Want vs. Need

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘slightly up’ this morning for (as usual) no apparent reason. Conversely, it didn’t take me long at all to unearth this disturbing article

As you and I both know, businesses that lose money quickly go bankrupt under the ‘fuck you, pay me’ social model that is capitalism.

MANILA, Philippines — Shipping lines are losing a record $141 for each container they haul to Europe from Asia, the world’s second-largest trade route for the boxes, as slowing economies dent demand, ACM/GFI said.

Companies are losing money even at a freight rate of $649 a container because of a fuel surcharge of $790 for each box, Mels Boer and Cherry Wang, container-derivatives brokers at ACM/GFI, said in a report e-mailed Oct. 28. Losses were at the highest level last week since a tally of rates began in March 2009, Wang said.

“Current rates on the route Asia to Europe are way lower than the lows seen in 2009,” said ACM/GFI, a joint venture between London-based ACM Shipping Plc and GFI Group Inc., located in New York. Shipping companies were losing $41 for each 20-foot box in June that year, according to the report.

Not one but TWO undeniable economic trends are on display here, ‘demand exhaustion’ along with energy expenses driving costs out of reach!

It is even more interesting to see stories like this running in, er, ‘batches’

Earlier this week, the (estimated) total number of people in the world blew past 7 billion. To put that number in context, for the first 70,000-odd years of human history, the total human population was around 1 million. Then, over the course of the next ~10,000 years through 1800, the population gradually grew to 1 billion. And now the population has increased 7X in the past 200 years.

Many of the resources used to sustain this population, meanwhile, have not grown.
On the contrary, they've shrunk. Because we've used them up. Oil, for example. And metals. And potassium, which is used to make fertilizer, which is used to grow the food we eat.

Optimists laugh at the idea that we should be concerned about this — ever-growing population and ever-shrinking resources. Science and innovation will save us, they argue. They always have. ("Always," in this context, of course, means the past few hundred years, which is less than 1% of human history.)

Read more:

The goods will ultimately reach the market and be sold ‘for a profit’ even if this is done by ‘liquidators’. The ‘suppliers’ get liquidated as well because they are the ones that ultimately ‘eat’ the losses when something like this happens.

The ships themselves, along with the containers, are ‘parked’ in the middle of the ocean, where they will wait for business to, er, ‘pick-up’.

And if it doesn’t?

Oh fucking well!

We, as a species, can no longer afford the ‘luxury’ of maintaining a commerce system that exists to enrich the owners at the expense of its customer base.

The coming carnage will be staggering. Billions will die and large swaths of infrastructure will be destroyed (since all money is funny I won’t attach a ‘dollar value’ to ‘property destruction’, it’s all relative anyway.)

So, back to the beginning…we are going into the fourth year of the so-called ‘Great Recession’ and ‘consumer demand’ still hasn’t stopped falling.

What needs to be done about this, good citizen?

Our Libertarian friends (and oxymoron in itself as Libbies are so ‘self-sufficient’ they don’t need ‘friends’) subscribe to the notion that you don’t ‘need’ ANYTHING, you ‘want’ stuff…like breathing and water/food.

Somehow, bizarrely, this ‘wanting’ isn’t ‘enough’. Perhaps this is how they get to sleep at night. By turning ‘biological imperatives’ into (selfish) ‘desires’ they can, in good conscience, ignore them…and if you die as a result of their convictions, it’s not their problem, it’s yours…

Ironically, the ‘solution’ for the Libertarian problem is to give them precisely what they want, a community populated with ‘like-minded’ individuals!

But I digress, this is not ‘totally’ about the cancer that is Libertarianism, it’s about the ‘end result’ of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ mindset.

Um, losing $140 dollars per container will lead to the same thing that happened during the Great Depression when farmers couldn’t recover the cost of harvesting their crops, they abandoned them while millions of US children starved!

That’s what the ‘more for me’ capitalism get you!

Which is to point out (once again) that what passes for society is being seriously ‘mismanaged’.

I mix in the ‘Libertarian Philosophy’ lessons to provide you with a reason ‘why’ this highly improbable bullshit is going on. In a world (yes WORLD) ‘ruled’ by less than .01% of the population you don’t need to have a lot of Libertarians to fuck things up royally!

That’s when ‘scary’ hits you where you live, the realization that the few can and will fuck things up big-time for the rest of us!

In a nutshell, the plan is to push us into our own cesspool (that they conveniently had dug for us) then to let us kill each other off, only to ‘re-emerge’ in a ‘barbaric’ future to ‘rescue’ us from ourselves.

The, er, ‘ridiculous’ part of this ‘fantasy’ is the ‘honeymoon’ of living under ‘noble nobles’ usually lasts less than a single generation…then its back to the ‘us vs. them’ game.

They institute taxes (for us, not them) to make ‘social improvements’ like courthouses and jails (ironically) then they can’t understand why people are ‘unhappy’ (especially the victims of the ‘for profit’ justice system.)

As you can see good citizen, there are many factors in our civilization that desperately ‘need’ re-visiting…although a Libbie would say I merely ‘want’ to revisit these issues.

Which raises a curious question, how does a Libertarian, er, classify, their, er, ‘desire’ to be ‘free’? is it a want or is it a need?

I suspect it depends on whose freedom is being discussed, when it come to the freedom of others, it’s a ‘want’ but when it comes to their own it is suddenly a ‘need’, go figure!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Twofer

Greetings good citizen,

I titled this particular post ‘twofer’ because there are two important issues in this article…

Okay, that was uncalled for. (I heard the sigh and caught the eye-roll!) Which one of you muttered ‘duh’?

It’s Sunday, give it a rest!

Well, I’d call 'Duh!' an understatement considering how obvious the first point is

Owners do NOT and CAN NOT ‘create jobs’:

One reason we have so few ideas about job creation is that up until recently, the U.S. economy had been growing so well for so long that few economists spent much time studying it. (They’re trying to make up for it now. See this chart.) With no new theories, Democrats dusted off the big idea from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s view that government can create jobs by spending a lot of money. The stimulus, however, has to be borrowed, and it has to be really, truly huge — probably something like $1.5 or $2 trillion — to fill the gap between where the economy is and where it would be if everyone was spending at pre-recession levels. The goal is to goad consumers into spending again. And President Obama’s jettisoned $400 billion jobs package, hard-core Keynesians argue, is nowhere near what it would take to persuade them.

STOP!

Bonehead is discounting ‘Keynesian theory’ (which actually works ‘locally’ but let us not forget, ‘temporarily.’)

Since we no longer enjoy a ‘sealed’ economy (where money pumped into one segment of the economy stays within the same economy) the Keynesian Ideal no longer works…as well.

To pull off a Keynesian recovery, we’re talking quadrillions of dollars, essentially paying people to buy what they ordinarily wouldn’t!

You don’t have to look at this too closely to see that this is ‘unsustainable’ (but that’s capitalism for ya!)

Many Republicans follow the more fiscally conservative University of Chicago School, which argues that Keynesian stimulus can’t heal a sick economy — only time can. Chicagoans believe that economies can only truly recover on their own and that policy interventions only slow the recovery. It’s a puzzle of modern politics that Republicans have had electoral success with a policy that fundamentally asserts there is nothing the government can do to create jobs any time soon. [snip]


Keynesians and Chicagoans, however, do agree on two important points. First, in economics, unlike politics, there’s no middle ground: You can’t simultaneously cut and increase government budgets. The only shot we have at truly transforming our economy is a one-party sweep in the 2012 elections that would lead to radical legislative changes. Still, either path — lots more debt or lots of fired government workers — will only inflame more Americans.

And here we see the gaping hole in Postulate Number 2, that ‘time’ will heal a ‘saturated market’.

It will not!

The ‘boom’ followed by the ‘war of attrition’ is the ‘natural course’ for so-called ‘free markets’.

Take a look at this world. It is full of ‘Banana Republics’.

Time has NEVER brought prosperity to ANY of these economies, it only ‘temporarily’ brings prosperity to the worthless bastards that enslave/employ them!

During these ‘booms’ (where they temporarily enjoy ‘cheapest labor market’ status) the ‘misery of perpetual poverty’ is ‘lifted’ as the capitalists cheer their victims on with images of their ‘bright future’.

Only, like ‘trickle down economics’ the crumbs from the exploiters table never reach the average worker…the criminals get them first.

EMPLOYERS/OWNERS DO NOT ‘CREATE’ JOBS, ONLY MOTHER NATURE CAN DO THAT!

Where no ‘biological imperative’ exists there isn’t any ‘demand’. You may ‘like’ art but you don’t ‘need’ it.

Conversely, the air may stink but you still ‘need’ to breathe!

Why economists, er, ‘overlook’ these obvious issues remains a mystery.

Market saturation is reached when everybody (who can afford it) has what they need.

Understand what this means good citizen.

‘Growth’ will NEVER occur fast enough to support a ‘for profit’ economy! (and if it did, resources would quickly be exhausted as 'carrying capacity' was exceeded!)

Once again I have submitted a Nobel Prize winning economic theory the consistently proves itself to be true but the Nobel committee is made up of capitalists…and they only award prizes to ‘economists’ whose work ‘advances’ the cause of capitalism.

Yet another of life’s ‘Aw shit’ moments.

Lucky for me ‘all money is funny’, eh?

If we use the proven fact that only Mother Nature/biological imperative ‘creates’ jobs/work, then we MUST conclude that our society is seriously ‘mismanaged’.

Our whole ‘doctrine’ of the ‘obligation of a corporation is to its shareowners’ is in direct conflict with the purpose of civilization, which is to make the life of (all of) its members ‘full’.

The ‘conflict’ here is the upper class ‘fixation’ that you CAN’T have BOTH!

Yet any fool can see that this is a lie!

And we continue to do ‘nothing’ about it.

Except those courageous OWS’ers, they are the proverbial ‘tip of the spear’.

Crunch time is close and getting closer…

Prepare good citizen!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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