Self-Defense...

Greetings good citizen,

Does anyone else find it curious that these clowns understand economics (some of the time) but do things they know will hurt (what’s left of) the economy anyway?

Let’s start with our top story from today’s NY Times:

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Experts estimate so-called budget sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, but Wall Street doesn’t expect the cuts to substantially alter corporate profits or threaten stock markets.

.7 percent of the much-modified workforce will lose their income source but this WON’T affect the ‘bottom line’ of US based corporations?

Which is to point out that 700k is in fact a much smaller percentage of ‘working aged citizens’ but the workforce isn’t measured ‘rationally’ considering the bizarre idea of if you don’t have a job you don’t count skews the whole picture…

Is Wall Street ‘right’ about this assessment?

Sadly yes. Your job was exported and you were made ‘redundant’ to the new global economy. The individual they gave your job to ‘replaced’ you as a customer as well…making you totally superfluous.

The only reason there hasn’t been blood in the streets is because our ‘globalization is good’ cheerleaders haven’t been telling YOU the whole story.

They concentrate on the ‘lower prices’ part of the story (won through lower wages/benefits) as a ‘win-win’ situation.

The part where you lose is the few hundred million competitors who (completely) took YOUR place via the heavily manipulated ‘funny money market’ (which is about to collapse!)

In this respect it is more than a little amazing to see the corporate owned media laying this fact out in a way that shows everyone what capitalism has done!

How else can the US workforce lose such a large percentage of its workforce and not affect profits an iota?

This is where the rubber meets the road good citizen, If you have never considered yourself as ‘surplus’ before…it’s time to LOOK AGAIN!

Did I not point out that the policies of the past three decades point directly towards an effort to kill off as much of the 'surplus population' as possible?

Headlines like today’s TOP STORY should leave you with NO DOUBT who the cannon is pointed at…

It points at YOU!

If you aren’t a bona-fide member of the >One Percent, you’re toast.

Like things weren’t desperate enough, it gets more interesting:

Chinese Stocks Fall on Steps to Curb Property Prices
By DAVID BARBOZA 5:13 AM ET

China’s cabinet, or State Council, said home sellers would soon pay a 20 percent capital gains tax.

You don’t suppose Chinese equity prices are being ‘propped up’ by a ‘real estate bubble’ do you?

What do you suppose is going to happen when that little episode plays itself out?

Can you say ‘cascading systemic collapse’?

I knew you could!

For our last installment of ‘belaboring the obvious’ (seems to be the day for it.):

As Hacking Against U.S. Rises, Experts Try to Pin Down Motive
By NICOLE PERLROTH, DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Motives for a cyberattack, which could range from industrial spying to disabling the power grid, remain obscure.

Given what we have already discussed, especially the part where it becomes obvious that YOU are being played for a patsy however you slice it, are YOU ‘mystified’ as to why ‘the capitalists’ are under heavy attack from the cyber-warriors?

I’d say it was ‘self-defense’.

The curious part of this unforeseen development is just how far will they let it go?

You know they’ve been looking for an ‘escape hatch’ for quite some time…could this be it?

Get out of dodge under the cover of a crippling (and likely self-inflicted) cyber attack?

We all know today’s capitalist/opportunists are a little light in the honesty department so I’d opine that it wouldn’t ‘surprise’ me.

But the corporate owned media is repeatedly astonished by such mundane occurrences as sunrise.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Distrust

Greetings good citizen,

As we continue to watch the mess our betters have made collapse around our ears we shall examine some of the shakier premises instituted by our so-called ‘leaders’.

Let’s start with today’s top headline:

TOP NEWS
Governors Push Bigger Reliance on Sales Taxes
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Ambitious experiments in collecting revenue that are taking place at the state level could shape the national approach on taxes.

left unexplained in both our history and our civics texts is the ‘rationale’ behind ‘taxation’.

Why didn’t our ‘leaders’ just do what needed doing (since ALL expense is ‘artificial’?)

Worse, the idea of ‘taxes’ was born when those who lead us were the ‘absolute master of all they surveyed’.

Since ‘master’ had already declared ‘ownership’ of the land along with everything on it or under it, why ‘tax’ the people?

Well…Big chief hand on hip didn’t have any farmers working for him, if he didn’t commandeer some food he and his army were going to starve!

This is why taxation predates money!

They ‘converted’ taxes to money as a way to put an end to the earliest form of ‘tax fraud’ submitting spoiled food as ‘tribute’.

This leads us to another fact just as ancient as taxes and that is why BIG tax fraud is never prosecuted while the tax man chases the little guy for every penny and then some! (Remember, they don’t ‘need’ this, it’s all part of the ‘control fraud’.)

Once the royals took over the money supply taxes COULD HAVE BEEN ‘done away with’ but no, because the Royals were now beholding to their ‘peers’ for their power (often having ‘gifted’ them tax authority as the price of their fealty.)

Without the history lesson, taxes are not necessary today and they haven’t been since, well, history would look a lot different if we could roll back the pages and find A SINGLE ‘wise ruler’…

They may have existed but they aren’t the ones who wrote the history books, a major indictment of our deeply flawed character, despite years of ‘preaching’ and ‘holier than thou’ mumbo-jumbo!

A character that could still be redeemed if we wanted it bad enough.

That’s the question…do we possess the determination to change our ways, thereby avoiding self-extinction?

Time will tell but from where we’re sitting today, good citizen, it’s not looking to good and ‘forever’ is a mighty long time…

Moving on…

Towns' Next Hit From Hurricane Is to Tax Revenue
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

As a result of property damage, localities hit by Hurricane Sandy cannot expect to reap the same property taxes from homeowners.

Funny how nobody sees the bear’s claws until they are ripping you to shreds. Yup, the once mighty USA now can’t seem to recover from a simple flood. For some strange reason ‘the government’ is unable to find the funding that will, er, ‘allow’ the private sector to rebuild.

We are, of course, leaving ‘private sector’ insurance companies out of this discussion. Did you know there isn’t a single ‘private sector’ insurance company that offers ‘flood insurance’?

And it’s NOT because they are prohibited from selling flood insurance, NONE of them WANT TO! (Mostly due to the chicanery in town halls across the nation that allow the well-connected to ‘twist’ the zoning ordinances to their liking for fun and profit.

Was THAT a ‘flood plain’? Who knew? Whoopsie…too bad you weren’t insured!

Some have (wisely) asked if we should even bother rebuilding storm ravaged coastal communities in light of global climate change.

I am of the opinion that we should, although we must rebuild ‘wisely’. The new structures should be ‘storm resistant’ capable of remaining watertight during flood conditions and storm surges.

But you aren’t going to see that under ‘shut up and pay me’ capitalism!

Only under an economic system based on general prosperity will the resources become available to build a world capable of withstanding the degradation heaped upon it by the selfish leaders of the past.

Moving forward one more time we find this story filed under the category of ‘it took long enough’, although ‘too little, too late’ may be more apt”

DealBook
S.E.C. Pick Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall Street
By BEN PROTESS and BENJAMIN WEISER

President Obama's choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney, suggested a resolve to hold Wall Street accountable for wrongdoing.

It’s been five six years, good citizen, and the only thing to come out of the ‘meltdown’ of the global financial system is distrust.

How many of you think this move is more than ‘symbolic’? If a prosecutor was going to change things then why didn’t they appoint one five years ago…oh, that’s right, because Bush was still in office five years ago! Well how about four years ago, when Obama first took over?

He had to ‘win the nation’s confidence’ and demonstrate he wasn’t going to do anything ‘rash’ like throw the criminals that elected him in prison! Or take away the punch bowl just when the party was starting to roar!

A world that doesn’t run on taxes, it’s about time, wouldn’t you agree good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Overdue

Greetings good citizen,

What does it say about our society when the headlines make more interesting reading than the BS stories that follow?

Which is to ask just how much ‘spin’ is too much?

You decide:

Fed Is Likely to Sustain Its Stimulus Program
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The Federal Reserve must still determine what to buy and how much to spend, and officials continue to debate the best way to describe when the agency is likely to stop buying.

Who do you suppose is ‘surprised’ to read that headline? Even a conservo-whacko would cluck their tongue and mutter ‘what did they expect?’ under their breath.

The disturbing part of this little ‘fluffball’ is what would happen to our badly broken economy if the Fed stopped pumping the banks full of free cash?

It’s almost as disturbing as what’s going to happen as a result of the Feds pumping the economy full of ‘funny money’…can you say ‘Zimbabwe’?

Not to mention that the fuckers have been at this for the past FIVE YEARS…yet it’s going to ‘sneak up on us’ overnight…that’s what ‘spin’ and failure to report the truth does to you!

But wait, there’s more!

Mortgage Crisis Presents a New Reckoning to Banks
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

A torrent of lawsuits could add significantly to billions of dollars of settlements in mortgage securities cases.

Um, geez…isn’t the real estate market making a 180 (according to the National board of Realtors?)

Oh, that’s right! Labor force participation is off 5% (which sort of spells doom for civilization itself, you can only carry so many unemployed before the wheels come flying off.)

More succinctly, who do we tell their ‘dreams’ (and any prospects for a better life) are ‘over’? We’ve been doing it to the ‘graying’ population (while enacting toothless anti-discrimination legislation…just try to get an attorney to take one of those cases!)

But now our kids are being told their race is already run and they’ve got no place to go…and no prospects either.

This most definitely won’t end well and is the result of piss poor management!

(Fortunately, A Simple Plan fixes this, providing that perfect ‘Happily Ever after ending’ we all come to expect.)

Um, there is nothing I can say that will mentally prepare you for this next piece of tripe so here goes…

Chinese Exports Slow, Even as Economy Recovers
By BETTINA WASSENER 1 minute ago

The 2.9 percent annual expansion in exports fell far short of the average of 9 percent that economists had expected, but analysts say that China avoided an economic hard landing.

Does anyone else suspect that these assholes wouldn’t recognize an ‘economic recovery’ if it were dancing naked in front of them?

Has the US press become so ‘jaded’ to economic bad news that they can no longer tell the difference…or is ‘down’ the new ‘up’?

We all know our corporate owned media has zero interest in the truth and (worse) those in public office are more interested in protecting their own backside than protecting the public from predation even THEY WILL SUFFER FROM!

Not that the media has treated ‘truth tellers’ with the respect and admiration they deserve…which brings us to the conservo-loonies and their version of the ‘truth’…which turns this whole argument on its ear!

Take a gander at the next article and tell me the global economy isn’t on life support…

Italian Political Turmoil Weighs on Markets
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO and DAVID JOLLY 6:37 AM ET

European stocks fell and borrowing costs in Italy and Spain rose Monday on fears that Italy was headed for another period of instability.

Next Steps for Italy Uncertain After Departure of Monti
Greece Extends Buyback Offer to Reach 30 Billion Euro Target 8:44 AM ET

For reasons unknown, the typical US citizen thinks the US economy will keep humming along despite what happens in Europe…which speaks volumes regarding the depth of economic ignorance among the general population…

I’m not qualified to say what the average European thinks about the tightrope their nation is walking (again due to gross mismanagement and extremes in economic imbalances.) But if I were a European I’d be shitting Twinkies…if only because we keep getting hit with the evidence that our old commerce model is FUBAR…(and you know what FUBAR means don’t you? [Fucked Up Beyond All Repair…])

Like most newspapers, The Financial Times is struggling with an industry-wide decline in print advertising revenue.

Bloomberg Weighs Making Bid for The Financial Times
By AMY CHOZICK and MICHAEL BARBARO

Michael R. Bloomberg, who has an affinity for The Financial Times, is said to be weighing the wisdom of buying the newspaper if it is put up for sale by Pearson.

The music industry is scroomed, the telecom industry is fooked, even the damned post office is threatened with extinction…

YET none of our so-called ‘leaders’ sees the need to change how we do things…so we are faced with changing even that aspect of our society!

What do we get instead? More fucking ‘reality programming’…has even one of these idiotic shows produced a single ‘star’?

Short answer…NO!

Blake Shelton, left, Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine judging a contestant on
NBC Rides ‘The Voice’ From Worst to First Place
By BILL CARTER

With its prime-time schedule in tatters, NBC bet on the singing competition show “The Voice” by adding a second weekly edition. The gamble paid off.

Yes good citizen and the next step is to proclaim a day of national mourning for our lost ‘entertainment industry’ (which seems to be going to Bollywood in case you haven’t noticed! Take a close look at the actors in the commercials.)

How fucking pathetic is it that ‘scarioke’ has become the primary source of new programming for the over-worked and underpaid housefrau?

(You see, she thinks she can sing too!)

More disturbingly we have this headline, which casts the future in a very dim light indeed…

Sundar Pichai of Google, which is hoping that its mobile Chrome browser can continue Chrome’s personal-computer success.
Browser Wars Flare Again, on Little Screens
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Shaping the browsers of the future has become a spirited struggle among the big tech companies that see the mobile world as a make-or-break business.

And that, good citizen, is news from the cutting edge of the manufacturing industry…whose browser will more people adopt (qualifying that system’s creator to receive lucrative contracts from the governments of the world to spy on its citizens?)

Is anyone STUPID enough see the millions of JOBS this relentless pursuit of, er, ‘technology’ (isn’t) going to create?

Why have you got your thumb up your ass? Because THIS is ‘state of the art’!

We went from building cars to ‘consuming’ electronics.

We are SO overdue to change operating systems but the keepers of the status quo don’t want to hear it…

So we’re going to have to ‘make them listen.’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Wicked...

Greetings good citizen,

Again it is curious to note that the (Madly inflated) Dow has dropped 600 points since this time last week and apparently this is NOT NOTEWORTHY!

Um, since the only noticeable useful information to be provided by the stock markets are as a gauge of the One Percent’s feelings regarding global affairs in general, perhaps they are supposed to be ‘sulking’ over the loss of their ‘alternate’ candidate.

An unhappiness that will certainly be as shortlived as it is undeserved.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of the public that the media plays us for stupid regarding the One Percent’s ‘relationship’ with the world’s largest purchasing organization (who regularly pays through the nose for literally EVERYTHING! )

Nation Building: Public Talk, Secret Action
In the final days of the presidential campaign, President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that it was time to reap a peace dividend as America’s wars wind down.  Nation-building here at home should, he insisted, be put on the agenda: “What we can now do is free up some resources, to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges.”

Setting aside just how slipshod or even downright disastrous Washington’s last decade of nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, the president’s proposal to rebuild roads, upgrade bridges, and retrofit the country’s electrical grid sounds eminently sensible.  After all, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives America’s infrastructure a grade of “D.”  If, in the era of the $800 billion stimulus package, $1 billion at first sounds paltry, ask the mayors of #Detroit, Belmar, New Jersey, or even New York City what that money would mean to their municipalities.  America may need $2.2 trillion in repairs and maintenance according to ASCE, but $1 billion could radically change the fortunes of many a city.

Instead, that money is flowing into the oil-rich Middle East.  Unknown to most Americans, thousands of State Department personnel, military advisors, and hired contractors remain at several large civilian bases in Iraq where nation-building projects are ongoing; hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been flowing into military construction projects in repressive Persian Gulf states like Bahrain and Qatar; and the Pentagon is expanding its construction program in Central Asia.  All of this adds up to a multifaceted project that seems at odds with the president’s rhetoric.  (The White House did not respond to TomDispatch’s repeated requests for comment.)

Just as the, er, ‘progressive media’ has predicted, the Republicans, supporters of tax cuts for the uber wealthy, are also HUGE ‘patriots’ in their support of military spending.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t distort the economy beyond recognition…but that’s one of the ‘side effects’ of predatory capitalism (over-concentration of money at the top of the social ladder, leaving wretched poverty below.)

What’s that? Still don’t think we need to replace the rules regarding money and its single useful purpose to society?

Again I will remind you that ALL money is funny…the only true cost is opportunity cost, the things we COULD HAVE DONE with those resources had they not been squandered to feather somebody’s personal nest.

In most cases a whole lot of nests would be a lot nicer than they are if those resources had been utilized in a wiser fashion.

Unfortunately, in these trying times it is difficult if not impossible to come to agreement on what constitutes ‘wisdom’.

Wise to me is outrageously stupid to a conservo-whacko! (who would rather not do anything with the resources in case the military needs them later!)

“Let society lounge in its own cesspool, the military will pay ‘top dollar’ for those resources that you want to waste on people who neither deserve or appreciate them…”

How do you deal with ‘whackos’ like that?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘holy military’ (conservo-whackos literally ‘worship’ active duty service personnel, after they’re discharged they become ‘fucking civilians’ again so ‘fuck ‘em!) was established to protect us ALL.

But again I belabor the obvious when I point out that when it comes to conservo-whackos, ‘nothing go up top’ (may as well be a block of wood.)

They think what they think because that’s what they think!

Worse, they believe what they believe because somebody else told them that how things should be…so please don’t ask them to explain it, believing it is difficult enough!

But I digress…and I sincerely apologize for parading around on my favorite hobby horse in front of you all, shamelessly.

And you have to admit, it is difficult to cement your attention on the issue of ‘austerity for you’ while we waste billions on a military that serves the interests of the One Percent, coming from someone who preaches that ALL money is ‘funny’.

But my point isn’t ‘false austerity’ nor is it a bloated, useless military. It is GROSS MIS-MANAGEMENT!

And the real kicker is there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it!

And I’m sure, by now, some of you want to slap me for reminding you AGAIN precisely how ‘powerless’ you are…

Well, I’m right here…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner