good citizen,

The, er, ‘stupidity markets’ are tanking (again) over the ‘lack of credibility’ of the proposed solution for the Greek crisis.

Now, allegedly, the Greeks have demanded a ‘referendum’ on the proposed settlement…and it is pretty much agreed that the proposal will be ‘Icelanded’ (or voted down, which is what happened the last time a nation was forced to choose between bailing out its bankers or pauperizing its populace.)

Save your banks or pauperize your people…it seems Iceland made the right choice when it threw the bankers under the bus!

Anyway, after adding more than 500 points on the news that a settlement had been reached, it looks like that has all come unraveled now that the, er, ‘victim’ is being given the chance to decide.

OUR USELESS Corporate Owned MEDIA does us no service by pretending that the collapse of the Euro-Zone will not effect the US economy.

Which raises the usual question of what do they know and when did they know it?

Mr. Panzer provides us with these tantalizing clues:

Pollaxed : pole·ax verb /po’ laks/ poleaxed, past participle; poleaxed, past tense; poleaxes, 3rd person singular present; poleaxing, present participle

1. Hit, kill, or knock down with or as if with a poleax

2. Cause great shock to (someone)

- I was poleaxed by this revelation

Aside from the dead cat bounce we saw last Friday in the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index report for October, virtually every survey being published nowadays  suggests the U.S. economy is poised to get hammered -- or should we say pollaxed? Here are just a few recent examples:

Click through to the article to read the rest.

Now let me share why I selected this piece ahead of many others I perused this morning.

There has been little holiday hiring (not zero but it is down significantly from previous years) and, if you follow the shipping indexes, there have been almost no ordering for the coming holiday season.

What do these ‘flags’ mean, good citizen?

It seems the government isn’t the only thing the predatory Libertarians want to shrink until it can be drown in a bathtub. The morons want to shrink the economy until it only supports them…

Not exactly ‘a promising future’ for you and yours, is it?

Don’t tax the ‘job creators’, don’t cut the military and don’t fund public services…what does that sound like to you?

(P.S. there is no such thing as a ‘job creator’, the only entity capable of creating ‘jobs’ is, coincidentally, also the only one who can endorse a bill of sale, Mother Nature.

If you weren’t ‘compelled’ to do a thing by some physical need, you wouldn’t!)

Sounds to me like they’re telling the rest of us to stand back while they strip our civilization of everything that makes life worth living.

They don’t want you to cut the military because they’re going to need it to defend their predatory vision of ‘life by your bootstraps.’

A game where YOU get to play the ‘fuckee’…

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the ‘Dark Ages’ are about to return.

And like everything else that has happened over the past four decades, there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it…because YOU never had control of ’the law.’

Worse, those that did, didn’t have your ’best interests’ at heart.

Which is why things are SO fucked up!

If civilization is EVER to be restored step one is putting the law beyond the reach of the ‘self-serving/interested’

And that’s what A Simple Plan does!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Legality

Greetings good citizen,

I have been ‘out of town’ over the weekend and had a rather long commute home on Sunday. I spent today ‘in the office’ thus I have not had the opportunity to post until tonight, Halloween…and we haven’t had a single trick or treater!

This isn’t unusual for the rural area we live in, it’s a long walk between houses around here and we’re the only house on our street (the condo’s across the road are in a ‘security building’ so the kids have to be ‘buzzed in’, anyway, suffice to say the kids usually ‘blow off’ our side street in favor of the ‘richer pickings’ to be had on the next street over.

Ironically, I am mindful of how few kids we normally get (it varies wildly, we’ve had as many as 50 and as few as 9, although this year’s zero is a first…probably due to the snow.) So I only buy candy my kids (and my humble self) will enjoy!

Harder to puzzle out is what happened on Wall Street today? Trick or Treat?

In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips closed down 3.1 percent, while markets in Germany and Paris lost about 3.2 percent. The FTSE 100 in London was down 2.8 percent. Asian markets were down around 1 percent or less.

“I think it is a big sell-off — profit-taking after an enormous, ferocious, violent run upward,” said James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist for Wells Capital Management, speaking about the declines in stocks.

But he also forecast that some of the data to be released this week could restore market attention to the economy in the United States.

“I think Europe is certainly part of the reason” for the down day, he said. “Where we end this week is going to have more to do with the data coming from Main Street, U.S.A.”

Seriously good citizen, what the HELL is WRONG with these people? Why does ‘bonehead’ think the collapse of the Euro Zone will leave the rest of the global economy unscathed?

He doesn’t even acknowledge that the recent (totally irrational) run up in stock prices displayed more than a little ‘cognitive dissonance’, does he?

Naturally, I’m being ‘kind’. Pretending the Euro crisis was solved (the purported reason behind the recent run up) or that it wasn’t an exercise in ‘wishful thinking’ borders on delusional!
But then again that’s the stock market for you (since the criminals took over.)

In reality good citizen, all of our ‘troubles’ (starting with the ‘fake prosperity‘) can be traced back to the breakdown in ‘the rule of law.’

We’ve been ‘told’ (rather than seen for ourselves) how ‘fabulous’ we’ve been doing…but in truth, only the criminals have been doing ‘fabulous’, everybody else has been sucking pond water!

Now there is a movement afoot to restore our failed Justice system but it has zero ‘guidance.’

So-called ‘legal professionals’ have let this situation get out of hand so they CAN’T BE TRUSTED to either rebuild or restore that which is broken.

Where do we turn in a situation like this?

We will have to ‘trust’ ourselves, good citizen.

A Simple Plan has an initial set of laws prescribed within it that can be used as a foundation we can use to re-establish the justice system.

I used the principle of those who must live under the laws should be the sole arbiters of what should or should not be ‘illegal’.

Full Time Law-makers are neither necessary or desirable.

In fact, providing anyone with the, er, ‘privilege’ of interpreting the laws will be prohibited!

For too long we have suffered the, er, ‘machinations of the self-serving’ who claimed only they ‘understood’ the law…

Which flies in the face of one of the most basic premises of law itself, that for law to be effective, it must be easy to understand!

You wouldn’t think you’d need a law that states that premise but indeed we do!

You wouldn’t think it would be necessary to prohibit the ‘practice’ of law but indeed we do!

Most people (until they find themselves on the ‘wrong side’ of an arbitrary legal decision) fail to see the necessity of prohibiting judges!

It is and has been a stupendous failure to let an entire class of self-important twits to make our laws while exempting themselves from them!

This is what happens when you let a certain ‘class of individuals’ claim exclusive provenance over what we all must live by!

So what will it be good citizen,

TRICK

Or

TREAT?

The law is no joking matter…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Creative Accounting...

Greetings good citizen,

As usual markets are tanking now that it has become apparent the proposed ‘rescue plan’ for the Euro Zone is a day late and a dollar short…

But that didn’t stop the Dow from breaching 12,000 again!

Think about the abysmal state of the economy, good citizen and ask yourself by what ‘logic’ could the Dow, er, ‘Financials’ be over 12,000 points?

Perhaps we could reflect on how pathetic it is the only remaining industry in the US today IS the financial sector.

As I have opined repeatedly, if not for creative accounting we’d be bankrupt.

Here, Mr. Williams shares his analysis of the latest (captive) government figures:

No. 396: 3rd-Quarter GDP, October Confidence, September Durables Orders and Home Sales October 27th, 2011

Consumer Confidence and Sentiment Sink to Levels Never Seen Outside of the Worst Recessions

No Economic Recovery Is in Place or in the Works

Third-Quarter GDP Gain Not Statistically Meaningful

GDP Nonsense:  Consumption Surged 1.7% While Disposable Income Collapsed 1.7%?

Consumption up, income down…somewhat ‘counter-intuitive’ but Mr. Panzer supplies us with this informative graph

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the ceaseless off-shoring of our jobs has been creating an economic desert so large that the ‘safety net’ is collapsing under its own weight.

When government ‘transfer payments’ make up 25% of GDP, you got problems.

Mind you, this problem is, in the short term, ‘self-correcting’.

Unfortunately, this situation WILL NOT take care of itself, at least not in a good way.

A massive rally in US equities today led by financials as there was relief that Europe will be bailing out the sovereign debt of some of their members, and most importantly of all, the large European and US banks.

The US GDP came in well. Intraday commentary was provided, and it was a hollow victory as household income continued to decline.

I think the stock rally may have more to go, but it might take QE3 to take it much higher into year end. And if we do get QE3, we then go into bubble watch as financial assets inflate at the expense of the real economy.

This is what happens when one applies monetary stimulus to a broken economy.

It is no surprise that Jesse agrees with the sentiment that the stock markets are, er, ‘divorced from reality’.

Don’t you wish you could ignore reality too? (And get rich doing it!)

Ah, to be an investor in capitalist utopia, especially these days where if you make a bad bet, the public is right there to ‘bail YOU out!’

It must be frightening to suddenly become aware that you’ve been played for a chump all of these years. The only thing worse is suddenly waking up from the ‘conservative dream’
Where a non-existent ’benevolent’ corporation rewards you handsomely for spending your entire life as their vassal…

Where reality is if you don’t own the company, you’ve been pitched over the side long before you can collect your (full) pension.

And when you DO go to ‘draw your reward’ you find the fund didn’t perform as well as, er, ‘advertised/anticipated’, so now you are faced with managing on a whole lot less than you originally expected.

Who knew EVERYBODY would invest in Enron?

That’s the problem with ‘creative accounting’. You’re assured that everything is all right until you go to collect, then all of a sudden all you have is a pocket full of IOU’s!

And there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it…

(Which is why I advocate stringing the bastards up now, Before they make us track them to the ends of the earth!)

A ‘promise’ is a powerful thing…it is what keeps cops on the job and teachers in the classroom.

It even keeps you returning to your worthless job, day after day, to catch a fresh bucket of shit to take home with you. (Because that’s how your boss thinks it needs to be…which is WHY he’s the boss and you’re not!)

Well good citizen, what do you do when that promise is broken?

They have NO INTENTION of providing you with even a fraction of all of the things you were promised in exchange for busting your ass every day of your adult life.

How does that make you feel?

Now ask yourself how long you’re gonna let them play you for a chump?

There IS a better way!

A Simple Plan, an idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner