Occupy Who?

Greetings good citizen,

Monday again and the ‘nonsense markets’ are up to their usual shenanigans, mostly reflecting the ‘will’ of the One Percent.

But that isn’t the headline that caught my eye. In fact it was the opposite question that popped into my head when I saw this story in today’s AlterNet newsletter

Is the Tea Party Over?
The answer all depends on what you mean by "Tea Party."
January 12, 2013 |

Photo Credit: A.M. Stan

There's a new parlor game in your nation's capital, played by reporters and pundits who begin with a single question: Is the Tea Party dead? Endlessly entertaining to ponder, it's a question whose answer depends on your definition of the Tea Party movement.

Are you talking about the 900 grassroots Tea Party groups in 2010 whose numbers have now dwindled to 600? Or the popularity of the movement among most Americans?

Or do you measure the "Tea Party" as a marketing plan by the right wing in its 50-year quest to bend the Republican Party to its will and bring the nation to its knees?

The opening question, as C.K. Michaelson is fond of phrasing it, is ‘asked and answered’.

The Tea Party has been around for years and isn’t going anywhere. Conspicuous by its absence (and thus the title of today’s offering) is ‘Occupy Who?’

What happened to that ‘loose confederation’ of ‘concerned students’ who peered into the future and saw stuff that would have made even Orwell balk?

Did they scare themselves into submission or did those magical acronyms do the trick?

(I’ll never get a job teaching with a FBI record hanging over my head!)

Thus did the ever so tenuous ‘movement’ to protest the rule of the oligarchs ‘vanish’ in pretty much the same way it coalesced.

Which is not to say the OWS ‘participants’ have, er, ‘abandoned’ the cause, they haven’t.

What they were looking for then and what they are looking for still are ‘answers’.

The trouble with being young and knowing all the answers (as they were spoon fed to you) is you begin to realize how little you actually ‘know’ with any degree of certainty.

Everything you have been taught has six inches of ‘whitewash’ covering it, whether it needed it or not! It’s done for ‘consistency’…so it all ‘blends’.

As I age I am seeing this ‘goo’ being applied to days of my youth and the national tragedy that was Vietnam.

The misguided vendetta against already wobbly ‘communism’ was really just a ‘trial run’ for the GWOT!

If we get kids young enough, will they ‘kill on command’?

And the answer turned out to be yes.

Well, good citizen, what do you suppose ‘the answer’ to that one is?

You’re correct again, I don’t ‘know’ either BUT I’m pretty sure throwing EVERYBODY in the INTELLIGENCE community in the big house would provide a clear starting point to correct 50 years of military ‘adventurism’.

I know I am not alone in ‘theorizing’ that something went radically wrong after WWII and the introduction of the ‘nuclear age’.

Just how far would/did ‘our betters’ go towards insuring that nuclear technology didn’t fall into the hands of ‘the rabble’? [Iran anyone?]

Aren’t those the ‘battle lines’ we are seeing today? Did the ever-paranoid capitalists see their doom written in a mushroom cloud wielded by those they have oppressed?

Worse, the ‘hate’ doesn’t stop there. There are those among us who ‘believe’ the human race isn’t worthy of the (totally fictional) ‘kingdom of heaven’, and would see us all ‘eradicated’ so that nasty Jesus wouldn’t be able to ‘save’ us (allegedly) again.

Which is to opine that there are some mighty unbalanced individuals out there. (Start with ANYONE who claims to speak for ‘spirit in the sky’…then proceed to the entire crowd born with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’ stuck in just about any orifice!)

But I digress, somewhat anyway.

Where is OWS and more importantly, where are its ‘children’?

The Tea Partiers have been with us for long time under different guises, soon they will abandon their tri-corner hats and start pretending it wasn’t them at all! (In typical conservo-looney fashion!)

I, perhaps unkindly, predicted the demise of OWS when it became obvious they were as ‘rudderless’ as the alleged 99% appear to be.

They ‘identified’ the enemy easily enough…and then they sat there and did nothing. And when the cops came they fled.

Somehow I don’t think that will be the case next time but I’m just ‘thinking out loud’ here.

When the ‘second leg’ of the downturn hits and the people take to the streets, chances are good the One Percent will be A.) long gone and B.) quick to ‘appease’ the protesters with mock trials for low level offenders…

But seriously good citizen, justice, five years delayed, will not repair the economy or our badly broken society.

While the Libertarian leaning ‘progressives’ speculate on the fate of the Tea Party, the rest of us can continue forgetting the movement that wasn’t…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Elected?

Greetings good citizen,

Almost as disturbing as yesterday’s post about the ‘conservative tri-fecta’ assualt on the White House is today’s story expressing ‘guarded optimism that the party of ‘1 in 5’ can wrest control from the Democrats if THEY DON’T SCARE TOO MANY INDEPENDENTS!

For Senate Republicans, 2012 is starting a lot like 2010.

They have a shot at taking control away from Democrats as long as insurgent conservatives who are defeating the party's more establishment candidates in primaries don't frighten too many independent voters like they did two years ago.

Deb Fischer, a little-known state senator, became the latest unexpected Senate GOP nominee Tuesday, rallying late to upset the favored — and better funded — choices of both the party's mainstream and tea party establishments: Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg.

Her victory occurred just a week after tea party and other conservative groups embraced Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who scored an arguably bigger upset — knocking off six-term Sen. Richard Lugar, the Senate's longest-serving Republican.

USA today prints some pretty outrageous stuff and this is just another example of how far ‘off the rails’ the predominantly conservative media has become.

Worse, it is this very same media that tells us who won the election.

So the answer to ‘gridlock’ in Washington is more ‘Tea Partiers’, eh?

How fucked up is it good citizen that the only 30,000 member strong ‘Tea Party movement’ is (well) financed by the > One Percent?

Just who are the ‘rank and file’ members of the Tea Party movement? Why they are the denizens of the dementia unit at the local nursing home!

And yet the corporate owned media has the audacity to claim this is the wind beneath the Tea Party’s wings…people who forget what the inside of a voting booth looks like!

Worse, the last person they REMEMBER voting for is Ike. (One of the last ‘true’ Republicans.)

Which only belabors the main point, Tea Partiers are OLD (and I’m no spring chicken myself!) hardly ‘representative’ of the general public but isn’t that just how the deep pocketed like it?

Yes, good citizen, just how much bullshit will you sit still for while the corporate owned media spoon-feeds it to you?

Because we’re going to be fed shovelfuls of it between now and November, then we’ll be expected to believe it happened again.

Then it’s four more years of waiting for another…chance.

When the truth is we don’t stand a chance. The cheaters have stolen the entire process and we have only one way to deal with it and this is to reject what can politely be called ‘the chute’.

Understand we’ve gotten where we are today via ‘non-participation’ so merely ‘ignoring’ the voting booth will do us no good.

We’ve got to ‘reject’ the entire process, vigorously!

Which, of course, assumes we even get that far. Last election I predicted we wouldn’t make it that far and was proven wrong…but what the hell, I never said I was psychic.

THIS time we have even less reason to subject ourselves to ‘more of the same’ but we can already see that is all there is going to be on the, er, ‘menu’.

Greece, Italy and France have all, er, ‘rejected’ austerity but we haven’t seen any lasting results. The Greeks can’t form a government and the Italians can't arrive at a consensus and the new French Prime Minister has already started ‘back-pedaling’ on some of his campaign promises…

Which is also what happened when Obama took office.

Worse, letting Obama be re-elected sends exactly the wrong message to Wall Street (who has contributed mightily to Obama’s re-election campaign…)

So, do YOU see an ‘alternative’ here to more of the same?

No…because you aren’t supposed to.

THAT is the message the > One Percent is sending to US!

So HOW do we reject this blind chute that robs us of our choices?

Do we petition THEIR courts?

Like the faux America United ploy, who do we get to run against such a ‘stacked deck’?

Who would be, er, ‘selfless’ enough to go and stand up against a brick wall of bought and paid for opposition?

Because YOU KNOW there isn’t a chance in hell of our man occupying the White House for longer than a few months before the ‘money power’ paid to have him (and his family) assassinated.

Nope, good citizen, the ‘old way’ of doing things is gone for good!

Which is both good news and bad news.

Good because the old way was corrupt beyond belief, bad because the current supporters of the old way want to go back to the ancient way of doing things, which will really suck!

Think they are ‘insufferable’ now…just wait until we HAVE TO address them as Your Lordship or Sir!

Then we’ll all have to ask ourselves if it isn’t better to die on our feet rather than live on our knees…(and we all know ‘feet’ wins, every time!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shameless Propaganda

Greetings good citizen,

There’s a lot of primal screams and finger pointing going on over Glen Beck’s Lincoln Memorial event. It seems a whole 2,500 ‘Tea Partiers’ attended…

With ‘grassroots’ like that it’s no wonder they regularly win elections…

So what are we looking at, really? (Why are they showing us this?)

Even the ‘zombies’ that attended know they’re being painted as ‘mindless morons’.

Propaganda is intended to work on a number of levels.

What does the ‘low turnout’ tell us? That those who made the trip were ‘party operatives’, following orders. (Hell, most of them were probably having their expenses picked up by corporate!)

The level of publicity this ‘faux’ movement enjoys also tells us it is a ‘front’, a ‘distraction’.

While the main focus comes from one of the founders/backers of the…er, ‘movement’, the rest of the MSM obligingly follows along, making us wonder if there isn’t a serious deficiency in the people who decide what is and isn’t ‘newsworthy’.

(Alas! We know that they too are simply ‘following orders’…)

Which leads us to the disturbing issue of when a ‘grassroots movement’ stops being ‘populist’? Would the Tea Partiers even exist without their corporate parent(s)?

From the looks of the much publicized (albeit lightly attended) ‘rally’, I don’t think so.

What can we take away from this?

‘They’ want you to think there is a groundswell of outrage attacking ‘government overreach’.

What do conservatives ‘fear’ most?

Conservatives fear higher taxes and closer scrutiny/more government regulation.

Um, 2,500 people is hardly a ‘groundswell’…

Funny how ‘anti-tax’ California has become the poster child for ‘failed government’.

Which is to say those who were originally outraged over ‘out of control’ government spending sort of got a wake up call when the local firehouse was left unattended every other day.

Bear with me as we shift mental gears here from ‘shameless propaganda’ to ‘economic reality check’

The latest ‘outrage’ to come under assault by conservative forces is the ‘comparatively generous’ benefits paid to public sector employees.

Naturally, this is the Union’s fault.

Employers would keep prices ‘in check’ by keeping wages, er, ‘stable’…

Well, that’s the theory anyway. When the guy down the street starts raking it in ‘hand over fist’ all bets are off!

Wouldn’t do to be left in the dust! What’s the point of being rich if you can’t get richer?

Naturally, ‘somebody’s’ going to have to ‘pay’ for that…

Yeah, they’re looking at you…

But once again I digress…

What should be lost on no one is the thirty years of ‘wage stagnation’ the laboring class/paycheck peasants have suffered.

This is why the comparatively modest gains made by the public sector appear ‘outrageous’.

It is NOT a case of the public sector being ‘overpaid’ as much as the private sector has been severely ‘underpaid’…and who is responsible for that?

The very same people that brought you the “Party of No!”

NO taxes, NO regulations (NO raises and NO job security…worse, thanks to their ‘anti-tax’ bias, there’s NO-body watching your back anymore either!)

But you were down with that, right?

That’s why there were hundreds of thousands of people at the heavily advertised ‘Tea Party’ event…NOT.

But, naturally, this isn’t the half of it when it comes to ‘propaganda’…

How do you feel good citizen when, after spending trillions (that YOU are on the hook for) to ‘bail out’ the banking sector from their own cupidity, the rest of the economy is still a disaster looking for a place to happen.

We just passed the three-year mark of the event that brought the housing market to its knees. Flipper’s default on the mortgages he couldn’t find suckers to rent/take off his hands for double what he paid. This caused all MBS to become ‘suspect’, crashing the market virtually overnight…

This also (amazingly enough) caused a 4 point drop in GDP, bringing to the fore the issue of what, precisely, the GDP tells us. Obviously not what we want to know…

So, after nearly a year and a half of ‘Green Shoots’ and a truly amazing (albeit nonsensical) ‘rally’ in the stock markets, we are once again being told that the rising tide won’t lift all boats…like the last two ‘jobless recoveries.’

If you haven’t been keeping track, this is the third jobless recovery…and you understand that without jobs THERE IS NO RECOVERY!

Why has the ‘stimulus’ done zero good (unless you work for a paving contractor and even then…a few people with money in their pockets does not an economy make.

What’s wrong with this picture good citizen?

You don’t suppose we are getting FUCKED by globalization?

What you need is an accurate picture of what’s going down.

The (flaming) asshole who owns a particular segment of the market for a given product decides to move production to a low wage nation because that is what his competitors are doing.

He fires everyone that worked for him here the second his new facility is up to speed…but he doesn’t drop his prices, not here anyway…people are already used to paying what he was charging. He uses this additional profit to subsidize the penetration of new markets…

Anyway, you no longer have a job, you can still buy the product and what you notice is the price remains the same…it doesn’t go up but it doesn’t go down either.

So you have to take a ‘new’ job…but guess what? The new job doesn’t pay what the old job did so you have to, er, ‘adjust’ your spending accordingly.

Since the Eighties, you’ve been forced to repeat this process several times, losing ground each time.

If you’ve been lucky enough to secure employment (again.)

What you DON’T see is the huge ‘shrinkage’ in overall payrolls (mostly because this ‘slack’ has been taken up by ‘bonuses’ in the financial sector.)

Some of these ‘slackers’ are pulling down 10 digit bonus checks…and we aren’t including ‘cents’ here!

Does anyone still wonder why the economy is sucking pond water?

What should blow all of your minds is two years down-range and the 2009 ‘bonus pool’ was LARGER than the 2007 pool was!

How the HELL did they manage that?

Worse, everybody and their Uncle was being foreclosed upon…so where did the money come from?

It, like so many other things in our propagandized info-sphere, remains a ‘mystery’…

Is the sad truth here as simple as ‘because they could?’

So, how will the housing market ‘recover’ if the pool of qualified buyers continues to shrink?

You don’t dare pay too much for a home because the odds of ever seeing the money again are diminishing rapidly…and who’s ‘the greater fool’ now?

Same applies to our outrageously over-valued ‘equities market’. What will happen to ‘social cohesion’ when everybody learns they’ve been played for ‘chumps’?

When you have traders pulling down billion dollar bonus checks, you can see how investment involves ‘risk’…

Where do you think your money went?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner