Self-Extermination

Greetings good citizen,

The hard won holiday has ceased activity on the NYSE, sparing the world from its toxic influence.

Um, a (now long neglected) common theme of my posts is desperation. People will do unimaginable acts of violence if they are ‘desperate’ enough.

It underlies everything I predict, such is the incredible ‘power’ of desperation. Increasingly we are seeing the acts of the desperate and the cowardly corporate owned media is covering them up as the random acts of the ‘psychologically unstable’ (which the feckless capitalists abandoned shortly after ‘privatizing’ health care.) Yet another stick pin on the social map with St. Ronnie’s name on it!

It may be just me but ‘gold bugs’ are very practical when it comes to money (although they don’t get the ‘funny’ part, which sort of erases the appeal of their arguments regarding the ‘conservation of value’.)

Then we have guys like Mr. Hedges here, who have their fingers firmly on the pulse of civilization but take the same ‘wicked left’ when it comes to solving those problems.

How blind do you have to be to see that only the truly wicked claim to ‘speak for God’?

Republicans regularly go ‘on record’ as having had ‘personal dialog’ with ‘the supreme being.’

In most circles this is evidence of insanity but not in US politics where the feckless corporate owned media is involved!

But I, as usual, digress. Let us move forward with today’s offering:

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

As Mr. Hedges indicates, there WILL be a ‘kill-off’ that will be disguised as a ‘Die-off’ (through gross mismanagement.)

Worse, the bought and paid for media will play it as a ‘natural disaster’…although the capitalist’s deliberate mismanagement of the economy has already begun the nutritional squeeze that will lead to the most devastating ‘global pandemic’ the world has ever seen.

Slip an unintended whoopsie in there (such as a real ‘natural disaster’) and it could spell extinction for our already ‘reproduction challenged’ base population.

But the ‘What if’ game is always a ‘dead-end’, we won’t ‘know’ until we get there.

Worse, the rhetoric surrounding climate change has taken on a harder edge, which is making it less credible. Global warming didn’t kill the dinosaurs and it sure isn’t going to kill us!

Which is to opine that we won’t ALL drown and sustainability (along with what it takes to get there) remains an ‘unknown’.

If we are to save ourselves from extinction (by self-extermination) we must manage the resources that remain to reduce desperation to an absolute minimum. (It wouldn’t hurt to put the brakes on the predatory capitalist's worship of gratuitous violence either! The hatred and the killing of your own species is a learned thing, it is NOT natural.)

The article misses another important point and that has been the cessation of all ‘forward scientific advance’ to preserve the ‘patents’ (profitability) of past discoveries.

Again, we need to refocus on the definition of ‘progress’ as the benefit reaped by all mankind from discovery and research rather than the imaginary benefit reaped by a few over the rest of us.

So we have it that stagnation, driven by self-interest, has resulted in creeping ‘desperation' that is shredding the fabric of our civilization…so ‘a few’ can be ‘rich’.

When true progress makes us ALL rich!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Educate

Greetings good citizen,

How pathetic is it that many of the following headlines are either ‘spin’ or rely on accounting gimmicks for their veracity?

But the lead story belabors a point I have been making for decades:

The Education Revolution
Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates
By KEITH BRADSHER

China is making a huge investment in its universities, hoping to leverage its enormous population into 195 million college graduates by the end of the decade.

No irony should be lost that China has overtaken the US as the world’s premiere ‘economic superpower’ on the strength of its ‘blue-collar’ workforce.

Shifting back to our curiously missing OWS protestors, what does this (capitalist profiteering) mean to those who already got soaked big bucks, studying for jobs that will not appear anywhere near here?

I repeat, All economies are LOCAL and no amount of ‘koom-bye-ya’ can alter that!

Let me take it one step further and state unequivocally that it is ‘impossible’ to establish global capitalism as the world’s economic system because of its predatory nature. Resources must be ‘managed’ not ‘exploited’!

Global capitalism gives us stories like this one:

The 787 that made an emergency landing in Japan on Wednesday. All 137 passengers and crew members were evacuated safely.
Regulators Around the Globe Ground Boeing 787s
By CHRISTOPHER DREW, JAD MOUAWAD and MATTHEW L. WALD 51 minutes ago

The directives in Japan, Europe and India follow a Federal Aviation Administration ruling Wednesday that it was grounding the planes operated by U.S. carriers.

Design errors, easily corrected or the by-product of the decades long ‘global race to the bottom?’

This is what happens when you put psychopaths in charge of ‘shaking up’ your supply chain. All of the routine safeguards get thrown to the winds in an effort to ‘bull’ their way to a profit. (by bringing their part of the project in under deadline and under cost, thereby maximizing their ‘bonus’!
Seriously good citizen, these people have lost sight of the rationale behind the awarding of ‘bonuses’ (especially considering half the time management rewards itself for failure!)

And remember, THESE PEOPLE CONSIDER THEMSELVES OUR ‘BETTERS!’

They are ‘superior’ to us…at least in their own minds.

But hey, after Wells Fargo made money producing mortgages, we have the (alleged) ‘dummies’ foundering in the same pond…so who are you supposed to believe?

DealBook
Profit Drops 63% at Bank of America After Mortgage Settlements
By BEN PROTESS 6 minutes ago

The bank’s widely expected drop in fourth-quarter profit comes after it settled legal claims over its mortgage business. It earned 3 cents a share, narrowly beating estimates.

Um, talk about lunacy! Here they are, bleeding from the eye-sockets, settling billion dollar claims against them (for mortgage fraud.) Somehow they still ‘beat the estimates’…and Wall Street is giving them a spanking anyway!

Seriously good citizen, if this story isn’t complete and utter, I don’t know what is!

Somebody’s getting robbed and I have a bad feeling about who that somebody is…

In a related story:

DealBook
Facing Legal Costs, Citigroup Disappoints in 4th Quarter
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG 9:30 AM ET

As the bank works to clean up its mortgage mess, it reported fourth-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or 38 cents a share, significantly below analysts’ estimates.

Did Vikram empty out the main vault as part of his ‘separation package?’ You know how these ‘Master of the Universe’ types operate…

“Sure, I’ll leave…just make sure my golden parachute has a platinum liner!”

Apparently this is something ‘the analysts’ aren’t privy too.

And yet more ‘disappointment’ from the global stage…

DealBook
Rio Tinto to Book $14 Billion Charge; C.E.O. Replaced
By JULIA WERDIGIER and NEIL GOUGH 8:27 AM ET

The mining giant blamed challenges in the aluminum business and at its coal unit in Mozambique for the write-down, and said Sam Walsh would succeed Tom Albanese as chief executive.

I may have dubbed the local rag as the Daily ‘cops behaving badly’ gazette but the business pages of the world’s media are dominated by the details of CEO’s behaving badly (and getting fooked for it…sometimes.)

Then we have this last ditty that lead me to my previous musing regarding the veracity of today’s reporting:

Economic Data Lift Stocks
By REUTERS 52 minutes ago

Wall Street opened higher after some cheery economic reports on unemployment and housing starts.

It’s been two years good citizen and no change as far as my unemployment status. I’m still twiddling my thumbs as are many of my over fifty peers.

Seems the girls of the over fifty club have joined us recently and if you think that’s a coincidence, tell it to Santa Claus!

Part of what I do here is shine a light on the stories the corporate owned media ‘neglects’ and the other part is providing some much needed ‘food for thought’ that should be fueling public debate.

The corporate owned media is paid to ‘pretend’ that things couldn’t be better, our problems are largely in our heads…and they’d be correct about that because it is their fault our head isn’t pointed in the correct direction!

But that’s an issue for another day,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Uncertainty...

Greetings good citizen,

As we slog forward into an uncertain future those who would drive our civilization over a cliff to mask their crimes against humanity care not what happens after that.

My advice, as always, is to prepare. (And NOT like the idiots on ‘doomsday preppers’ who obviously have a screw loose…besides being decidedly homicidal! If you need further convincing that the world after the collapse is going to be uncommonly hazardous, watch the show!) Hint: it’s the trigger happy preppers you have to watch out for! Stumble upon their ‘hide’ and they will open fire first and ask questions afterwards!

In a flicker of insight on an otherwise direction-less horizon we have this article that belabors the obvious in a couple of directions…

Our Economic Pickle
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The debt-ceiling debate is unlikely to alter one major factor contributing to income inequality: stagnant wages.

Now that it is ‘on the table’, who (and how) will the issue of ‘stagnant wages’ be addressed?

‘Employers’ have no problems raising their prices in pace with inflation (driving inflation ever upwards) but are ‘strangely reluctant’ to raise their ‘employee/customers’ purchasing power.

The ‘strategy’ could be called ‘out-waiting the competition’, the longer they wait to raise their employees pay, the more they keep for themselves.

Ultimately, your NOT being paid a living wage is being driven by the ‘owners desire’ to wax rich (at, ultimately, ALL of our expense.)

It’s lower prices we don’t pay and fair wages you don’t get, because the idiots who sign your paycheck follow their mother’s advice and PAY THEMSELVES FIRST!

Funny how this advice isn’t so sound when you put it into this context, is it? It creates a ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ situation that is crumbling all around us as we sit here contemplating how we got ourselves into such a, as the article calls it, ‘Pickle’?

We will see in the article after this next one who WON’T be working to save us from employer greed

But the other article first:

News Analysis
The Low Politics of Low Growth
By ANNIE LOWREY

What if it is the weak economy that is driving the fiscal failures in Washington?

How odd is it that the question answers itself? (But this can be attributed to the ‘muzzle’ the ‘write for hire’ crowd is forced to wear.)

I find it astounding that our, and let’s face it, none of them has a grip on reality, ‘politicians’ continue to flog the concept of ‘perpetual growth’ as the key to future prosperity.

How can you ‘grow’ when there has been NOTHING ‘new’ since Pong? Every other technological marvel is merely the ‘fleshing out’ of potential that was already there.

So ‘exporting jobs’ (to make it more profitable for the ‘owner’) also doesn’t encourage (local) economic growth. It really only serves to make the owner richer than he/she deserves to be.

But are our politicians focused on their ‘primary job’ of managing our civilization for the benefit of our species?

Let’s have a look:

TOP NEWS
Obama Will Seek Citizenship Path in One Fast Push
By JULIA PRESTON

President Obama and lawmakers from the two parties believe that their best chances for passing substantial legislation on immigration will come early in his second term.

Like healthcare, NOBODY is looking for a ‘solution’ to an already over-populated, far too competitive job market!

It’s been opined that this (European satellite) was built by ‘immigrants’. (It was even somewhat true when most of the immigrants hailed from Europe…)

Not that providing EMPLOYERS with a ‘cheaper labor pool’ to exploit is ever a justification to ‘streamline’ the immigration process, especially when you get a load of how they intend to go about it.

You’ll get your ‘citizenship’ all right but first you’ll have to do your military service. You will be sent to foreign lands, meet new, interesting people and kill them.

What used to be scabs to keep the factories humming (cheaply) will become fodder for the endless wars the capitalists wage, merely to keep the population (and by extension, the unemployment rate down.)

There won’t be any ‘resource wars’. Resources are all sold openly on the (alleged) ‘free markets’ so what’s to ‘fight’ over?

Even the current conflict in the Middle East is over a police problem that should have been handled ‘internally’ by local law enforcement.

BUT NO! Our (block-headed) government had to use military force instead of foreign aid and providing foreign governments the tools to handle the problems itself.

Worse, our (rogue) government supports criminal regimes like the Israelis who openly subjugate the former inhabitants of the nation they now ‘occupy’ and use military force to maintain the upper hand, in open defiance of international law…not that ‘respect for the law’ is real strong here either.

But that’s another issue altogether as the ‘over fifty crowd' prepares to fight for its survival!

BUSINESS
Over 50, and Under No Illusions
By CAITLIN KELLY

Many people aged 55 to 64, who had been dreaming of easy retirement, have had to remake their lives to find work during the recession and its aftermath.

As many of us close in on the ‘finish line’ of our professional careers (most of them in tatters…the careers and our humble selves.) We are encountering the above mentioned ‘lawlessness’ that offers us no recourse to what is likely to turn into a very deadly confrontation.

While we have long lamented the ‘rudderless’ condition of our crumbling society, this was no accident. It didn’t ‘wear out’, it was snapped off by those who could (through manipulation) afford to ‘buy’ the justice system…(something many will pay dearly for because so many already have!)

Note how the capitalist credo is parroted here in the headline. How the ‘over fifty crowd’ are (unsuccessfully) ‘making themselves useful’ as they ‘sprint’ (more like limp/drag) themselves toward a finish line that (mysteriously) keeps backing away! (So a wretched few can be rich…)

Yes, good citizen, we’re all going to be each other’s ‘financial advisors’ and manage each other’s money and sell each other houses neither of us can afford.

With those ‘encouraging words’ I thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wishes!

Greetings good citizen,

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder, they (naturally) surprise the fuck out of you by becoming downright surreal!

The logic of Schuller’s philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn’t exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts — banish the spectres of sadness and failure — and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today’s seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours’ time, by George W . Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as “negativity thinking.” To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven’t really grasped it at all. If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else. [snip]

In reality, mine is up in the nosebleed section; it is a hard plastic perch, painful on the buttocks. But I am grateful for it, because it means that by chance I’m seated next to a man who, as far as I can make out, is one of the few cynics in the arena — an amiable, large-limbed park ranger named Jim, who sporadically leaps to his feet to shout I’m so motivated!” in tones laden with sarcasm.

He explains that he was required to attend by his employer, the United States National Park Service, though when I ask why that organization might wish its rangers to use paid work time in this fashion, he cheerily concedes that he has “no fucking clue.” Dr. Schuller’s sermon, meanwhile, is gathering pace. “When I was a child, it was impossible for a man ever to walk on the moon, impossible to cut out a human heart and put it in another man’s chest … the word ‘impossible’ has proven to be a very stupid word!” He does not spend much time marshaling further evidence for his assertion that failure is optional: it’s clear that Schuller, the author of “Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking” and “Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do!,” vastly prefers inspiration to argument. But in any case, he is really only a warm-up man for the day’s main speakers, and within fifteen minutes he is striding away, to adulation and fireworks, fists clenched victoriously up at the audience, the picture of positive-thinking success.

The organisers of Get Motivated! describe it as a motivational seminar, but that phrase — with its suggestion of minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy hotel ballrooms — hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged roughly once a month, in cities across North America, it sits at the summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and, somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner) has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, there’s a good chance you’ll find him or her at Get Motivated!, preaching the gospel of optimism.

As befits such celebrity, there’s nothing dingy about the staging, either, which features banks of swooping spotlights, sound systems pumping out rock anthems, and expensive pyrotechnics; each speaker is welcomed to the stage amid showers of sparks and puffs of smoke. These special effects help propel the audience to ever higher altitudes of excitement, though it also doesn’t hurt that for many of them, a trip to Get Motivated! means an extra day off work: many employers classify it as job training. Even the United States military, where “training” usually means something more rigorous, endorses this view; in San Antonio, scores of the stadium’s seats are occupied by uniformed soldiers from the local Army base.

Technically, I am here undercover. Tamara Lowe, the self-described “world’s No. 1 female motivational speaker,” who along with her husband runs the company behind Get Motivated!, has been accused of denying access to reporters, a tribe notoriously prone to negativity thinking. Lowe denies the charge, but out of caution, I’ve been describing myself as a “self-employed businessman” — a tactic, I’m realizing too late, that only makes me sound shifty. I needn’t have bothered with subterfuge anyway, it turns out, since I’m much too far away from the stage for the security staff to be able to see me scribbling in my notebook. My seat is described on my ticket as “premier seating,” but this turns out to be another case of positivity run amok: at Get Motivated!, there is only “premier seating,” “executive seating,” and “VIP seating.”

It is only months later, back at my home in New York, reading the headlines over morning coffee, that I learn the news that the largest church in the United States constructed entirely from glass has filed for bankruptcy, a word Dr. Schuller had apparently neglected to eliminate from his vocabulary.

Um, not for nothing but you don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that the list of sponsors of this whole ‘voodoo prosperity’ gimmick reads like the Who’s who of the conservo-whacko movement?

We knew these people were ‘gone’ but until now we weren’t certain just how far the ‘Kool-Aide’ went…

Well, this article wraps things up nicely!

And to be honest, good citizen, I didn’t read any further.

I don’t need anybody to define ‘success’ for me (nor do I attempt to define it for others, a decidedly Republican pass time.)

I think the most disturbing ‘revelation’ this article makes is the extent of the US government's’ ‘support' for these carnival barkers.

It’s the story line of the >One Percent they are actively defending…why should tax dollars be expended to spread useless propaganda (while the conservo-whackos are howling about the deficit and ‘entitlement’ spending.)

Which brings us full circle with that pesky ‘management problem’ I keep bitching about.

Did I mention our civilization is woefully ‘mis-managed’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bondage

Greetings good citizen,

Did the markets close ‘up’ yesterday because this morning the Dow was back over 13,000 for no reason whatsoever! (Which is to assume that the markets ‘rallied’ yesterday towards the end of the session.)

And yeah, people are back to their old tricks, going ‘in the hole’ for Christmas because they believe the electoral rhetoric that assured them the economy was ‘improving’, when it isn’t.

So, in a not too surprising ‘repeat’ of the old ‘boom-bust’ cycle, people will spend what they don’t have followed by a renewed raft of foreclosures/repossessions…and we’ll all be the worse for it.

But as Jon Stewart (of Comedy Central fame) sarcastically put it, at least there isn’t a bill of sale with your name on it (yet)

I’m sitting here wearing clothes made by modern-day slaves and probably so are you. I’m lit by studio lights assembled in countries where workers who try to organize are imprisoned, as are many of the lights in your home.

We rationalize all the products of distant slaves we use – after all, we don’t have to look into their faces like Jefferson did – but it’s still just a rationalization.

The stark reality is that we in America didn’t “end” slavery. We simply exported it.

And it’s so much more comfortable for us to criticize Jefferson and his peers for agonizing over – but still using – slave labor 200 years ago, when we don’t have to look into the faces of today’s slaves who are toiling and dying at this very moment to sustain our lifestyles.

It’s the ugly truth good citizen, the one they don’t want you to know about…that ALL CAPITALISM is ‘predatory’ (which is why it NEEDS slavery to operate!)

You education ‘omits’ this basic fact because the only thing separating you from one of those slaves is a law the fuckers can rip up whenever it suits them.

And when they decide to rip up that law, you instantly become something the oligarchs’ fear more than anything else; you become somebody with nothing left to lose!

Worse good citizen, every day we inch closer and closer to the day when the slave market re-opens and your kids go up on the block to the ‘highest bidder’.

What are you going to do when that day comes?

Grab your favorite ‘peace now’ banner and go march in front of the Statehouse?

Will the cops NOT arrest you for creating a ‘public nuisance’ because your cause is just and they know it?

(They will if they want to keep their jobs!)

You’ve been around long enough to know how this fuckaroo works. First you have to act up and then you have to take out whoever tries to stop you…because there’s no such thing as ‘half-way’.

People ‘died’ fighting for the forty-hour workweek. They were ‘killed’ (read murdered) by guys who were ‘just doing their job’.

It’s an indelible stain on our society that those murderers were never prosecuted for their crimes, it also makes the beginning of the end of what passes for justice…pretty much anywhere on this planet.

Which is to point out the unethical exploitation of others through money is another form of ‘slavery’ we aren’t even close to ending.

Capitalists don’t like it when we refer to ourselves as ‘wage slaves’…because it’s TRUE!

Capitalists, like cops are NOT you ‘friends’. They do what they do because that’s what they are paid to do. (They try to trick you because it makes their job that much easier, once the key turns in the cell it’s ‘fuck you, idiot!’)

Ironically, A Simple Plan and the Human Anti-Exploitation Law will be the first time in human history that slavery will be truly outlawed…and attempting to ‘enslave’ anyone is an instant one way trip to exile (a decidedly nasty place.)

Naturally there will be those ‘twisted’ bastards who will charge that those who run A Simple Plan are ‘exploiting’ the rest of us; but their ‘compensation’ is not under their control so their actions don’t benefit themselves personally.

But I digress…

Once again we should flip this issue over and explore the ‘real implications’ of Modern Slavery.

Why would Bwana ‘hire you’ for a salary he can keep in his pocket when he can ‘buy’ a slave for a fraction of that?

And when the slave is ‘used up’ he just cuts it loose to fend for itself, what happens to it after that isn’t their problem…just like employees!

Yet another ‘plague’ visited upon our society by rapacious capitalists…and our ‘legal system’ turns a blind eye to the problem.

Well good citizen, what are you sitting there for, you didn’t win Powerball and you’re already a month late to the revolution!

Snap to it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

HSC

Greetings good citizen,

Um, markets ‘slid’ today giving back their inexplicable gains they made earlier this week.

Funny little game these Wall Streeters’ play but it has zero relationship to the ‘real’ economy.

Which brings us back to the basic Human social contract

What’s that you ask?

It is an important understanding between people that libertarians and the like say is a fairy tale.

Anyone who advocates ‘bootstrapping’ and YOYOism likes to pretend the human social contract doesn’t exist.

Ironically, it was the violating of this allegedly non-existent contract that resulted in ‘The Terror’ of the French Revolution.

Let us take a moment to lay down some background first:

Japan is quite different from the U.S. and Europe, with a homogeneous populace and a culture rooted in Confucian values and social hierarchies. Despite the many differences, including definitions of depression, I think it is self-evident that the rising insecurity and workplace changes in Japan result from long-term economic stagnation.

I suspect "new-type depression" may have some universal aspects, as rising insecurity and new demands in the workplace characterize Western economies as well.

New-type depression--NTD--(also called modern-type) is not a classic depression. It does not respond to anti-depressant medications, and it is triggered by events in the workplace--usually criticism from superiors. Those who exhibit the symptoms--difficulty focusing at work, physical symptoms of stress, etc.--tend to be in their 20s and 30s.

What we see here are the emerging effects of a people who tap dance on a landmine every day.

They don’t know from one day to the next if they will be able to support themselves.

Now our Libbies and their kissing cousins the Conservo-loonies, bootstrappers one and all, are calling the appearance of this malaise ‘a weakness’ in the individuals displaying the symptoms.

This would be incorrect. The reaction is caused by the violation of the human social contract, the REASON WHY we DON’T KILL ONE ANOTHER ON SIGHT!

Just stop for a second and let that sink in.

Why DON’T WE kill one another on sight? We are the ‘alpha predator’, it’s only natural that we ‘ought to’ eliminate competitors from our turf.

But wait, something’s wrong here. We are only top dog when we act ‘in concert’. All alone we are easily killed by goddamn viruses!

Hell, if it got the jump on you, a dog could kick your ass and kill you. In fact, on your own, there is a long list of wildlife that has the upper hand in a one on one encounter.

So we don’t dare to kill one another on sight. We only prevail in, er, ‘packs’.

But why do incidents like the terror occur?

Well, under those circumstances one ‘pack’ of humans oversteps it’s bounds and neglects its responsibility to the other…’packs’, if you will.

They take all of the ‘good stuff’ for themselves, leaving next to nothing for anyone else.

Now, the ‘unwritten contract’ states that we suffer or prosper TOGETHER.

But the greedheads don’t like that idea. They subscribe to the ‘I was here first’ principle.

If there is any suffering to be done it will fall upon those who didn’t grab what they could, when they could.

But that’s not the deal!

The deal is share and share alike!

So you can see how these little ‘impasses’ end up in the streets running in blood.

Because the people, looking for their share, now have to go out and take it from those who took it unjustly.

And yeah, it’s still ‘crowd vs. crowd.’

And my how that crowd has grown under the false prosperity sown to hide the theft.

Worse, it’s a not a question of ‘if’ we are about to hit the wall but ‘when’?

Again there will be cries of shock, ‘why is this happening’ when we saw it begin all of those years ago…and stood motionless as they whispered ‘it’s different this time’.

It’s NEVER different…and it’s not different this time.

What has to happen, since they pretty much walked away unscathed the last time, is they have to be, er, ‘taught’ not to violate the contract all over again.

Like they were taught in 1789…and why we are here again so soon after 1929 because we DIDN’T ‘make them pay’ then.

We won’t enjoy that luxury this time. Although that’s what they’re counting on, that we’re ‘too civilized’ to punish them…the way that they punish tin pot dictators who object to their ‘machinations’.

We are rapidly approaching a time when we can no longer tolerate the few to prey upon the rest of us.

Those who fail to appreciate the benefits of the human social contract will have those benefits (forcibly) withdrawn from them.

Like it or not, we are all in this together.

Thus do we need to decide, together, what we should do next.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Drain Bamaged...

Greetings good citizen,

As I have pointed out in many posts, I live in the red portion of a blue state and because of that I have found myself surrounded by Conservo-loonies.

Worse…and this is probably a function of that ‘one in five’ thing I keep pointing, to is one of my five siblings is married to, and has thereby converted to ‘conservo-whacko-ism’.

To get an idea of how this ‘disease’ affects the afflicted, observe the following, which was e-mailed to me this morning:

One should always be prepared. So, if someone asks you what the main difference is between most of the Obama supporters, and Romney supporters, instead of stammering, and stuttering, and looking for an answer, just tell them that the Romney supporters sign their checks on the front, and the Obama supporters sign their checks on the back.

You want to start off with ‘who, in their right mind would point out something stupid like this? But we have established at the beginning that these people are NOT ‘in their right mind’.

Worse good citizen, nobody from the >One Percent signs paychecks, they have ‘lackeys and underlings’ who handle such menial tasks.

So pointing out that the ‘minions’ of the uber rich are Romney supporters tells us what exactly?

It tells us that he has no chance of winning…legitimately. (Of course, neither did Reagan, Bush or anyone else elected after LBJ.)

The number of people who sign the front of paychecks couldn’t fill a thimble much less swing a national election in a nation where 50 percent of the population has been made ‘redundant’!

The people who threw you and others like you out on the street support the party responsible for the destruction of the global economy.

And now they’re STUPID enough to BRAG ABOUT IT?

In fact, when you stop for a moment and consider it, it’s pretty disturbing to consider the implications of signing the front of anyone’s paycheck.

It ‘infers’ that the signer ‘has the right’ to decide if the ‘payee’ is worthy of payment (and not the other side, that the signer ‘owes’ the payee for services rendered!)

This is how politicians call programs that you pay your entire working career into ‘entitlements’.

Even the jackass running for re-election calls programs YOU PAY FOR, entitlements! WTF!

But I digress…we were discussing debtors and the indebted.

Weirdly, the> One Percent LOVES (having their minions) sign(ing) paychecks…because they make money on each one!

In fact their whole ‘income stream’ is based on the difference between what they get for your labor and they buy it from you for.

Notice how YOU can’t get a raise but the ‘owner’ of the company keeps getting ALL of his ‘expenses’ picked up by the company, so he never runs short of money.

Worse, a lot of these ‘owners’ are the biggest deadbeats on two feet, they know the money is all funny so they don’t feel compelled to pay…ever.

But THAT little factoid is not for ‘general consumption’.

So who do you suppose is going to ‘benefit’ from this headline in a world where it is all the average citizen can do to keep wheels under their ass, a roof over their head and food in their bellies?

Potential for a Mining Boom Splits Factions in Afghanistan
By GRAHAM BOWLEY

With a trillion-dollar cache of oil, gold and other resources underground, hopes of self-sufficiency in Afghanistan are tempered by worries about corruption and security.

Who do you suppose is ‘worrying out loud’ for the Afghan peasants who are and will remain ignorant of this arrangement (unless and until they are forced off of their ancestral lands by miners and developers (posing as the Taliban?)

Why put it in the media at all, given our generally acknowledged powerlessness to put a stop to that which is sure to come?

Sadly the logic of advertising these ‘thefts’ is to provide the ‘pretense’ that somebody, somewhere, is keeping tabs on the activities of these thieves and this unnamed authority will insure the Afghan public receives their due. Just as future generations of Americans are coming into theirs, thanks to the ‘vigilance’ of our (bought and paid for) government.

How sad is it good citizen that?

That the ‘tracking’ of global exploitation serves as the illusion of propriety just as voting serves as the illusion of participation.

Which is to ask, point blank, HOW STUPID ARE YOU?

If you’ve already forwarded the above conservo-loonie message I received this morning to all of your contacts, the answer doesn’t matter. You’ve landed here in error and haven’t read down this far because your teeny, conservo-loonie head would have exploded!

Cruel bastard that I am, I WOULD bounce the following category of hapless victims off the wall a few times BUT it’s the ‘Only Game in Town’ and they WERE just following ‘instructions’…

How could they have known the final instructions would read ‘Here is your degree, now place the barrel of this pistol in your mouth, point it toward your braincase and squeeze (or jerk) the trigger?

Debt Collectors Cashing In on Student Loan Roundup
By ANDREW MARTIN 9:24 AM ET

The Department of Education last year paid $1.4 billion to collection agencies to hunt down defaulters, a group that includes nearly one in six borrowers with a loan balance.

A Big Default Problem, but How Big?

This ‘latest development’ of predatory capitalism is perhaps the most disturbing.

Swindle children out of their future by grossly overcharging them for a shot at jobs that don’t exist, then make the loans irrevokable…WTF!

And again the bankers are NOT held responsible for their cupidity…

So I ask you again, good citizen, do we have a money problem here or one pisser of a legal one?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Look Down (the work song.)

Greetings good citizen,

I feel compelled to declare that I harbor no animosity for Ms. Romer personally, it is her, er, profession that I loathe (or more succinctly, how that profession is currently ‘practiced’…if that’s what you want to call it.)

I love Paul Krugman despite the fact he regularly avoids , er, ignores the bigger picture.

Perhaps that is the ‘divide’. Mr. Krugman still displays the ‘old school’ charm of what it means to be a Democrat while Ms. Romer is a prime example of ‘Modern’ Democratic philosophy, those fucking ‘centrist-triangulators’!

Famously paraphrased by Curly of the Three Stooges when he complained; ‘I’m trying to think but nothing happens!’

Puzzled? Perhaps this will clarify matters for you.

JOBS A key argument for encouraging manufacturing is to create jobs and reduce unemployment. Unfortunately, those effects are probably small.

Unemployment today is high, but not because of a decline in manufacturing. That decline has been going on for 30 years — and for most of the 1990s and 2000s, the unemployment rate was less than 6 percent.

Today, we face a profound shortfall of demand. That truly is a terrible market failure, and it warrants government intervention. But we need actions that raise overall demand — like a tax cut for households so they have more take-home pay to spend, more aid to troubled state and local governments, and public investments in infrastructure. These are all things that President Obama has advocated.

A narrow tax cut for manufacturing is unlikely to raise aggregate demand significantly. By making our industrial goods cheaper, it might stimulate foreign demand, but probably not enough to make a dent in our unemployment rate. On the other hand, more aggressive monetary policy that lowered the price of the dollar would stimulate all our exports, and so have far more impact.

I selected this particular article because the title, “Do manufacturers need special treatment” exemplifies just how badly the global economic model is broken.

The above is what I’d refer to as a ‘bonus’.


Let’s begin with the excerpt and what it says to me: It says, don’t listen to me, I’m an idiot!

Lets take erroneous assumption number one:

We have been shedding manufacturing jobs for decades and the unemployment rate has remained ‘on average’ below 6%.

Which is the first ‘idiot statement’ made…what does the ‘average unemployment rate’ spread out over 30 years tell you? Why not back up ten thousands years and drop that bad boy right down to the hundredths column…it’s the SAME THING!

Old guys like me remember the last time unemployment was this bad was back when Reagan took over (and he didn’t give a fuck, nor did he ‘do’ anything about it. Ironically, he pointed to high unemployment and preached that ‘trade protectionism’ was the culprit!

He was going to ‘fix’ the economy by throwing the trade doors wide open with ‘free trade agreements’.

IF we agree that the founding tenant of capitalism is MARKET SHARE then the ‘global destruction’ of domestic industries led to what, good citizen?

Global monopolies! Held aloft by a greatly reduced number of ‘competitors’.

What is the ‘end result’ you may ask?

YOU become an obsolete member of a redundant society that will be driven into extinction.

But we digress…and we’ve drifted quite a ways off topic as well

Um, the next statement is no better than the first. She is spot on about the (formerly masked by credit cards) ‘lack of demand’ problem but totally misses the relationship between the tens of millions of workers that the monopolists have ‘squeezed’ out of the workforce and that same ‘lack of demand’.

I mean fucking Duh! (But that’s what happens when you ‘average’ figures that have no basis in reality in the first place!)

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the global economy IS bankrupt, the only thing keeping it glued together is some extremely ‘creative accounting’…and even that will eventually fail.

And the rest reads like a communist indictment against capitalism!

She falls just short of screaming for The State to ‘rescue us’…which is why the fucking clueless Republicans have been having a field day accusing the ‘Liberals’ of ‘Socialism’, ironically for trying (stupidly) to prevent the collapse of the economy brought on by the ‘global race to the bottom!’ (That the Republicans championed!)

I have made the case, the same case Ms. Romer is making, ironically, that providing ‘special treatment’ for manufacturers would do nothing to improve economic conditions that have been ‘porked’ by monopolists.

But tax cuts for that rarest of beasts, the employed US citizen will have even less positive effect. Our ‘economic desert’ has grown to the point where it can no longer support the number of people living here.

But this is true throughout the ‘Western World’ (as well as the ‘emerging nations’ that are trapped in capitalist economic models…that form the foundation of their political systems as well.

IF you do not directly influence the laws you will live under then you remain at the, er, ‘mercy’ of those who DO get to decide…and two hundred and thirty years of ‘representative democracy’ is enough to inform us quite clearly that this ‘experiment’ has failed…miserably.

In fact, the title of today’s offering comes from the opening tune of the opera of the same name, Les Miserables.

Particularly poignant is the stanza:

Look down, look down, your standing in your grave!

Don’t let others decide for you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Caged

Greetings good citizen,

Some articles have the effect of waving a red cape at a Bull, it infuriates the animal just as articles like this infuriate me! (although there is some debate as the whether it is the waving motion alone or the color red, since Bulls are supposedly color blind, that incites their ire.)

When this sorry excuse for a human being passed away a few months ago the corporate owned media reacted as though the USA had lost one of its ‘leading lights’ as opposed to one of its greediest psychopaths.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"They could hire 3,000 people overnight. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?"

JENNIFER RIGONI, Apple's worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, on the advantages of using foreign plants.

The suicide rate at Foxconn is an international scandal…is THIS what ‘employers’ want?

Seriously good citizen, this is what the ‘us vs. them’ mindset is leading to! Animals who live on ‘production farms’ working 16 hour shifts for peanuts…and that may well be precisely what/all they get, peanut butter!

The question has disintegrated from ‘what’s fair’ to ‘who’s worth it’…and I’d hate to be the one without a large caliber, high rate of fire weapon in my hands when that question is being decided…

The human anti-exploitation law does what is necessary. It voids the employer/employee contract out of hand (and believe me, it will be tantamount to killing them!)

Nobody can ‘sell’ their labor just as nobody can buy it (for personal gain.)

But (naturally) this isn’t going to happen on its own.

Um, as the ‘Overton Window’ keeps shifting rightward (towards absolute control) the issue of ‘fairness’ is, er, modified into ‘who deserves fairness’?

Increasingly, good citizen, you are not included in these ‘calculations’.

When your humanity is no longer enough to earn you ‘just consideration’ it is time set the forces of revolution into motion.

For verily you and yours will be slaughtered like animals and with just as much ‘consideration’.

You may consider yourself a ‘child of god’ but those who would exterminate you like vermin don’t count you as a child of THEIR god! (Which is why the whole ‘god thing’ sucks…but that’s another can of worms!)

And God is certainly in the ‘drivers seat’ of the Republican nomination process!

What most of you don’t realize is ‘that god’ is the ‘righteous and angry’ god of capitalism!

Here is a god with few children, a ‘chosen few’ as a matter of fact! So few it is ludicrous to think they could win election (which is why we were switched from the one person/one vote method to the one dollar (share)/one vote system like the one used in the corporate boardroom.)

Speaking of ‘buying’ elections, what do you make of Newt’s come from behind victory in South Carolina yesterday?

Again, while we’re on the subject I’d like to remind you that only ‘one in five’ eligible voters self-identify as Republican, it is the alleged ‘independents’ that keeps swinging them over the top. (Read: allows the corporate media to keep ‘stealing’ elections!)

Um, there is no ‘delicate’ way to phrase this because the disturbingly lopsided coverage of this election process tells us something frightening.

What’s ‘up for grabs’ this coming election cycle is who ‘does’ and who ‘does not’ count as human.

The fucktard from Apple says it straight out, would American workers ‘agree’ to live in a ‘dorm’ (pen/cage) and work around the clock for (virtually) nothing?

Just an opinion here but I think everybody who has an Apple product should discard it immediately…and shun all things Apple (especially their stock!)

Why are we suffering from staggering unemployment? Because Rapacious Employers would rather work a few people 16 hours a day, 7 days a week than spread those jobs around for all who need them!

Did I mention our civilization is EXTREMELY mismanaged? (Funny thing about society, you have to 'participate' to be a member!)

Well, this is not an ‘accident’. This is what happens when ‘hooray for me and fuck everybody else capitalists take over!

They don’t give a shit if it sucks for you! That’s your problem…until YOU make it THEIRS!

And I can’t say it any plainer than that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Luck...

Greetings good citizen,

It is another day and I have yet to reach a live human at Massachusetts division of employment and training…

The spooky part is, for all of their protestations of being ‘busy’, I have yet to get a busy signal! I get right through every time I dial.

And the moment I ‘confirm’ my SS number I am shunted to the ‘there’s nobody available to take your call right now, please call back later…’

Just did it again and got the same result!

I suppose I should be happy that I’m not dialing 911...although that is a ‘state operated’ phone system too, it’s merely a different part of the same social safety net that the Republicans are trying so hard to ‘starve to death’.

What the stupid bastards don’t realize is they are ‘dismantling’ the only apparatus that protects their false claims of ownership…although one suspects the plan is to replace ‘expensive’ public sector employees with ‘commissioned agents’ very much like the ‘pirates’ of old.

Wonder how much the ‘truly stupid’ will sell the rest of us out for?

Will it be a ‘Boss Hog’ sort of arrangement where they get 10 percent of five percent of the ‘net’ after expenses?

And all they have to do to get that is 100% of the dying along with 99% of the heavy lifting…

Wonder how ‘eager’ our present day ‘swashbucklers’ will be when they find out about the disturbing new trend in employment practices

How much ‘bloodletting’ will the cut throats tolerate after their masters continue to ‘bottom fish’ with their means of supporting themselves?

Tonight’s offering is a disturbing development in the future ‘shape’ our civilization is taking. How will a ‘temp’ secure a mortgage? Short answer, they won’t.

Which makes your house worth? You got it, zilch.

So much for that ‘storehouse of value’ nonsense. As it stands right now, most people will never recover what they paid for the properties that they, er, ‘rent from the bank’.

Mortgages people pay tens of thousands of dollars in interest on, annually.

Making the real ‘sweet deal’ here the money lending business.

Stick ‘em the fuck up…sucker!

Sadly, they think much less of you than that, I’m being kind calling them ‘suckers’.

I’ve avoided the ‘All Money is Funny’ meme for a while as well as the other ‘cornerstone’ of A Simple Plan, the ‘multitude of issues’ that aren’t the elites problem, they’re YOURS!

Cant find a job? Tough! Maybe YOU’RE not looking hard enough, or you want too much money…(or you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny. While they don’t say this last comment, you just know they are thinking it!)

You get the drift, it’s not their ‘mis-management’ that is the problem, it is YOUR lack of ‘dilligence/persistence’ that has landed you in this, er, ‘unfortunate set of circumstances’.

Sure they shipped millions of jobs overseas but you wouldn’t believe the prices you’d be paying if they hadn’t! (Which is a lie, the ‘value’ of a nation’s currency is directly proportional to the amount of wealth that nation produces. So shipping jobs overseas actually serves to ‘devalue’ your currency, flushing your ‘purchasing power‘ down the toilet with it!) Too bad our idiot politicians are too feeble to grasp that concept!

Like I’ve said a million times, stupid is as stupid does.

What nobody here in ‘the wounded land’ is prepared for is the pending ‘switch’ that will remove ‘reserve currency status’ from the US dollar.

The ONLY reason our money us worth anything at all right now is because we hold the world’s ‘reserve currency’.

‘Rejecting’ the value of US currency is to repudiate the value of their own!

This is an extremely perilous position to be in, despite the fact that ALL money is ‘funny’.

Moving on, most of you are aware that oil is once again past the $100 a barrel mark.

I belabor the obvious when I remind you that our civilization is based on cheap, abundant AND ‘portable’ energy. Once it stops being any one of these things our entire civilization collapses!

But you knew that.

I don’t think I need to point out just how disastrous a sudden shift to ‘every man for himself’ would be, do I?

What do you suppose making everybody ‘temps’ is an attempt to do?

Add that to the ‘strategy’ of stripping collective bargaining rights from unionized workers and you have two examples of the advent of ‘YOYO’ society.

Did I mention ‘hell in a bucket’ (due to mismanagement)?

I didn’t think so but I also didn’t think that would be necessary either…

Anyway, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Kids learn what they live...

Greetings good citizen,

Some of these posts are inspired by what I hear on the radio and the other night I was listening to, how to phrase this delicately, a bunch of morons ‘losing it’ over the budget deficit.

IF the deficit ‘mattered’, WE’D ALREADY BE BANKRUPT!

You want to talk about ‘neat tricks’ you have to marvel at how they continue to pull that one off; although it’s not particularly surprising, ‘ignorance’ is a mighty powerful tool!

This also explains why the infamous they have so little respect for the rest of us, the vast majority of us are TOO STUPID to figure out we’re being played!

Sadly, the truth is there is only a tiny degree of separation between ‘stupid’ and trusting/gullible.

They’re NOT SUPPOSED to lie to us so we automatically ASSUME they don’t.

What has some of you scratching your head is, ‘if deficits don’t matter then what happened in Zimbabwe’ (or Weimar Germany for that matter?)

Is it a ‘massive coincidence’ that both, er, ‘governments’ ran afoul of the world’s banking interests?

The very existence of ‘the cheaper there’ proves that the value of money is ‘arbitrarily manipulated’ to the bankers advantage…

Understand good citizen, this sort of shit doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there are a lot of people ‘following orders’ and ‘sticking to the script’ for this sort of thing to go down.

I don’t often lament this ‘directly’ but on the other hand it seems as though it is all I talk about and that is the staggering amount of ‘willful ignorance’ there is surrounding money.

The real ‘baffler’ is that there is no depth of depravity that the truly stupid will resort to if it means a big ‘payday’ for them in the end.

It has become increasingly evident that ‘money’ is meaningless and becoming more so all of the time.

Take the multi-trillion dollar ‘bailouts’, does anyone have the faintest clue just who, precisely, is collecting all of this money?

Shit, even TARP was ‘handed over’ to banks who all claimed they didn’t need the money! They all took it so nobody would be able to figure out which one actually ‘needed’ it.

Such ‘nice’ guys!

WTF!

Did I mention that only rogues and scoundrels need to hide beneath the ‘cloak of secrecy’?

Geez, guess who else is hiding beneath that friggin’ cloak? Isn’t that our ‘elected representative' under there too (playing pat-a-cake with Wall Street?)

Anyway, under ‘A Simple Plan’ money is relegated to its one useful purpose and EVERYBODY starts at zero, no exceptions!

In fact, soon enough, we’re all going to find ourselves ‘flat broke’, well, not all of us. The top one percent will have finished the job they started forty years ago, they will have accumulated almost all of the money in the economy into their own pockets and the rest of us can just go suck rocks!

The hullabaloo caused by this ‘economic imbalance’ is just getting ready to kick off, with the ‘usual consequences’ in store for the ‘average individual’.

Left to our imaginations is whether or not we will experience a ‘wild card event’ like the 9/11 attacks to provide ‘cover’ for the escape of the ‘uber rich’?

Understand, we aren’t talking about planes being flown into buildings again. This time the, er, ‘axis of evil’ (which many of us have come to equate with our own government) will lob either a ‘dirty bomb’ or an honest to goodness nuke at some US ‘target city’.

Considering the ‘scale’ of the theft that needs to be covered up, it is highly likely that the ‘retaliatory strike’ may border on ‘overkill’, which might trigger some ‘tit for tat’ exchanges.

Look at all of this ranting and I haven’t even gotten around to tonight’s offering

What does it mean when a well know ‘financial guru’ comes out and declares the ‘American Dream’ to be DOA?

If you own a home today, you ARE NOT going to recoup what you have paid for it BECAUSE there will be an extreme shortage of ‘qualified buyers’ as we head into the murky future.

You’ve seen the ads on TV, you can buy houses in some parts of this country for a thousand dollars.

Is such a price ‘too good to be true’?

Nothing for nothing, good citizen, if you don’t bring your job with you to the ‘economic desert’ you’d best hope the local wildlife ‘recovers’ fast enough to keep you alive!

That and there aren’t any schools or ‘public services’ (you know, little niceties like street lights, 911 emergency services and trash pick up.)

How’s your ‘American Dream’ looking now?

It looks an awful lot like a nightmare from here.

As I pointed out in a recent post, things AREN’T going to ‘get better’, not in your lifetime if you remain too chicken shit to do anything about it!

Perhaps that last part is the ‘bad news’, if we fail to correct the ‘excesses’ of our self-professed ‘betters’, it will NEVER get fixed!

Kids ‘learn what they live’.

Nuff, said!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Insult to injury...

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