Answers?

Greetings good citizen,

Temporarily on the back burner the mis-labeled ‘Greek debt crisis’ isn’t going anywhere.

Um, stock markets around the globe are tanking at the moment but I have little doubt the mysterious forces that defy all logic will push them back up to new highs (again)

And I will once again remind you that the >One Percent are, for the most part, only rich ‘on paper’, a really dodgy reason for share prices to rise ‘inexplicably’.

So what of the Euro-Zone? (Because we all know it’s not just the Greeks or the Mediterranean countries that are, er, ‘wiped out’.)

Take away Germany’s luxury cars and what’s left? Same thing as Japan…not much.

Worse, factor in that the US accounted for the bulk of BOTH nation’s sales and now where are you?

Ironically, building ‘luxury cars’ in China will only keep those who profited from the ‘desertification of the West’ in bad ass wheels. You’re left with a market too small to keep even a single manufacturer running.

But the ‘criminal class’ doesn’t care, if it keeps the ‘mud people’ clubbing each other over the head instead of prosecuting the people responsible for bankrupting the global economy, so much the better!

But the ‘progressives’ at Alternet keep their eye (and by extension, yours) on the ‘little picture,’ just like the Corporate Owned Media:

1. Pretend Politics. Prior to the June 17 vote, Greek voters were intimidated with a massive number of threats from Germany and elsewhere of what would happen if they didn't vote "the right way" (i.e. anybody but the "radical leftists" in Syriza who would have negotiated harder with the financiers). The conservatives barely led the vote count from their main anti-austerity rival. Yet New Democracy leader Antonis Samaris suggested in his victory speech that the results reflected a vote for "growth." There is more than a touch of Orwell at work when you can redefine the kinds of programs the Greeks will be forced to swallow as "growth policies." Germany's suggestion to cut the minimum wage, for example, will only take more money out of the pockets of regular people, which, as Keynes taught us, further weakens the economy.

But it looks like the Greek government will continue to plug away at austerity. And the "Troika" -- the three organizations that have the most power over Greece's financial future, namely the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) -- will continue to pretend that such policies will ultimately lead to a Greek economic recovery. There will be some fake advertising about Europe making it easier on the Greeks, but it will be a "something" without substance.

Have a gander at the (now old) Keynesian argument about removing income from a society.

What these fucktards fail to point out is ‘Keynesian stimulus’ only works in a ‘closed’ society! (Where those who are paid more CAN ONLY buy ‘locally made’ products.)

Take your typical US highway worker and give him an extra $100 to spend, it does the economy ZERO good if he goes out and buys a new Chinese big screen TV!

Do that and the Chinaman goes out and has steak for dinner, the people living in cardboard boxes down the street get nuthin.

Perhaps the question should be is it going to take YOU being moved into a cardboard box before YOU give a shit?

If the attitude of today’s youth is anything to go by that is precisely what its going to take…

And the Devil take the hindmost!

Um, did I mention that our civilization is crumbling right before our unbelieving eyes?

And yeah, when you move into a cardboard box it will only be a matter of days before they come to collect you to go to ‘the camp’. (This will be a place to hold you in case you entertain any ‘funny ideas’ like revenge or something equally as trite.)

Because you’re ending up in a cardboard box won’t be an ‘accident’ either…and you may even work that out for yourself…eventually.

You have become so used to being systematically cheated and robbed that you no longer find it ‘questionable’.

Well, I’ve got news for you little man. This is NOT your grandpa’s USA!

Take a good look around you and ask your Grandpa (if he’s still around) He’ll tell you straight up ‘Hell no!’

What nobody is talking about is how the ‘game of survival’ has turned into a game of ‘winners and losers’ with the self-styled ‘winners’ pushing the (sorry) ‘too stupid to live’ losers over the edge of the cliff!

What does this mean, good citizen?

The still ‘too few’ ‘winners’ are playing a desperate gamble, that they can dupe enough losers into following them so they can push the hapless but otherwise law abiding ordinary people literally to their death.

The law abiding must die if the cheats have any hope of pulling off their crime against society without being prosecuted!

So if things seem a little ‘out of whack’ to you, don’t dismiss it, you’re right!

The headlines tell you every day of the failure of the justice system on a global basis.

The unhinged (more for me!) conservo-whackos are actively blocking their own prosecution for crimes against humanity.

They have succeeded in creating a global monopoly that has ‘shattered’ the economies of the Western world while they themselves have waxed incredibly rich (on paper.)

We are left to ponder what we can do about this and the answer is:

As long as they retain control of the justice system, we can do NOTHING.

Which means we have to…what?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Only a Game

Greetings good citizen,

The markets seem poised to drop below the 10,000 mark (again,) maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but soon.

Some of the ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ is coming from the (badly mis-managed) housing sector where an extreme dearth of ‘qualified buyers’ has intensified an already disastrous situation.

Worse good citizen (I know, things are already bad enough without throwing ‘worse’ on the pile) is the recent, how the hell do you phrase this? ‘Gobbling up’ of competitors, originally touted as the ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery, properly called ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’ has produced the same ‘end results’ it always produces. Once the separate entities are ‘joined’, the ‘redundancies’ are eliminated, making the over all pie that much smaller.

Why moronic economic analysts fail to see/report the inevitable consequences of this activity remains a mystery (albeit a shallow yet opaque one.)

We are left once again to ponder just who is the moron?

Worse, we are left to ponder just who is ‘stupid’ enough to have been buying equities while the crazy train was clearly headed off a cliff?

Could the ‘obvious answer’ be as close as the nearest mirror?

Yes, good citizen, there is very little difference between forgery and counterfeiting.

Which is to say theft is theft (and yes you can still be ‘ripped off’ even if you don’t believe in ‘private property’! This blows the Libbie’s mind because they are unable to differentiate between personal property and communal property. They KNOW the difference but they CHOOSE to be ‘dense’ on the subject.)

We have once again veered off to the dark side of the hoary rock we know as capitalism. I am tempted to go Henry C K Liu on you and launch into a ‘history lesson’ about the, er, strategy behind ‘trust busting’ but it is difficult too draw proper parallels from that situation to our modern problems…although they are highly relevant.

So, against my better judgement, I’ll attempt the ‘Reader’s Digest’ version.

As you may not know, capitalism has been on the brink of collapse since it’s inception. While the market crash of 1929 is widely known a the start of the ‘Great Depression’ there was a similar severe economic upheaval shortly after the Civil War (just as the Great Depression followed WWI.)

Totally ignorant historians gloss over the true forces behind all three ‘economic collapses’. What were those forces? The ‘inevitable’ consolidation of ‘market share’ that caused all of the money in the economy to flow to the top and stay there.

What was the ‘solution’ to this economic imbalance? Trust busting! The government stepped in and broke the stranglehold of the Robber Baron’s by ‘forcing’ competition into the marketplace.

Where are those laws today? You’d have to sift through the scrap heap of history to find them and if you did find them they would be ‘irrelevant’, they are US laws that don’t apply to ‘global trade’.

Which is to point out that today’s ‘Robber Barons’ merely kicked things up to the next level…there isn’t an effective ‘international government’ to regulate them so they can engage in the highly profitable (for them, destructive for everyone else) ‘global race to the bottom, unhindered.

This may not be apparent to the average Joe in the street but our idiot politicians (obviously) lack the mental horsepower to recognize what they have failed to prevent.

Figuring things out isn’t what politicians do well.

Understand, by the 1880’s the Robber Barons has a stranglehold on ALL commerce via their control of the nation’s transportation system. Automobiles were still rich man’s toys, oil was just beginning to replace coal as the fuel of choice in Marine applications and this nation’s commerce moved on rails.

The largest ‘cost factor’ of any given item had become the cost of getting it to market. A trivial amount you think? This factor alone funneled most of the ‘free cash’ in our society into the purses of a handful of businessmen…who were already richer than they needed to be.

No irony should be lost on the fact that capitalism keeps creating exactly this situation, over an over again!

All of the money keeps flowing (and subsequently gets stuck) at the top, causing the rest of the economy to collapse!

To ‘rescue’ capitalism (from itself) the ‘trust busters’ seized the monopolies and broke their stranglehold on the nation’s economy. (Once they had competition, prices had to come down.)

This is one of the ‘beauties’ of globalization, the multi-national ‘parent’ corporation is invisible to the national regulator who only sees the shell created specifically for the host nation.

Just because they don’t ‘look’ co-joined doesn’t mean they aren’t.

Bottom line good citizen, what is the ‘objective’ of the board game Monopoly?

Your mission is to ‘bankrupt’ all of the other players.

While it is a ‘fun’ intellectual exercise, it is not particularly desirable in ‘real life’.

Yet modern business majors have no problem with executing socially dangerous/disastrous strategies to maximize their bonus pool!

It is not a ‘game’ but the fools in charge fail to recognize the ‘consequences of their actions.’

These will be the same people who will loudly proclaim they were just ‘serving the shareowners’ as the rope is slipped over their heads.

It’s ‘only a game’ until its not.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Depression...think again.

Greetings good citizen,

There is a strong tendency to write about the last idea the mind processes, as evidenced in the comment section of most posts online (mine included.)

So a wise writer should save their most meaningful ideas until the end.

Now, I’ve been thinking all day about what topic to expound upon in tonight’s missive so it’s rather a coincidence that the last article I read the intro for was yet another piece by a well known economist pooh-poohing the idea of another ‘Depression’.

“Things will be ‘bad’ but they won’t get ‘that bad”…relative to what we may inquire?

The article I perused prior to the above post provides a considerably more ‘down to earth’ assessment of our current circumstances.

The ‘last’ Great Depression’ lasted 9 years (I say ‘last’ because there were other crippling financial crises prior to 1929…but none ‘as severe’ since.)

You all understand that an ‘economic downturn’ occurs when demand falls in a hole. People ‘cut back’ on purchases while they try to get their financial house back in order.

You also understand that this is not what happened this time…this time the credit rug was pulled out from under us…we could no longer use our homes as ATM’s, dashing off payments on our credit cards with checks drawn on our home equity lines of credit.

The fact that some people had made all of their mortgage payments through their HELOC’s was certainly a worrisome development for the buyers of collateralized debt.

So worrisome that the market for such debt froze virtually ‘overnight’. The ‘party’ stopped in its tracks the second we lost the ability to ‘roll over’ our past debt into new debt.

When the ‘music’ abruptly stopped, a vast number of this nation’s population was caught ‘swimming naked’. They didn’t have sufficient income to pay their debts.

Not to point the finger at the consumer alone, corporations were also up to their eyeballs in hock due to stock manipulation, borrowing heavily to buy their own shares to boost the size of the bonuses they would pay themselves.

The ‘end result’ of this sudden return of reality was a bankrupt banking system that had loaned far more money than was ‘prudent’.

It is this development that most of us find disturbing. They never gave money away before, why now? Worse, it’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing. I wasn’t the only one muttering under my breath about how anyone (even an extended family) could afford an $800,000 dollar mortgage.

It’s a rare bird indeed that can cough up a $160,000 down payment (not that this was required when bankers went berserk.)

Which leads us to today, where such down payments ARE being required again, shrinking the pool of qualified buyers to the size of a small pet’s water bowl.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the dope dismissing the idea of another Depression is considered an expert on the Real Estate markets.

The people that could never afford the homes they bought have lost them already.
The banks have recouped the capital but now there aren’t enough buyers…this has led to an even more bizarre development, you can today show up at a real estate auction and they’ll still write you a nothing down, ARM liar’s loan!

Worse, the loan will be bought by Fannie or Freddie! (It may well also be underwritten by a TARP bank, so they are lending public funds to what boils down to be ‘flippers’, which is how this mess got started in the first place!)

This still doesn’t get us to ‘why’ and why is a real important question in the overall scheme of things.

Why did banks throw caution to the wind? No good citizen, it had nothing to do with collateralization or the phoney baloney CDS markets that have so far failed to insure anyone (but Goldman Sachs) from their ‘bad bets’.

Strangely, the answer lies in the sky high stock valuations of companies that didn’t have a product and ultimately never earned a dime.

Was this ‘blind faith’ on the part of investors or was it more indicative of too much money with no place to go?

Understand it was precisely this brand of idiocy that drove the stock markets over 13,000 when our ‘real economy’ was bleeding jobs by the millions.

The ‘explosion’ in IT jobs in the 90’s masked the simultaneous massive drain of manufacturing jobs. Now you can’t land an IT job without first qualifying for an H1B visa.

Once IT crashed, the economy shifted to ‘finance’ and GDP barely skipped a beat even though our domestic economy was entering its second decade without any significant industrial investment.

Once the finance bubble began to grow, there was a simultaneous rise in commodity prices, forcing consumers to borrow more to maintain their lifestyle.

And the banks were good and ready to lend.

So it came to pass that people were putting groceries on their credit cards, then paying them off with checks dashed off of their home equity lines of credit.

This worked out real well until the price of a Porta-Potty on a postage stamp (of land) exceeded the means of the average worker.

During the past thirty years the wealth generating capacity of this nation was being shipped off-shore to generate higher profits for the shareowners, literally hollowing out the economy while simultaneously creating a huge economic desert in the process.

Our ‘major exports’ now consist of food and raw materials. The ‘multi-nationals’ that are ‘domiciled’ here in the US no longer contribute to the ‘real’ economy and in fact earn most of their profits from the overseas sales of their overseas divisions.

Sure, some of this shit is sold here but almost none of it is ‘made here’. There is only one company I know of that produces its product here in the US from (mostly) US materials.

Which boils down to a life of privation for most of us while the bastards responsible for this enjoy lives of luxury. Thanks to their bought and paid for government.

Worse, it will soon become apparent to these selfish pigs that they have succeeded in creating a new Banana Republic that will be forced to deal most harshly with the ‘insurgent’ population.

And these patriots will soon depart to go and join their ‘wealth’ in the ‘up and coming’ economies of the Far East, leaving the rest of us to wallow in the cesspool they’ve created for us.

As I have stated many times good citizen, globalization was not done ‘for’ you, it was done ‘to’ you.

The primary thing that drove the global ‘race to the bottom’ was currency manipulation.
This is the danger of allowing the self-interested to control the value of your money.

We have been betrayed…and you know what the price of treason is.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner