Misanthrope

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to the former day of rest decreed by the supreme being. For the religious among you, this can be a puzzling act of defiance by the legislators who claim divine provenance as the basis of all they do.

Also unhelpful is the number of ‘Captains of Industry’ who make similar claims…

With so many powerful and influential people, ALL doing ‘God’s work’ the world should be a magnificent place instead of the hell-hole it is.

Which could be to ask if the ‘god’ of the >One Percent is named Beelzebub? (Better know as Satan among the teeming masses of Christians.)

Just asking because my atheist beliefs preclude the existence of either, er, ‘fairytale’.

Which is to say it is my opinion that actions speak louder than words…and the ‘bloodsuckers’ draining the public weal while enriching themselves, it is fairly self-explanitory.

Speaking of which, let’s have a peek at our first headline of the day, where we visit a theme common to these pages…justice for sale:

In Prosecutors, Debt Collectors Find a Partner
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

In exchange for a fee, district attorneys’ offices have been allowing debt collectors to use their letterhead when going after people behind on their bills.

It is comforting to no one to know that once the human anti-exploitation law takes effect, the act of declaring someone in your debt becomes a crime punishable by exile.

So selling your office as an aid to collecting a debt would be a crime punishable by execution (on the spot.)

It’s not the law…but it should be.

Which is to opine that there are a lot of people who will have a difficult time ‘unlearning’ some very bad behavior…which makes it likely there will be a lot of people who will run afoul of the law.

Not a majority mind you, just the ‘incurably greedy’…ironically, people ‘hardwired’ to become successful under predatory capitalism.

Speaking of which, we have an article that investigates this very phenomenon in today’s NY Times:

Thiel fellowships reward young people for forgoing college to dive into practical work on ideas.
[what kind of idea will win you a Theil Fellowship?]
Connor Zwick, 19, saws a profile for his “coco controller,” a game app for smartphones
[Ah, what society ‘values’!]

Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams
By CAITLIN KELLY

Thiel Fellowships pay young people to forgo college and to plunge into real-world projects. So what has become of those who managed to snag fellowships?

I must first confess to NOT reading this article due to the limitations placed upon those who receive ‘free’ subscriptions…which is basically just the headlines…but it’s enough for this poor boy’s purposes.

Talk about a quandry…spend a fortune you don’t have to study for a career that is unlikely to exist when you graduate and spend the rest of your life paying off debt that did you zero good.

You don’t suppose this is the ‘long way around’ to get ‘America’s seed’ to swallow its own gun, do you?

You couldn’t ‘make yourself useful’ so you might as well just pack it in here and now, BEFORE those collection letters start rolling in on the DA’s stationary…

WTF!

Listen to me, the assholes that exported the economy have no use for you period. They don’t even need you as a customer.

What they DO need from you is for you not to KILL THEM before they join (your) money overseas.

Naturally, uncertainty has slowed down that process considerably:

European Bank Overhaul Meets Opposition From Finance Ministers
By JAMES KANTER

A plan by the European Union to overhaul bank supervision and help troubled lenders hit a roadblock at a meeting of finance ministers.

The kids and I were discussing exactly that situation last night. My son has the idea he wants to go to college to study the arts...(more behind the camera than in front of one.)

My daughter (a man-killer if you ever saw one) wants to raise puppies.

Somehow I think my little girl stands a far better chance at success than my son. You can do all right for yourself operating a ‘puppy mill’ and the work is its own reward.

Because in the end, the predatory world of the capitalist always ends up like this:

At a coal market in Mumbai, India. Natural resources remain tightly controlled by politicians and bureaucrats.

Scandal Poses a Riddle: Will India Ever Be Able to Tackle Corruption?
By VIKAS BAJAJ and JIM YARDLEY

A brazen brand of crony capitalism has created huge fortunes for a few, at the expense of the nation as a whole, which is falling short in energy infrastructure.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, this WILL NOT change until the system itself is changed.

A Simple Plan does precisely that…complete with the safeguards to prevent it from slipping back into the now ancient model of the many, toiling ceaselessly in wretched poverty to enrich an uncaring few.

It’s time to kick the uncaring few into the desert where they can learn for themselves what it’s like to truly be ‘self-reliant’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS.

Dear miserable greedhead,

You must be wondering why I am NOT appealing to you, the ‘children of the privileged’ to lead the charge for the salvation of mankind.

Don’t hold your breath ‘cuz it ain’t happenin’.

We have gained absolutely zero ground trading the rule of the privileged for their children’s rule despite innumerable bloody revolutions…they always end the same…because the ‘apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’.

So don’t even delude yourself into thinking you have a place in the future…you do not.

If you don’t self-destruct, you will be ‘expelled’.

Have a nice day (while it lasts.)

Gegner

Crisis

Greetings good citizen,

Sick to death of riding the media see-saw that tells you the ‘recovery’ is chugging along with one breath while reporting there are no jobs with the next?

As much as they’d love to have it both ways we all know it is one or the other…

Here are two headlines from today’s Business section:

Jobs Few, Grads Flock to Unpaid Internships
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

In a weak job market, many college graduates are taking unpaid internships that fail to deliver on their promises of experience by offering little more than menial work.

A Gateway to a Career Through Volunteering
By EILENE ZIMMERMAN

Public service work can be a gateway to careers and gives new graduates time to consider options and learn about themselves.

Geez Louise, what’s wrong with this picture?

Working for no pay sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

I completely understand the ‘paying it forward’ concept and getting a leg up on the competition by making yourself the best candidate for a position that may or may not materialize sometime in the fairly murky future…maybe.

Which assumes Mom and Dad can afford to put you up indefinitely (even putting off their own retirement) until YOU get ‘situated’.

Works for Bill and Linda…probably works for Warren as well (heck didn’t he already gift HIS kids with a billion a piece?)

Naturally the part that sticks in one’s craw here is the idea of making oneself ‘valuable’ to an employer (despite having gone hundreds of thousands of dollars into hock to learn a skill that numbnuts is unwilling to pay you full measure for!)

I mean. What’s the point? Why not just go out there and start your own venture?

But wait a minute…can’t do that can you…because there’s no such thing as ‘capitalist utopia’.

There isn’t enough ‘market share’ to go around…

Which presents us with another damning problem…the extreme ‘mismanagement’ of the income distribution.

How many workers does it take to make a single billionaire?

Because, believe it or not, there is a ‘co-relation’…dependent on what you’re selling.

Certain endeavors are incapable of creating even a single billionaire, which is why most billionaires have their fingers a many pies.

And without exception, ALL Billionaires are only billionaires ‘on paper’, it’s their stock holdings that make they, er, ‘rich’…and we know what a sham the stock market is.

Forgive the ‘tangent’ good citizen but very subject of the ‘uber wealthy’ makes my blood boil…in ‘a just society’ they wouldn’t exist at all!

They truly are ‘slavers’.

It is easy to see that very existence of the ‘privileged few’ is fostered by a corrupt justice system!

In this respect, the US has been a fraud from the outset! (Although it could be argued that the founders truly didn’t know better and it was a major victory that they resisted the traditional route of naming a new king.)

Yes, conditions were ‘different’ two and a half centuries ago and we can’t be too hard on the comparatively ignorants who established what has since devolved into a cluster-fuck.

Methinks the fact that the US is the OLDEST established government on the planet is a damning indictment in itself.

And the ‘status quo’ really doesn’t like the idea of changing horses with such an ‘enlightened’ public to ‘win over’.

Nope, won’t do at all.

It used to take days to learn what we now get instantly.

The old ‘too bad we didn’t know that last month’ worked out quite handily for the founders way back when.

Today they have to ‘buy’ silence and it has become quite expensive.

Most ‘information workers’ are kept in check with their paychecks. The editors play hardball with them and dictate, quite specifically, what they are looking for.

If a reporter want to keep their paycheck coming they will do what the guy who has the power to squash them tells them to do.

But sometimes the story ‘gets away’ from how the spin-doctors want it handled…and now we have a game of blackmail on our hands.

Not that there is a chance in hell of a story getting past the copy editors…but (and largely despite ‘syndication’) there are still other outlets who would be glad to ‘scoop’ the major players.

The problem is even those ‘fringe’ players have to be careful of what they run with.

Most of what you hear is ‘speculation’, but it is ‘sanctioned speculation’. It’s what the players WANT YOU TO KNOW (actually ‘think’.) It doesn’t have to be true, it only needs to be ‘credible’.

Thus are you always the ‘dupe’, lied to at every turn with no possibility of escape…or so they would have you think!

Rewind with me back to the beginning, good citizen.

Unpaid internships and volunteering WILL NOT solve the ‘employment crisis’ our entire civilization is faced with!

Our civilization is based on cheap and abundant energy, the problem we have now is the cheap and abundant energy of the future doesn’t have a reliable point of sale (meaning the status quo can’t go forward!)

How do you ‘extend’ the reign of the existing order?

By eliminating as much of the ‘surplus population’ as possible…

Don’t ask chuckle-head how he will sort out the surplus from the valuable, he will likely answer something as simplistic as how many commas they have next to their ‘net worth’ estimate…or whether or not they even have a Dunn & Bradstreet rating.

Stupid is as stupid does…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Conventional 'Wisdom'?

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to this edition of ‘mythbusters’.

No, this is not that popular show on the Discovery channel. This edition is brought to you by the corporate owned media, that occasionally publicly admits that a widely advertised ‘belief’ has been proven to be ‘wrong’!

First up in our in our parade of debunked ‘conventional wisdom’ is the belief that a college education will ‘guarantee’ access to a comfortable, middle class lifestyle.

Why blow all of that cash on a college education if you’re doomed to end up pushing a broom for the bulk of your (brief) productive life?

Which is to point out what we already know, if you haven’t ‘made it’ by 40, you ain’t gonna!

But don’t take my word for it:

Now evidence is emerging that the damage wrought by the sour economy is more widespread than just a few careers led astray or postponed. Even for college graduates — the people who were most protected from the slings and arrows of recession — the outlook is rather bleak.

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.

How sad is it that if you DON’T put your hard won degree to work ASAP, you will be ‘competeing’ with next year’s graduates who possess the ‘latest and greatest’ (knowledge) in your chosen field of endeavor.

You may be able to ‘underbid’ them when it comes to an open position but the fact that you weren’t hired right out of the box marks you as ‘damaged goods’, diminishing the ‘likelihood of success’.

Bringing us back to the other old truism, it isn’t WHAT you know but WHO that matters when it comes to your ‘career path’.

Once upon a time a ‘useful idiot’ with a college degree (and a generous dose of chutzpah) could ‘break in’ to the lower reaches of the highest stratum of society…but you had to be the ‘real deal’, a modern day Machiavelli if you will.

Today, not so much.

Automation and the trend of ‘renting’ brainpower on an ‘as needed’ basis serves to leave those precious openings at the ‘golden trough’ for the offspring of the ‘deserving’.

But this is not the the time or place to discuss the ‘worthiness’ of our future leaders, whose first best qualification to lead us is being ‘born to greatness’ (by virtue of being born to the criminal ‘ruling class’.)

I’ll bet you thought we got rid of that royalty bullshit, didn’t you…

Surprise!

Anyway, the second myth to get busted in today’s paper is one of those ‘what the hell are they smoking’ deals in the first place.

Which is to point out that it didn’t ‘make sense’ in the first place.

The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates. [snip]

“There’s a perception that the private sector is always going to do it more efficiently and less costly,” said Russ Van Vleet, a former co-director of the University of Utah Criminal Justice Center. “But there really isn’t much out there that says that’s correct.”

Such has been the case lately in Arizona. Despite a state law stipulating that private prisons must create “cost savings,” the state’s own data indicate that inmates in private prisons can cost as much as $1,600 more per year, while many cost about the same as they do in state-run prisons.

The first thing to hit the average person in the eye was the idea of doing ‘prison on the cheap’.

How the hell do you ‘reform’ a convict ‘on the cheap’?

Which is to ask how much ‘emphasis’ is being put on ‘reforming convicts’ (which is the actual ‘purpose’ of prison in the first place!)

Why even bother sending felons to prison if they don’t benefit from it?

Getting criminals ‘off the streets’ is a temporary solution at best. I’d posit that if the goal was to remove those unwilling to obey the rules from society that the removal process should have a more permanent methodology employed.

Naturally, those who favor ‘privatizing’ prisons are more interested in milking the public than they are in providing a ‘necessary service’.

Worse, punishment for profit isn’t even remotely ‘humane’. We already know what bloodthirsty employers do to their employees and the employees are ‘free’ to find less onerous employment, inmates are not!

Naturally, this brings us full circle to the central problem facing our civilization, that it is being run by ruthless criminals.

If we can’t keep our own house in order, do we ‘deserve’ what becomes of us?

Because that’s what THEY think!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Jobs? What jobs?

Greetings good citizen,

As is typical of the day before a long holiday weekend, the markets traded sideways for much of the day before dipping into negative territory at the close.

Not much in the news today either (on the economic front, anyway.) Just the usual psychobabble about imaginary consumer sentiment picking up and more yapping about ‘green shoots’ being in evidence all around.

There was a rather curious article that posited once again that the true cause of the ‘downturn’ was psychological. So apparently that charlatan thinks being broke is all in our heads!

Although such a mental incompetent would probably mock me for being foolish enough as to opine that anyone who wasn’t rich matters…only the attitude of the wealthy counts!

Which brings us to a bizarre question…why aren’t the rich ‘happy’?

I can come up with several reasons that have nothing to do with money and are indeed, um, ‘psychological problems’.

Which is to belabor the obvious, that anyone who thinks the ‘recession’ is purely psychological has some issues of their own that need attention.

But we knew that…so we arrive at tonight’s offering where we once again close the noose around the ‘green shoots’ crowd’s neck when we inquire, where are all of these jobs coming from?

California Led U.S. in Job Losses in April

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 22, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forty-four states lost jobs in April, led by California where employers slashed 63,700 positions, as the recession took a further toll on workers. [Understand good citizen that the US isn’t the only nation hemorrhaging jobs, we are actually behind most other ‘advanced’ nations in the job loss as percentage of workforce category…and no, this isn’t another ‘green shoot’!]

Trailing California in over-the-month job losses were Texas, where 39,500 jobs vanished; Michigan, which lost 38,400 jobs; and Ohio, where payrolls fell 25,200, according to a Labor Department report issued Friday.

California’s unemployment rate was 11 percent last month, fifth-highest in the country. Michigan’s jobless rate was the highest at 12.9 percent, followed by Oregon at 12 percent, South Carolina at 11.5 percent and Rhode Island at 11.1 percent.

As the recession eats into sales and profits, companies have laid off workers and turned to other cost-cutting measures, like holding down hours and freezing or trimming pay.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the United States has lost a net total of 5.7 million jobs. The nationwide unemployment rate now stands at 8.9 percent, a quarter-century high. [We will eventually have to ask the question nobody else is asking…where are the jobs to replace these (in many cases permanently) lost jobs going to come from?]

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and some economists hope the pace of layoffs will moderate as the recession eases its grip and probably ends later this year.

But even if employers reduce firings, the nationwide unemployment rate is expected to hit double digits by year-end. Employers will not be in any mood to ramp up hiring until they feel confident that any recovery has staying power, economists say.

In Friday’s state report, Arkansas and Montana tied for the biggest over-the-month payroll gains at 1,500 each. They were followed by Florida, where jobs increased by 1,300 —a dose of good news for a state that has been especially hard-hit by fallout from the housing collapse.

On the hiring front, North Dakota [The ‘defacto’ home of most credit card companies] again registered the nation’s lowest unemployment rate — 4 percent. It was followed by Nebraska with a 4.4 percent jobless rate, Wyoming at 4.5 percent and South Dakota with 4.8 percent. [Is there any irony in the fact that Wyoming and South Dakota are two of the least populous states in the nation? These four aren’t called ‘fly-over’ states for nothing…]

Layoffs in manufacturing, construction and retail are common threads running through the states with the highest unemployment rates. Other states, including South Carolina, Michigan and Rhode Island, are having difficulty luring new types of companies to help cushion the loss of manufacturing jobs and retraining laid-off factory workers for other kinds of employment.

Nearly 6.7 million people nationwide are drawing state unemployment insurance, the highest on records dating to 1967, the federal government reported Thursday. The crush has exhausted unemployment funds in California, New York and elsewhere, forcing them to tap the federal government for money to keep paying benefits.

While were on this rather ‘sensitive’ topic, let’s dispel a few ‘myths’ while we’re here.

After we’ve all gotten our advanced college degrees, we’re all going to work in the alternative energy sector, saving our economy while saving the planet in the process!

Currently Germany and China are the ‘leaders’ in solar and wind technology. Both of these ‘export oriented’ nations already have the necessary ‘infrastructure’ to press that advantage.

Worse, the WTO will ‘spank’ us if we attempt to close our borders to any imported technology. Still worse, our weak minded politicians aren’t of a mind to go there, even if they did (somehow) grow a pair.

So assuming we’d have to ‘compete’ for business in our own domestic energy market, this doesn’t inspire much confidence that these new ‘green collar’ jobs will pay anything approaching a ‘living wage’.

Worse, once the process is ‘perfected’, there are zero guarantees that the facilities/jobs will stay here.

Gotta be ‘competitive’ ya know!

Naturally, this stuff is expensive…if the jobs making this green technology don’t pay well, who the hell is going to buy it?

It’s the central problem facing employers across the nation (as well as around the world)…show me the customers!

It only makes sense that in a lower wage/lower price world there will be fewer customers for pretty much everything.

So where are the jobs that will replace the 6.7 million jobs that have been destroyed to date?

Worse, a majority of these jobs (and the equipment to do the job) has been ‘off-shored’, never to return.

The important thing here is to keep this issue in ‘perspective’, if you don’t have a job it’s not their problem, it’s yours!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner