Wildly Optimistic

Greetings good citizen,

I was watching the idiot box by myself last night and what should come on but a show about global warming titled 2100. I am fully aware that the Discovery network is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by the amazingly optimistic timeline presented as a ‘worst case scenario.’

Turns out this little ‘made for cable’ pseudo horror show was produced in 2009 in association with ‘Mr. Flat-Earth’ himself (Thomas Friedman, a bonafide >One Percenter.)

The premises put forth were optimistic in the extreme. Fantasies such as commercial air travel (in futuristic jetliners and not dirigibles, which would have been more ‘realistic’) still existing in a post energy scarcity world, a topic which was, for the most part, ignored!

I shouldn’t say that, they did include a mention of gas stations being out of fuel but the knock on effects of this event weren’t factored it.

Oh, the real icing on this fantasy cupcake was that the nation’s most populous city (and the hometown of Mr. Flat Earth) was showcased as a shining example of sustainability!

The (cartoon) buildings all had wind turbines on them and the rooftops all had gardens to sustain the residents below…which is total BS, the numbers don’t work.

Another ‘curious’ feature of this ‘countdown to doomsday’ (after Humanity becomes sustainable it still manages to collapse!) is how the global population keeps dropping as the true bogeyman of global warming and over population is revealed to be water shortages.

Incidents of civil unrest are met with lethal force by the, er, ‘government’…and nobody protests. (Although in the show our protagonist protests a rate hike by the privately owned desalination plant and the people ‘win’…and she meets her future husband…

But again, like most ‘capitalist fairy tales’ this too goes against its own principles!

Anyway, the hero of this epic has a baby girl of her own, which she and protest boy (both allegedly ‘liberal do-gooders’, she’s a nurse and he’s an engineer.) move to NYC to raise…(it’s now around 2040)

This is during this cross-country trek that the energy situation is touched upon, yet they make the trip in a gasoline-powered vehicle!

Oh, and they show gas stations advertising $5 a gallon gasoline…when as soon as this summer we will be hit with pumps that can’t handle the new ten plus dollars a gallon prices.

And if you can’t pay…or worse, how much more ‘irresistible’ will this increase in prices make knocking over convenience stores?

Remember, all crime is ‘cash and carry’!

The same people who can’t afford double-digit gasoline will likely be the ones robbing the place after dark.

The ‘wildcard’ here is next generation ‘gangs’.

Will outlaws start traveling in numbers again?

But this, er, ‘eventuality’ wasn’t explored in last night’s (wildly optimistic) ‘worst case scenario.’

After the sustainable grid fails (inexplicably…well, okay, there is a plague but the assumption that it only kills the people maintaining the equipment is a bit far fetched…(although you can see one of the deep seated fears of the One Percent in this situation.)

The plague won’t get them (or the damn liberals) they’re ‘too good’. It will be their faithful servants who will be struck down by the terrible disease, leaving them helpless and alone in the dark and the cold.

Funny how this whole scenario circles back to the inability of the wealthy ‘to conceive of a society without slaves.’

More ironic is how these worthless creatures will perish without someone to do the heavy lifting for them…

This is how it will end for the champions of the ‘rugged individual’.

But not so for our liberal protagonist! At 75 years old (and recently widowed, her husband dies when the dam he designed fails…) She sets out through the wasteland on foot to find her long lost daughter living in upstate NY.

And like most capitalist ‘feel good’ disaster films, she finds her…and isn’t she widowed too!

I wonder how much of this story Tom’s wife contributed? I’m seeing a pattern here.

So, back to reality…

The ‘slow fizzle’ depicted in this 2009 ‘dramatization’ wasn’t even close to how it will likely go down.

They use the (failed) global warming summit of 2009 as the ‘turning point’ that sets mankind on its path to doom.

Makes you wonder how disappointed the One Percent are that the retail economy collapsed, basically shutting down worldwide consumption?

Somehow the pinheads don’t see this as an ‘opportunity’.

Remember what I keep saying, ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL! Here is the ‘chance’ to rebuild local economies around the globe, considerably lightening their ‘carbon footprint’.

It starts with LOCALLY PRODUCED ‘renewable energy products’. You know the capitalist pinheads want to sell you CHINESE wind turbines and solar collectors…but unemployment is too high!

So the turbines and panels need to be built locally (maybe incorporating A FEW ‘imported parts’) Unfortunately the idiots don’t understand what ‘a few’ means but this can be straightened out at the border, so to speak.

Maybe the capitalist pinheads will figure out that the Chinese need solar panels and wind turbines too…

But for this to work the rest of us need to abandon capitalism and its predatory ways…and we may want to put the boots to communist leaders whose ‘cats don’t hunt’ as well.

Because the worst case is a lot closer and much worse than the >One Percent ‘imagines’ it will be…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Former number 2...

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are once again ‘cliff-diving’ as jaw-boning a global recovery becomes less and less effective…a tactic that continues to be proven wrong at every juncture and by every measure.

When ‘improvement’ is seen it has proven to be both miniscule and massaged…which is to say it is ‘statistically indistinguishable’ from the margin of error in the reported data.

Which usually turns out to have been ‘wildly optimistic’ when it is examined again later.

But hey, what’s happening doesn’t matter, it’s what YOU BELIEVE that matters.

Well, every once in a while things pop up to remind us that the world’s second largest economy tanked over two decades ago (due to globalization) and has yet to recover.

The preliminary estimate for the three months through June is sharply lower than the revised 5.5 percent annual rate of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter. The second-quarter figure fell short of the median forecast of 2.3 percent among 24 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, and it signaled that the recovery after the earthquake and tsunami of last year might be stalling.

The slowdown has also highlighted economic worries just days after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda won his bid to double the Japanese sales tax to tackle swelling public debt, with the upper house of Parliament passing the increase Friday. The last sales tax increase, in 1997, snuffed out any hope of a strong recovery from the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s, and opponents of Mr. Noda have warned that the latest increase in the tax could lead to a similar slowdown.

At a board meeting last week, the Bank of Japan held back from easing monetary policy, saying that reconstruction demand in the wake of the tsunami was continuing to drive economic growth. But the central bank cut its outlook for exports and output, citing global economic risks, and it signaled that it was ready to expand stimulus again if needed.

Do we really need to play ‘Mirror, mirror’ here? Aren’t we headed down the very same ‘primrose path’ Japan was forced down more than twenty years ago?

Which begs the question of, ‘was Japan the ‘dry run’ for what the oligarchs eventually DID to the US?’

National ‘economic suicide’ through financial fraud.

Ironically, Japan’s banking sector problems are being blamed on ‘Organized Crime’.

Worse good citizen, take a drive down any US highway and what do you see? Toyota’s and Hondas, all being driven by unemployed Americans!

What does this tell you good citizen?

That SOMEBODY in Japan is still raking in the big bucks…but all of those ‘profits’ are going into the pockets of a decidedly corrupt banking sector.

I know you were thinking something different and you’re right, but that’s not the point I am attempting to make.

The ‘focus’ here is on the ‘global’ > One Percent.

Which I’d like to think I’ve made it pretty clear the problems our civilization is faced with are ‘global’ in nature…meaning the perps are operating on a global basis.

So when I comment that ‘the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace, I’m not just talking about the USA, I’m talking EVERYWHERE!

You might want to ‘test drive’ the idea of a ‘global monarchy’ in your head (as reprehensible as that idea is) for a while so you aren’t totally blind-sided when they, er, ‘coronate’ the new King and Queen of the planet!

(It’s either that or we go ALL ‘Orwell’ and find ourselves divided into perpetually warring factions with the ‘third’ party alternating between the role of ally and enemy, meaning you can never completely trust them.)

For the second time I emphasize the point: Reality doesn’t matter, it’s what you BELIEVE that counts!

And the bought and paid for corporate owned media regularly fill YOUR noggin with shit pudding, occasionally swapping the cherry on top with a different variety of turd.

Worse, good citizen…the media keeps on (subtly) blaming YOU for not acting when you actually never had the opportunity to act!

After convincing you that 20% is somehow 50%, it is the ‘unknown’ whackos out there who keep voting against what’s ‘good for the country’.

This is how they’re going to sell the Romney/Ryan ticket to you…that there are more whacko Tea Partiers out there than you know!

Mind you they could only account for 30,000 of ‘em at the peak of their popularity but you’re gonna be told that they ‘carried’ the election for a >One Percent ‘underdog’…

And it’s a meaningless question to ask ‘how stupid do they think we are’ if you continue to do nothing about it?

Look at everything they’ve gotten away with to date:

They have effectively ‘ended’ welfare.

The have exported our manufacturing sector.

They have provided aid and material comfort to our enemies (and profited mightily in the exchange.)

The have cheated tens of millions out of their retirement funds. They literally bankrupted the global financial network…and nobody has been prosecuted.

So maybe it’s time to step back for a moment and look at what happened to the world’s ‘second largest economy’ and think about ‘why’ it happened?

You don’t suppose there was a little ‘criminal element’ involved, do you?

Just keep standing there, the boys will be along in a little while to fit you with your new cement overshoes.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Facts not in evidence...

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though the stock markets are being ‘juiced’ again for the upcoming elections…left to our imagination is whether or not the artificial high is being created so it can collapse dramatically a month or so before the election…

Although how that will help any of the specific bozo’s running against the incumbent remains a mystery.

Perhaps it isn’t intended to aid a particular candidate but intended to foster an ‘Anybody but him’ environment…

With that lens in our trusty kaleidoscope, let us have a gander at today’s offering

Another Day of Surreality on Wall Street

OK, let's try and put this into terms that a fifth-grader (or even a Wall Street MBA) might understand.

If the economy is recovering -- or even close to doing so -- why is the Federal Reserve maintaining that short-term interest rates will remain "exceptionally low" until late-2014 -- that is, below the levels that prevailed at the beginning (or even the middle) of every single recovery in the post-war era, as well as below their multi-decade median of five percent?

Why are investors piling into stocks and growing increasingly bullish at a time when the Fed has essentially confirmed that their optimistic assumptions about the economy are not in synch with reality?

If, as Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke says, there is still "enormous" negative equity in U.S. housing and, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner says, "housing finance is still a mess," why did homebuilding stocks today rally more than twice as much as the overall market, and why have they gained nearly 90 percent since October?

I can repeat ‘our financial system is completely broken’ a billion times but if nobody listens…oh fucking well!

Which begs the opposite question, good citizen…what the (F) would you do if the corporate owned media did announce, without elaboration, that our financial system had ‘collapsed’?

Let’s suppose we went a teensy bit further and added that our money (the US dollar) had been stripped of its ‘reserve currency’ status and had been ‘devalued’ by a factor of a thousand (making every existing dollar worth a tenth of a single cent.)

How ‘fucked’ would you be then?

Which is to ask what would your bank balance look like if you shifted the decimal point four places to the left?

Don’t shake your head in disbelief, they knocked 13 zeroes out of Argentina’s monetary base…and we’re only talking four here!

The part that will gnaw on your ass is you didn’t see any four decimal place jump in your standard of living…how the fuck did they settle on four?

Look no further than the (good for nothing) stock markets!

Or would it be more accurate to say the ‘delusionally priced’ stock market?

It is not a ‘coincidence’ that the nations that are in the deepest financial difficulty also have stock valuations that are totally out of whack with reality.

But this is a ‘contrived’ situation, we’re all being ‘gamed’…(although no one is going to find the end result the least bit amusing. I’m sticking to my guns, the bastards are trying to get the herd to thin itself!)

But repeating “the bastards are trying to kill ‘you’” won’t register any better than belaboring the obvious and reminding you constantly that ‘we’re broke’ does…(or doesn’t as the case may be.)

Um, it is also useless to point out that security at Davos is ‘insane’, reflecting how paranoid the ‘silver spoon toting class’ has become…

Not that this actually matters, I strongly suspect the people responsible for the current ‘brink of collapse’ situation have seldom, if ever, ‘bothered’ with Davos (such pandering is beneath them.)

They’d no sooner ‘beg for their lives’ than they’d spare yours!

Which is to say they will not ask for mercy because they will not show any.

Winner take all, straight up!

The word ‘compromise’ (or ‘surrender’ or ‘lose’ for that matter!) isn’t in their dictionary…how sad is it good citizen that these people also ‘believe’ ‘the law’ is whatever they say it is, at the moment they say it.

Their law is for you, not for them!

But I digress (as usual.)

What I hope to impress upon you is that you are being ‘deceived’ (not that there is much you can actually do about it…legally) and to be/remain ‘on guard’.

While the current ‘uncertainty’ is nerve-wracking, your future survival depends on your ability to ‘shrug’ this sort of nonsense off.

It is also important to stress that those of you who are NOT killed outright in the initial chaos (of collapse) will be enslaved (and die under inhumane conditions imposed on you by your so called ‘protectors’.)

You are better off banding together with your neighbors and pooling your meager resources than reporting to an official ‘Aid Station’.

They will become known as the ‘concentration camps’ of the 21st century.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rope or Light Poles?

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes the tune is ‘the beat goes on’ (Sonny & Cher, remember?) and so it is, good citizen, that we are offered an unvarnished look at today’s economy

No. 413: December CPI, PPI, Production, Housing Starts, Real Retail Sales 
January 19th, 2012

Patterns of Slowing Growth Have Re-Emerged
Inflation from High Oil Prices Still Impacting Broad Economy
2011 Average Annual Consumer Inflation: 3.2% (CPI-U), 3.6% (CPI-W), 10.7% (SGS) 2011 Average Annual Wholesale Inflation: 6.1% (PPI)
Perils of Poor-Quality Inflation Data and Bad Assumptions

Followed by an an encore of yesterday’s disturbing ‘what employers want’ debacle

Many employers, though, say they have little choice. Robert Batterman, a labor lawyer who represents employers, said whether it was the N.F.L. or Sotheby’s, which locked out 43 art handlers in Manhattan last July, “the pendulum has swung too far toward the employees, [says the man who makes his living advising employers how to ‘legally’ break their contracts] and the employers are looking in these tight economic times to get givebacks.” [Which is, make no mistake about it, how the rich get richer! None of them ‘need’ these givebacks, it’s just taking advantage of the economy! Every raise they DON‘T give multiplies their, er, ‘personal bonus!’]

“Employers,” he continued, “are using lockouts because unions are reluctant to do what the employers consider reasonable in terms of compromising. Employers are looking to reset their collective bargaining relations.” [And in many cases they’re doing whatever it takes to ‘bust’ the unions! The assholes cited here have even hired ’replacement workers…something that would have gotten you killed in the old days! Think about that while you enjoy your forty-hour work week!]

After being out of work since Aug. 1, Paul Woinarowicz, a warehouse foreman employed at American Crystal Sugar for 34 years, sees another rationale for lockouts. “It’s just another way of trying to break the union,” said Mr. Woinarowicz, a member of the bakery and confectionery workers union. “People here in the Red River Valley are really mad at American Crystal. It was just like a knife stuck in your heart.”

Because we all KNOW what the next step will be, the plant will close and all of the sugar beets processed here will be shipped to China! And a big ‘fuck you’ to the workers still capable of ‘bargaining’ for a living wage…such as it is these days.

Which brings us to the larger question of ‘are ‘free markets’ really the best way to regulate commerce?

The short answer is no because the free market is ‘incapable’ of justly determining what constitutes a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. There are simply too many variables.

Under A Simple Plan, pay is determined on a needs basis where everyone is provided with a guaranteed ‘living wage’. Not necessarily enough to live like a Rockefeller but you won’t have to dumpster dive or skip two meals a day either. Nor would you have to sit in the dark, shivering in the freezing cold, contemplating your navel until sunrise either…

But if that’s what you like, it could be arranged.

Just don’t try to martyr yourself afterwards on the cross of ‘lost opportunity’, it’s one of the quickest ways there is to get yourself exiled!

(Assuming our descendants are as ‘vigilant’ as we will become…)

Because the exploiter will always be ready to insist that the ‘old ways’ weren’t as bad as the ‘old folks’ make them out to be.

And it only takes one ‘exception’ to completely reverse the process.

Once they gain the ‘right’ to buy and sell again, it’s all ‘downhill’ from there.

We’re back to ‘stick ‘em up’ and ‘fuck you, pay me!’

We are in this clusterfuck we find ourselves in today BECAUSE we belong/tolerate a justice system that is centered NOT on the well-being of the individual but on the ‘sanctity’ of property rights!

It USED TO include the ‘inviolability’ of a contract (this is where old time union organizers thought they had the capitalist cornered but the fucking weasel capitalists can’t be trusted!)

Which leads us back to the current ‘employer/employee’ contract…can the capitalist be trusted?

I think we all know the answer to that one, the answer is a resounding NO!

Property rights do NOTHING to build or preserve a society, much less a civilization. (Which is to point out we may have been doing this for millennia but that only means we’ve been DOING IT WRONG for millennia!)

Which is to say it takes hundreds of thousands of workers/customers to make a single billionaire, and we have a few thousand of them, world wide.

Well, good citizen, automation cuts out the ’customer’ side of the equation, putting more ‘purchasing power’ in the pockets of the owner…BUT this additional or ‘surplus’ income comes at the cost of lost demand!

Robots don’t get paychecks and neither do the people the robots replace…in fact, there are myriad things that the people replaced by robots don’t/can’t do…like pay taxes. (which is PART OF THE REASON our ‘infrastructure’ is falling apart…but not to worry, the don’t intend to replace it in Hong Kong either, they’ll just build new in Africa!)

Which brings us full circle to the president’s ‘jobs program’. The government has a proverbial ’bottomless well’ of cash…but if you print money with abandon, it makes the existing money (in whatever form) worth-less…in both senses of the term.

Which is to point out that we must throw these ‘short-sighted weasels’ out of power (preferably) before there’s nothing left to salvage!

So, yeah, here we are, 4 years after the collapse of the banking system and we have these shit weasel, one percenters locking down domestic factories to extract ‘give backs’ from beleaguered and besieged workers!

Which brings us full circle to the question of ‘What will we run out of first, rope or light poles?’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No Place to Hide...

Greetings good citizen (& comrades,)

One of the ‘contradictions’ of targeting the proverbial ‘one percent’ is the well known fact that they ARE NOT a ‘cohesive group’.

If not for their ‘common enemy’ (the rest of us, ergo the 99%) they would dedicate (more of) their attention toward wiping each other out.

There is much to be gleaned from this morning’s offering set as it is in the former Soviet Union.

It is a mystery on the same level as the kings stepping off of their thrones in succession after the US revolution that the world’s two (nominally communist) nations both abandoned their failed economic systems and embraced (failing) capitalism (one of whom did this WITHOUT disavowing communism!)

Well, this small ‘retrospective’ of how it went down in Russia offers some clues to what happens when revolutions are, er, ‘privatized’…

Post-Soviet privatizations shifted state-owned factories into the hands of a coterie of well-connected businessmen — the oligarchs. Partly as a result, Russia has 101 billionaires, behind only China, with 115, and the United States, with 412, according to Forbes.

Only now, capital flight, a problem in the 1990s, has re-emerged. Money is flowing out of Russia faster than it is flowing in. The net outflow is expected to reach $70 billion by year-end, and the figures suggest that the bulk of that will be from large investors.

Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank here, notes that “the scale of capital flight has more than compensated for the rise of oil prices.”

Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ ignores the undeniable fact that when some one ‘wins’, there are inevitably losers.

Which is to point out that ‘greed’, even greed passed off as serving the greater good, is still a game of winners and LOSERS.

And after almost 400 years, the ‘losers’ are starting to pile up out there!

Which is, not too bizarrely, viewed as King Louis’s big mistake.

He didn’t ‘exterminate’ the rabble often enough, thus he lost his head (and the throne too!)

Um, I mention this because it forms the basis of my ‘kill off’ theory. The powerful feel compelled to kill off large segments of the ‘preferably’ surplus population (although it is all the same to them. As far as they’re concerned we could all be replaced with trained baboons (and they wouldn’t notice the difference!)

Greed is NOT GOOD. It INEVITABLY results in the SQUANDERING of resources!

And this is NOT an argument you want to get into with the ‘self-centered’, who, by default, view any effort expended not advancing their own agenda as ‘wasted’.

Why do you think the poor number in the billions? It is because the selfish/greedy don’t give a damn about anybody but themselves!

If we flip back a few paragraphs we would see the downright ‘shameful’ number of global billionaires…

Which opens another, er, ‘window’ good citizen.

How the hell did we leap from Millionaire to Billionaire in a single generation?

Ironically, the answer lies in ‘peak oil!’

A phenomenon that is being driven by a global population that is out of control…

Um, just because the corporate owned media, er, ‘chooses to ignore’ certain topics doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they are ‘non-issues’.

Let us take our unemployment ‘crisis’ in the context of an ‘out of control’ population.

There aren’t enough jobs for the people we already have…yet we continue to ‘breed’ more ‘workers’. (Making babies is the main reason why (the children of) workers don’t suicide on their 15th birthday…despite some believing that they should!)

Funny how that ‘biological imperative’ turns into a two-edged sword…isn’t it?

And you can’t, er, discourage someone that has little else to live for from breeding or they won’t squander their lives making YOU rich!

Neat trap, eh?

Ironic that the, er, only effective/humane way to get our population back under control is to ‘level the playing field’ so the battle for survival doesn’t turn the planet into ‘scorched earth’, fit for no one.

In case you didn’t detect it, that was indeed another shot at our ‘useless’ media…not that I expect it to change anything.

Nope, I’m putting my faith in YOU gentle reader! There are more of you than you may think.

Eventually, you will start hearing people talking about the ideas presented to them here and you will find that it wasn’t a ‘waste of time’ to click through that blogger firewall after all.

But the key here is ‘eventually’.

Although I do invite you to share this with your, er, ‘friends’ (possibly revealing them as not being quite the ‘friend’ you thought they were…)

Which is to acknowledge that the self-centered don’t like ‘sunshine’.

It’s like the ‘factually challenged’ Republicans that are unable to defend their assertions with logic.

Like I said, this isn’t about ‘me’ it’s about ‘us’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS. You know I seldom 'add' to a post afterwards BUT I was just visiting The Automatic Earth and read Ilargi's opening comments...which is mighty sound advice, considering what will happen if there's a 'panic' in Europe (It will cause one here as well.)

If you don't have some 'ready cash' on hand, it would be advisable to 'get some'...before you can't!

Although I suspect this will do you little good if you aren't prepared to spend it all quickly...because that's the 'other shoe'.

Prices will likely go haywire!

Just saying, ya know?

Let's talk about DEATH...

Greetings good citizen,

In an effort to divert attention from their bloodthirsty (and obviously mindless) sycophants, the corporate owned media has engaged in a campaign to, er, ‘clarify’ who precisely ‘deserves to die’.

What quickly bit Libertarian leaning politicians in the backside is the ‘lack of choice’ that often accompanies these self-imposed death sentences…

When asked if an ‘otherwise healthy’ individual who ‘elected’ to forego the expense of health insurance and then suddenly learns he needs ‘extensive (and expensive) medical treatment’.

The crowd ‘cheered’ the Republican candidate’s spirited defense of the individual’s ‘right to choose’ (even when he chooses poorly, because that’s what ‘freedom’ is all about boys and girls!)

Well, Bubba, the politician was telling the audience that our ‘liberty-minded’ young man should be made to live with the consequences of his decision. If he dies as a result then that’s his tough titty!

Besides being awkwardly insensitive, the response opened the door to issue of the tens of millions of US citizens who have no health insurance through no fault of their own.

These people didn’t get to ‘elect death’, that choice was made for them by a predatory economic system that has no use for them.

Where’s the ‘freedom’ in that?

How bizarre that we find ourselves once again faced with the question none of us ask…

Do you wonder what that question is?

Naturally, I’m going to tell you…and depending on which way you’re ‘bent’ will govern your reaction.

The question is ‘what is the purpose of society?’

According to our Libertarian friends (an oxymoron if there ever was one, rugged individuals don’t need ‘friends’!) society is an accident of proximity. People ‘band together’ for the simple reason of being close to stuff.

Under the ‘fuck you, pay me system’, people congregate where the jobs are because that’s where the money is.

But why did people band together BEFORE there was any money?

Here the ‘rugged individual’ likes to pretend there wasn’t a time when people needed one another…because originally forming ‘tribes’ was a survival tactic.

And, ironically, what was true then is still true today. We live ‘better’ together than we do on our own.

So how does an entire political movement spring up around the concept of ‘rugged individualism?

Ask yourself just where all of those ‘rugged individuals’ would be without their customers?

Verily, it is the utmost of conceit for anyone to boast they have succeeded on their own.

NOBODY does it alone…which is a bit of a misstatement, there are many things we do alone, it’s just that few of those things are worthwhile…and almost all of them are improved by sharing.

So where do we get this cheering for what boils down to be utter heartlessness?

Wasn’t the ‘purpose of civilization’ to improve our chances at survival? And now in our modern times only those who can ‘afford it’ are worthy of surviving?

I ask, what kind of beasts are these animals? First they block raising taxes on people with more money than they can spend and then they advocate letting the destitute die because adequate healthcare is beyond their means?

Worse, it is these same animals who are responsible for the poor’s sorry state!

But this is not ‘new’ by any stretch of the imagination. The privileged have always resented their obligation toward helping the less fortunate…and sometimes this resentment appears in public disguised as a political movement!

Which brings us full circle to another concept that has fallen by the wayside and that is the concept of ‘membership’ in a society.

Most of us take it for granted we are members of society at large.

Many of us are active in local affairs, this is, in a sense, ‘citizenship’.

So how is it that your citizenship can be unilaterally revoked for not sharing the same political viewpoint as…well, the powerful?

Are the powerful also the majority?

Not by a long shot…so why should THEY dictate who is and who isn’t ‘worthwhile’?

WHO among us has the ‘right’ to decide who lives and who dies?

And before you say it is up to the individual I tell you assuredly IT IS NOT!

Let me remind you that if you can’t live on your paycheck it’s not your employer’s problem, it’s YOURS!

Worse good citizen, your problems often become someone else’s profits!

Thus do they have no stake in lessening YOUR burden.

Ironically, you don’t NEED to become ‘thy brother’s keeper’, you merely need to let him up off the mat and he will care for himself!

The human anti-exploitation law, an idea whose time is long overdue!

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Default, naturally!

Greetings good citizen,

I apologize for both today’s tardiness and yesterdays’ missed edition. My ‘puter has been acting up and you can’t compose on a machine that won’t stay powered up.

Which is to note that despite ‘good intentions’ I might still not post today!

Not that my message is seriously different from my last post…it is still looking like a default is eminent.

That said, apparently the dominoes this will set in motion will ravage our society in much the same manner the Eurozone is being decimated.

I have often warned that one of the chief dangers facing ‘mankind’ was the value of money falling into doubt.

The prohibitions against counterfeiting were strong for good reason, now ‘creative accounting’ has done nothing more than to create a new way to counterfeit!

Money is money, derivatives are NOT!

But they had to run with it because there was no other way to ‘cycle’ money fast enough to keep up with the ‘interest payments’.

But you’re not supposed to understand this…as far as you’re concerned, everything is just peachy!

Those rumors about capitalism being broken are just that, vicious lies!

Only they’re not…capitalism is toast!

And yeah, for that I rejoice!

Even though it is more likely the social clock will turn backwards instead of forwards (at least initially) New won’t happen until Old dries up and blows away.

Of course, the thing you need to understand is we DON’T have a ‘money’ problem, what we have is a LEGAL problem!

With the hope of picking up more votes, Mr. Boehner revised his deficit-reduction plan to achieve additional savings of $65 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office said the revised proposal would save $915 billion over 10 years, up from an estimate of $850 billion in savings from the original plan.

The revisions involved technical changes in annual limits on spending in 2012 and 2013, but they produced substantial additional savings.

In a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, Mr. Boehner and the majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, scolded members for allowing Democrats to unify in protest against them. “This is the bill,” Mr. Boehner said, according to those who attended the meeting, who said he advised them to “get your ass in line.”

Who do you suppose Mr. Boehner was telling to get in line? Does he think his corporate media elected compatriots are ‘unaware’ of how they’re supposed to vote, even if it destroys any chance of their ever being re-elected?

No non-politician wants to see the US default on its debt (and technically it can’t.)

The Kabuki dance playing out before us is a ‘demonstration’ that our democracy is broken. That we are ‘incapable’ of governing ourselves (Not that we’ve ever been in any danger of actually deciding anything!)

From the founding of this nation the only thing we’ve been permitted to decide (and then only occasionally) was who would make decisions in our name without ever consulting us.

The charade is wearing thin good citizen. The people are tired of being lied to (and the liars know it)

So the liars are going to take matters ‘in hand’ before they suffer the consequences of their actions.

How successful this gambit will be remains to be seen…

For this offering and this one tell of the woe that lies in store for the ‘common man’.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the ‘average American’ KNOWS they have been sold down the river, the lunatic fringe cheering from the sidelines, feeding their irrational fears.

Is the ‘average American’ afraid?

They most certainly are. They see how ‘wrong’ things are going and nowhere in the national dialog is the voice of reason.

You could pull just about anybody off of the streets and with a minimum of coaxing they would tell you precisely what was wrong with how this country was being run and precisely how to fix it!

I’d probably have to add the qualifier that the only ones who ‘know’ where this country went wrong are over 50, the rest don’t know any different!

Which is to point out they know something is wrong but they can’t put their finger on what…they can’t recognize what changed…but us old coots. We know!

Why there are no jobs and why you can’t buy anything ‘Made in the USA…you’d think you wouldn’t need to draw young folks a picture but they don’t remember when EVERYTHING was MADE HERE!

How sad is it that the number 2 and number 3 economies in the world earned their status by selling CARS into the US market?

WTF!!!

The REAL scary thing is both the US market and the Eurozone are both in serious decline.

And ‘Peak Energy’ is almost on top of us…

Now, our ‘elected pinheads’ are doing absolutely NOTHING about the alternative energy situation while the number of unemployed pretty much equals the number of employed (including part timers and the taxpayer supported ‘public sector’.)

If you consider for even a moment the way the powerful have screwed over the rest of this country, Ted Nugent’s admonition of ‘Eat the Rich’ starts to sound like real wisdom!

Although I do not advocate cannibalism, Hanging ‘em works just fine for me!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

One step closer...

Greetings good citizen,

Can you say ‘Police State’?

It was bad enough that we had cops that seemed indifferent to crime or couldn’t recognize criminal activity, but now they are being granted ‘expanded authority’!

Well, guess what’s being ‘sacrificed’ so they can exercise their expanded authority? YOUR civil rights!

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

Just how far are you willing to push that ‘if you haven’t done anything wrong then you’ve got nothing to worry about’ meme?

Especially in the hands of the people who decide what is and isn’t, er, ‘wrong’.

There’s a reason why these idiots don’t prosecute bankers; but you aren’t quite so invulnerable, are you?

Most FBI agents are lawyers (so not busting bankers is sort of a ‘professional courtesy’ if any of these lawyers hope to have a second career with an, er, ‘influential law firm’ after departing Federal Service…)

There is a sort of weird disconnect here as TV portrays the FBI as ‘dedicated public servants’ rather than putting their more opportunistic traits on display.

How do you make partner in a large firm without years of ‘sweat equity’? You get some dirt on a major client of the firm…then, shazam, you’re a full equity partner!

But you won’t see that in the plot of you favorite cop show, will you?

But that’s propaganda for you…

I’m going to guess this new legislation will NOT make the hunt easier for those seeking a shortcut to future financial security. Their bosses will be on the alert to keep the field agents digging where they’re supposed to dig, in the trash of the malcontents, seeking the necessary evidence to brand them ‘insurgents’.

That’s why they want to go digging in YOUR trash! (Chances are good they’re already digging in mine!)

If there were a meme for the day it appears to be the growing disconnect between the people and the rulers.

They insist they are trying to make us ‘safe’ but it becomes evident that they are really only interested in their own safety, they are attempting to protect themselves from ‘retribution’…thus are YOUR rights being thrown out the window.

The old meme has a new caveat: ‘you have nothing to worry about if (you’re rich and) not doing anything wrong.’

If your disenfranchised and complain about it, you might find yourself branded a ‘terrorist’, even if you don’t have so much as a slingshot to execute your ‘reign of terror’ with!

Um, the ‘class war’ is turning ugly and it won’t be long before we witness open warfare in the streets of Europe. (IF they don’t ‘censor’ such broadcasts…)

We really are just inches away from martial law.

And nobody is doing a fucking thing about it…which should frighten you good citizen!

Where have all the ‘good men’ gone?

Apparently they were all bought off or fired!

Which leaves us where?

I guess it’s up to you and me.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Power of Gold!

Greetings good citizen,

There is a plethora of disturbing news this morning but that is to be expected, considering where all this is headed.

I’m going to ‘point to’ a disturbing truth so you will recognize it when you see it but guess what, you’re gonna panic anyway.

Maybe I’ll let the media break the ice for me

Gold breaks 1,500 dollars an ounce!

Guess what followed gold up almost 200 points?

Yup, the damnded Dow!

Understand, gold is rising due to what they are calling a ‘flight to safety’ but it isn’t our extremely mismanaged commercial sector they’re fleeing from (although they should be!) NO, investors are fleeing that bulwark of bulwarks, that safest of all safe havens, the US Dollar!

Now puzzle me this good citizen, if investors are ‘losing confidence’ in the (essentially worthless) US Dollar, shouldn't that loss also translate directly to ‘the generators of those dollars’, the US commercial sector?

How can the stocks of US companies rise while while their currency falls?

Short answer, IT CAN’T!

But the ‘stock market’ is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It is worse than a crooked casino because all of the ‘games’ are ‘fixed’in the ‘houses’ favor.

And the bought and paid for corporate media has zero interest in telling you the truth, but that’s nothing new.

All of this should make you ask, “why do I live here?” Not that there’s a better place out there that will have you.

How do you like those apples, you’re stuck AND fucked!

How sad is it this isn’t the only, er, ‘nonsensical’ bit of fluff you are regularly expected to swallow?

The stock market makes much more ‘sense’ if you think of it simply as the yardstick that tells us how rich the already wealthy are making themselves.

That’s the ONLY reason stocks rise when the dollar falls.

Of course, this is the same ‘idiot logic’ used when the government measures unemployment. How moronic will it be when ALL jobs have been offshored that the unemployment level will finally reach zero?

Er, ‘calculating’ stocks to rise when the dollar falls is the same twisted logic, when the dollar becomes worthless, stocks will be ‘priceless’!

Doesn’t matter how many times you read it, it still doesn’t make sense…but that’s what they do!

But we digress (believe it or not!)

The real ‘shocker’ here is…

The price of damn gold!

Gold hovered around $200 an ounce for the first thirty years after the ‘gold standard’ was abandoned. (This is a reference point, not an endorsement!)

Then, in the depths of the second ‘jobless recovery’ gold suddenly and inexplicably doubled. Jumping from $200 to 400 an ounce virtually overnight in 2004.

Seven years (and another financial crisis) later and it more than ‘triples’? (almost quadruples!)

Um, does anyone else see a disturbing, er, ‘pattern’ developing here? (Because the corporate media has no interest in ‘investigating’ this ‘non-news’ story!

So, what’s the ‘price of gold’, good citizen?

Whatever they say it is! (And if you get fucked in the process, too bad! You should have been ‘more careful’…)

But more to the point good citizen, letting others decide what is and isn’t valuable (to them) has proven to be catastrophic in the past.

In fact, we’re headed for just such a catastrophy as we speak!

Oil is being ‘undervalued’ while alternatives are being discounted completely!

I read an article predicting $5 a gallon gasoline by the end of the summer. Since gasoline runs pretty much in line with heating oil there are going to be a lot of people freezing to death this coming winter…and there WILL BE RIOTS in anticipation of that event!

Are we ‘off the rails’ good citizen? Most definitely! The cause, which should surprise no one, is ‘mismanagement’.

You must be getting sick of my advocating for A Simple Plan in every piece but the plan was designed with the current situation in mind…and doesn’t depend/hinge on everybody suddenly wanting to join the peace corp or becoming missionaries for ‘spirit in the sky’…

You just keep doing what you do because that’s what you do…until you decide you want to do something else, then you transfer. (I suspect ‘gypsys’ will be fairly common.)

There’ll be plenty of time for ‘doing nothing’ during the regular day or after you turn fifty.

Gold is a soft yellow metal, pretty but otherwise worthless.

Life, on the other hand is ‘priceless!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tin foil hat territory

Greetings good citizen,

Plans to, er, ‘murder’ the ‘surplus population’ proceed apace.

Just as being an ‘admirer/advocate’ of capitalism DOESN’T make YOU a capitalist (one who makes their living through the ‘shrewd application’ of capital.)

Neither does pointing out ‘socially unacceptable’ truths mark one as ‘insane’.

Although your continued refusal to so much as ‘entertain’ the very real probability of this outcome casts a certain degree of suspicion upon your own ‘mental stability‘…

As a couple of reports yesterday pointed out, revealing the truth doesn’t make it acceptable, people are quite stubborn when it comes to their beliefs.

Still, if you look past the ‘fluff’(dis-information) the corporate owned media continues to ‘spew’, the truth remains ‘unaltered’.

They are doing their damnedest to paint this as an ‘unintended consequence’ of cost reduction while the exact opposite is true.

They most definitely intend to kill as many of us as possible and ‘intent’ is all it takes in our decidedly ‘overcrowded’ world.

You don’t even need to be a very good ‘detective’ to figure it out either.

Because in the end it will all be blamed on ‘mis-management.’

Just as the ‘financial crisis’ is being blamed on an, er, ‘lack of oversight, compounded by a failure to enforce’ existing regulations.

And not only has no one been accused (never mind arrested) for malfeasance or misappropriation but no one has been, er, ‘terminated’ for failure to do their job. (Although I did hear of some regulators being laid-off when funding for their jobs was cut…)

Think of a crime good citizen, the way a criminal does. In order to ‘get away’ with the crime you have to ‘deter pursuit’, either by running to where you can’t be followed or by giving the victims something else to focus on while you make your escape.

Like a world-wide famine, made worse by willful inaction on climate change (not that there’s really anything we CAN do about it. It took a century to get where we are, we aren’t about to reverse that overnight!)

There is another explanation for our screwed up weather but we’re already dancing dangerously close to tin-foil hat territory, so its best not to go there in the same post.

Yes good citizen a crime has been committed and now the perps are paving their way for a ‘clean’ getaway!

It seems committing the crime involved crippling the Justice system, now getting away with it seems to involve ‘collapsing’ the victim’s prosecutorial bodies.

If the government under which the crime was committed collapses, is it still a crime?

Stupid question, of course it is. Unless you ‘own’ the new government!

Which will be ‘phase two’ of the original crime.

Once again I feel compelled to admonish that just because YOU can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening!

The part that really sucks is now we’re DEEP in tin foil hat territory!

While Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, his ‘deductive reasoning’ was sound. After eliminating the impossible, the answer lies with in whatever remains.

Have I ever mentioned that immortality would seriously fuck with your head?

Well, screw down your tin-foil hat because I think that’s where I think we’re at!

Again, I’m not telling you what to think, I am merely providing you with something to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Snow Day

Greetings good citizen,

Spent today battling ‘planned obsolescence’, the electric start on my snowblower shit the bed but (and it turned out to be a one time deal) the pull starter worked on the first pull. So, the first 18 inches were removed mechanically.

Just spent the last two hours trying to get the starter motor to work because Hercules isn’t strong enough to pull start that stubborn bastard.

Looks like I’ll spend some time tomorrow with the service department at the place I bought the sum bitch to figure out what its going to take to fix the damn thing.

Worse, it’s still snowing out there.

Oh fucking well.

The ‘idiot barometer’ (a.k.a. the stock market) was up again today and as usual this was due to nothing you could discern as increased commercial activity.

Perhaps more interesting is how long these boobs think they’re going to get away with doing nothing while pretending everything is fine.

There’s a question to ask yourself good citizen…IS everything ‘fine’?

Naturally, the answer depends on how you define the purpose of commerce. If commerce exists to enrich its owners, then everything is indeed ‘fine’.

If commerce exists to facilitate participation within a society by satisfying the needs of that society then things aren’t quite where they should be.

Thus should we all find this ‘pretend’ thing more than just a little ‘disturbing’.

You see, the elite can afford to pretend for a damn long time, a hell of a lot longer than you can.

They can keep pretending, all the while beating you down by ‘devaluing’ the money supply until long after you’re dead and gone, your children locked up because they became common criminals just to survive.

Yup, that’s how it’s gonna go down if you keep doing ‘nothing’.

Speaking of ‘doing nothing’, how long is it going to take until to finally realize that the ballot box doesn’t do your bidding? You will NEVER be offered a ‘desirable’ choice…and if you are it will turn on you just like the current occupant of the White House has.

A system that only serves the upper reaches of a society is broken and needs to be abandoned, it can’t be fixed.

The only ones who want to fix it are the ones who broke it in the first place.

Sadly good citizen, life is hard enough without having to ponder whether or not you are already in hell…

It has been a long day and tomorrow holds more, difficult challenges…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Correction

Greetings good citizen,

It seems the (worthless) stock market managed to drag its ass back into positive territory before yesterday’s closing bell.

What does this mean good citizen? Is the economy actually doing ‘better’ than we ‘think’ it is?

That’s what they’d (the manipulative wealthy) like you to think.

Hell the ONLY evidence we have that the mis-labeled ‘Great Recession’ is over is the (totally nonsensical) run up in stock prices.

Was there any reason at all for stocks to finish in positive territory yesterday?

Short answer: NO!

But they did anyway. Worse, stocks were up some 290 points for the week!

Is this a ‘bad thing’, good citizen?

If you don’t own stocks it didn’t make you richer (and even then, only owning the ‘right stocks’ would benefit your personal bottom line.)

So what about the opposite? The Fed buying up its own bonds and putting you on the hook for it, how does that affect your bottom line?

Remember when a cup of coffee cost 10 cents?

The ‘parallel’ here is the stock market was still under a 1,000 when you could get a cup of coffee for one thin dime.

Understand good citizen you are ‘poorer’ today then you were then. In terms of ‘real purchasing power’ you make only a fraction of what you used to make just a few short years ago…and guess where that ‘buying force’ went?

Yup, the fucking stock market!

In a game that is related to the totally subjective ‘value of a buck’, stocks ‘appreciate’ in value when your money loses value!

What’s the real ‘kick in the balls’ here? The same people who benefit from this cock-eyed situation are the same people who get to decide!

What good is fifty dollars an hour when it only gets you what you used to be able to get for five dollars an hour?
Worse, as your pay doubles, prices quadruple.

Just like the fucking foolish stock markets.

They should be shut down, forcibly if necessary!

Understand good citizen, this is PRECISELY what the government SHOULD BE protecting us from!

The fact that there is absolutely nothing we can (legally) do about this untenable situation is way beyond ‘unacceptable’.

Still, you’d like to think people would come together to fight back BEFORE we start finding children that have starved to death, buried in landfills!

Damn, I honestly don’t set out with the purpose of making these posts as ‘grim’ as I can, it is just how it works!

That said, if you can’t handle ‘grim’ then the future isn’t going to be to your liking.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

There WILL be Blood...

Greetings good citizen,

I highly doubt that the newsmakers of the NY Times read this insignificant little collection of wild mental ramblings but how do we account for their, er, ‘channeling’ me?

Yesterday, we had Mr. Rich parroting my ‘prediction’ that we would be faced with another ‘untenable choice’ come November 2012.

As I pointed out yesterday, Hillary has (for now) stated she’s ‘not interested’ in making another run at the White House but will The Media take ‘no’ for an answer?

Okay, maybe that’s just drawing a ‘logical conclusion’ from observing who has been (and continues to) suck up to the ‘spotlight’…

But today we have This Piece from our Nobel Laureate echoing my, er, ‘prediction’ of two weeks ago that we face the very real danger of the government, um, ‘dissolving’ itself…

The only thing ‘worse’ than the mess we are currently suffering from is the ‘certainty’ that nobody is in charge.

For the moment we can cling to the notion that somebody, somewhere is taking care of business. While Mr. Krugman points to what amounts to political hostage taking, the end result is the same.

The party of ‘One in Five’ could bring what passes for our government to a standstill, just to prove they can.

And, like the man says, There will be blood.

The ‘rage meter’ is off the charts on both sides of the political fence…worse, you can’t ‘reason’ with a closed minded conservative, they believe what they believe because they believe it!

So it’s ‘head cracking time’ (again) where we demonstrate to the 20 percent of us who can’t understand normal thinking what the difference is between a ‘minority’ and a majority…again.

Understand good citizen, we find ourselves in the same old jam BECAUSE we have failed to rein in the baser instincts of the psychopaths among us.

Worse, we have also failed to implement safeguards that would prevent these anti-social psychos from rising to positions of authority.

Adopting ‘A Simple Plan’ will solve these issues; it’s ‘built in’ to the system.

The tests measure more than just proficiency at a given skill, they also measure the candidates, er, ‘moral compass’.

Ironically, we won’t have time to explore the finer points of ‘alternate proposals’ once the current government is, er, ‘derailed’.

There’ll be too much blood flying around and nobody will be stepping in to stop it once the paychecks stop flowing…

Does anyone else see the ‘major flaw’ in ‘taxpayer supported’ government now?

You get the ‘government you pay for’ BUT that fails to take into account what happens when the same people who fail to pay you also fail to pay for your government…

We have a word for situations like this…we call it ‘fucked’.

Are you ‘fucked’?

Well and truly!

Is it high time we abandon this reckless free for all we’ve been saddled with and adopt a more equitable, sustainable model.

No more ‘debt driven’ economics, it is time for a ‘people driven’ model!

We do what we do for YOU!

If you give more than you get we’ll all be better off!

No irony should be lost on the fact that we should now be working only 20 hours a week (because we have so many ‘workers’) but we don’t because the employer class uses us as their ‘income stream’.

It not about us, it’s about THEM.

Time for that bullshit to go out the window too!

Peak Oil is a clear and present danger. If we don’t act soon it will be too late.

The time to disincentivize fossil fuel is now while we still have some left. This way the remaining supply can be used to smooth the transition to a ‘new/old’ way of doing things.

Wind power IS the future, if we don’t start building it now it won’t be ready before we run out of fossil fuel.

Here is just one of the many, er, ‘political discussions’ that we aren’t having thanks to the ‘disaster Capitalists’.

Naturally, you know why we keep lurching from disaster to disaster don’t you?

Because under capitalism, you solve problems with money…too bad the money is already decidedly ‘funny’.

Under my unspoken credo of ‘not too many foreign concepts at once’ we’ll adjourn this edition of ‘Rambling with Gegner’ for another day,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner