Hell, Circled

Greetings good citizen,

Largely because it’s the middle of the night and I don’t have to go in tomorrow I’m taking advantage of my ‘down time’ to create a new post.

Probably how it will go for the next couple of weeks until I adjust to a ‘regular’ 3rd shift pattern.

That said there have been MANY disturbing news items I have wanted to expound upon, including the typical beating of the war drums surrounding North Korea (and how the hopelessly stupid believe we are in danger of ‘eminent attack’!)

Seriously…but the same thing happened when W was drumming up support for an invasion of Afghanistan, followed thirty days later by a totally irrational invasion of Iraq!)

Which is to return to our main theme…the one where I belabor the obvious and point out the destruction of our civilization by the hopelessly greedy (and stupid.)

But let’s see what the ‘guardians of truth and justice’ have for us?

We’re One Big Team, So Run Those Stairs
By JED LIPINSKI
CrossFit, the workout fitness program, is viewed by some companies as a way to improve worker production and morale.

Yes siree, you are a ‘member of the team’ until it becomes more profitable to ship your job to Timbuktu (where your replacement will do what you do for two cents A DAY!)

Lying corporate America keeps insisting that they ‘value’ their employees until they don’t.

The rats have no loyalty.

Your circumstances hinge largely on their inability to replace you with a competent meat puppet that they will also tell what a valued member of the ‘team’ they are!

As long as stupid keeps getting the work out the door, they will remain a ‘valued member of the team’.

But if they start angling for a better, fairer deal, suddenly they are a ‘liability’.

Although complaining about working conditions will also result in ‘early termination’:

As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester
By IAN URBINA
OSHA, the watchdog agency that many Americans love to hate and industry often faults as overzealous, has largely ignored long-term threats.
Video: A Dangerous Trade
Documents: Investigating a Chemical’s Hazards

Why do workers ‘hate’ OSHA? Because the typical capitalist will terminate employees who complain about unsafe working conditions, often telling the media those workers were ‘unwilling to work’.

In our ‘desperation’ to hold on to our paycheck, many people will throw their would be savior under the bus, ultimately aiding no one.

It’s not until the ‘true blue’ employee loses an appendage and gets terminated for being disabled that they learn who their real ‘friend’ was.

But hey, we have bigger things to worry about:

Oil Pipeline Ruptures in Arkansas
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ 11:16 PM ET
An Exxon Mobil crude oil pipeline ruptured near Mayflower, Ark., spilling as many as 10,000 barrels of oil, the company said.

Somehow I don’t think it is particularly helpful to point out that a barrel of oil only has 33 gallons in it. When it’s 33 gallons of black guk it still mighty nasty business.

But locally two water department employees were terminated for ‘dressing’ deer they had shot at one of the town wells.

Now the paper is saying the town may have to pay a fine for ‘contaminating’ the drinking water along with not reporting the incident to the state environmental protection agency.

MORE LUDICROUS is the fact that the town wells are over 1,500 FEET deep…long way for deer blood to ‘seep’ into a portion of the town’s water supply (and the well in question is just down the street from where I live. So theoretically I’d be drinking ‘contaminated water’.

Mind you, Exxon Mobil probably WON’T be fined for spilling crude oil in Arkansas but two town employees who happened to take advantage of a public water source got fired for letting deer blood run 1,500 feet above the town water supply!

You know what the chances are of that blood even reaching the water table, pretty much nil!

Soil bacteria alone will gobble that stuff up long before it even begins to get under the earth.

So why are our environmental police so stupid?

Oh, that’s right, they don’t have to know anything about biology! All they need to know is law, which is written by equally as ignorant legislators!

Did I mention we have a problem with the ‘maladministration’ of our society?

Which probably explains why this myth persists:

Freed From Its Cage, the Gentler Robot
By ANNE EISENBERG
New factory robots, designed to work and play well with others, no longer have to be fenced in to protect workers from accidents.

Let’s leave aside the reality that robots don’t consume the products they make. Once again the ‘trend’ (driven by the greedy and short-sighted capitalist) is towards ‘total automation’.

You no longer have to keep robots isolated if you eliminate humans from the factory altogether!

Thus do we continue to read ‘happy talk’ about robots learning to operate ‘safely’ around their human counterparts.

How many robots will the capitalists need when nobody has a job anymore?

(Or the ONLY jobs left are in healthcare and law enforcement…) It’s a bit too nightmarish to even contemplate a healthcare environment utterly devoid of humans, sort of re-defines the innermost circle of hell, doesn’t it?

It certainly redefines being trapped with no way out.

And this is from Saturday’s NY Times.

How bad does it need to get good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tragedy

Greetings good citizen,

The cheats on Wall Street are ‘taking a break’ from pushing the Dow (which is mostly bank dominated) higher.

We are supposed to ‘assume’ this condition is natural when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Dow could be pegged at 20,000 TOMORROW and NOTHING would change except the one percent would be richer and YOU’D be poorer…on paper of course.

How sad is it that the ‘back of the envelope’ is ‘as good as it gets’ for most of us?

Once again we must ask ourselves how did we come to this place?

Let’s have a look at our predatory commerce system:

5 Ways Privatization Is Poisoning America
We all live better lives when the common good is not for sale.
March 10, 2013 |

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

The free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said "We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money."

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

Long recognized as an elementary evil, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the very reason we have/establish government.

How sad is it good citizen that the people who control the printing presses keep selling the rest of us out?

What is the ‘inevitable outcome’ of profits before people? You’ve been living in it’s ‘death spiral’ for decades.

Why can’t Japan ‘recover’ from being robbed by its corrupt?

Predation, plain and simple.

Those who are robbing you blind ‘own’ the government that was established to ‘protect’ you.

This is the thing ‘treason’ (and it’s terrible punishment) are made from.

So…where is our White Knight? Who will rescue us from the nasty, evil predators?

Historically it has been the ‘professional class’ that has led and nurtured revolutions but our better educated rabble now know there is barely a nickle’s worth of difference between the predators and their well paid lackeys.

Why these ‘stupid people’ continue to replace the system they’re rescuing us from with a virtually identical one defies comprehension.

I suspect a ‘lack of imagination’ has nothing to do with it.

In many ways a revolt can be like hitting the lottery for the sublimely mentally deficient.

Which is a big reason why so many revolts are ‘stillborn’ technically dead before they start.

But people are stupid and continue to believe the funny money they’re bought off with is actually worth something more than it really is.

Worse, a reliance on scrip that has no actual value can be a powerful weapon in the, er, ‘wrong hands’.

(Or so argue the gold bugs/hard money crowd.)

Read my lips, ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

When taken in this context ‘the tragedy of the commons’ is put in its proper perspective.

Usually followed by the, er, ‘swift sword of justice’ cutting down those who would cheat you out of your just share.

Those who would privatize the commons for their own benefit.

How tragic is it good citizen that besides suspending rights you have enjoyed for 900 years our bought and paid for ‘Supreme Court’ has also re-purposed commerce to ‘profit’ the shareowner at society’s expense?

Which is to ask why is there no revolt? (Are the lackeys so well paid this time or have they become so stupid as to be blind to the danger our current course represents to themselves as well as their ‘masters’?

A truly troubling question good citizen.

It can’t be because we’re afraid of dying, those who rob us with impunity have taken everything worth living for!

Government, it’s supposed to work FOR YOU, not for THEM!

Just another painfully obvious point I felt compelled to belabor.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dirty (Republican) Deeds

Greetings good citizen,

Most of us (now graybeards) draw a straight line from our current troubles to the ‘Imperial Presidency’ of ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon and his hapless follow-up act, Ronnie Reagan (a lifelong ‘paid corporate shill’.)

What disturbs us (graybeards) most is the ignorance surrounding the criminal activities of both administrations

The corporate owned media still lionizes both men as ‘great (albeit misunderstood) leaders’ serving during ‘difficult times.’

But the evidence shows otherwise:

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

What do you suppose happened to that (and countless other) ‘files’, good citizen?

Everybody knows the rubric of ‘National Security’ is regularly abused to shield the guilty from prosecution.

Can you think of a more bullet-proof office than that of the presidency?

When your justice system breaks down to the point of protecting criminal wrongdoing as a subset of guarding the faux‘honor’ of elected office, then your justice system is indeed FUBAR.

When national security trumps justice you find yourself living in an ‘anything goes’ society…where the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of man.

I don’t think I sit on my ‘high horse’ when I opine that most of us want no part of an unjust society.

Especially one that favors the criminal element so brazenly (in the interests of commerce [and against the interests of our species!])

While our first ‘anecdote’ points to Nixon’s mischief as ‘commander in chief’ even before he was one, let’s look at how Saint Ronnie’s ‘handlers’ manipulated the voting public to elect an ‘unlikely’ candidate:

At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980, i.e., whether Reagan’s campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981

If you didn’t live through these times and these particular incidents, you are likely ignorant of them. Worse, it plainly shows evidence that ‘somebody’ had control they shouldn’t have had BEFORE either (hand-picked meat puppet) was elected.

(In case any of you were ‘wondering’ where I come up with some of my crazier sounding ideas! [Like the entrenched wealthy ‘conspiring’ to kill off as many of us as they can get away with.] We’re dealing with some first class, above the law ‘sickos’ here good citizen!)

But the corporate owned media maintains its silence regarding this conspiracy that hides ‘in plain sight.’

If we don’t acknowledge it, it doesn’t exist.

Which is to ask, do you really need to be told (by Oprah) that the bear poops in the woods?

With that chilling thought I leave you to yours...

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Amazing!

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow is regaining yesterday’s losses (if only because they can) which is to point out the obvious, that NOTHING has been done to ‘fix’ the economy…although (apparently) YOU aren’t supposed to be ‘concerned’ about that…

Like my ‘economic desert’ scenario, a ‘broken economy’ spells disaster for the residents thereof.

Currently the global financial system is on central bank life support and is (thanks to ‘creative accounting’) doing much better than the ‘real economy’ as this article demonstrates:

U.S. Banks in 2012 Post Highest Profits Since '06 – FDIC
By REUTERS
Published: February 26, 2013 at 11:54 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. banking industry in 2012 recorded its highest earnings since before the 2007-2009 financial crisis, according to data released on Tuesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The FDIC said the industry's full-year earnings were the second-highest on record at $141.3 billion, an increase over 2011 of $22.9 billion, or 19.3 percent. But the head of the agency said growth would probably slow this year, and warned that bank profits could dive if Congress does not reach a federal budget agreement that prevents automatic cuts.

Bank earnings peaked in 2006 at $145.2 billion.

Much of the earnings growth in 2012 came from banks reducing the amount they set aside in case of losses on loans, the FDIC said. Banks also saw gains on loan sales and higher servicing income.

"While there is still room for further income growth, we don't expect the pace of earnings growth to continue at these levels," FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said.

Um, se habla ‘creative accounting’?

Why does it look to me like the predatory banks are looting the public treasury?

Facts on the ground tell us that banks should be shedding people like mad, they don’t have the ‘income’ to support the people they have because a vast majority of their customer base is a serious credit risk.

Again we bash into the solid fact that fifty percent of US families are on some kind of food assistance program…why is that? Because cheapskate capitalist employers won’t pay their people enough to buy food AND keep a roof over their heads!

[Have to ‘stay competitive’ you know!]

Followed by, “What does how big a bonus I got have to do with anything?”

Same thing in the financial sector…how can these criminals reward themselves for screwing up the global financial system beyond repair?

We’re back to the need to re-define why you get a bonus!

(Because these guys clearly don’t understand the concept.)

Worse, they seem to think we don’t either…

The world clearly isn’t falling apart (Because all money is Funny) but that’s the ONLY reason. (Otherwise we’d be up to our buttocks in reptiles right now!)

Let me explain it a bit more clearly…because you won’t hear this from one of their stooges or anyone else who can get within a thousand miles of a major media outlet.

The banking ‘business model’ is broken!

There aren’t enough customers to keep these monsters afloat.

ALL of the banks (around the entire world) went bust in December 2007.

And until the global economy is re-balanced, they’re NEVER going to be profitable again!

It’s simply not there to be had!

Interest rates locked at Zero are ‘self-explanitory’. There is no money in banking…So, how did the banks have one of their best years since the crash?

Can you say ‘Loot’?

Not that this really matters…what you SHOULD be losing sleep over is that sudden stop that will occur when they decide to ‘derail’ our existing civilization.

(And they’ll do this to throw the law off of their trail.)

Do we have weeks or days remaining good citizen?

The nasty problem here is even they don’t know.

You have to keep your eyes on the exits and even then there will be about a jillion ‘false starts’.

Like the market going up and down for no discernable reason.

I preach to the choir when I point out that our civilization is already ruined.

I was watching the run up to WWII on the Military channel last night and experienced serious ‘déjà vu’.

Nobody dares prosecute the criminals for fear of what they’ll do…

Well good citizen, they’ve already bankrupted us…And A Simple Plan can stop that in its tracks (because it only deals in real assets in real time, none of this derivative nonsense.)

But the decision to change from today’s predatory system to tomorrows equitable one remains to be made…

And guess who gets to make that choice?

YOU!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Workie-workie!

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s topic is the world of work. While some, er, ‘freethinkers’ argue that work is unnecessary, they can’t argue their way around that fact that if nobody works, nothing gets done.

And you’d be amazed at how few people want to participate in ‘productive ventures’ (at least on a ‘trade basis’.)

They’d rather ‘decorate’ rocks and trade those for food than do the actual hard work of tilling the soil and growing crops or tending to the needs of the livestock because if someone doesn’t do either, there won’t BE any.

But our ‘why workers’ point to nature shows like ‘Yukon men’ or ‘Alaska the last frontier’ and their ‘self-sufficient’ lifestyle and claim that’s how it should be.

When the shows themselves focus on how as the population rises, it becomes harder and harder to bag enough game to make it through the 8 month long winters.

Yet each episode demonstrates how Mother Nature herself is a cruel taskmaster. You’ve only got so much time to get the job done and if you don’t finish or if things are a little ahead of schedule, too bad.

Which is to say every one of our ‘frontiersmen’ works their ass off just to survive.

Mind you, nobody ‘pays’ them to do what they do. (Well, the TV crew must pay ‘em something but there isn’t anyplace up there to buy the stuff you need.) So the money buys fuel, ammo and tools like ATV’s, new boats and bigger guns.

Most of us grew up in a society that doesn’t make us work ‘hard’ (Compared to what our ancestors had to do to survive.)

The miracle that is ‘money’ enables us to live comfortably without having to do EVERY LITTLE THING for ourselves.

So it is that we have encountered a different, er, ‘situation’ than the one our ancestors faced…although, truth be told, this situation is far from ‘new’.

Now we have more workers than work…what a happy situation because now everyone can do a smaller chunk of the task at hand and everybody wins more ‘free time’.

But that’s not how it works under (more for me) capitalism.

Worse, more for me capitalism is extremely wasteful…now that the population is approaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet, don’t you think it’s time we start addressing the inefficiencies and inequities of the ‘more for me’ mindset?

Yes, ‘need’ drives the entire picture…and it’s what keeps the ‘more for me’ crowd living in the lap of luxury.

How, er, ‘frightening’ is it that the already filthy rich don’t need but a fraction of the wealth they have gouged out of the rest of us?

It SHOULD scare you spitless.

Because if money were being used ‘correctly’ the more for me bunch wouldn’t have the lock they have on our species survival they have now.

The very fact that the uber wealthy exist demonstrates the main flaw in capitalism.

Sadder perhaps is the >One Percent’s ‘legalization’ of their unjustified avarice.

When the giants of our society had the Supreme court (which they own, lock stock and barrel!) declare that the purpose of commerce was to enrich its owners!

Whereas the original and most commonly accepted definition of the purpose of commerce is to serve society’s needs ‘at a reasonable profit’.

How much trouble do you think ‘we’ (as a species) are in considering the conservo-whackos did away with the anti usury laws? (Never mind stripping you of your right to due process!)

Um, boys and girls, the >One Percent have declared ‘open season’ on us and there isn’t a darn thing we can do about it! (I was going to say they declared war upon us but that would imply we have the ability to fight back…which we don’t!)

The real riddle is what these weasels are going to tell our sons and daughters when they order them to open fire on us?

Now here’ s a scary thought. Considering the basic theme of most video games, how many of ‘em will even hesitate?

We aren’t ‘The Family of Man’. We are a collection of (pseudo) ‘rugged individuals’ a la John Wayne or Captain Kirk.

And guess who has fed our children THAT particular illusion?

While we did nothing to stop them.

Which is to point out good citizen that there are some real ‘monsters’ loose at the top of our society.

And they should be made to PAY for their CRIMES.

Illegal and immoral are two separate concepts and you can only wonder why…because immoral SHOULD BE illegal. Yet these sicko’s are going to use the ‘I’ve done nothing illegal’ defense as they stand amidst the smoking landscape that their actions turned to scorched earth.

Then, the real coup de grace, they’re going to ‘apologize’.

And we will respond with ‘take a hike mac!’

So let’s recap, shall we?

We have a world that we have ‘tamed’ and COULD BE working a lot less than we currently do…but we have been saddled with a system of commerce that doesn’t need all of the available workers.

Now the, er, ‘beneficiaries’ of this twisted system are trying to keep things from changing, which HAS RESULTED in the collapse of the commerce system.

(In case it looks like I went screaming off the reservation towards the end there…I did not.)

The question, good citizen, as always, is ‘what are we going to do about it?’

Anyway,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Revolting

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though the only people visiting the new page are the folks who ensure you’re complying with the terms of service…which doesn’t bother me at all.

Truth be told I ‘catch’ myself (when I’m composing) all the time. The angst that I let flow freely behind the firewall doesn’t like being ‘redirected’ into, er; ‘less provocative’ terms.

However, the time has come (and for my longtime readers I add ‘once again’) to discuss the ‘purpose’ behind this blog.

While I am very ‘opinionated’, I don’t try to tell you what to think. I feel I have my work cut out just trying to provide you with things to think about.

So the focus here is not ‘what to think’ but merely to think…as in ‘at all’.

One of the obstacles I encountered in trying to popularize A Simple Plan was nobody felt the need to learn a better way of doing things. Their parents taught them what to do and they’d teach their kids, worked for them and it will work (sort of) for you.

No irony should be lost on the fact that YOU dear reader, are the first generation (since the founding of this nation) that this strategy WILL NOT work for.

You CAN’T tell your kids what your parents told YOU because THIS ISN’T THAT WORLD ANYMORE!

The now famous “Go along to get along” advice is more likely to get your children killed than to help them move ahead in life.

What advice DO YOU give your children these days?

Sorry, can’t help you out because if WE don’t derail this crazy train there won’t be anything left to save!

Sort of brings us full circle to the need to discuss ‘alternatives’ to the way things get done now.

Your parents didn’t have to worry about such things, survivors of the Great Depression and TWO ‘wars to end all wars’; they know what worked and how to make the world ‘tick’.

But that’s not the world their kids have left for yours.

The New Deal planted a rather insidious seed in the minds of the privileged few…and the fact that they nearly destroyed the world’s economy AND THEY WEREN’T PUNISHED FOR IT wasn’t lost on these people born with a sense of entitlement.

Oh how their parents ‘suffered’ paying those workers all of that money they would have had to pay the tax man! (And that’s the only reason companies ‘competed’ for help…they don’t do it in Banana Republics because the government doesn’t dare tax them the way the New Deal Democrats taxed the Wall Streeters!)

Now it’s a hundred years later and we’re right back where it all began! Only this time there is nobody on the side of the downtrodden and destitute.

Because the One Percent has added a ‘lead lining’ to the go along to get along canard. You either do what they tell you or they’ll find somebody who will (and YOU’LL never work in this town again! A ‘hangover’ from the old days.)

While this tactic is the main ingredient opposing armies are made of; nobody has the backing to field the force these battalions of the ‘dispossessed’ can bring to bear.

Thus do the ‘entitled’ continue to press their advantage.

While whole armies of the dazed and confused remain clueless as to what to do about it.

Because nobody remembers that our government was designed by the very same ‘entitled people’ we are unable to wrest control from now.

Not that most of you need any convincing that we have some dangerous if not downright ‘feral’ people in charge of, well, the world as it turns out right now.

If we, the governed, don’t clip their wings (and soon) we will be unable to.

Although the ‘bad news’ is we don’t have the tools to clip their wings with…and you’d think the people who had just fought a bloody revolution would have thought about that but no. The ones who get to decide what comes next get to toss out any ‘limitations’ on their ambitions!

Thus do we have an empty toolbox.

We shouldn’t feel bad, everybody else has a system modeled after ours…so they’re tool-less to!

Which brings us to the topic of what are we fighting for and what can we ‘replace’ the current broken system with?

Because if we only change who’s in charge, our kids will find themselves faced with the same problems we face today.

It’s not ‘who’ runs thing but HOW THEY ARE RUN that MUST BE changed!

And that’s what the next series of posts will touch upon, an ‘alternative’ to how things are currently done.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Counsel

Greetings good citizen,

Only eleven more shopping days until the end of the world as we know it! While the stations owned by Fox News are still trying to make a story about bit of cosmic weirdness left behind by a long defunct civilization, others have written off the doomsday predictions when tangible proof of inevitable doom failed to materialize over the summer.

Not that said ‘doom’ isn’t going to happen! We are hurtling towards a disaster that can’t be seen with a telescope or measured with a seismograph yet it will destroy our civilization just as surely as it has destroyed every (human) society before ours.

Which is to point out that even the Mayan predictions of eminent doom are expected to be ‘survivable’, the question, as always is what will rise from the ashes?

And for some fucked up reason, people keep letting the ‘opportunists’ take the reins…and down the same old path we run!

Um, since we are at the tail end of what passes for ‘civil society’ the following is an incomplete picture of how we got to where we are:

The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one hour?

1. The super-rich are stealing our fair share of productivity. The U.S. economy is enormously productive. Since 1947, the amount of goods and services we produce per hour of labor has risen by nearly 300 percent. That's because as a nation, we blend together a potent mix of effort, skills, technology and organizational capacities.

2. Americans really want a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. First, virtually all Americans greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in our economy today. They had no idea how extreme the U.S. wealth distribution really is -- which goes to show you what a good job the super-rich have done in mis-educating us.

Second, when asked to construct an ideal distribution of income, 92 percent of Americans preferred radically more equality – on a par with the social democratic state of Sweden! What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the respondent was a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wanted more economic fairness.

3. Everything we hear about government debt is wrong. Right now, the biggest target of public mis-education is the government debt debate. And the biggest spender on the mis-education of the American public is billionaire Pete Peterson.

4. We are under-taxed, not over-taxed. The super-rich want us to believe that taxes are too high and that those taxes are harming job creation and economic growth. It's a fabrication.

5. Government jobs are just as good as private sector jobs. Another major con job concerns the attack on public employees. The greedy rich are trying to pit public and private sector workers against each other in large part because public employees still seem to have benefits the rest of us have lost (and they have unions…

6. Wall Street needs to be shrunk (until we can drown it in a bathtub.) The function of finance is simple: moving our savings into productive investments. By doing so, money supposedly moves to where it will do the most good for our economy. This function is considered so simple that most economics textbooks ignore Wall Street entirely.

Does anyone else see the irony in the use of Grover Norquist’s famous quip about government being applied by the writer, who is a champion of ‘saving’ predatory capitalism from the scrap yard of history (where it belongs.)

Perhaps not and perhaps it is this same blindness to hypocrisy that dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But I digress.

These bullet points do not constitute the whole article and my removing them from the main body of the text has likely altered their intended meaning.

Suits me fine, maybe not so much if we were to ask the writer…

Whatever.

The main thrust of this article is mis-information that is foist upon the rest of us by a ‘for profit’ media (which we need to do away with ASAP!)

Here’s a case where we see the problem but are powerless to fix it because of our ‘attachment’ to money.

It’s going to be more fucked up when we’re all starving to death thanks to ‘insufficient funds’ (which actually has nothing to do with nothing…except perhaps gross mismanagement.)

Which brings us full circle with the selective blindness thing, that which we see but choose to ‘ignore’.

Casting into doubt the assertion that ‘ignorance can be fixed’ (sometimes people don’t want to be ‘cured’.)

How about you good citizen? You are wise enough to seek counsel beyond your peer group…what you do with that counsel is entirely up to you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Commemorating a lost cause...

Greetings good citizen,

Um, after the Dow tacked on 225 totally irrational points after the Fed announced the commencement of QE3 (Ah, but for the days when QE was short for Queen Elizabeth and the QE2 was a luxury ocean liner!)

But I’m showing my age, am I not? (Or perhaps we’re all getting a little long in the tooth, don’t have a good handle on the demographics of my audience.)

Anyway, back to the stock market…which is tanking as we write this. Oddly, in a microsm of the larger world the Eastern markets did…okay (bit of an overstatement as they traded sideways throughout the first trading session of the week.)

The West went into the tank the minute Europe came online and has (thus far) stayed there…but it’s still early and we all know that movement of the markets doesn’t have to make sense.

As last weeks 225 point rise of the Dow proves.

Just as our lead story for the day informs us:

Earnings in United States Are Beginning to Feel a Pinch
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

The estimated drop in corporate profits removes what had been an economic bright spot in an otherwise cloudy picture.

For Spain, Rising Risk in Discord

Equally as, er, ‘curious’ is the sudden re-appearance of the Occupy movement…like a ‘flashback’ from last year.

They are planning on, er, ‘commemorating’ last year’s (mostly fruitless) occupation of a space four or five blocks from Wall Street.

Just as the original occupation accomplished nothing, it is tough to figure out what the point is of commemorating an event that ended with their being on the receiving end of a bum’s rush administered by Bloomberg’s NYPD.

Was the whole point to ‘do nothing’ (besides grumble about how ‘unfair’ the system was) and to protest their being duped by a system of commerce that has no need for them?

Welcome to the USA kiddos! It’s all fun and games until it’s not!

If you have eight minutes to kill you might want to have a gander at this piece for a ‘gloves off look’ at our current geo-political situation provided by Chris Hedges.

I’ve never seen anyone paint it quite as clearly as he does here…so it’s worth the trip.

(Talk about knocking the scales off your eyes!)

So what was the ‘occupy’ movement all about? It seems nobody knows.

More the pity because all of the ‘heavy hitters’ (also known as the ‘serious people’) got behind the Occupy movement figuring it was the next big thing.

Well, thanks to the corporate owned media, the Occupy movement ‘served its purpose' (resistance is futile) and was ‘extinguished’ only to be resurrected again just before the elections to rile up the Republican base.

Not that there are enough of them to elect anybody.

Funny how the pundits keep waffling between a deeply divided populace and one that doesn’t give a shit so the ‘marginal few’ decide for the rest.

You don’t need to conduct a poll to figure out that the current situation is ‘untenable’ and won’t be tolerated much longer.

The old system doesn’t work…so the question now is what to replace the old system with?

I’m ‘lobbying’ for Direct Democracy where we all vote directly on the laws we ALL must live under. (It is utter bullshit that members of Congress can and do ‘exempt’ themselves from the laws they make.)

And truth be told good citizen there aren’t a whole lot of ‘other choices’ out there.

In fact most of the other choices involve having someone else decide what THEY like and your having to lump it…(sort of like now.)

And only the insane conservo-loonies think now is ‘okay’.

But what do you want from people who are cool with being told what to think?

It’s the same mindset the tolerated slavery for thousands of years.

But back to our (neglected) original headline…

Sorry good citizen, it’s easy to sidetrack a freight train full of ideas, all busting to see daylight at the same time!
Thus do I digress (all the time!)

Who among you is surprised to see US corporate profits ‘slipping’?

If so, then how long have you been a stock analyst? (Those guys are always ‘surprised’…by fake numbers no less!)

For the past ten years I have been pointing to the Riders of the Apocalypse closing in on our civilization.

The part that should be bumming you out is they have arrived and they are just outside the gate.

It’s gonna be an ‘interesting winter’ good citizen, mark my words.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Heap

Greetings good citizen,

I haven’t ‘cursed’ you with a long post in quite a while…(although some of you would opine my ‘standard’ three pagers are two pages too long, but to each their own.)

Anyway, there are a lot of headlines in the left-hand column of today’s business section in the NY Times meaning you can consider this your ‘long post’ alert (if you find such things off-putting.)

We begin where I always like to begin, with a quick word about the current state of the nonsense market:

Wall Street Flat in Choppy Trading
By REUTERS 58 minutes ago

Investors awaited clarity on media reports that the European Central Bank would, with broad support from its council members, unveil an unlimited, sterilized program of bond purchases.

“Investors await clarity…”

The part that’s disturbing is how long they have waited (since the caveman days?) There is ‘opportunity in turmoil’ and half of the time the bastards are muddying the waters themselves, as, with sufficient assets, it is often simpler/safer to just create your own 'opportunities'.

But you NEED ‘the herd’ to follow your lead otherwise you’ll find yourself ‘foist by your own petard’.

But I digress.

It seems Mr. Market is wrestling over the difference between a fox and a dog again. (Meaning they’ve run out of dogs the can be made to appear ‘foxlike’ which has left them to defend their earlier commitments to dogs they swore were foxes…after the luster of newness has worn off.)

Worse, after having built up some of those stocks, and watching (smirking) as those stocks bled ‘value’ copiously (because the build up had zero basis in reality.)

Sadly, this speaks more to the wasteland that investing has become than to the ‘stupidity of investors’.

Too much predation has driven opportunity from the markets.

But this is one of those three things people hate, cameras, mirrors and the truth.

If you want some market advice you’re in the wrong place, I am not in the market and recommend that you follow my lead.

Stop your 401k TODAY and pocket the cash you were investing. Take what has accumulated and invest it in firearms and non-perishable foods (that you like.)

We are rapidly approaching the day when the buck in your pocket will be worthless and if you’ve got nothing to trade you’re gonna be forced to steal what you need, simple as that.

If you don’t have the chutzpah to ‘help yourself’ you’re gonna have a miserable time of it.

Which sort of casts the next headline in a curious light:

Competitiveness Gap Widening in Europe, Study Finds
By STEPHEN CASTLE 5:48 AM ET

A World Economic Forum survey of 144 countries noted that a growing north-south divide was one of the factors at the heart of the continuing euro zone crisis.

I have proven beyond a doubt that the ‘competitiveness gap’ is a work of whole fiction. The whole idea of ‘the cheaper there’ is merely a construct of the (criminal) financial sector.

Why is the ‘divide’ North-South?’

Where is the money? (In the North.)

Why is the South ‘less competitive’?

Because money’s ‘masters’ are in the North as well!

It’s not like you don’t know this, what you need is for someone to ‘confirm’ what you have long suspected…just like the stolen elections.

How long have you ‘suspected’ that the corporate owned media has been using the growing ranks of ‘uncommitted’ voters to justify announcing extremely unlikely outcomes?

That worthless twit Mr. Flat Earth was on his (billionaire) soapbox today calling the election in Mitt’s favor, precisely because of the growing number of ‘uncommitted’ voters.

But again, I digress.

Just ‘clipped’ a couple of headlines because they weren’t particularly relevant (I could have made them so but we’d have had to expend a copious amount of precious electrons and I just couldn’t justify it.

Pressing on:

President of Tokyo Electric Urges Nuclear Future
By HIROKO TABUCHI 7:50 AM ET

Japan would be punished with sky-high energy prices and would see its greenhouse gas emissions surge if it went nuclear-free, said Naomi Hirose, president of the Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Um, here’s a ‘reality check’ that the green crowd (most of them faux green) won’t like.

Returning to a ‘simpler time’ is not an option (without a MASSIVE Kill/die off.) and opting to turn back the social clock will NOT result in a hundred-year step backwards but a THOUSAND year ‘roll back’.

There aren’t enough trees on the fucking planet for us to make even one winter burning wood!

We MUST keep those nukes running, the cost of going backwards is too high!

The loss of knowledge alone will doom our species to extinction.

But I digress.

Let’s just agree that cementing over all of those nukes would be a terrible waste of the only ‘clean’ fuel we have.

The plants may like the extra carbon but the ‘side-effects’ of industrial pollution are about to cause major problems:

Experts Issue a Warning as Food Prices Shoot Up
By ANNIE LOWREY

With climate change affecting crops, United Nations officials urged countries to guard against global hunger.

Switch mental gears with me here good citizen as I ‘once again’ re-hash how the financial sector was able to create ‘the cheaper there’…and why we’re in trouble now.

It all circles back to the commodities or staples of life.

In the so-called ‘cheaper’ labor markets, their ‘purchasing power’ is skewed so that the average Westerner would starve to death trying to compete with the subsidized food prices the artificially cheap labor markets enjoy.

I’m sure there’s a clearer way to phrase that but I’m hip-shooting here so bear with me please.

We are now approaching genuine ‘food shortages’ that will in fact erase the cheaper there…but it’s too late to move production back to where the buyers (used to) live.

In order to sell the food for less than it cost to produce in the ‘cheaper there’ you have to charge the people in the country of origin more than it’s worth!

This is why you spend a month’s wages for the average third world hell-hole worker on a weeks worth of groceries!

It’s because YOU’RE Subsidizing THEIR food bill! (As well as having given them your old job!)

Naturally, we have finally arrived at the point where ‘off-shoring’ has decimated the world’s customer base completely, resulting in a (permanent) crash in demand.

How these assholes think they’re going to ‘fix’ this (or that it will ‘fix itself’) boggles the mind!

A Simple Plan fixes this instantly by reshuffling the economic deck and restoring Justice AND Equality.

The >One Percent will cease to be…and it won’t be because we exiled the lot of ‘em.

But I digress…let us move on to our final headline:

Heavy congestion in Guangzhou, China, where officials are imposing restrictions on new licenses to reduce traffic and pollution.
A Chinese City Moves to Limit New Cars
By KEITH BRADSHER

Guangzhou wants to improve quality of life through license plate auctions and lotteries expected to halve the number of new cars on the streets.

Have you been wondering what’s been driving up the price of gasoline down on the corner?

Hey, believe it or not you’re ‘subsidizing’ that too!

[Think it’s time we erase the current financial system and start over?]

A Simple Plan does that too! (But let’s try to stay ‘on topic’ as we’re almost done.)

How good are you at ‘mental images’?

Imagine your nuts/ovaries in a vice…currently resting comfortably but in eminent peril of being squeezed into pulp!

Now imagine a ‘sub zero’ winter…with food prices bouncing off crazy levels…now add in five dollar a gallon gasoline.

At what point would you start busting up the dining room set and feed it into the fireplace to keep from freezing to death?

All the while cursing the >One Percent, who are probably burning bundles of twenties to stay warm!

Actually, they have plenty of heating oil (and they got a ‘cash discount’ on it too!)

Of course the security team shot three ‘poachers’ they caught stealing firewood in the sub-zero overnight…one of them was a child.

The theft was reported to the authorities (along with a good scolding for not keeping the neighborhood ‘safe’ for honest, hardworking citizens.)

Not that the >One Percent pays taxes anymore…it’s just the idea of the whole thing.

This is what will run through your mind THIS winter, right after Romney is, er, ‘crowned’ president by the corporate owned media and you won’t know what to make of it because when push came to shove, there wasn’t an alternative.

With that sorry thought, we’ll wrap this sorry exercise in futility up.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Martial Law

Greetings good citizen,

You know I sometimes complain about how this nation is ‘turning into’ a Banana Republic.

On further diagnosis, we’re already there!

How America Became a Country That Lets Little Kids Go Homeless
Family homelessness essentially did not exist until the 1980s. And the financial crisis has made the problem massively worse.
[snip]
Here's what happened to a family Nilan met in Florida. The parents both worked at restaurants in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina wiped out their jobs and their home and sent them to Nashville. When "the floods came back and upended them again," they asked their 8-year-old daughter where she wanted to go. "Disney World!" she said. Not a bad idea, they figured, since tourist traps are filled with restaurants where they could find jobs. But when they got there they couldn't find steady work (Orlando has an 8.7 percent unemployment rate). Sometimes the mom had a job, sometimes the dad did. Mostly the jobs were part-time and temporary. To make ends meet, Nilan says, they rented one of the beds in their motel room to a 53-year-old homeless vet. DIY homeless shelter.

Sure, the headline is dramatic and it could be worse…suppose the infamous they took the message of this headline to heart and decided to give these kids a roof over their heads…but just the kids.

Let the parents twist in the wind…

How many of you would let social services take your kids because YOU couldn’t find a job (at any wage?)

Which is to point out that we don’t just suffer from a ‘broken society’ we have a broken civilization on our hands!

So it’s collapse should be considered a ‘net positive’.

The problem, as we are all well aware is how the evil fucks who run things now plan on being the same ones who run things after this clusterfuck does a face plant in the dirt.

And THAT ‘will not do’.

And the struggle to insure that doesn’t happen is what will cause the largest loss of life during the ‘transition’.

Left to you imagination is what we will transition to?

Will the current oligarchy give way to monarchy or will it be something more ‘Orwellian’ in nature. A place with no rules so the term ‘lawbreaker’ can be determined on an ‘as need’ basis?

Um, just so you know, your TV set is already watching YOU. What remains unclear is if it is listening to you too.

If they can rig it so the set will transmit an image while/when it appears to be off or if a remote viewer can see in while you’re watching (a neater trick than you might imagine) it is entirely reasonable to assume they can hear you as well.

Not that it makes a difference. The big danger here is the casual observer’s inability to distinguish the ‘authenticity’ of what they’re seeing.

Or worse, to grasp the context within why the observed person is in an ‘agitated’ state.

To ‘prosecute’ much of what they observe the laws would have to be modified. If we enter into a state of Martial Law this step would immediately become ‘moot’.

Under Martial Law all legal ‘protections’ are automatically ‘suspended’.

The thing to fret about is whether or not they’d even bother to inform you that Martial Law had been declared.

Nothing says they have to tell you.

And today it would be near impossible to tell!

Just one more little factoid that should disturb you deeply.

We may well be under Martial Law right now and not even know it.

And what a woeful thing it will be to learn that your rights have been ‘suspended’ at the same time they arrest you for ‘suspicion’ of (fill in the blank.)

So what kind of society lets small children live in the streets?

One that is centered on the Haves and the Have Mores!

The Reagan Revolution (also known as the corporate hijacking of the US government) has ushered in some decidedly draconian changes in our society.

If we fail to launch an immediate counter-revolt, our children are doomed.

How’s that for putting a ‘fine point’ on things?

Don’t think the danger is ‘eminent’?

Think again.

Kids living in the streets are just the tip of a massive iceberg.

We need change and we need it NOW!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The yoke of Stalinism

Greetings good citizen,

Social obligations pressed yesterday, I apologize for the lapse. Seems many of you are on vacation if my traffic meter is any indication (although most of the time I can’t make heads nor tails of what it tells me with any degree of confidence.)

Um, looks like the foxes have turned in to dogs again, at least they are this morning as stock markets around the globe are mostly posting red ink.

I know it’s only funny the first time…yet the ‘fit’ is still so there!

Which is to state that the destruction of our civilization is indeed proceeding unabated.

The spectrum across which this destruction is taking place is breathtakingly wide as we can see from today’s offering

The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship

We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Back in the 1970s, the American retail landscape was still mostly dominated by mom-and-pop stores, which in turn carried merchandise also made by small manufacturers (many of them right here in the US). Not only did this complex economy sustain tens of millions of comfortable middle-class jobs; it also produced a dazzling variety of retail choices. Every store on Main Street carried somewhat different merchandise, bought from a different group of preferred suppliers. A shoe store might carry 20 different brands. The shoe store down the street might differentiate itself by carrying 10 of the same brands, and 10 different ones. The result was a very wide range of consumer choices -- though you did have to go from store to store to find it -- and a rich variety of stores that competed aggressively for their customers' attention. And if you visited a different part of the country, the selection might be very different from what you'd get back home.

Now, every Macy's in America carries the same dozen or so lines of bland, middle-of-the-road women's clothing. You'll find exactly the same stuff on the racks in Long Island as you do in Long Beach. If you're looking for something that hasn't been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, you probably won't find it at the mall.

Yes, good citizen, even the Great Marketplace is wearing the blinders and muzzle fashioned for it by the ‘monopolists’.

You don’t see it because our useless media has also been ‘monopolized’. It doesn’t point out the one note song because its part of that one note song.

Going to start your own business and show these deep-pocketed morons how to, er, ‘do it right’?

You’d better be able to set up shop in an area where your customers have plenty of free cash…because everyone else buys on price.

Welcome to [Libertarian] free market hell.

Where the average customer can’t afford ‘different,’ they buy what they buy so they can still eat without running around naked.

Nothing like ‘dominating’ the alleged ‘free markets’, is there?

Buy my mass produced dreck or go naked, those are your choices.

Same thing with food, if they don’t stop ‘value enhancing’ the product, we’re all gonna explode!

And like the article points out, this new ‘totalitarianism’ doesn’t stop at the limiting of choice in the marketplace, it limits where you can work which in turn limits where you can live.

That’s why this capitalism bullshit has to be abandoned, tomorrow!

And the crafty capitalist would agree (while snickering that ‘tomorrow never comes, it’s always today!)

So let me modify my plea and say we need to eliminate capitalism (and all of its structures) NOW!

Better a planned withdrawal than the chaotic collapse we’re headed for!

Let me briefly go off the reservation to share this observation with you.

The pundits are all worried sick that once the violence starts, it won’t stop until the losses become ‘catastrophic’.

They preach peace while we can all see that the other side is clearly girding itself for war.

Why are our leaders (such as they are) taking this pseudo-pacifist stand?

Are we supposed to be ‘reading between the lines’ here?

There are those who want change and those who want more of the same…

There’s your ‘thought to ponder’ for this hot, muggy Monday.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Compasses

Greetings good citizen,

In what can only be described as massive case of cognitive dissonance (although there is the 'only game in town factor’ also in play) markets are generally ‘up’, again, for no apparent or rational reason.

The pending Greek vote, like the upcoming Egyptian elections both appear to be just like the upcoming US elections, already stacked with ‘non-choices’ pretending to be ‘alternatives.’

Because no matter how you choose, the outcome remains the same.

And how friggin’ sad is THAT, good citizen?

In my mind it conjures the image of a captive being prepared for slaughter by cannibals. It doesn’t matter that the captives out number the cannibals by a factor of a million to one, the cannibals have them all hobbled, hand and foot so they can’t resist.

You should seriously take a moment to marvel at how effective just a handful of men with guns can be.

Which raises some other, disturbing social problems and the raging debate over ‘how’ these problems should be ‘handled’:

In his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality and the conceptual framing that determines economic policy. He speaks of “the people the economy is supposed to serve” — “the unemployed,” and “workers”— and “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming.”

Krugman is right to bring these matters up. Markets are not provided by nature. They are constructed — by laws, rules, and institutions. All of these have moral bases of one sort or another. Hence, all markets are moral, according to someone’s sense of morality. The only question is, Whose morality? In contemporary America, it is conservative versus progressive morality that governs forms of economic policy. The systems of morality behind economic policies need to be discussed.

Most Democrats, consciously or mostly unconsciously, use a moral view deriving from an idealized notion of nurturing parenting, a morality based on caring about their fellow citizens, and acting responsibly both for themselves and others with what President Obama has called “an ethic of excellence” — doing one’s best not just for oneself, but for one’s family, community, and country, and for the world. Government on this view has two moral missions: to protect and empower everyone equally.

In a debate totally void of reason the conservative ‘argument’ over ‘the natural order of things’ smacks so loudly of religious dogma as to be indistinguishable from it.

‘It’s that way because that’s the way it is’ is a mighty ‘feeble’ argument that is only a half a degree removed from the truth, it’s that way because that is how I want it to be!

Which the meat-headed conservative will vehemently deny (if he is not surrounded by his criminal cohorts.)

How fucked up is it that the phrase ‘the poor deserve what they get’ serves as the ‘secret handshake’ for a club any self-respecting human doesn’t want anything to do with?

Funny thing about that particular ‘handshake’, you know what it will buy you under A Simple Plan? It gets you an all expenses paid trip to ‘liberty-land’, that place where you’re ‘free’ to do whatever you like, you can lay claim to the whole place because it will be the only place in our new society where you will be allowed to ‘own’ things.

Sounds like a ‘good deal’ right?

There are a couple of little ‘hitches’…and ‘how little’ are matters of ‘perspective’.

First, we send you on your ‘permanent holiday’ in your ‘birthday suit’ [regardless of time of year.] Since you don’t appreciate the cooperative nature of society/civilization, you will not be permitted to bring anything you didn’t make yourself out of natural materials. Um, there are also ‘size restrictions’, you won’t be allowed to bring the Hogan you built with you either.

For safety reasons, if your only handmade possession is a ‘sharp rock’, you won’t be able to bring it with you because there will be no shortage of ‘sharp rocks’ where you’re going.

You won’t be permitted to bring food with you, part of your, er, ‘rehabilitation’ will be the sharpening of those self-sufficiency skills that you folks prize so highly.

You’re free to hunt, prep and eat whatever comes along…and ‘whatever’ is a literal term.

The people who have been there longer may well include you as part of the day’s menu, so choose your ‘allies’ carefully…

Those who befriend you may have other motives (like not wanting to drag your dead ass to the cook fire.)

Now it sounds a bit ‘harsh’, doesn’t it?

Shouldn’t we show these misguided souls some ‘mercy’?

In answer to that we have to reverse the situation and ask where was THEIR mercy when it came to the destitute?

Who were they to decide who did and didn’t deserve succor in a situation THEY created?

An employer ‘picks’ their employees, hiring no more (and usually less) than they need.

So it comes down to cases…do the poor ‘deserve’ what they get?

Are they truly ‘undeserving’ of respite from their misery because they are ‘immoral’ or is the pig who would pocket the poor’s share for himself the one with the broken moral compass?

Circle logic is often employed to cover self-serving behavior.

The disturbing aspect of this whole line of questioning is why nothing is done when we see these feeble excuses being used to defend inequity?

Why aren’t the defrauders of the destitute prosecuted?

Why aren’t the employers who don’t pay a living wage fined?

Where is the Justice, good citizen?

And ‘I don’t know’ isn’t the right (or enough of) an answer.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Foreclosure

Greetings good citizen,

Wall Street is hopping up and down while traders continue to call sow’s ears silk purses.

As we can observe from this headline from today’ NY Times:

Trading on Wall Street Is Mixed
By REUTERS 10:31 AM ET

Stocks opened with a slight lift as investors grappled with euro zone uncertainty, a raft of corporate earnings and softer-than-expected data on the American labor market.

Um, I’ll bet that last bit caught your eye!

We are all left wondering just who it is that keeps getting surprised by these very straight-forward, cause and effect results.

Worse, is the raft of bank stocks that lost money but not as much as some (obvious moron) ‘estimated’ they would. Why something like that turns the whole situation into a ‘net positive’ is beyond stupid.

But let’s not get into what our so-called ‘betters’ think of us right now, shall we?

In other news, the man most often considered to be a ‘living fossil’ because he’s been in the public eye for so long has passed away.

Yup, Dick Clark is dead. Ironically, his obituary not only outline his long and distinguished career but it also ballparks the fortune he left behind!

Um, a fortune that did the guy who accumulated it absolutely no good and is unlikely to do anyone else any good now that he’s passed away.

How pathetic is it that IF it is donated to ‘charity’ the administrator of that charity will pay HIM/HERSELF 80 to 90 cents on the dollar as ‘salary’ for overseeing the fund…

Any amassed fortune is always thus: Lower prices the consumer never saw AND higher wages the workers never received!

Did I mention our commerce system is both highly illogical and moronic…besides being beyond repair?

Well, it’s worse than you might imagine good citizen. It’s one thing to visualize what foreclosures are doing to our society and quite another to read actual accounts of people being turned out of their homes.

Understand that most of the incidents listed are ‘outliers’, normally, the average individual/family is nowhere to be found when the Sheriff comes knocking to throw them out. (And we have ‘stage fright’ to thank for that…and the typical sheriff usually does smile when this common human foible does his job for him.)

I don’t have ‘hard numbers’ on how many foreclosures turn into Mexican stand-offs because the (corporate owned) media keeps these incidents of 'bureaucratic brutality' out of the public eye.

Naturally, the banks have received trillions in ‘bail-outs’ (Hank Paulson’s $700 billion was just ‘eyewash’, chicken feed, compared to what the financial sector really needed!) So why are the, and let’s not sugar coat this, ‘people responsible’ for this disaster still trying to collect by forcing people out of their homes?

It seriously begs the question, good citizen, of how many times the public, in its role as the taxpayer, is going to be forced to pay for this?

Weirder still is this BS is going on in a feeble attempt to (re) enforce the idea that a contract is still a contract (depending on who the counter party is.)

If the deal is between you and the bank, a deal is a deal and the fuck you, pay me part stands…but if the deal is between an investor and a bank, well suddenly your ‘deal’ is ‘negotiable’.

And if the deal is between the bank and the government, forget about it.

YOU have to make the bank whole regardless of how stupidly they handled the transaction!

Did I mention that what passes for our justice system is also FUBAR?

The only way to fix it is to purge it completely.

Restoring confidence in a new system will require us to deal harshly with the administrators of the old, corrupt system.

I belabor the obvious when I point out that ANY ‘new administration’ will be suspect until it ‘proves’ itself.

Under A Simple Plan there is only ONE contract and that is the contract between the individual and society itself.

It is your agreement to surrender your labor in exchange for having ALL of your needs addressed. (And you do have a ‘choice’, you can choose not to surrender your labor and you will be provided with free transport to any nation that accepts you…but this is a one way ticket, you can NEVER come back.)

All free with no taxes (which were actually invented as a means of paying ‘owners’ for shit that wasn’t theirs in the first place!)

You will still be obliged to ‘pay’ for food and other high demand perishables, but not to worry, your labor will be compensated commensurate with your experience/skill level.

This is ‘money’ as it was intended to operate, as a ‘regulator’ for scarce items.

More curious is you can neither gift nor bequeath your money when you die, your money is for YOU and you alone. EVERYONE ‘earns their own way’ under A Simple Plan.

As an addendum to the above ‘choice’ you have, should you reject A Simple Plan and the country that welcomes you subsequently decided to adopt A Simple Plan, you will be expelled from that country and provided free transport to anywhere that will accept you. (So be careful who you piss off because countries that adopt A Simple Plan will NOT trade with countries that are ‘unaligned’, making those places technologically backwards by default.)

In the unlikely event that there is no place left to ‘adopt’ you, a die hard ‘rugged individualist’, you will be transported to a desert isle to cope as best you can with the resources available. (Um, desert means ‘uninhabited’ and by no means guarantees ‘habitability’, refuse a sure bet (ASP) and you takes your chances.)

A Simple Plan, the choice is yours!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Extraction Process...

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to capitalism 101 where the name of the game has become an audience that suddenly finds itself ‘captive’.

What punishment is fitting for such treasonous scum?

In a barely concealed ‘fuck you’ (made that much more ironic by the ‘who didn’t see this one coming?’ issue) this article shines a spot light on the motives of those who, er, ‘compete’ for our business.

"If you don’t like the price just try and buy it someplace else!"

The thing you need to understand is THIS WASN’T AN ‘ACCIDENT!’

First have a look at the ‘teaser’:

Chinese Exports Hit Record for April
By KEITH BRADSHER 10:21 AM ET

Chinese factories appear to have passed on rising costs to buyers who are finding that they have few alternatives in other countries.

Then take a gander at what ‘few alternatives’ actually translates to:

Chinese imports rose at a slower 21.8 percent, to $144.26 billion, as government policies took effect to restrict bank lending in an attempt to control inflation. Japan accounts for about one-eighth of China’s imports, and these shipments barely increased from a year earlier, dragging down the overall total as the earthquake off northeast Japan triggered rolling electricity blackouts and parts shortages that disrupted the manufacture of cars and many other products.

Labor costs are surging by 10 to 30 percent a year in China and commodity costs are rising around the world, leading to warnings by suppliers of Western retailers that price tags will start rising globally. Many companies are searching for alternatives to manufacturing in China, but finding that nowhere else offers China’s combination of a large labor supply, world-class highways and ports and strongly pro-business policies, including a strict ban on independent labor unions that tended to hold down wages until very recently.

Every once in a while YOU, the reading public, is better served by a trip directly to ‘the well’

While it is always worth the effort, today’s offering is nothing short of extraordinary!

Once your head stops reeling allow me to direct your attention to yesterday’s post that dealt with the topic of ‘rampant mismanagement’.

If viewed through this filter, today’s SAR gains significantly!

Naturally, we are left with the issue of what to do about it?

How do we regain control of an out of control situation?

Does anyone honestly believe it is possible to ‘elect’ somebody to fix a badly broken system (that ‘some people’ don’t want fixed?)

Well, it’s not about what ‘some people’ want. It is and always has been about the ‘common good’.

Why this keeps getting out of hand is no mystery (although the perps would like you to keep thinking it is!)

When the only thing standing between the common good and the personal plundering of public resources is an individual’s ‘better nature’ (a ‘virtue’ that is completely eliminated by the ‘corporate veil/shield’) you’re just asking for gross mismanagement!

Our deeply misguided judicial system has come out in favor of defending a corporation’s ‘highest responsibility’ as that of generating a profit for the shareowners!

This, by default, turns the entire ‘purpose of commerce’ on its head!

This is what ‘criminal government’ looks like good citizen.

Our species will not survive this type of ‘predation/treachery’ committed by those entrusted with the protecting the ‘public good’.

Just in case any of you were ‘unclear’ as to why we need to ‘revolt’ (change.)

But I preach to the chior, do I not?

The ‘wrong’ will not go away until we make it go away.

Step one in that process is choosing a new direction. (Understand the ‘old’ path ALWAYS leads to the same place!)

I once again find myself compelled to state that it is NOT my job to tell you what to think!

It is my ‘mission’ to extract your head from your anus (in as much as that is possible!)

Thanks for bearing with me (and letting me inside your head)

Gegner

Buy American? (How the hell are we supposed to do that?)

Greetings good citizen,

Your circumstances drive your actions. It is unlikely that you will be seeking ‘investment opportunities’ if you don’t have enough ‘capital’ to fill a thimble…which pretty much describes 97% of us.

However, as tonight’s second offering suggests, could the actions of a ‘few’ blast an irreparable hole in our already foundering economy?

Isn’t one of the key factors of the current crisis due to the ‘consolidation’ of much of the nation’s (as well s the world’s) wealth into the hands of those who need it least?

If we posit that commerce exists to serve the needs of society, a crime of stupendous proportions has been committed.

Worse, the (bought and paid for) US ‘Supreme Court’ invalidated itself by ruling that the ‘primary purpose’ of commerce was to generate profits for its shareowners and nothing else!

This decision, by itself, invalidates the entire purpose of government! (For that alone every one of the justices literally shredded their law degrees, never mind their right to practice law, anywhere!)

Does anyone else find it ‘odd’ that this decision has never been challenged?

If we consider that this, er, ‘judgement’ dovetails nicely with the agenda of our corporate overlords, it’s not surprising at all!

So we arrive at tonight’s first offering where the reporter to a very exclusive section of society ponders a pretty ‘bone-headed’ idea…

Buy American? Upscale Investors Look Abroad
By PAUL SULLIVAN
Published: November 19, 2010

Well-heeled American investors have been doing something lately [Excuse me but how does the last four decades translate into ‘lately’?] that they resisted for decades — becoming more like their European, Asian and Latin American counterparts and substantially diversifying their portfolios outside their home country. [Obviously Bobo is referring to ‘small time’ investors…’simple millionaires’ who have, until recently, found ample ‘investment opportunities’ right here in their own back yard.]

Are overseas investments worth the risk? Which ones can be part of the mix for a prudent investor?

There are two reasons for this. The financial crisis and the slow recovery showed them that the United States was not immune to devastating crashes of the kind that wealthy people in emerging markets have tried to hedge against by investing abroad. And second, American investors are worried that their portfolios are going to suffer for the foreseeable future, given the size of the United States’ budget deficit, the weakness of the dollar and the uncertainty over the stock market.

“I’ve never seen a period in which clients have expressed such an interest in nondollar investments,” said Kent Lucken, managing director at Citi Private Bank. “People are spreading their chips around more prudently and I think more wisely.” [Could ‘quantative shredding, er, easing’, the ‘direct dilution’ of the US dollar be behind this sudden ‘rush for the exits’?]

What is different is how directly these investors are going into non-American markets. They are not content with buying international equities or going into an international bond fund. They are looking to invest directly in Chinese private equity, Indian real estate; Brazilian equities denominated in reals and Australian government bonds. They are also opening cash accounts in multiple currencies. [As you can see, the suggestion here is these particular investors aren’t very ‘sophisticated’ because they are only just now getting around to something they should have done years ago….]

“International clients understand the need to diversify currencies, but this is something new to U.S. clients,” said David Frame, global head of alternative investment at J. P. Morgan Private Bank.

The people putting as much as 40 percent of their portfolios into nondollar investments are quite wealthy. But consider it this way: What can investors of more modest means learn from what the wealthiest people in the country — with the best research and advice at their disposal — are doing with large portions of their fortunes? [What about you? If you don’t have a ‘fortune’ does this behavior have an ‘impact’ upon your future? It sure does. As the money ‘flees’ your future employment is likely fleeing with it.]

UPSIDE Investors who lived through the 1990s will remember the crises in Asia, Mexico and Russia that shook global capital markets. Investing internationally has always carried risks and it is by no means without perils today.

But many investors see a different trade-off, one based as much on a stagnant or declining United States as on certain international markets that are growing, if not booming. [If we keep in mind this article ‘assumes’ that the reader is, er, ‘wealthy enough’ to at least ponder the investment advice offered here, the same statement is ‘incendiary’ to those of us, er, ‘left behind’ by the investor class.]

“When you make an investment in nondollar currencies, you’re making two investments at once,” said Tony Roth, head of investment strategies at UBS Wealth Management. “You’re betting the dollar will go down, but you’re also buying another investment. You need to be compensated for that source of risk.”

He cited the example of buying a one-year Australian government bond, yielding 5.25 percent. He said he believed that the American dollar was going to lose value and the Australian dollar was going to gain it. That’s Part 1. Part 2 is that the Australian government is stable, so an investor can count on receiving that 5 percent annual return. The alternative is less than half of a percent if invested in United States Treasuries.

“I’m going to receive a return,” he said, “that more than compensates me for the marginal risk I’m taking.” [Notice the disturbingly ‘self-centered’ tone of this last paragraph. It’s not about the community you live in (being devastated) it’s all about making something for YOUR pocket! ‘Invisible hand’ my ass! It’s always been about ‘hooray for me and fuck the rest of you!’ It’s high time we put that kind of treasonous tyranny where it belongs, on the hangman’s platform!]

But there are far more risky investments. And the ones that are less liquid — infrastructure in China, say, or a private equity fund in Brazil — carry more uncertainty. But like their equivalents in the United States, they provide a higher return, in theory.

Mr. Frame said clients were investing in Asian infrastructure and Asian private equity by pooling their money with other investors. “There is a lot going on when a country is growing and developing that is hard to address through the public markets,” he said.

While there’s an obvious "pull" to international investments, there is also a bit of a "push" out of the United States: investors who are making their portfolios more international are doing so because they believe that the role of the United States in the global economy is shrinking.

Mr. Roth said the United States contributed 40 percent of global gross domestic product 15 years ago and now contributed 21 percent. He predicted that that figure would fall to 12 percent in another 15 years. Going along with this is the shrinking market capitalization of American stocks compared with global stocks.

“We have the U.S. experiencing flat to 2 percent G.D.P. growth, but you have Brazil, India and China with substantially higher rates,” Mr. Lucken said. “Equity investors are investing abroad to capture higher returns and invest ahead of higher growth rates.” [snip]

Do not fail to recognize this for what it is, it is nothing short of treason! These traitors are putting their own financial interests ahead of the interests of the rest of the nation. Until we regain control of the government, these worthless slimeballs will continue to literally bleed the rest of us to death…because in case you haven’t noticed, you are a ‘captive audience’, you have no place to go!

Unlike the three characters in tonight’s second offering

If you have enough money YOU CAN ‘buy your way out’ of the sinking US economy…

Could Millionaires Fleeing the U.S. Cause a Wildcard Economic Event?

November 21st, 2010

For years, I’ve received emails from people who want to move to New Zealand. Some young, some old. Some well off, some not so well off.

Over the last month or so, three millionaires have emailed me about moving to New Zealand. [Truth be told good citizen, if I had the money, I’d be looking for a ‘safer’ place to be myself…]

The three people who emailed me were all going to invest their way into New Zealand. In case you don’t know, millionaires can make “investments” in New Zealand to, in effect, buy different types of residence visas. New Zealand Immigration calls these “Business Visas.” Depending on the type of arrangement and the age of the applicant, between NZ$750,000 and NZ$10 million is required. [So plans to open a Pez dispenser sales booth isn’t good enough to buy you entry into a, er, ‘safer’ environment.]

It’s one thing for me to leave the U.S., with my meager savings, boxes of books and already old clothes (not much, in other words), but what happens if large numbers these wealthy people leave the U.S., pulling millions of dollars out of U.S. banks and moving it… elsewhere? [I think Kevin has the wrong ‘take’ on this, these people are fleeing the growing ‘economic desert’ where ‘lack of funds’ is increasing the incidence of ‘lawlessness’. There are still roughly 750 US Billionaires so a few, er, ‘multi-millionaires’ isn’t about to cause a financial panic…especially when we consider ‘what’ it is that makes most of these ‘refugees’ rich…stocks! These people AREN’T going to liquidate their holdings just to move to a different economy.]

It worries me that I heard from three of these people in such a short period of time. What does that mean, in terms of the bigger picture? Might this be a leading indicator of something to come? I started to wonder if this flow of wealthy people out of the U.S. represents a sort of wildcard threat to the U.S. economy. Is there a way to know how much money is leaving the U.S., and at what point it places the system in jeopardy?

I know, many of you are thinking, “Who cares if a few fat cats flee the U.S.?”

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, a tiny number people have most of the money in the U.S. The absurd U.S. ponzi scheme depends on these wealthy people leaving their funds in U.S. institutions. One of these people leaving the U.S. (and taking their money with them) would be like thousands or tens of thousands of “normal” people pulling their money out of the banks. [Still, the ‘percentages’ aren’t there…most of us don’t have a pot to piss in, never mind a window to throw it out of!]

Anyway, if little-old-Kevin on his backwater conspiracy blog heard from three millionaires who want to flee the U.S., what might we be able to extrapolate from that in terms of the bigger picture, if anything? Has some kind of tipping point occurred? Or, is this not that big of a deal?

Um, I’d be inclined to say ‘no biggie’, there’s aren’t ‘millions’ of millionaires and a lot of people who are so fortunate CAN’T liquidate their holdings because they’re locked up in a trust!

There are only a couple of hundred thousand ‘households’ with networth in excess of seven figures. Of those ‘couple of hundred thousand’, only one percent of them control 85% of that wealth! This brings us to our handful of billionaires, with a large percentage of members having a single billion and change.

Worse is how much of this exists only ‘on paper’. You can be fabulously wealthy ‘on paper’ but ‘penniless’ in fact. We are extremely fortunate that most of the ‘quadrillion dollars’ worth of CDS debt exists only ‘on paper’ because push come to shove, there isn’t a ‘quadrillion dollars’ in the whole fucking world!

Sort of like ‘old times’ where instead of ranting for three or four pages, I provide you with half dozen pages of somebody else’s stuff!

Then I’d worry that I’ve taxed your patience and sign off real quick

Leaving my opening comment unexplained…actually, half the time, I leave a lot of topics open for interpretation…

I guess I’m just no good at pinning something down and beating it to death. If I get bored writing it, you MUST get bored reading about it!

One last comment before I do close this out. Didn’t Mr. Rich focus this week’s piece on the potential for a Palin presidential bid?

Ironically, ol’ Hil has just gone ‘on record’ as stating she ‘isn’t interested’ in making another run at the White House.

Naturally, politicians seldom say what they mean…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Same old, same old...

Greetings good citizen,

By the third day of a three-day weekend anything resembling a ‘consensus’ is lost.

Even yesterday’s North Korean nuke test failed to attract much attention. Once again Mr. Obama trotted out the same tired, threadbare posture that has passed for the US main line on nuclear proliferation for years…

He didn’t say HE was upset about nuclear testing, he said THE WORLD condemned North Korea’s ‘flouting’ of global regulations. Where does this fit in with a nation that attacked another sovereign nation, without provocation and continues to ‘occupy’ that nation?

Since North Korea can’t deliver its nuclear warheads to rain down destruction upon its ‘enemies’, the only people ‘worried’ about a Korean nuke are its closest neighbors. (No irony should be lost on the fact that the nation most in danger of being on the receiving end of a North Korean nuke, is also the only nation that ever had nuclear weapons deployed against it during wartime in recorded history.)

But hey, no big deal.

So the next ‘hot topic’ of the day appears to be the commercial Real Estate markets. As businesses rush to shrink their ‘footprint’ in efforts to cope with diminishing consumer demand, the business of ‘renting to business’ is collapsing under its own weight.

But again, no biggie…the now colossal ‘For Lease’ Corporation is making an enormous amount of progress in the current business environment.

While other businesses contract, the For Lease Corporation is growing in leaps and bounds! (A huge tip of the hat goes out to off-shoring and globalization!)

While we’re here I would be remiss in not taking a few well-deserved swipes at my favorite punching bag.

A hearty FU to all of the treasonous bastards in the US government that placed the interests of their campaign contributors ahead of the welfare of the workers of this nation!

And another FU to the campaign contributors responsible for throwing tens of millions of US workers out on the streets, cutting their benefits and suppressing their wages during decades of record breaking quarterly earnings.

By the way, selling out the welfare of your nation for personal gain is the very definition of Treason…and we all know what the ‘penalty’ for treason is.

The law [lack of enforcement to be specific] protects you today but it won’t protect you forever!

Moving on, I stumbled onto this article by none other than the illustrious Paul Krugman that can be read a dozen different ways…

World economy stabilizing says Krugman

ABU DHABI, May 25 (Reuters) - The world economy has avoided "utter catastrophe" and industrialized countries could register growth this year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Monday. [Note the ‘qualifiers’, a lot of things ‘could’ happen, it’s just that some things are more ‘probable’ than others.]

"I will not be surprised to see world trade stabilize, world industrial production stabilize and start to grow two months from now," Krugman told a seminar.

"I would not be surprised to see flat to positive GDP growth in the United States, and maybe even in Europe, in the second half of the year." [Two ‘I would not be surprised’s’ in a row! Is he merely providing a hat tip to the ‘spin doctors’ or is this a simple admission of the fact that ‘anything is possible’?]

The Princeton professor and New York Times columnist has said he fears a decade-long slump like that experienced by Japan in the 1990s.

He has criticized the U.S. administration's bailout plan to persuade investors to help rid banks of up to $1 trillion in toxic assets as amounting to subsidized purchases of bad assets.

Speaking in UAE, the world's third-largest oil exporter, Krugman said Japan's solution of export-led growth would not work because the downturn has been global.

"In some sense we may be past the worst but there is a big difference between stabilizing and actually making up the lost ground," he said.

"We have averted utter catastrophe,[for now] but how do we get real recovery? [I strongly suspect ‘real recovery’ is not and never was a part of the plan.]

"We can't all export our way to recovery. There's no other planet to trade with. So the road Japan took is not available to us all," Krugman said.

Global recovery could come about through more investment by major corporations, the emergence of a major technological innovation to match the IT revolution of the 1990s or government moves on climate change. [Um, bizarrely, both of these ‘initiatives’ rely upon a ‘solvent’ customer base, something we do not currently enjoy… ]

"Legislation that will establish a capping grade system for greenhouse gases' emissions is moving forward," he said, referring to the U.S. Congress.

"When the Europeans probably follow suit, and the Japanese, and negotiations begin with developing countries to work them into the system, that will provide enormous incentive for businesses to start investing and prepare for the new regime on emissions... But that's a hope, that's not a certainty."

What do you find ‘interesting’ about this particular article?

Did you see it, right there at the end?

Did you see the enormous rock we’ve been beating our heads on for the past thirty years?

Worse good citizen, do you see the ‘insanity’ of repeatedly trying to break that rock?

What rock am I babbling about?

It’s the next ‘big’ thing. The technological break through that will create millions of new jobs, lifting the population of the planet out of poverty…temporarily.

Instead of working on creating a ‘sustainable’ social model, these idiots are seeking another ‘bubble’ that will lead us to the next bubble!

Don’t look now good citizen but Mr. Krugman points directly to the ‘next big thing’…the ‘problem’ is there isn’t (currently) a ‘profitable’ way to do it.

In case I’m being ‘opaque’ here good citizen, it is Mr. K’s reference to ‘another planet to trade with’.

If we were ever to crack the ‘speed of light’ problem, all of those twinkling lights up in the sky would instantly become ‘real estate’…and the governments of the world wouldn’t hesitate to sell it to you!

Flipping that rock over, developing this technology would nullify the government’s monopoly on ‘death from above’. That aside, it is hard enough to enforce laws on even a local basis, how well do you suppose a ‘galactic tax law’ would hold up?

No, when viewed on a broader scale there is little incentive for the ‘powers that be’ to fund initiatives intended to ‘reap the stars’.

Worse, those same powers are incapable of conceiving of a social model that doesn’t involve slavery.

So for them the only solution is to leap from bubble to bubble, even if it involves ever-greater degrees of civil unrest (due to increasing marginalization of the working classes.)

What do you suppose could be developed quickly, with a minimal draw on resources, that would generate tens of millions of jobs?

Can’t think of anything? You’re not alone. The ‘Masters of the Universe’ can’t come up with anything either…that’s why they are spending heavily on methods to monitor and suppress the ‘rabble’.

Until there is something truly ‘new’ under the sun, the probability of economic recovery will remain ‘remote’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner