United

Greetings good citizen,

Good news, the weekend is here! But that doesn’t stop the bad news and, if we pause to consider that most of what they tell us serves to distract us from other issues, the bad news only becomes that much more poignant.

These are headlines drawn from the front page of today’s NY Times:

As Suicides Rise in U.S., Veterans Are Less of Total
By JAMES DAO

The convergence reflects the fact that suicide numbers are rising slightly among both veterans and everyone else, but has increased more in the general population.

How does this headline sit with you good citizen? I’d opine that my favorite hobby horse, ‘desperation’ is on the rise and this is proof.

If you don’t go on a rampage, ‘the alternative’ is to destroy yourself.

Is this the kind of society we want to hand over to our children? Increasingly, Hollywood (or more correctly Bollywood) has focused on an endless stream of dystopian futures.

I watched Looper last night and I have to admit, it was beyond grim…although the ‘lynchpin’ of the story (by my way of thinking) will always be ‘impossible’ because the past doesn’t exist! We remember what happened but that doesn’t mean it’s still there. Same thing with the future, it doesn’t exist (yet) so it is impossible to ‘travel’ there because we live in the perpetual ‘now’. It was now a moment ago and it will still be now in a couple of seconds but you can’t rush it. Time (as mankind understands it) is a mental construct…that has some very detrimental side effects for the environment.

Man (read capitalists) foolishly believes that given enough time the environment will ‘repair’ itself…not true.

But, as usual, I digress.

Don’t believe in God, don’t believe in time and I definitely don’t believe in money so what DO I believe in?

I believe in YOU (and by extension, myself.) May not be much but it’s all we’ve got.

The keyword there, good citizen, is ‘we’.

Speaking of words we come upon this one often enough but it is so context sensitive and flexible that it’s hardly useful:

BUSINESS
As U.S. Growth Lags, Some Press the Fed to Do Still More
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Federal Reserve officials believe the bank could do more to increase the pace of inflation and aid growth. They simply are not persuaded that the benefits outweigh potential costs.

While not necessarily a ‘one time’ trick, the idea is to skin everybody in the economy via inflation. Last time they did this trick it cost me fifty percent of my purchasing power.

Purchasing power that I have never regained.

Now they are contemplating doing it again…and here we are on the cusp of an energy crisis.

Needless to say the death toll will be horrendous considering the unemployment situation. (40% + of the population on some type of ‘food assistance’ because their jobs pay poverty wages AND OUR POLITICIANS DON’T THINK THIS IS AN ISSUE!)

Once again I propose that we ‘string ‘em up’ but it seems nobody likes that idea…

Yet somehow just letting them walk away after what they’ve done just doesn’t seem proper.

Unless that walk leads them to a peaceful and contemplative place where they had all of the time in the world to weigh the impact of their bountiful deeds. (The one way walk nobody survives, a.k.a. ‘exile’.)

But I’m doing it again, ain’t I…

The thing is we have no way to stop them from ‘poisoning the well’, something they’ve already done. Thanks to the funniness of money they have been able to keep the economy ‘alive’ (on life support) which has the exact same effect as ‘inflating away’ our debts.

The problem here is the tens of millions of people who don’t have an income stream to tap.

Part of the ‘inflate away’ process is raising everybody’s pay (literally absorbing) a portion of the inflation while they raise prices.

Most people get fooked in this process, their paycheck doubles but their expenses quadruple.

And the bailed out bankers (the cause of this whole mess) happily hand out loans to the soon to be bankrupt workers.

Then the economy crashes (like it did on Carter) and another Reagan comes along with more ‘voodoo economics’ and things get better…for the one tenth of one percent.

Needless to say, given our starting point, this is how you wake up one morning to realize you’re living in a Banana Republic!

In fact, you’re three quarters of the way there already.

Understand good citizen, nobody is keeping the ‘tyrants’ in check. They’re going to run you down and you have no place to turn to but your neighbor.

How pathetic is it that there’s a fifty-fifty chance they are in ‘denial’ that anything’s even wrong (thus would they be disinclined to help you.)

United we stand but united we aren’t good citizen…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Me First!

Greetings good citizen,

This morning’s news caused me to do a double take because it is that incredible, like we need more ‘evidence’ of which letter SHOULD come after the incumbent’s name…

WASHINGTON — When President Obama nominates Chuck Hagel, the maverick Republican and former senator from Nebraska, to be his next secretary of defense, he will be turning to a trusted ally whose willingness to defy party loyalty and conventional wisdom won his admiration both in the Senate and on a 2008 tour of war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The choice of Mr. Hagel, the first Vietnam veteran to be nominated for the post, would add a prominent Republican to Mr. Obama’s cabinet, providing some political cover for the president’s plans to exit Afghanistan and make cuts to a military budget that has roughly doubled since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But Republicans made clear on Sunday that they would give Mr. Hagel a rough ride on his path to the Pentagon, questioning his support for Israel, his seriousness about the Iranian nuclear threat and his commitment to an adequate defense budget. And Mr. Obama may also face difficulties from some Democrats who are wary of negative comments that Mr. Hagel made more than a decade ago about gays.

Quick point before we smack ourselves silly with disbelief would be, you don’t suppose the corporate owned media HAD TO throw in that BS about Mr. Hagel’s past ‘anti-gay’ comments, do you…I mean who gives a fuck?

The infamous ‘they’ handed the election to Obama because appointing their boy Mitt would have created too much backlash. You’d have had open revolt in the streets.

While I am tempted to shout ‘see, he really is a DINO!’ I had ‘forewarned’ that this day was coming.

And it doesn’t satisfy me in the slightest to be both correct and to have NOT voted for the lapdog. (At least the girls got arrested for protesting their exclusion from the presidential debates!)

Naturally the curious part will be seeing the ‘rubber stamp’ in action as the One Percent’s will is fulfilled, as commanded.

Sort of redefines the term, ‘so let it be written, so let it be done.’

Never mind all of the ‘criminals’ who have skated for the past (3)5 (yeah, that’s thirty-five!) years (probably longer.) I am sure I’m not the only one who finds this ‘homogenous’ government (that acts in lockstep) disturbing.

Barking like rabid dogs until something the One percent favors comes along then it is rubber stamped without even the pretense of debate and it back to being ‘mortal enemies' again!

Are we ‘over the edge’ good citizen? Is it the corporate owned media’s intention to infer that we are all insane because we refuse to acknowledge the inconsistencies (that they routinely gloss over…)

More disturbingly is the ‘revolving door’ of the ‘usual suspects’ being awarded cabinet posts by members of the opposite party.

Does party affiliation mean ANYTHING anymore? (Or are those piddling trifles only of concern to the ‘riff-raff’ and the rabble?)

Worse, we’re being told the same thing we are getting mighty sick of hearing…and that is ‘What are YOU going to do about it?

And we all know the answer to that one, don’t we?

Nothin’.

The criminals are in charge and there isn’t a thing we can do about the mismanagement of our civilization...and you'd think by now somebody would have come up with a solution to that problem.

And we have…it's just not one the criminals ‘like’…but since when are the criminals supposed to be ‘okay’ with justice?

Isn’t it their reckless disregard for the common good that marks them as criminals in the first place?

They know this and try (uselessly) to move the ‘goalposts’ of justice further down the field…by inventing improbable scenarios…like the GWOT.

It takes a truly sick mind to invent something so nebulous…and now we have our national leaders appointing said fabricators to top cabinet posts!

FULL STOP

WE ARE FACING A CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION ENDING IMPORTANCE

But it’s being handled dead wrong!

I will once again point out that MONEY does not equal INTELLIGENCE.

Although it is a sad indictment of our society to feel compelled to point that out because too many people make that erroneous connection.

(Jack Ass is rich so Jack Ass must be smart!)

The ‘criminals’ are protecting their ‘privileges’ at our expense.

It is time we jail the criminals and their co-conspirators in the legal and financial communities.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Undebatable

Greetings good citizen,

So, tonight’s the night where we get to hear the conservatives debate one another. Which is to point out that I won’t have a reaction ready for you until tomorrow night.

I don’t usually watch these debates (because they are so divorced from reality as to be a frivolous waste of time.)

Which is to say that for the past thirty years the whole presidential campaign schtick has been so far removed from the actual issues facing our society as to be surreal.

You watch the whole time wondering…who are these people and what the fuck are they prattling about?

Like tonight’s debate will (supposedly) center on the economy and jobs.

And they’ll both ‘tilt at windmills’ and fabricate ‘pie in the sky’ plans that don’t have a chance in hell of succeeding because of the tapped out, unemployed consumer.

I mean how many fast food restaurant jobs can you have (considering the people who work in those places don’t eat the food.)

So we have tens of millions of burger and fry people standing around in empty restaurants, cleaning shit.

While the unemployed drive their Hondas and Toyotas to the mall, wondering why they can’t find a job…(because they’re over 40.)

Well, it’s one thing for me to sit here and criticize the non-existent economy and something else entirely to have someone who knows what he’s talking about show us EXACTLY why our collective asses are sucking pond water:

Without further ado, I give you Mr. Williams of SGS fame.

No. 472: GDP Revision, August Durable Goods, Household Income, New Home Sales
Subscription required September 27th, 2012

• Unusually Large 2nd-Quarter Revisions: Headline GDP Growth Dropped to 1.3% from 1.7%, Theoretically Equivalent GDI Dropped to 0.2% from 0.6%
• Plunging Automobile and Commercial Aircraft Sales Savaged Durable Goods Orders
• August Household Income Took a Hit

No. 471: August Housing Starts, Existing Home Sales
Subscription required September 19th, 2012

• Official Recovery Remains an Illusion
• Stagnant U.S. Economy Starts to Contract Anew
• Housing Starts and Existing Home Sales Still Are Bottom-Bouncing

No. 470: August CPI, PPI, Retail Sales, Industrial Production
Subscription required September 14th, 2012

• Fed Easing Aimed at Propping Banking System, Not Boosting Economy
• CPI and PPI Headline Inflation Highest Since June 2009
• Headline CPI Held at 0.6%, Instead of 1.0%, Due to Intervention Analysis?
• August Year-to-Year Inflation: 1.7% (CPI-U), 1.7% (CPI-W), 9.3% (SGS)
• Retail Sales Showing Consistent Pattern of Overstated Headline Activity Being Revised Lower in Following Month
• Monthly Production and Real Earnings Turn Down

No. 469: 2011 Income and Poverty Report, July Trade Balance
Subscription required September 12th, 2012

• Real Median Household Income Collapses to 16-Year Low;
• 2011 Income Below Levels of Late-1960s, Early-1970s
• Income Variance Hits Record High, Suggestive of Greater Financial and Economic Crises Ahead
• Trade Deficit Contained by Short-Lived Decline in Oil Prices

No. 468: August Employment and Unemployment, M3
Subscription required September 7th, 2012

• A Move to Open-Ended Monetization of Treasuries?
• Payroll Jobs Down by 261,000, Household-Survey Employment Down by 86,000, Since President Obama’s January 2009 Inauguration
• BLS Did Not Publish Actual July-to-August Unemployment Rate Change
• August Unemployment: 8.1% (U.3), 14.7% (U.6), 22.8% (ShadowStats.com)
• M3 Annual Growth Notches Higher
• Jump in Reported Inflation Likely in Week Ahead

No. 467: GDP Revision, Gold Standard
Subscription required August 29th, 2012
• GDI at 0.6%, GDP at 1.7%, GNP at 2.2%, All Plus-or-Minus Three Percentage Points
• GDP Recovery Remains An Illusion, Based on Understated Inflation
• Fiscal Conditions Have to Be in Balance for Gold Standard to Work

How many of the above factors will be discussed tonight?

How about none of them.

This is the ‘disconnect’ we keep feeling between the real world and the one politicians choose to talk about.

It may not be apparent to the occasional reader but what hit me in the eye is the unemployment rate. While the government figures keep dropping, the SGS (which is calculated the ‘old’ way) remains UNCHANGED!

You don’t suppose THAT will come up during tonight’s discussion, do you?

Seriously good citizen, what do you do when NEITHER candidate is the man for the job, punt?

Because that’s part of how we came to be here, every election it’s the SAME BULLSHIT, the right man of the job is NOT PRESENT!

Because every candidate (Since Kennedy) has to pass a ‘sniff test’ conducted by the One Percent…they aren’t going to let another Roosevelt into the Oval Office.

Where is Robisphere when you need him?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Unnatural Selection

Greetings good citizen,

Our civilization continues to circle the drain…while the feckless few proceed to laugh all the way to the bank…

Which is misleading because none of these players are hurting for money or the things money can buy.

In fact, most of them don’t have a friggin’ clue how to make their way in this bad old world of ours.

Remembering her roots is what Rinehart fails to do. She forgot to add that if you want to become a millionaire – in her case a billionaire – it helps to inherit an iron ore mine and a fortune from your father, and to ride a spectacular commodities boom. Had she spent her life lying in bed and throwing darts at the wall, she would still be stupendously rich.

The rich lists are stuffed with people who either inherited their money or who made it through rent-seeking activities: by means other than innovation and productive effort. They’re a catalogue of speculators, property barons, dukes, IT monopolists, loansharks, bank chiefs, oil sheikhs, mining magnates, oligarchs and chief executives paid out of all proportion to any value they generate.

Looters, in short. The richest mining barons are those to whom governments sold natural resources for a song. Russian, Mexican and British oligarchs acquired underpriced public assets through privatisation, and now run a toll-booth economy(4). Bankers use incomprehensible instruments to fleece their clients and the taxpayer. But as rentiers capture the economy, the opposite story must be told.

Scarcely a Republican speech fails to reprise the Richard Hunter narrative, and almost all these rags-to-riches tales turn out to be bunkum. “Everything that Ann and I have,” Mitt Romney claims, “we earned the old-fashioned way”(5). Old-fashioned like Blackbeard perhaps. Two searing exposures in Rolling Stone magazine document the leveraged buyouts which destroyed viable companies, value and jobs(6), and the costly federal bail-out which saved Romney’s political skin(7).

Curious to see people like Mitt claiming to be ‘self-made men’ when his father was a public figure as well.

Where do you suppose the Mittster got the ‘seed money’ to start Bain Capital?

Then there’s the choice of names there that give us some pause, considering what a slight difference in spelling Bane instead of Bain means.

And how many companies did the Mittster, er, ‘eradicate?’

I mean, nothing like a little ‘truth in advertising’, nicht whar?

Um, this article that wags its finger in the face of the privileged is worth the read and it’s only a couple of pages…

Otherwise there was more rioting in the Eurozone over the, er, renewed enforcement of austerity in Spain as well as in Greece.

Worse, the other Mediterranean countries are watching this CF ready to blow and they’re not sure what to make of it.

Will there even be a Eurozone a few weeks from now or will they be forced to join the struggling nations in austerity for a doomed attempt to ‘save’ a failed currency?

But naturally, the problem is deeper than that. The reason the currency has crashed and burned is due to the criminals hijacking all of the jobs and closing all of the factories so no one could compete with their monopoly on third world suppliers.

Read my lips: ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

If you have nothing to trade then you have NOTHING!

The entire US economy now consists of raw materials and some esoteric financial products…and nobody is buying the financial products considering what happened the last time.

Yet, er, ‘we’ have made zero progress repairing our local economy because the people in charge here are too stupid to realize what needs to be done.

Especially Wall Street.

But this too is a function of a ‘captive audience’. They can’t change the way things are done because the people who fucked it up don’t want it changed.

Which leads us to a tragic set of circumstances.

Your children’s future being decided by a criminal.

If we fail to remove the criminal element running this society then our species is doomed.

Some of you are savvy enough to know that sometimes nature requires you to fight to the death if you want to continue your bloodline.

Would you give up on your family history now just because some chiseler decided you were ‘superfluous’?

Understand, he’ll make YOU redundant before he sacrifices his chances!

You really only have one option and that’s to take the mother out before he gets you!

Just a little something to chew on while your waiting for the next shoe to drop.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Price

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the markets are ‘up’ a tiny bit although that tells us nothing. Markets around the globe are a ‘mixed bag’ all up or down, but not significantly in either direction.

As one might expect in an election year, our first headline announces:

Second-Quarter Growth Revised Up to 1.7 Percent Rate
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 52 minutes ago

The American economy fared slightly better than initially estimated in the second quarter, the government reported in its first revision of gross domestic product.

Like a lot of things ‘statistical’ the variation on display here isn’t ‘significant’. The only reason you’re hearing about it is because it’s ‘up’, if it were down it would remain obscure if not unknown.

This is one of those ‘it should piss you off’ sort of things! Here’s our economy, sucking pond water due largely to ‘gross mismanagement’ and who has to brave streets filled with starvation crazed rioters?

YOU WILL!

Yet here are the Twinkies crowing about abysmal economic growth like you were ‘saved’.

Hallelujah, the rapture came after all!

Fucking twits!

It’s ‘the other shoe’, always.

Speaking of ‘pipe dreams’:

Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank says there can be no return to the many currencies that preceded the euro.

Central Banker Facing a Test
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, will be under pressure to provide details of his plan to shore up the euro zone’s weaker member nations by buying their bonds.

Dunno how it will play in Peoria but it seems asshole’s mouth cut a check his ass is unable to cover.

Like two wrongs don’t make a right, two lies don’t suddenly make it true!

But politicians have a, er, ‘difficult time’ comprehending that concept…

Especially when ‘the truth’ jumps up and takes a big bite out of your backside, like we see here:

Shut Out of the Debt Markets, Catalonia Asks Madrid for Emergency Aid
By RAPHAEL MINDER

The request from the most economically important region of Spain underscores a growing regional debt burden as the country struggles to pull out of its economic tailspin.

As many observers have pointed out, where are the Euros supposed to come from to bail out all of these mismanaged economies?

Looks to me like they’re going to borrow them from Bob Mugabee! (What the hell, he has trillions!)

It’s what Zimbabwe Ben is doing…and it might be a good time to remind everyone that our ‘apolitical’ Fed Chief, like his predecessor, is A FUCKING REPUBLICAN!

But THAT doesn’t matter, and coincidentally, neither does this:

Germany and Italy to Meet on Euro Crisis
By MELISSA EDDY and RACHEL DONADIO

Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy is hoping to persuade his European partners to let the European Central Bank buy more government debt to help keep borrowing costs lower.

We can appreciate that the ‘Prime Minister’ of Italy really NEEDS to pull a rabbit out of his hat (and not just any rabbit, a ‘credible rabbit’!)

Funny thing about ‘funny money’, it requires a lot of faith that its worth something…a difficult task indeed when the thieves in the stock markets keep jumping their price, thereby ‘devaluing’ the purchasing power of money (regardless of whose it is!)

Naturally, when there’s only ‘one source’ for everything we will all be compelled to pay whatever they demand…or their private army will shoot us.

Again I ‘project’ but I suspect we are closer to that day rather than farther:

E.U. Widens Probe of Ryanair Bid for Aer Lingus
By REUTERS 30 minutes ago

Regulators began an in-depth review of Ryanair’s latest bid for its Irish rival, signaling the budget airline may have to make big concessions to ease competition concerns or face failure.

Don’t be deceived good citizen, this airline thing is but one of many often hidden ‘mergers’ that have been providing the economic data with a false ‘positive spin’.

Company ‘A’ gobbles up company ‘B’ cementing a near monopoly in a given market sector, the price goes up to pay the cost of the take-over (as well as to line the pockets of the out-going executives being made ‘redundant’.)

And viola! We now have profits were we once had ‘stagnation’!

(It’s Magic, fuck you!)

Speaking of ‘magic’, it appears not everybody is gullible enough to take the ads for electric cars seriously: Sure you don’t have to buy gas that often but the last time I checked, nobody was giving away ‘free electricity!’:

A Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle, front. Consumers so far have been slow to buy electric cars.
U.S. Sets Higher Fuel Efficiency Standards
By BILL VLASIC

The rules, first proposed last year, would require new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving by 2025.

The real question being put to you here good citizen is ‘will you be driving anything ‘inorganic’ come 2025?’

You will be considered ‘crazy well-to-do’ if you have a horse or some other form of ‘drayage’ (like oxen.)

Only the extremely wealthy will have ‘motor vehicles’ (and they will expect us to keep up the road network for them!)

The job title ‘mechanic’ will be preceded by the word ‘personal’ because if you can afford a car, you can afford a mechanic and you probably won’t want to risk going to a garage (that regularly has its tools stolen.) So you’ll keep the tools and the mechanic safe behind your gated walls, guarded by your security team of private merc’s.

But again, I project.

Just as this somewhat disturbing ‘sign of the times’ bodes poorly for the, er, ‘less than affluent’.

The Patriot-News, which won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Penn State sex scandal, intends to print three days a week.

Newspapers in Syracuse and Harrisburg, Pa., to End Daily Distribution
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The decision by Newhouse Newspapers follows its similar move in New Orleans and is set to take effect in January.

Many have given up the physical delivery of newspapers because the Internet tells them what they need to know.

Naturally, there’s a downside to this as well. Under capitalism, information is a commodity and thus for sale.

If you can’t afford the asking price then it gets added to the ever growing list of things you ‘do without’.

You might have noticed that I limit myself to the ‘headlines’ of the NY Times stories because the ‘free’ edition limits me to actually clicking through to read a mere ten articles a month.

That’s not even one a day. (But you knew that!)

The headlines, on the other hand, remain ‘free.’

And with a little luck, so will we.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Zippo!

Greetings good citizen,

It would be presumptuous of me to assume that you are all acutely aware of the advanced state of collapse which our civilization finds itself.

For some bizarre reason, the corporate owned media is just now figuring out that the global financial system not only crashed but burned four years ago…

Perhaps they held their tongue in (futile) hopes that the patient could be resuscitated.

So trillions of dollars later, long after the banks should have been reduced to a tenth their current size, the media tells us the global financial network is ‘at risk’.

If you aren’t screaming WTF you should be.

So it is our lead headline for today tells it like it is:

TOP NEWS
Worry for Italy Quickly Replaces Relief for Spain
By LIZ ALDERMAN and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

The prime minister of Italy faces a host of problems at home that may ultimately lead investors to take aim at the too-big-to-fail, 2-trillion-euro economy.

Why aren’t these (useless) bankers being told to get stuffed? Is political corruption that rampant that the pols will do anything to cover their ill-gotten gains?

I mean baby, there’s corrupt and then there’s this shit (which takes corrupt to a whole new dimension!)

Beware good citizen, the ‘bad’ in the system is so outrageous that it will, suddenly, call into question the very value of money itself. (Which we have been totally misled into believing is something it CAN’T be.)

As the ‘tide’ continues to rise, we are already seeing people working for paychecks that don’t cover their expenses…

BIZARRELY, this is being ‘covered’ with governmental assistance!

When that ‘assistance’ plays out…there is gonna be one bitchin’ fuckaree! (or fuckaroo, depending on your preference.)

Actually, by inference, a ‘fuckaroo is a ‘mistake/error’, a fuckaree is the level of distress the fuckaroo creates.

Thus bankrupting global civilization is a supreme fuckaroo…so it stands to reason that the resultant fuckaree will be of equally stupendous proportions.

[Admit it, you read me for my decidedly twisted sense of humor…]

And in yet another stunning demonstration of ‘tone-deafness’:

Slight Gains on Wall Street
By REUTERS 22 minutes ago

Stocks gained early on Wall Street after a late sell-off Monday, as investors continued to digest a bailout plan for Spanish banks.

Man, oh man , that has got to redefine the term ‘heartburn’, it’s been four freaking years and investors are still trying to ‘digest’ the idea that the world as they have come to know it is GONE?

Either that or ‘stupid’ has been/is being ‘redefined’!

But I belabor the obvious when I point out that the only thing the stock market tells a bankrupt civilization is how much they are getting ripped – off by the criminals who rule them.

Or we could use this measure:

Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early ’90s, Fed Says
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The recent downturn left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said.

Seriously good citizen, how the hell do you tell?

There is so much ‘financial uncertainty’ out there that the only thing you can be sure of is YOU are regularly being played for a sucker!

Freaky how this all circles back to the very beginning of money itself and the ‘inability’ of the parties involved to agree on a value.

That’s why everybody has their own dollar and everybody has their own list of what that dollar will buy (today…until it doesn’t.)

Interesting to note that the ‘globalization’ (read: consolidation/monopolization) of manufacturing processes has made the value of non-producer country money a question mark.

The western world is ‘broke’ (except for a handful of, er, ‘privileged’ people) so what is the monetary value of a nation that manufactures pocket lint (wholesale?)

You guessed it…zippo!

And when that little factoid becomes public knowledge, watch out for the fuckaree!

You’ve been busting your balls all of your life for nada!

Anything worthwhile you’ve done has been taken away from you for a pocket full of empty promises that we call ‘money’.

Which SHOULD wake you up to the FACT that there is more to life than MONEY!

How screwed up is it that the only people who know this are the same people who insure that the rest of us spend our days in grinding poverty?

Time to remake the world…because the old one is about to fall apart.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'We' (re-defined)

Greetings good citizen,

In a shattered world with a hopelessly broken economy, the dream weavers are shamelessly celebrating the Dow’s return to the 13,000 point level.

How this relates to the real world is incomprehensible to the typical non-psychotic. You have to be bonkers to believe the Dow IS at 13,000!

But that isn’t nearly as disturbing as this latest ‘re-definition’ of the word ‘we’ that confounds us:

He said rhetoric about the American Dream has been featured during this election cycle more than in decades, which he attributed to the tough times the nation has been suffering. "It's pretty basic stuff (Obama) talks about and I think as it turns out that's pretty much where the dream is right now," Ford said. "We can say the dream might have been lowered a little bit in terms of its aspiration but the aspiration is still there, and it's always there."

Some polling suggests that, despite voters' continued unhappiness with the economy and Obama's handling of it, the president may be convincing Americans he's on their side. A recent CBS/New York Times poll shows people view Obama as the candidate who best understands the needs and problems of "people like you," and see his policies as more apt than those of the GOP candidates to favor the middle class or the poor.

Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod said "the viability of the middle class is the central economic challenge of our time, so I think that this is very essential in terms of this election." "He's been talking about this for years, that there are certain things that are pillars of a middle-class life, and he's been very focused on those things and addressing them as president," Axelrod said.

How fucking sad is it good citizen that the only time any candidate even mentions the poor it is relationship to caring ‘more’ about them than the opposition does.

Although one can’t help but wonder if somebody researching useless facts glanced at the polling data and (wrongly) figured out that the ‘majority’ of voters were 'middle class.'

Which is to point out, guess what boo-boo, there are ‘poor people’ living in/near ‘rich’ neighborhoods/voting districts!

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the LAST THREE ELECTIONS have centered on ‘The Middle Class’…like there were only two, the rich, and the middle…nobody gives a fuck about the ‘working poor’ (although they make up the bulk of the population!)

Naturally, this brings us full circle to another, er, ‘common misperception’. The working poor are very likely to ‘mis-identify’ themselves as ‘Lower to Middle’ ‘middle class’.

Which brings us to yet another conundrum of why people ‘supposedly’ vote against their own best interests?

And the, er, ‘unfortunate answer’ to that question is they were ‘mislead’ by what we commonly refer to as ‘political speak’.

This is why the (near) complete absence of both the working class and the poor from our national conversation is so disturbing to me.

It also sends a rather clear message about the future of this burgeoning Banana Republic…

Such as the message we see repeated here

Symons, fresh out of college, entered this brave new world thinking she'd do pretty much what her parents' generation did: Work for just one or two companies over about 45 years before bidding farewell to co-workers at a retirement party and heading off into her sunset years with a pension.

Forty years into that run, the 60-year-old communications specialist for a Wisconsin-based insurance company has worked more than a half-dozen jobs. She's been laid off, downsized and seen the pension disappear with only a few thousand dollars accrued when it was frozen.

So, five years from the age when people once retired, she laughs when she describes her future plans. "I'll probably just work until I drop," she says, a sentiment expressed, with varying degrees of humor, by numerous members of her age group.

Unlike Ms Symons, I do not have a college degree (but most of my contemporaries in the rapidly shrinking world of ‘non-communist manufacturing’ do either!)

If I held my resume to my chin it would hit the floor!

How sad is it that I’ve had more jobs than my fifty-five years and more often than not I have worked two jobs (adding to the heap!)

Let’s not forget that I have been unemployed for the last year. (as our Ms. Symons comments toward the end of the article, the older you get, the harder it gets to find another ‘situation’.

So we return full circle to the plan of most over fifty workers…’the work til you drop’ plan.

It’s not that they don’t intend to draw their social security, they do! It is just that lately Social Security has been sending them ‘statement of account’ with ‘estimates’ of what they can expect come retirement time…

And most people have already determined that they can’t live on what (for most of them) is the ONLY income they will have (until the government collapses…and it will!)

Yup, most have been ‘churned' out of formerly good paying positions long before they became vested in the company pension plan. Then their 401k’s were, er, ’plundered’ by opportunistic fund managers who squandered their life savings on the alphabet soup of risky bets connected to ’securitized mortgage obligations’.

Funny how NOBODY HAS BEEN prosecuted for these brazen thefts…which isn’t to say that NOBODY WILL BE.

Because retribution is coming…and the hundreds of millions that have been ’screwed’ out of their future economic security will do whatever it takes to insure it doesn’t happen again.

Which brings us full circle to A Simple Plan.

Let’s briefly revisit the last presidential campaign and examine the, er, ‘mis-interpretation’ of the term ‘Yes WE can’…

You now know THAT ‘we’ didn’t include YOU (and by extension, yours.)

How much longer can our civilization survive these 'politics of division?'

I will once again leave you to ’connect the dots’, ( YOUR future depends on it!)

A Simple Plan, one people, *one purpose!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(* to provide for the needs of ALL humanity, not just a selfish few!)

Legality

Greetings good citizen,

I have been ‘out of town’ over the weekend and had a rather long commute home on Sunday. I spent today ‘in the office’ thus I have not had the opportunity to post until tonight, Halloween…and we haven’t had a single trick or treater!

This isn’t unusual for the rural area we live in, it’s a long walk between houses around here and we’re the only house on our street (the condo’s across the road are in a ‘security building’ so the kids have to be ‘buzzed in’, anyway, suffice to say the kids usually ‘blow off’ our side street in favor of the ‘richer pickings’ to be had on the next street over.

Ironically, I am mindful of how few kids we normally get (it varies wildly, we’ve had as many as 50 and as few as 9, although this year’s zero is a first…probably due to the snow.) So I only buy candy my kids (and my humble self) will enjoy!

Harder to puzzle out is what happened on Wall Street today? Trick or Treat?

In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips closed down 3.1 percent, while markets in Germany and Paris lost about 3.2 percent. The FTSE 100 in London was down 2.8 percent. Asian markets were down around 1 percent or less.

“I think it is a big sell-off — profit-taking after an enormous, ferocious, violent run upward,” said James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist for Wells Capital Management, speaking about the declines in stocks.

But he also forecast that some of the data to be released this week could restore market attention to the economy in the United States.

“I think Europe is certainly part of the reason” for the down day, he said. “Where we end this week is going to have more to do with the data coming from Main Street, U.S.A.”

Seriously good citizen, what the HELL is WRONG with these people? Why does ‘bonehead’ think the collapse of the Euro Zone will leave the rest of the global economy unscathed?

He doesn’t even acknowledge that the recent (totally irrational) run up in stock prices displayed more than a little ‘cognitive dissonance’, does he?

Naturally, I’m being ‘kind’. Pretending the Euro crisis was solved (the purported reason behind the recent run up) or that it wasn’t an exercise in ‘wishful thinking’ borders on delusional!
But then again that’s the stock market for you (since the criminals took over.)

In reality good citizen, all of our ‘troubles’ (starting with the ‘fake prosperity‘) can be traced back to the breakdown in ‘the rule of law.’

We’ve been ‘told’ (rather than seen for ourselves) how ‘fabulous’ we’ve been doing…but in truth, only the criminals have been doing ‘fabulous’, everybody else has been sucking pond water!

Now there is a movement afoot to restore our failed Justice system but it has zero ‘guidance.’

So-called ‘legal professionals’ have let this situation get out of hand so they CAN’T BE TRUSTED to either rebuild or restore that which is broken.

Where do we turn in a situation like this?

We will have to ‘trust’ ourselves, good citizen.

A Simple Plan has an initial set of laws prescribed within it that can be used as a foundation we can use to re-establish the justice system.

I used the principle of those who must live under the laws should be the sole arbiters of what should or should not be ‘illegal’.

Full Time Law-makers are neither necessary or desirable.

In fact, providing anyone with the, er, ‘privilege’ of interpreting the laws will be prohibited!

For too long we have suffered the, er, ‘machinations of the self-serving’ who claimed only they ‘understood’ the law…

Which flies in the face of one of the most basic premises of law itself, that for law to be effective, it must be easy to understand!

You wouldn’t think you’d need a law that states that premise but indeed we do!

You wouldn’t think it would be necessary to prohibit the ‘practice’ of law but indeed we do!

Most people (until they find themselves on the ‘wrong side’ of an arbitrary legal decision) fail to see the necessity of prohibiting judges!

It is and has been a stupendous failure to let an entire class of self-important twits to make our laws while exempting themselves from them!

This is what happens when you let a certain ‘class of individuals’ claim exclusive provenance over what we all must live by!

So what will it be good citizen,

TRICK

Or

TREAT?

The law is no joking matter…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Telltales

Greetings good citizen,

I don’t usually follow the, er, ‘specific’ trials of the Euro-Zone because it is commonly acknowledged that the banking system is global, so pointing to problems of a particular geographic region is really a media attempt at deliberate ‘mis-direction’.

But when one is handed Lemons, one strives to turn them into something more palatable.

Under the headline of ‘Euro crisis’ we have this tale of, what else but ‘contagion’…

Dexia’s problems are not entirely caused by Europe’s debt crisis, but some issues in its case are a matter of broader debate. Among them are how much of a bailout banks should get, and the size of the losses they should take on loans that governments cannot repay.

Among Dexia’s biggest trading partners are several large United States institutions, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer without the taxpayer rescue.

Whether this sets a precedent if Europe needs to bail out other banks will be closely watched. The debate centers on how much of a burden taxpayers should bear to support banks that made ill-advised loans or trades.

Let us spend a moment and digest what this means to the average individual.

First off is how the government HAS NOT reached into YOUR pocket to make these shiftless bastards ‘whole’. They waved their ’magic wands’ and conjured a bunch of brand new debt into existence…debt that YOU’RE NOT ‘technically’ on the hook for…today.

All of this is being done in the realm of ‘creative accounting’, the, er, bondholders/creditors don’t actually NEED the money, it is all the ‘principle of the thing’ involved.

No irony should be lost on the fact that this is being done to satisfy ‘the rules’ (at the expense of even more important rules…which cannot and will not be, er, ‘avoided’.

This perhaps is one of the most disturbing facets of the current economic environment, the ‘wrong’ principles are being enforced while more basic functions are being ignored.

In the end the, er, ‘historians’ will point to greed and they will be correct.

The real question good citizen is when will we break the boom-bust chain?

Since the question is, at this point, rhetorical we don’t have a definite answer but we do have this curious graphic that is useful more so as a teaching tool than a graphic representation of ‘global fiscal interconnectedness.’

To begin, let’s look at who is being depicted as the ‘Fat Man’ in the room, are any of you wondering why?

In fact the real question is why certain circles are ‘gray’ and why others are ‘red’ for they certainly aren’t representative of the economic well being of the labeled nation’s populace…although the labels start to make more sense when viewed by the ‘percentage of whales/fat cats’ residing in a given nation.

How disturbing is that, good citizen?

Naturally, the thickness of the arrows shows us how much each, er, ‘group of taxpayer supported fat cats’ are on the hook for.

Looks like the US is on the hook for some serious dinero!

How big are those fat cat banker’s balls now?

Let me direct your attention to to a site that has been all over this Euro mess

I leave the choice to visit up to you.

I feel compelled to return to the issue of ‘principles’ and of being ‘on the hook’.

I have frequently asked the (rhetorical) question of ‘what is the PURPOSE of commerce?’

If there is a single issue that defines the ‘political divide’ in this nation, that issue is it.

Since commerce is, by definition, the endeavor established to ‘supply’ society with the essentials of life, we have to ponder where ‘credit scores’ come from?

Worse is being forced into debt to obtain life’s essentials (which are ‘free to the owner’.)

Conservatives (those who wish to preserve the ‘status quo’) are quick to re-direct you to the somewhat insane concept of ‘ownership IS freedom’.

This, somehow, begins with the concept of the ownership of ones’ self…sort of totally missing the whole point of civilization (but it does clearly explain their complete lack of appreciation for the efforts of others, which is brushed off as the ‘stupidity‘ of others, which appears to be the ONLY thing they are genuinely grateful for!)

Well, all of this, er, ‘ill conceived’ debt is exactly that. The ‘investor class’ ran out of opportunity so they ‘created’ one out of the last possible resort, the full faith and credit of the nation!

Take the full faith and credit of the nation and hand it over to people who don’t give a fuck for anything or anybody besides themselves and what do you get?

In a word, Chaos!

Again we return to the initial question, what is the purpose of commerce? Understand, without civilization, commerce doesn’t exist!

Only uncivilized savages exist outside civilization so how do these self-centered conservatives (specifically Libertarians) justify their place in society?

Well, the ‘own’.

Not that ONE of them has a legitimate title to ANYTHING…

But, lo and behold, WHO is a big supporter of ‘government’ now?

Why it is the same assholes that want to abolish ‘government oversight’.

They’re all for ‘starving the government’ until their property rights are jeopardized!

Anyway, in the end what we’re seeing is the cooking of the books at YOUR expense.

When we slip back into a Stone Age level of existence the excuse will be ‘we don’t have the money to pay teachers or maintain the roads’ (or to feed all of you useless bastards!)

We ‘spent’ that money ‘rescuing’ the now defunct banks!

I don’t need to remind anyone that ALL MONEY is FUNNY, do I?

It isn’t the entry on the ledger that dried up the goods in the marketplace, it was the entry in the bank account of those with more than they could spend, who didn’t ‘re-invest’ their income and voted against ‘re-distribution’ of ‘their’ money.

I have opined before that the conventions that prevent us from killing one another on sight are wearing thin…pretty soon it will become the only logical outcome.

I don’t know about you but I didn’t raise my kids to be murderers…

The question here is, did they?

And the answer, at least partially, is they aren’t raising their kids at all!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The beat goes on...

Greetings good citizen,

You don’t need me to tell you (again) that the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace. The disturbing part of this process is what those responsible for this disaster hope to gain?

Have they (like suicide bombers) been promised 72 virgins upon the successful completion of their, er, ‘mission’?

As it turns out we can only wonder what the idiot politicians have been offered to sell their nation’s future to the private sector?

Economists also expressed concern that the austerity program demanded by European and international lenders could end up pushing the Greek economy into a deeper slump, making its debt even harder to pay back. More broadly, critics said they doubted that Europe had done more than postpone a day of reckoning for the euro, with Ireland, Portugal and Spain, as well as Greece, all struggling with slow or negative growth and rising debts.

The passage of the measures, a difficult and possibly debilitating feat for a Socialist Party elected on a social welfare platform, ensures that Greece’s foreign lenders will unlock the next installment of $17 billion in aid that the country needs to meet its debt obligations through August. But analysts in Athens predicted that the existing government might not last much longer than that, suggesting that political and financial uncertainty could continue for some time.

“It’s a giant step in terms of conception,” said Theodore Couloumbis, a vice president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, in Athens. “But it’s a baby step in terms of realization or implementation.”

Greece CANNOT pay which leads to the fact it WILL NOT pay, this circle jerk is being provided to prove that capitalism is not broken, that ‘extend and pretend’ will make it all work out in the end…

At least until the killing starts.

And from the looks of the picture that accompanies the article it’s not far off.

In keeping with yesterday’s established fact, (that the media IS THE PROBLEM), what do you suppose they were thinking when they cooked up this load of mularky?

Because we have two choices here good citizen, this article is either total bullshit OR the STUPID Brigade is much larger than originally suspected.

(Rush Limbaugh’s regular listeners only constitute a tiny percentage of the national audience, well in line with ‘the normal distribution’ of stupid throughout a society.)

Nearly nine in 10 Americans say homeownership is an important part of the American dream, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And they are keen on making sure it stays that way, for themselves and everyone else.

Support for helping people in financial distress over housing is higher than support for helping those without a job for many months.

Forty-five percent of the respondents say the government should be doing more to improve the housing market, while 16 percent say it should be doing less. On the politically contentious issue of direct financial assistance to those having trouble paying their mortgages, slightly more than half of those polled, 53 percent, say the government should help. And almost no one favors discontinuing the mortgage tax deduction, a prized middle-class benefit that has been featured on some budget-cutting proposals.

The first thing to remember with polls is most of them are unreliable, (most of the time not enough people are polled.) I have been asked to participate in polls only to be told I was ‘ineligible’ after being asked a few demographic questions.

Most polls are reported as ‘All Americans’…although if the poll includes anything it is usually just the number of people asked.

But honestly good citizen, what are these people smoking? WHO do they think is going to buy their homes from them (even if they somehow manage to pay them off?)

Worse, there aren’t a lot of ‘smart people’ looking to turn their homes around for LESS than they paid for it.

We did have that…um, decidely misleading report the other day that home prices were ‘on the rise’…

What do you suppose caused that?

What we’re seeing there is the same thing that’s measured when the filthy rich go shopping at ‘high end’ retail outlets.

Who owns the most desirable property?

(The filthy rich)

And who buys property from the filthy rich?

(Other filthy rich bastards!)

So if housing prices are increasing (in Bel Aire) is it ‘safe to assume’ that downtown Detroit is ‘rebounding’ as well?

Only if you’re an idiot!

Soon good citizen we will have to adopt a ‘no news is good news’ policy and start, er, ‘punishing’ the corporate owned media for lying to us.

Despite their assertions to the contrary, it ISN’T ‘harmless’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Flying Wheels...

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘lead’ headline on today’s NY Times is about the unrest in Pakistan…but the REAL headline story (which apparently didn’t break until the markets opened, although markets around the world are bleeding from the eyesockets ‘in unison’.)

The exact time Japan raised the ‘threat level’ from its damaged nuclear reactor to 100% isn’t known at this moment. Although if market performance is anything to go by it must have been sometime last night (local.)

So we can only assume that this one caught the night editors napping.

OR we have another example of ‘if disaster were about to strike would they tell us?’

Given the ‘panic’ this would cause, I’d opine that they would…NOT!

Nice how this segues into today’s ‘topic du juor’ of “Are we witnessing the wheels flying off of our crippled civilization?”

Again we have a headline that didn’t make the cut

Worse is the ‘spin’…

Gas prices are approaching record highs, but so far most Americans do not appear to be drastically cutting back their driving or even their spending as they did in 2008.

Prices for a gallon of regular unleaded gas are topping $4 at more service stations nationwide, revisiting the bleak territory of three years ago, when the average price for a gallon of regular gas reached a peak of $4.11 on July 17, 2008, according to the Oil Price Information Service.

[The question below was originally between the other two paragraphs]

The question, economists agreed, is what happens if prices continue to go up and remain high.

Um, tell me true good citizen, is this really the most pressing issue on your mind?

Aren’t you just a bit more concerned about how much quicker this is going to bring on ‘collapse’?

The eight million jobs lost AFTER the economy tanked haven’t come back…are all of those unemployed people, driving around looking for work behind this…sustained usage level?

No good citizen, they aren’t.

The article tells us the answer, the date given for the previous high in fuel prices was THREE YEARS AGO, what we’re seeing is ‘The New Normal’.

People aren’t ‘cutting back’ because those people lost their damn jobs and haven’t found replacements yet.

And as the next article shows us those jobs aren’t coming back

The thing to remember good citizen is this ISN’T the first or the second ‘jobless recovery’ they’ve foisted off on us, it’s the THIRD!

If the other gloom and doom sites are to be believed, we are facing (or will face in short order) ANOTHER ‘financial crisis’ before the summer is over!

This should surprise no one as we all know NOTHING has been done to correct the causes of the LAST financial crisis!

Hell, our pal ‘Flipper’ is still able to take out a ‘liar’s loan’ to buy foreclosed property with!

But hey, no guts, no glory, right? Isn’t that the same reckless attitude that caused the last train wreck?

Which brings us back to my ‘favorite’ whipping boy…mismanagement.

Extend and pretend is a game you can play for just so long, it’s over when you run out of suckers.

Which begs a more pointed question…are you being played for a ‘sucker’?

If you haven’t gotten a pay increase in the last two years you are!

We have seen the news reports of US facilities shutting down because no alternative to parts ‘normally’ produced in Japan is available.

How far do you supposse that will ‘cascade’?

I think you will be amazed at just how far reaching this event will ultimately become.

You know how the parable ‘for want of a nail’ ends, don’t you?

'For want of a nail the war was lost…'

But the fucking ‘beancounters’ dismiss this wisdom as being ‘outdated’.

The evidence speaks for itself good citizen, civilization was built on ‘redundancy’, those who embraced it prospered, while those who didn’t perished.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Over the edge!

Greetings good citizen,

Have a look at at this bullshit and ask yourself ‘Seriously, who voted for this?’

Does it seem like you are living in Crazyville, a place where nothing makes sense and nobody even attempts to explain what’s going on?

I think the progressive blogosphere has the right take on the political Kabuki Theater playing out on the headlines of the nation’s leading newspapers.

Some ‘fucking lunatics’ are doing their damndest to ‘repeal the 20th Century!’

So what’s more disturbing, the fucking lunatics or the fact that they are in a position to pull it off?

I’m confident that no ‘rational individual’ wants what the Republicans are trying to foist off on the nation so why is the (corporate owned) media giving them a pass?

Understand that the Republicans have brought this nation to the brink of destruction, they are the primary cause of the economic desert that has replaced what was the world’s mightiest manfacturering machine…and they did it all for ‘personal greed’!

Now, I know I sound like ‘a broken record’ but there is another name for what took place/is taking place, a technical name, a legal term that is seldom heard anymore.

Because that term strikes fear into the hearts of all who hear it.

Treason is still a charge one does not level ‘lightly’.

You see there’s no such thing as a little treason; a little treason is like being a little pregnant.

One need only look at the economic wasteland that has replaced what once was the world’s leading manufacturing zone and ask, ‘what happened here’?

On the surface it looks like ‘the rust belt’ fell victim to the ‘global race to the bottom’…but is that what really happened? Could no one ‘foresee’ the consequences of shipping all of that work overseas…so ‘a few’ could be rich?

Um, you see there’s another thing about treason, there is no such thing as ‘accidental treason’; treason is ever and always a deliberate act.

We are left holding a stinking bag of slime made for us by the very people who ‘swore’ to put the interests of society ahead of their own…and it’s not like they didn’t reward themselves handsomely for, er, ‘foregoing their global monopolies’.

I’d opine that most of you are at least aware of who did what to whom and some of you even lived through the ‘how’, multiple times.

So how do today’s headlines strike you?

Have you dismissed it as more ‘Republican Theatrics’ or are you disturbed by the fact that the last time a political party went this far off the political map it culminated in Nazi Germany?

Are the 2012 elections starting to look like the staging area for the next civil war?

One thing is certain, you can no longer look at any of this, er, ‘propaganda’ and dismiss it as mere ‘partisanship’.

For decades now the polls have been telling us that a majority of US citizens believe this nation is on ‘the wong track’…and yet no matter who we elect, nothing changes, or worse, things continue to deteriorate!

Hasn’t every president since LBJ been a little worse than the one who preceeded him?

Does this mean it’s ‘finally’ time for a female chief executive?

Believe me what I tell you, we’d be better off electing a Gerbil if who wears the big hat is the only thing we get to change!

Seriously good citizen, take a good look at the cesspool the privileged few are trying to push the rest of us into.

We can’t afford it (and I’m telling you right here and now most people will never stand for it!)

That’s perhaps the other, er, ‘dangerous’ thing nobody is paying attention to. Our civilization is like a pressure cooker that is perilously close to exploding…and yet the bastards keep the heat on full blast!

So nobody should be surprised when the same morons who haven’t said a word about the building pressure pretend to be ‘astonished’ when all hell breaks loose!

What might REALLY astonish them is their very public executions at the hands of the same people they have mislead for so long!

Pissed off is an understatement 99% of the time.

It’s well beyond the ‘oh bullshit!’ stage. Shutting down the government is serious stuff…not that the government has actually done what it was founded to do anytime in living memory…

Naturally I’m refering to the ‘stated purpose’ of government. That ‘protecting the people’ part most people mistaking believe includes them instead of the REAL reason governments are established and that’s to ‘protect the RICH PEOPLE’!

Although ‘rich’ isn’t an accurate descriptor considering the ‘funny’ nature of money, as currency is currently ‘abused’.

Someone once likened society, in particular ‘high society’ to pirates.

Extremes in ruthlessness seem to result in social success, at least in the upper circles.

You land ‘on top’ because of a ‘certain disregard for the rules’, once there, you write your own ticket.

No irony should be lost on the common ‘diagnosis’ for such ‘driven’ individuals being called ‘psychopaths’ but it does go a long way towards explaining the increasingly ‘insane’ nature of our civilization.

I’m gonna let it go now…but YOU shouldn’t.

I just wanted to point out that we are now witnessing ‘gradualism’ in the extreme. A decade ago what is happening around the world right now would be ‘unthinkable’ instead of being generally dismissed as mere ‘political showmanship’…

Just something else to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Worse than it appears

Greetings good citizen,

The, er, ‘near collapse’ of the world’s financial markets is purported to have been caused by reckless lending/investment, of course, the official version is ‘speculative’ rather than ‘reckless’ but it turns into the same difference.

Is it really ‘reckless’ to, er, ‘lend’ money to people you ordinarily wouldn’t GIVE a dollar to for a cup of coffee?

Worse, of course is the ‘unsubstantiated income’ part of the puzzle. For CENTURIES banks have DEMANDED absolutely rock solid proof of both income and employment before approving even a modest loan.

So what the fuck happened? Did bankers suddenly ‘lose it’ and start handing money out to anybody that asked, because they asked?

Um, no…in fact something much more sinister was going on behind the scenes.

First and foremost the, er (now global) ‘economy’ had arrived back to the same place the US economy had been thirty years ago, that forbidding place they call ‘saturated markets’.

And the only way to shake more business out of chronically ‘underpaid’ consumers was to ‘loosen credit’.

And the only ‘safe’ way to lend to, er, ‘marginal’ borrowers was to have the government ‘guarantee’ the loan.

Anyway, push come to shove and pretty soon we’re talking a quadrillion dollars here!

Seriously good citizen, is the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD worth a QUADRILLION DOLLARS?

Because if it is, then we have a Zimbabwe situation on our hands where the problem folds in on itself, how much can a dollar be worth?

The answer, as we are finding out, isn’t much at all.

Like that weren’t bad enough, ‘throwing good money after bad’ is only making the whole situation worse.

The entire US housing market is (very generously) estimated to be worth 7 trillion dollars.

Our current ‘dearth of buyers’ situation probably drops that generous estimate by more than half, you’d be lucky to get 2 trillion for the whole US market (considering how much of it lies in an ‘economic desert’ now.)

So where does this ‘thousand trillion dollar’ figure come from?

Why, the same place all values come from, the greedy heart of the investor (coupled with the ‘bottomless’ pockets of the government.)

But that’s not the problem is it? The problem is how much of this ‘imaginary value’ is going to ‘leak’ into the real economy?

This is the shit ‘hyper-inflation’ is made of. It is the same thing that leads to 2 bottles of spring water and a pair of watercress sandwiches ‘fetching’ nine figures.

At which point the ‘money’ has gone ‘beyond funny’.

When the ‘scrap value’ of the paper exceeds a note’s ‘face value’, you know you’re in trouble.

This is precisely why bankers are being rewarded with million dollar bonuses.

If you or I had fucked up this bad we’d be staring at prison time!

Anyway, more than three years into this monumental cluster fuck and things STILL aren’t on an even keel.

Naturally, some of that is due to NOBODY BEING PROSECUTED for the original crimes, (which is a crime in itself) and the fact that nobody has enacted legislation to curb these destructive practices from continuing. Another crime but hey, we can just keep stacking ‘em up because ‘rich men don’t go to jail’…

Something that is likely to remain true…although if I remember correctly, the elite of King Louis’s court spent their brief last days in the Bastille before they were beheaded.

I’m thinking most of today’s elite will never see the inside of a courtroom, most of them will be tried and executed on the streets.

We’re even seeing some of the same behavior on display that was seen during those perilous times.

Which is to ask ‘do the poor even exist if we do not see them?’

My own sister was living out of her car…but I’m a lot ‘closer to the ground’ than your average resident of a ‘gated community’ is.

My job, as I keep pointing out, is to bring the big picture into focus for you. If you cannot see the ‘treachery’ of those who would cheat you out of everything they can get away with, It’s not because ‘nobody’ was pointing it out…although I am as close to ‘nobody’ as you’re ever going to get!

How sad is it good citizen that in the space of fifty years we find ourselves stranded aground on the exact same shoals we wrecked on in the late 60’s?

And until we alter how and why things get done we will keep on, er, ‘crashing’ here.

Just another tidbit for you to chew on.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

This can't go on much longer...

Greetings good citizen,

As one might expect, the 6 unemployed workers for every job opening is now 8. This, as the poor bastards that have exhausted their unemployment benefits take any available job in an effort to keep their families together.

Not all of these efforts succeed…resulting in a certain amount of ‘resentment’.

If we are to believe the capitalists, this is their own fault. If they had only taken the necessary steps to make themselves ‘valuable’ they’d still have jobs!

Somehow, that 8 to 1 ratio indicates to me that something else is amiss.

Could this Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet have anything to do with it?

You know, we elect these, er, idiots to protect and preserve our society/civilization. How unfortunate is it that ‘society’ like anarchy, has been ‘bastardized’ by the self-interested?

Nothing scares the elite like direct democracy, it is the most frightening thing in the world to our self-professed ‘betters’. It is the clueless elite who have perverted the meaning of anarchy (which means rules WITHOUT ‘rulers’) into a synonym for chaos.

The twisted the ‘no rulers’ concept into ‘no rules’.

But wait, we aren’t finished (and neither were they.) They also twisted the word ‘society’ from it’s original ‘all inclusive’ meaning to it’s modern interpretation where the word ‘high’ is implied whenever ‘society’ is invoked…which is to say if you aren’t rich/elite then you don’t count as a member of ‘society’.

This is the same spooky/creepy implication you get when the Anglo-centric media announces ‘the world’ condemns this or that.

It is the same ‘conceit’ of conducting a sporting event where only a couple of dozen (predominantly US teams) play in a ‘world series’.

But they aren’t done good citizen, not by a long shot!

Not only has our captive government gone completely tone deaf but they have taken it upon themselves to to draft legislation like this which is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they were elected to do!

Sadly, this is far beyond the ‘few bad apples’ stage. Nonsense like this is sweeping the nation!

While NOTHING is being done about the multiple crises that threaten…nay, WILL collapse our civilization.

While today’s other articles are disturbing enough, if you want to read something really disturbing click the link!

And if you want to make sense of it all you could do worse than paying a visit to my favorite news aggregator.

One of the things I strive to do here is keep it to a ‘dull roar’ but if you want to keep up…well.

Anyway, I’ll end today’s offering here, there’s more than enough here to absorb in one sitting.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Death from Above

Greetings good citizen,

Um, okay, is it just me or have there been a lot of earthquakes popping up all over the planet?

I know this is supposed to be a sign of the end of days but the ‘end of days’ is a bit problematic for we atheists…that and the knowledge that the technology exists to, er, ‘incite’ these and other ‘natural phenomenon’ (including what’s being called ‘global warming’.)

On an unrelated but no less disturbing note, Mr. Rich bidding farewell to the editorial pages of the NY Times…er, abruptly only serves to amplify these dark suspicions.

Because he takes great pains to state that he wasn’t either censured or chased off (why bring it up at all if it isn’t a factor?) makes his sudden departure that much more, er, suspect.

Not that it matters.

Its dangerous enough to have a media you can’t trust. Put those lying bastards in charge of, er, ‘fabricating’ evidence that the ‘greatest story/fairy tale ever told’ is drawing to its grisly conclusion.

Considering all the ‘criminal activity’ we have witnessed recently, the ‘end of days’ would make a mighty convenient cover story while the criminals made good their escape.

Naturally, not everyone believes in the ‘Second Coming’, Hell, the Jews are still waiting for the first one!

Not that this bothers the criminals any, they have the cops in their pocket so nobody is going to be in hot pursuit…not at first anyway. When the magnitude of their crimes becomes widely known, pursuit is inevitable. We cannot re-establish the rule of law while these criminals walk free.

But let’s back up a step…just who is in control of this extremely dangerous technology? Why the criminals, of course!

How do we prosecute people who can trigger earthquakes and/or tsunami’s at the flip of a switch? Hell, if I’m correct these criminals can even turn an ordinary tropical depression (your typical thunderstorm) into a category 5 hurricane!

It’s gonna make ‘em a little hard to take alive if they can reach into the most closely guarded and (supposedly) secure sections of our military and orchestrate attacks on our own citizens.

I can’t ‘prove’ any of this BUT all you need to do is plug the word HAARP into your search engine for a genuine eyeful.

The part that really sucks is how all of this technology came into being under the pentagon’s infamous ‘black budgets’.

Who knows what else has been developed that is being hidden from the people who funded the research?

Remember, only rogues and scoundrels require ‘the cloak of secrecy’.

While lip service is paid to ‘transparency’.

So, who’s next?

Or more specifically, where will the next ‘(un)natural disaster’ strike?

Brings us full circle to our original conundrum, WE are the, er, ‘captives’ of self-interested criminals who ‘control’ us via the media.

And they are none too subtle about it either…because there isn’t a frigging thing you or I can do about it…short of declaring war upon them.

Which is coming. Not that our declaring war on them will mean anything considering THEY have already declared war on us.

If you wonder why nobody is doing anything about this it is because it all seems ‘crazy’. How could anyone pull such a thing off…and the answer is ‘it’s much easier than you would think’ (especially when you consider how much of our government is ‘appointed’.)

YOU can readily see that things aren’t what they should be, hell, most of the country agrees that we as a nation are ‘off course’.

So why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?

We’re back to the criminals and they sure as hell aren’t going to put a stop to it!

Like I’ve been saying right along, there isn’t a way to fix the system using the system because the tools don’t exist (and were we to fabricate the necessary tools, the criminal element would block their passage!)

If calls for a new constitutional convention were to succeed the end result would be an incredible clusterfuck! Worse, we’d probably end up with even less control that we currently have. (Which is a little hard to do since we currently have none.)

I know it must look like I’ve knocked back a few before I started writing this but, sadly, that is not the case.

As always, I do not ask for your blind trust. I merely present the situation the way I see it and leave it for you to decide for yourself.

If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(Post number) 525, if anyone is keeping track...

Greetings good citizen,

It is fascinating to watch the Corporate Owned Media blatantly ignore impending doom (both ours and theirs.)

One could only suspect that they don’t believe the rioting taking place elsewhere will occur in their own backyard.

Allow me to direct your attention to the axiom that governs this peculiar variety of willful ignorance: Civilization is only 9 meals deep.

Global Food Prices Hit New Record High

The FAO measures food prices from an index made up of a basket of key commodities such as wheat, milk, oil and sugar, and is widely watched by economists and politicians around the world as the first indicator of whether prices will end up higher on shop shelves.

The index hit averaged 230.7 points in January, up from 223.1 points in December and 206 in November. The index highlights how food prices, which throughout most of the last two decades have been stable, have taken off in alarming fashion in the last three years.

How bizarre is it good citizen that the original ‘consumer price index’ was heavily weighted towards the cost of ‘staples’? How, er, ‘stupid’ is it to exclude food and energy from the ‘cost of living’ index?

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’? (Which they themselves are fond of labeling as ‘incompetence’? Is it still incompetence if it is what you are ‘ordered’ to do?)

Perhaps it is more succinct to point out that the, er, ‘heavily manipulated’ data you are regularly fed is intended to, er, ‘mis-direct’ you as to the current state of affairs.

I think most of us would agree that being ‘directed to, er, mislead’ the public falls short of the test for incompetence.

Sure looks like lying to me…which is legally known as perjury, the willful telling of an ‘untruth’ (usually, but not always, to protect oneself from the damning implications of the, er, untainted data.)

No irony should be lost on the fact that lying is still lying at ‘one remove’…usually manifested as perpetuating a lie to preserve one’s income stream (a.k.a. job.)

Now wouldn’t be a good time to launch into the bigger lie that perpetuates all of these lies, would it?

I’ll spare you…this time.

So, global food prices are at ‘record highs’…does this revelation make you yawn?

I promise it will only bore you until you get hungry. What’s that? You’ve got plenty of money?

You don’t get it, do you?

Who’s going to unload this shit for wages that DON’T PUT FOOD on their own table?

Would that be you?

All we have to do is tell you where the drop point is and you’ll get it yourself?

Um, are you bringing your ‘armed escort’ (and are they leaving immediately? Because there isn’t going to be anything left if you dick around!)

What do you mean you don’t have an armed escort? Do you even have a gun?

What! You might as well forget about going to pick up something to eat on your own.

You’re gonna get killed (and if you’re VERY unlucky, eaten, and not necessarily in that order either!)

This may look, er, ‘funny’ to you but let me assure you, I’m deadly serious.

So, ‘Noah’, how long can you ‘tread water’?

All is not lost (yet.) Let us take a moment from our idle musings to ponder the source of all of our woes; our deeply misguided and mismanaged commerce system!

Is it any wonder the bulk of humanity both distrusts as well as disdains those who would withhold what we need to live for their own personal gain?

That, good citizen, IS capitalism without the ‘candy coating’.

Without ‘essentials’ capitalism itself collapses.

And guess where we’re headed?

Right in one. Collapse.

Why? Because of income streams that place profits before people.

Shorthand, utter insanity, but how else do you explain the relentless pursuit of profit by people who already have more than they can spend?

If you ponder it even for a short time, it is a much more succinct definition of ‘insanity’ than the current definition of persisting in doing the same thing repeatedly, each time expecting the outcome to be different!

How disturbing is it good citizen that all of our problems are directly attributable to ‘mental instability’ on the part of those who manage in our name?

The ‘good news’ here is this thought has not occurred to most of us, otherwise we’d be a nation of insomniacs.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Grim and Grimmer

Greetings good citizen,

Since all money is funny, the world’s credit system ISN’T about to collapse (although there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t, we are, beyond any reasonable doubt, bankrupt in every possible sense of the word!)

With that as a given we once again come full circle to the deeply perplexing question of just who, precisely, is the ‘opposition’?

Mr. Rich gives us a peek in this weeks editorial that shines a spotlight on a new political party called the ‘no label’ movement.

Neither ‘right’ nor ‘left’, the no labelers describe themselves as ‘centrists’, just like Bill Clinton.

Um, Mr. Rich does not point to Mr. Clinton in his editorial as even being involved with this new ‘alternative’ but if Billy Boy had a ‘claim to fame’, being a ‘centrist’ was it.

The ability to map out the mythical ‘middle ground’ between the left and the right (and it was usually farther to the right than most lefties were comfortable with.) was Clinton’s trademark talent. Through political ‘triangulation’ he’d get a Republican dominated Congress to do his bidding.

Although in all fairness, Billy boy has been called the ‘best Republican president this nation has had in many years.’

And once again, his actions speak considerably louder and truer than his ‘lukewarm apologies’ do (because fuck head has had to apologize for 90% of what he did during his two terms as president…but hey, ‘puppets’ commonly find themselves ‘at odds’ with their ‘legacies’.)

Just as Obama will find himself at odds with the train wreck that occurred on his watch.

At least the ‘betrayals’ of the next two years will by justified by the Republican majority in the House.

And I’m here to tell you that this is just ‘window dressing’ too.

The Republicans didn’t win back the House; the (CO) media handed it to them.

Something the multi-national corporate crowd will keep on doing until all of the corporate owned media outlets spontaneously combust.

Don’t laugh; that day is probably closer than you might think!

So good citizen, just ‘who’ is the ‘enemy’? Who is the opponent that can’t be reasoned with? If we were to listen to the CO media, it is BOTH mainstream political parties.

Although logic tells us that the corporate crowd gutted the Left wing by eviscerating the unions that made up their base.

Not that this happened in a vacuum, there were plenty of ‘opportunists’ that were more than willing to sell the unions down the river for what turned out to be ‘short money’.

Real short money to the crowd that prints as much as it wants!

But this still doesn’t provide us with an answer. Who would decimate our economy AND destroy our way of life just to stretch out their control of the global economy?

Let me give you a hint…our entire way of life is predicated (based) on ‘cheap and abundant energy.’ When energy is neither, our entire socio-economic model collapses.

UNDERSTAND that without energy MOST of you literally couldn’t do what you do and the rest can’t keep doing what they do for very long because the places people live in become uninhabitable after a few days of no energy.

With this as a given we really SHOULD be doing everything in our power to convert to a more sustainable way of life but NO! That’s not happening and do you really have to wonder why?

The cocksuckers that have you by the short hairs don’t want to relinquish their control over the rest of us.

It is, sadly, that ‘serve in heaven or rule in hell’ thing again… and you can guess which direction they decided to pursue.

Yeah, they see no reason to stop ‘ruling’ us (even though millions will die!)

You see, the bastards ‘owe it to their kids’…your kids can go fuck themselves!

As long as you don’t figure out who is putting the screws to you, you can’t fight back…and that’s how they want it!

Um, as grim as this is, it is far preferable to the alternative. An alternative that says we as a species are too immature to manage our own affairs and if left to our own devices, we WILL destroy ourselves.

Understand that the immature few that are currently in charge of things BECAUSE of their ‘nominal ownership’ of our energy supply are indeed too infantile to accept the end of their reign over the rest of us.

Does ANYBODY own this planet’s energy supply good citizen?

Sadly, some people THINK that they do and that’s all it takes.

We are currently playing a (deadly serious) ‘game’ of stick ‘em up!

If we fail to neutralize this threat to our species the whole situation could (needlessly) get out of hand.

Left to your own judgment is whether or not my ‘assessment’ of the situation is overblown of if I’ve underestimated the danger.

As I have mentioned before, our ‘worst case scenario’ is one where the government simply dissolves itself and nothing takes its place, leaving us in an effective ‘Wild, Wild West where the ones with the guns make the rules.

And there will be a lot of people with guns in the first few weeks of the power vacuum, so there will be a lot of new (and mostly temporary) ‘rules’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Kindergarten

Greetings good citizen,

On and on it goes…

No consensus, no meeting of the minds (as if such a thing were possible!) which is to point out that as long as we don’t have a reliable ‘feedback mechanism’ the ‘self-interested’ will continue to what seems ‘good’ to them and damn the consequences!

Baseline situation: millions of people have lost their jobs and are defaulting on their debt.

YET, nobody is ‘focusing’ on why these people were made ‘redundant’ NOR are they doing anything to put a stop to the carnage.

The (heavily massaged) employment data continues to sink through society’s molten core while the party of ‘the owners’ (also known as The Party of No) cries for their tax cuts to be made permanent!

Worse, these selfish pigs who persist in refusing to invest in the US economy (which is what they claim the tax cuts are for) have also succeeded in defeating the repeal of the subsidy for off-shoring US jobs!

Ignorance is a terrible thing but this is well beyond ‘stupid’.

How do you know when your government has been hijacked by criminals?

Take a good look at what has become of our electoral process. These fuckers should be executed at the polls! (Just a ‘suggestion’, I’m not telling anyone to do anything AND you did ‘opt in’ to read this so it’s ‘shame on you’!)

So we return to the topic of how you, er, ‘restore’ the rule of law to a nation gone berserk?

The media has usurped the ballot box so we can’t ‘vote’ the fuckers out. (The corporate owned media isn’t obliged to provide any news that disagrees with the ‘opinions’ of those who ‘own’ it.)

Just an opinion of my own here but ‘eradicating’ the lying media would be an excellent place to start the bid to return this nation to the rule of law. (It is a proven fact that you can’t make informed decisions without accurate information. 99% of what comes out of the ‘advertiser supported’ corporate media is, er, ‘questionable’, to put it kindly. In fairness, they point to blogs such as this one and level the same charges…so it really is up to you when it comes to deciding whom to believe.)

I think the ‘facts’ speak for themselves…


To have ‘accidentally’ arrived at where we are today beggars belief, what we are currently suffering is neither an accident nor a coincidence!

But you already know this argument so I’ll spare you a rehash.

Strange logic BUT if you don’t want to live a lie you can’t tolerate a ‘lie machine’ to operate in your presence.

Sadly good citizen, those who ‘own’ the media also ‘own’ free speech.

For truth to prevail it cannot suffer the ‘yoke’ of ‘ownership’. Think about that one for a minute because it is in no owner’s best interest to admit this is the truth!

And if owning a media outlet is what it takes to ‘enjoy’ free speech, then only the owners of the media can speak freely! (Worse, free speech is not necessarily ‘true speech’.)

While Mr. Rich rightly slams those who point to the Internet and claims that the ‘ultimate freedom’ now exists are lies because the ‘anonymity’ of the Internet hides the identity (as well as the agenda) of some powerful (and deceitful) players.

Which is to argue once again that the truth suffers mightily when it conflicts with the agenda of the self-interested.

Which brings us to an interesting argument, one regarding your own status as a ‘self-interested’ individual.

You are most definitely ‘self-interested’ when it comes to enjoying ‘equal footing’ in both the marketplace as well as in the eyes of the law.

Yet the ‘owners’ don’t see it that way. They believe ‘ownership’ has its privileges.

Ironically, they’ve always believed/espoused such doctrine; so if you find it offensive they will turn the tables on you and it becomes everybody’s favorite game…’I was here first’ (like that has anything to do with it!)

For all of its ‘complexity’ life really never really gets too far from the damn playground. The principle difference being the schoolyard bully has somehow become the Judge.

This somewhat explains the popularity of the recent book “Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten.”

But this ain’t kindergarten anymore and such simplistic reasoning can no longer be used to guide civilization.

It’s time to ‘grow up’ good citizen and spank the kids who grab whatever they want and scream ‘I had it first!’

It wasn’t a good reason then and it definitely didn’t become one after you put your hand picked puppet into the judge’s seat!

A stacked deck is still a stacked deck and there is too much at stake to ‘appease’ the spoiled and privileged among us…

Okay, time for a nap!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Conservative Logic...

Greetings good citizen,

Let’s put ‘oblivion’ on hold for the time being (it will be here soon enough.)

Which is not to say we are going to put a stop to ‘crazy talk’ because there’s plenty of that masquerading as ‘sane commentary’ in the MSM.

Let’s start with our ‘usual’ dose of schizophrenia, shall we? As recently as Yesterday the markets tacked on almost 200 points. This was ‘attributed to’ the (barely perceptible) ‘uptick’ in service sector employment. A mere few hundredths of a single percent good citizen and our stock markets went absolutely NUTS!

So what’s the ‘buzz’ today? Retailers project that they won’t be hiring much seasonal help this year…somewhat reinforcing predictions of yet another ‘poor’ holiday season.

Needless to say the markets are ‘flat’ on this news…

So what the hell was yesterday all about?

Truth be told good citizen, if it weren’t for the activity of the big trading desks themselves, the stock market would be ‘flat-line’.

Moving on, I read some conservative pundit who was bemoaning the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, like making the rich even richer has done such wonders for the US economy! WTF is wrong with these people?

Don’t they understand that NO AMOUNT of money is going to make the US more attractive to invest in as long as the ‘cheaper elsewhere’ fiction persists?

Apparently, nothing goes up top…which is sort of a ‘hallmark’ of conservatism.

Well, here we have another fine example of bullet proof conservative logic…

Sadly good citizen, this brings us to the chicken or the egg conundrum.

What the fuck is the point of extending more credit when people can’t pay for what they’ve already borrowed?

You know what endless ‘rolling’ leads to don’t you? It leads to debt that will NEVER be repaid!

It turns the ‘fuck you, pay me’ scheme into just the ‘fuck you (stupid)’ part.

If you’re dumb enough to let me keep ‘rolling over’ my debt, I’m never going to pay you!

THAT’S what the ‘oughts’ were about!

Guess what the ‘only way out’ is?

That's right, Jubilee!

Cuz, bizarrely, if you ‘prosecuted’ all of the people who took advantage of the situation (a situation that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.) You would also be able to address your ‘surplus population problem at the same time…except who is going to build (never mind pay for) all of those prisons?

Are you beginning to see the ‘scope’ of the problem good citizen?

This is ‘mis-management’ writ large, nay ‘writ colossal’!

Who ever ‘approved’ this wanted, nay, WAS BEGGING FOR a crisis!

(One can only assume the ‘infamous they’ arrived at the same conclusion their ideological opponents reached long ago; there is no way to use capitalism to ‘save’ capitalism.)

So they faced their second choice, to serve in heaven or to rule over hell?

Sadly, they have chosen the latter.

I’ll stop here because I promised not to go there at the beginning of this piece…

It is curious how many of our thought experiments conclude in ‘oblivion’.

If you thought the ride had been ‘interesting’ up ‘til now, wait!

It’s going to get a lot more than ‘interesting’…trust me!

Some of these pieces are surprisingly short but there really isn’t anything else useful to say on the subject other than to point out the obvious, that ‘conservative logic’ is an oxymoron.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner