Seconded (post 1100)

Greetings good citizen,

While I am the local ‘crank’ who appears to be ‘discontent’ with just about EVERYTHING, on certain topics I am not alone.

Seems Mr. Chomsky agrees that we are on the brink and the current system of leadership (if that’s what you want to call it) is , er, ‘unacceptable’.

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war. The former is regularly on the front pages. On Sept. 19, for example, Justin Gillis reported in The New York Times that the melting of Arctic sea ice had ended for the year, “but not before demolishing the previous record – and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.”

The melting is much faster than predicted by sophisticated computer models and the most recent U.N. report on global warming. New data indicate that summer ice might be gone by 2020, with severe consequences. Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050. “But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes.

“To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe. This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.

That’s hardly all.

A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.”

Okay, then he goes into an in depth look at the ‘nuclear hypocrisy’ being displayed by both the US and Israel.

Or the infamous ‘do as I say and not as I do’ doctrine.

I educate no one by saying this brand of ‘high-handedness’ has started more wars than any other single reason.

Or maybe it is me who is being obtuse when I recognize the fact that they have been simply itching for a reason to invade Iraq…and the disturbing question is who would stop them? [The ‘indefinite ‘them’ in this case is the military industrial/energy complex who brook no defiance to their desires. Wait, there’s just another dash of gasoline for this inferno, guess on whose behalf this complex operates?

But I don’t need to draw you pictures.

Unfortunately this backs us into the same old corner we’ve been backed into for the past thirty years.

You know which one I’m talking about, right?

It’s the ‘what are YOU gonna do about it’ corner.

And you will eventually have to accept if YOU don’t do ANYTHING about it, it won’t stop.

And as Mr. Chomsky points out, the survival of our species hangs in the balance.

Kind of funny really. We all know things will go downhill quickly when this ‘false peace’ gives way in a couple of months…then there will be nothing for it…because you literally will be ‘fighting for your life.’

Um, most of you probably haven’t noticed but the crap the Oil Drum keeps harping on…well, that shit is already happening.

Remember the second law of thermo dynamics? Also known as ‘the law of diminishing returns?

Simply put there is a point where you will expend more energy that you get back then extracting the energy is a counterproductive exercise.

They won’t admit it but we’re already there with these oil sands and oil shale.

We’re probably roughly level. We’re probably expending as much energy trying to mine these ‘incomplete’ energy sources as we are reaping from the effort.

Which is to say we are expending a barrel of oil to extract one…and that’s already a losing proposition…

But the fuckers HAVE NO CHOICE!

And they can’t let YOU know that we’ve reached the end of the line because it means abandoning everything north of the Tropic of Cancer and everything south of the Tropic of Capricorn!

The bad news is seven billion people AREN’T going to fit in that tiny space…(considering much of it is desert.)

WE COULD start a ‘crash’ program to build solar and wind facilities to offset our oil and coal energy plants, and we could also beef up our national rail system and rebuild our sailing ship industry…and you can even add ‘airships’ back into the mix.

But that would require a mindset that isn’t intent on the extermination more than half of the human race…which is what the >One Percent has determined it needs to do to maintain THEIR status (the rest of us can go pound!)

Which is to opine that the quicker we, er, liberate these 'owners of all they survey' from their leadership responsibilities and give them something more pressing to deal with (like survival: personal) the better off we will all be.

I can’t be that crazy if members of the ‘serious people’ crowd are echoing my sentiments…

But then again, crazy is ‘relative’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Snapshot

Greetings good citizen,

There’s nothing better than ending the week with a snapshot of the ‘Funny Farm’!

For your review, straight from the business section of today’s NY Times:

Reticent Rich: Preferred Style in Silicon Valley
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

At Facebook, ground zero for the nouveau tech riche in Silicon Valley, peer pressure dictates that consumption be kept on the down low.

DealBook: Facebook Raises $16 Billion in I.P.O.
Video: Silicon Valley's Lust for High-End Bikes
[Let’s not forget their ‘passion’ for $5,000 footwear!]

DealBook
Long Odds on a Big Facebook Payday
By NATHANIEL POPPER 29 minutes ago

If history offers any lesson, average investors may find they face steep odds if they hope to make big money in a much-hyped stock like Facebook.

Interactive How Will the Stock Fare?

[This is a stunning example of the ‘dearth of investment opportunities’ out there, good citizen. Once again, if this is ‘as good as it gets’, the rest of us are in a heap of trouble!]

Other Business News
News Analysis
A Greek Exit? Euro Zone May Be Ready
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Years of foot-dragging and brinkmanship have prepared the currency union for life without Greece.
[WTF! Are they now trying to say that this was ‘the plan’ all along? What will become of the rest of the ‘PIIGS’? (Without Greece will the acronym 'pigs' still apply?)]

Euro Watch
Markets on Edge After Downgrades in Europe
By PAUL GEITNER 7:27 AM ET

Fresh credit rating downgrades affected Greece and Spain as the Group of Eight leaders gathered.
[Yet another ‘no shit, Sherlock!’ moment]

New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition seeks provide aid to farmers like these in Ethiopia.

White House Enlists 45 Companies to Invest in Food Production for the World’s Poor
By STEPHANIE STROM

President Obama and four African leaders will introduce the group of companies, the Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security, on Friday at a forum on food security and agriculture.

[Um, tucked quietly between tales of economic mayhem is this deeply troubling item that foretells of the coming famine, likely brought on by ‘Frankenfood’]

Workers at a solar panel factory in Huaibei, in Anhui province. A Chinese official called the American move “really dangerous.”

U.S. Slaps High Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels
By KEITH BRADSHER and DIANE CARDWELL

The United States Commerce Department concluded that Chinese producers had “dumped” their products on the American market.
[Okay, how does Chong think the denizens of the ‘economic desert’ are going to react to a technology DEVELOPED HERE but being made somewhere else? Are we supposed to be ‘jumping for joy’ that Chinese workers can make them (more profitably) than US workers can? NO! US workers are going to be PISSED because we could (and should) have made them HERE (with native materials) and FUCK the weasel ‘owners’ for sending the technology to China in the fucking first place! Chong has the wrong idea about just how 'dangerous’ a move this is. It is not dangerous to China, it is dangerous for the capitalist!]


‘Princelings’ in China Use Family Ties to Gain Riches
By DAVID BARBOZA and SHARON LaFRANIERE

The authorities are eager to paint the fallen official Bo Xilai, whose family has a substantial fortune, as a rogue operator. But other officials’ relatives have also amassed vast wealth.
[I suspect it is safe to say that China is no longer a ‘communist’ country, considering the ‘new royalty’ that has, er, usurped the revolution.] (See why I don’t like Commies?)
Graphic: Power and Profit in China’s Economic Boom


Hewlett-Packard to Cut 30,000 Jobs
By QUENTIN HARDY

The tech giant will refocus on product development and sales, executives say, and operations in China will most likely be spared.

[Any questions?]

Bribery Case at Wal-Mart May Widen
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The scope of an investigation into foreign bribery issues seemed to have widened at the retailer, which reported higher-than-expected first-quarter earnings.

That concludes this week’s ‘snapshot’.

Did I neglect to confirm that the destruction of our civilization is proceeding unabated?

Which, disturbingly, confirms my ‘kill-off via cascading systemic collapse’ theory.

Left to our imaginations is what will replace our failed attempt at a ‘benign republic’.

If history is any indication, the benign republic is usually replaced by crushing feudalism, a ruthless hereditary dictatorship.

The choice regarding what comes next is, of course, yours.

If you refuse to fight are you prepared to accept what will surely come next?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Post 900, The Difference

Greetings good citizen,

While the ‘cracks’ in our civilization appear to have widened visibly overnight we still haven’t reached ‘the end of the line’ the Doomsday crowd is ‘preparing’ for.

I’m gonna have to ‘go off’ on that topic in the not too distant future, partly because of the ‘bird-brains’ they have ‘judging’ these psycho’s efforts.

There’s a dynamic at play in this whole ‘hoarding to survive’ meme that is more then a little ironic, considering how we got to this point in the first place.

Behind this latest collapse of ‘Western Civilization’ is ‘more for me’ capitalism.

Now just how ironic is it that some of these greedy fucktards are trying to ‘buy their way out’ of a situation CREATED by this very same GREED?

Worse, they are justifying what they do as ‘protecting’ THEIR food source from, er, ‘predators’ (formerly known as ‘employees’! Although let’s not forget Chumps and Muppets!)

If you don’t have enough bullets to ‘kill ‘em all’ I’ve got bad news for ya, it’s not YOUR food, it’s everybody’s!

But, (naturally) I digress.

Today’s offering shows us the true dynamics of civilization, (a dynamic the so-called conservatives ignore!)

Put this in the context of only conservatives running in this fall’s election and howl with dismay!

The view that the private sector is the independent engine of economic growth is obviously false. It’s time for an articulated economic framework which describes how the modern state has worked in an active co-venture with the for-profit sector.

Who knows what kind of tax system on debt position the nation would be in if we had created a venture capital bank that explicitly shared in commercial revenues as all venture capitalists do? Put another way, what would a public finance system look like if the public shared the private profit and personal wealth that was made with the help of our money?

Elizabeth Warren has clarified how the social web and the physical infrastructure that government supports is essential to market function, growth and wealth creation. It makes sense to go a step further and clarify how government action and public dollars serve as a direct partner with the private sector in advancing growth and wealth. Then, it would not be so easy to take the money and run.

Government’s ‘JOB’ is to provide for (all) of society (not just the One fucking Percent.)

UNDERSTAND, it is the government that gives legitimacy to EVERYTHING (including religion!) thus when your government undergoes a ‘hostile take-over’ like ours obviously has (and I’m talking world-wide here, good citizen.) You end up with ‘mis-management’ on the scale we’re currently witnessing!

Mis-management that leads to situations like this

Which are the Middletowns of our new era of precarious living? Is it Muncie, whose denuded industrial landscape tells a familiar story of Rust Belt decline? Or is it the new industrial landscapes of Smyrna and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where jobs that look a lot like those the residents of Muncie once had have become posts for a downwardly mobile working class? Or is it Sun Belt boom-cities like Nashville, where the promise of postindustrial transcendence has created its own reserve army of low-wage service employment, condemning many to lives of permanent poverty and vulnerability? Or is it some byzantine conurbation of them all, a commons of the American Nightmare—a Middletown of the 99 percent?

Muncie was my first stop, for it seemed as good a place as any to begin a tour of working-class life in America, to discover what it once had been and what it had become.

Which is to point out what you’ve all know all along…what happened here was no ‘accident’. Nor was it what they try to pass it off as, ‘incompetence’.

The destruction of our civilization (by and for the greedy) was quite deliberate.

The part that sucks is THEY will insist it is OUR FAULT they did what they did.

And much carnage could have been averted IF we had stopped them sooner…BUT, by then they had the keys and were firmly in the proverbial ‘driver’s seat’, all we could do then was to wait for the inevitable ‘crash’!

Um, the reason we are standing PRECISELY where we were almost a hundred years ago is because LAST TIME, the fucking perps ‘walked’, nobody ‘paid the price’ for destroying the economy.

Which leads me to opine that this time they will pay in spades!

[Either that or we will abandon the entire concept of living ‘socially’ and become ‘lone predators’, killing (or enslaving) one another on sight until our eventual extinction. (Which for some species won’t be soon enough, given what we’ve done to their habitat.)]

But I strongly doubt the latter option (as attractive as it might sound to a pin-headed Libertarian…)

So as you wade through the offal that masquerades as ‘news’ try not to get too discouraged, the old world is passing away…but a new one is about to rise…and it is this new one that we need to fight for!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Creative Mind

Greetings good citizen,

Certain thought experiments are fun and others are just disturbing. I’d opine that most often there is a ‘mis-match’ between the concept and who gets to play as we can observe in this peculiar piece

It’s a rather curious collection of responses with half of the respondents staying ‘in character’ Their response was heavily influenced by their ‘claim to fame’, which is to point out that there is zero ‘outside the box’ thinking on display, even from the one respondent known for his ‘innovation’.

And understand good citizen, if it were proposed that we assemble ‘a panel of experts’ and set them to the task of solving the United States problems, the idea would enjoy HUGE support.

Nothing succeeds like success and humans have disturbing tendency to ‘transfer’…‘If Moe is so terrific at doing this, just imagine what he could do with that!’

Even when the ‘skill sets’ required to succeed between ‘this and that’ are apples and oranges! On occasion, a well rounded individual does indeed ‘rise to the challenge’ (but that’s more the exception than the rule…and ‘success’ is often measured as ‘unfailure’ rather than exceptional performance.)

But I digress…

One of the respondents at least took a practical approach, he (a scientist) stated right up front that making him ‘president’ would change little.

The engineered ‘three way power split’ prevents anyone (who isn’t already ‘entrenched’) from walking in and upsetting the applecart.

Which says something pretty disturbing about who plays ‘puppet master’ in our political theater but there it is.

Which is to ask that even if we were able to assemble a ‘panel of experts’ and set them to the task of solving the republic’s problems, who would we ‘tap’?

As today’s ‘thought experiment’ displays, most people ‘are what they do’…

IF we selected people who are already ‘successful and prosperous’ would they change anything?

Probably not.
If a person is prospering under the current environment, why alter it?

So we’d need to utilize other selection criterion to avoid adverse selection.

In A Simple Plan, I ‘use’ expertise to its maximum advantage, the individual leverages their expertise into the top position…but the closer you get to the top, the broader your skill set must become.

Which is to say that in order to succeed one must truly be proficient at ‘problem solving’… just as the ‘cannibals’ among us have become.

If they can’t figure out what to do they either outsource it or they eat it.

Actually, these days the most popular choice is to ‘compartmentalize’ trouble, then you ignore it, making it into your successor’s problem.

Which is to say many of today’s ‘success stories’ are centered not on solving problems but ignoring them!

Look at the environment and peak energy…

Hell, it’s Sunday morning and Sporky Dorky is chatting up his latest ‘jobs’ bill.

The ‘solution’ to the unemployment situation is easy (and it always has been.) You simply need to re-adjust the work week while reducing the ‘expense picture’ for the typical worker.

Make housing free while chopping the work week down to twenty hours, unemployment instantly ‘disappears’. (Banks and the stock markets will ‘vaporize’ along with this step but fuck ‘em, they've outlived their usefulness anyway!)

And anyone who thinks the problem WON’T be solved by re-adjusting the work week is yanking your chain…or they’re an idiot, pick one.

How unfortunate is it (for roughly half of us) that the 'infamous they' appear to have opted for plan 'B', which gets you to the same place as reducing the work week gets you only backwards.

If you reduce the number of workers it becomes unnecessary to reduce the work week.

When they finally DO take the obvious steps to solve the crisis they will marvel over why ‘no-one thought of it sooner’!

Unless they attempt ‘half a loaf’ which will absolutely FUCK too many people. You can’t cut the workweek without FIRST cutting the expense picture.

And YOU (you lucky dog) will have known the solution all along!

You will also know what will happen if they try to cut the workweek without reducing the expense picture, so you’ll be prepared.

Mine is the kind of expertise that is seldom brought to bear in situations like this, largely due to ignorance. People can’t support what they don’t know exists.

Which is to ask, good citizen, that you be willing to expose my ‘madness’ to a broader circle of your acquaintances, even if you introduce them to my writings for their ‘comedic value’.

Because nothing is going to change if we don’t start talking about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Unsettling...and then some.

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s collection of articles are in no particular order and therefore will conform to the willy-nilly format that you’ve become accustomed to here at ASP.

If we return to one of the core concepts of A Simple Plan, the axiom that it is impossible to make informed decisions without accurate information, we encounter our first offering that takes to task our purposefully destructive educational system.

[This article first appeared on TruthDig.]

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs. [snip]

We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

The slap in the face here good citizen is that it’s bad enough we suffer a ‘truth challenged’ media, it is worse that we suffer an education system which stresses blind acceptance over critical thinking!

Right and wrong are not ‘universally apparent’; right and wrong are whatEVER we tell you they are, whenever we tell you, subject to reversal without prior notice, as the circumstances demand!

If the above reads fucked up it’s because it IS fucked up!

It's like the statement ‘my words mean exactly what I want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less.’

Sadly, that limits the pool of people who ‘understand’ what you said to just you!

We are not a race of telepaths.

Much to our employers chagrin!

Moving along Today’s stock markets were “Markets Unsettled on Concerns About Jobs and Inflation

In the United States, the latest reports pointed to higher inflation and highlighted the continued weakness in the job market. The weekly unemployment claims rose back above the 400,000 level and the government said the core producer prices rose slightly faster than expected in March.[snip]

Investors are particularly concerned about Chinese inflation, fearing that government efforts to restrain it could prompt a “hard landing” for the economy.

“Inflation in emerging economies has become a serious issue, as the impact from high commodity prices is stronger for those countries,” Arnaud Scarpaci, fund manager at Agilis Gestion in Paris, said.

So don’t ‘confuse’ food riots with political unrest. The former are much more serious than the latter.

What’s the bottom line here good citizen? We can only wonder who they think they’re fooling with their ceaseless ‘Happy Talk’ about the state of the economy.

It’s fucked and they aren’t doing a damn thing to fix it (because they don’t give a fuck if you starve, in fact, they’re hoping you do!)

Which leads us to What I was saying Monday

HOLD EVERYTHING: There's No Budget Deal, And The Government May Still Shut Down

Like I warned earlier, this ‘budget deal’ is far from a ‘done deal’.

I've already expounded on what I think will happen if the federal government ‘shuts down’ and it’s a lot more serious than anything either the blogosphere or the corporate owned media will admit to, being the ‘reality based community’ that they think they are!

And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse we have this bullshit!

Seems as though there was something to those claims of fraud leveled against that private consortium of banks that call themselves The Fed.

Dunno how much more evidence you need that our ‘house’ is so far out of order as to be uninhabitable!

But, the disturbing part is how this is no accident!

The fuckers really are trying to kill a shitload of us off.

And the more you refuse to accept this, the closer it creeps.

It has probably already happened, somebody somewhere has ‘slipped’ likely when they, (being mentally unstable and all) flipped out and launched into a tirade about how they couldn’t wait for the day when most of us end up cutting one another’s throats for a crust of bread!

Because that’s exactly the direction this clusterfuck is headed…and there ain’t a frigging thing you can do about it, especially if you’ve already been pushed to the margins of our society.

So, some mighty ‘weighty’ reading here good citizen,

Consider it well and prepare accordingly!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Over the edge!

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do today’s headlines strike you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pissed off is an understatement 99% of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just something else to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Starting Over

Greetings good citizen,

Could this be ‘D-Day‘?

Naturally it’s poor reporting to open an article with such a vague question. Most of my readers ask the opposite question, is this NOT D-Day considering my generally grim outlook.

So we need to ‘spell out’ the conditions that ‘legitimize’ the asking of this question.

Where to begin? Do we start with the (still ongoing) ‘hollowing out’ of this nation’s economy (while letting the ‘ongoing’ part speak for itself, which is to point out that the situation remains ‘unaltered and unaddressed.’)

Or do we cast our gaze upon the, er, ‘wobbly’ financial sector which, despite trillions of dollars worth of bailouts and accounting ‘gimmes’, is still poised to collapse at the first breath of fresh air and sunlight?

Which, naturally, belabors another obvious fact, that absolutely NOTHING has been done to actually…‘repair’ the global economy.

The riots in the Middle East ARE NOT a ‘cry for freedom’ as the corporate owned media would have you believe. It is the anger of nations, frustrated and fed up with ineffective government.

While the, er, ‘revolts’ have, in some cases, brought ‘regime change’, switching who wears the big hat does nothing to address the real problem…as the Egyptians are now learning.

How unfortunate is it that the only people who will be allowed to run for the post with the big hat must first promise not to change anything?

So their only option will be the violent suppression of their own people.

Governments that don’t protect you coupled with rampant fraud and deceit

What does that spell to you?

Well, today’s headlines aren’t particularly surprising to the informed observer.

Disappointing Economic News Pushes Wall Street Lower

Geez good citizen, just when you thought the only thing that could derail Wall Street’s irrational rise to its historic highs was to have the NYSE actually burn to the ground we get this!

Not that today’s ‘dip’ actually means anything. If history is any indicator, today’s ‘dip’ will create tomorrow’s ‘bargains’ (just don’t look too closely at who is buying what…)

Which is to ask that despite the horrific state of the (real) economy, are we really just seeing some ‘profit taking’ by the big trading desks?

What’s real and what’s an illusion?

If you find yourself asking that question good citizen the chances are excellent that the only thing you can be sure of is that YOU’RE getting FUCKED!

If you find yourself among that ‘bottom 40%’ of the country’s population that has ‘combined’ a .02% share of the nation’s annual income, you know something is radically wrong.

This is one of the dangers I’ve been pointing to for quite a while now. If you can’t trust the people in charge, you have no place to turn.

You literally have to start all over again from scratch, one person at a time.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What a week!

Greeting good citizen,

What a week, eh? Between the, er, ‘improbable’ elections and Bernanke diluting the money supply. What the fuck else could go wrong?

Well, we need look no further than Mr. Rich for the answer to that one.

The part that amazes me is why someone so intelligent continues to ‘pretend’ that Obama is even interested in ‘salvaging’ his, er, ‘legacy’.

He must have known going in the door that he was going to be used as, er, well…toilet paper…and they MUST be making it worth his while because he never attacks those that regularly hang him out to dry.

You’d think after two years he’d have woken up to what the rest of us knew fifteen minutes after the inauguration, that the Republicans would fight him every step of the way.

But Nooooooooooo! Even after having his ass handed to him on November 2nd, the first words out of his mouth are, “I’m ready to listen to any reasonable proposals.”

Like the election caused the Republicans to suddenly morph from being the ‘party of no’ into the big tent party of the one idea!

Sadly, if you have anything to add to that one idea, any hope for bipartisanship goes right out the window.

If you’re disinclined to read Mr. Rich’s excellent article I’ll tell you here what it points out…just how clueless do you have to be to schedule a ‘trade mission’ to ‘out-sourcing central’ right after getting your ass kicked in the mid-terms?

Instead of ‘re-visiting’ NAFTA (like he said when he was campaigning) dickhead is now talking about writing MORE ‘free trade’ agreements…why the fuck does HE think unemployment is at 9.6%? Has he turned into a fucking Republican and decided the unemployment problem is due to people no longer ‘wanting’ to work?

Why do we continue to tolerate this bullshit?

No sooner are they elected than they forget why people voted for them!

Which only serves to strengthen my case to put an end to electing ‘representatives’ who don’t have the backbone to represent themselves, never mind the rest of us!

It’s beyond ridiculous, it’s even beyond annoying, it’s infuriating yet still we fail to do something about this constant source of frustration!

Which brings us full circle to the ‘main problem’ with electing ‘representatives’. It is ‘assumed’ they already know what’s wrong with the nation. It is the bigger assumption, the one where they already know what to do about it that kills us.

We are ‘shut out’ from the national dialog. Even the media doesn’t talk to us (and when they do, they control what is said and why.)

Bizarrely, they do this because they know the public is interested in more than the ‘mundane’ pabulum their editors demand (and the public actively volunteers to have those conversations…but the editors won’t let it pass so it’s better to not go there in the first place.)

Yup, instead of ‘partnering’ with the press we are left to seek alternative sources for a more accurate picture of the world around us.

Is it just me or has anyone else picked up on Mr. William’s ‘cynicism’?

No. 332: October Employment and Unemployment, Dollar Debasement, Election Subscription required November 5th, 2010

• Baloney Payroll-Employment Data: Seasonal Adjustments Become Primary Driver of Jobs Creation?
• October Household-Survey Employment Fell 330,000
• October Unemployment Rates: 9.6% (U.3), 17.0% (U.6), 22.5% (SGS)
• Fed Move to Debase U.S. Dollar Will Generate Higher Inflation But No Recovery
• Election Results Do Not Alter Basic Economic or Inflation Outlooks.

Actually, that was a rhetorical question. These days, if you’re not a cynic, you’re not credible.

I look at SGS’s unemployment figures and it scares me…because even that number fails to reflect the ‘true’ unemployment situation.

As I have stated many times in the past, the ‘true’ unemployment percentage is somewhere in the 50 % range of the ‘total’ workforce (and that’s not counting the ‘underemployed’, which would push it well over 50%!)

Um, our ‘social model’ is badly broken good citizen. What is it going to take before we demand it is changed?

Funny how we keep returning to the subject of conversations we aren’t having.

Do you REALLY care if gay people marry one another or are you more concerned about getting screwed out of your retirement savings?

It should blow you away that NOBODY, either in the media or the government is asking what is being done for the homeless?

Because when the programs to help the homeless dry up, the homeless will looking at YOU…and not necessarily for a handout either.

This is another issue that the media is totally ignoring. There is an ever diminishing amount of tax revenue and an ever-increasing number of people landing in dire straits!

There were not one but three ‘referendum questions’ on the ballot to repeal taxes locally and I didn’t vote for one of them! (Unsurprisingly, only one passed and that’s going to ‘bite us in the ass’ too.)

People aren’t stupid. Repeal taxes and you’ll get socked with higher ‘fees’ (that won’t go away!) Been there, done that.

We aren’t having the ‘right’ conversations…and maybe the ‘blogosphere’ is the answer to that problem.

Sadly, I have my doubts.

There are too few Internet users seeking solutions.

That said I am thankful for the attention you give me, gentle reader.

That and being amazingly ‘troll free’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Yawn...

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we encounter MSM political maneuvering intended to distract us from what has become the ‘norm’. After more than a solid year of ‘inaction’, the president has decided to start exercising some of that power Mr. Bush left for him. (Which is to point out that the newly elected president has done absolutely nothing to ‘roll back’ the power grabs made by his predecessor, adding them to the pile being slowly built up by many past administrations.)

Hard to say what is more disturbing, this sudden flurry of activity or the fact that the Executive office once again finds itself beleaguered and besieged by a Congress so influenced by lobbyists that it can’t break free from the constant state of deadlock?

The ‘critics’ of Democracy point to precisely this type of ‘procedural wrangling’ as the ‘downside’ of democratic forms of government. They say these ‘deadlocks’ hinder swift action when the nation needs to be ‘nimble’…although the only time governance requires ‘agility’ is when the interests of the public are being undermined.

Worse, those who freely ‘criticize’ democracy usually do so while wrapping themselves in the banner of liberty…while advocating either monarchy or fascism in democracy’s place!

I am no fan of ‘representative’ democracy because ‘proxies’ can (and have) been bought. If I can’t take the time to educate myself and decide directly on the issues I certainly don’t want to be forced to live with the decisions of someone who sold my vote to the highest bidder.

But it is a choice YOU don’t get to make. In fact, the system, as it currently exists, bars you from making any decisions save the choice of who will make decisions in your name without ever consulting you!

Yeah baby, that’s what they call ‘freedom’ (although no one in their right mind would call it that!)

So what is the ‘quality of freedom’ when the situation leads to this outcome ?

Obama Bypasses Senate Process, Filling 15 Posts
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 27, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama, making a muscular show of his executive authority just one day after Congress left for spring recess, said Saturday that he would bypass the Senate and install 15 appointees, including a union lawyer whose nomination to the National Labor Relations Board was blocked last monthwith the help of two Democrats. [Well, how could president Obama appoint ‘scum’ like a lawyer for a labor union to ah, um, what post did he appoint that guy to? Which begs a different question good citizen…the question of what happened to the Democratic ‘party apparatus’ that it hands its endorsement to people who OPPOSE union leaders? How the FUCK did those people get into the party? Or, more succinctly, how, er, ‘accurate’ is anyone’s ‘party designation’ if these basic values are, er, ‘for sale’?]

Coming on the heels of Mr. Obama’s big victory on health care legislation, Saturday’s move suggests a newly emboldened president who is unafraid to provoke a confrontation with the minority party. [Most of us would hope this newfound courage would result in some desperately needed criminal prosecutions of people who were actually responsible for destroying the US economy…oh wait, that would mean prosecuting politicians! That ain’t gonna happen…yet.]

Just two days ago, all 41 Senate Republicans sent Mr. Obama a letter urging him not to appoint the union lawyer, Craig Becker, during the recess. Mr. Obama’s action, in defiance of the Republicans, was hailed by union leaders, but it also seemed certain to intensify the partisan rancor that has enveloped Washington. [How much more ‘intense’ could it possibly get? The next step is bloodshed and we’re all very curious to see how that is handled…or not.]

“The United States Senate has the responsibility to approve or disprove of my nominees,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “But if, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.” [Just as President Bush appointed UN hater John Bolton as US envoy to the United Nations during a congressional ‘recess’. For some bizarre reason the Bush White House didn’t share the Obama administration’s ‘sense of urgency’ when it came to staffing government offices.]

It was the first time the president has used his constitutional authority to fill vacant federal positions by making recess appointments, thus avoiding the requirement for the advice and consent of the Senate. Mr. Obama, who currently has 217 nominees pending and 77 awaiting action on the Senate floor, said Republicans had given him little choice.

“At a time of economic emergency, two top appointees to the Department of Treasury have been held up for nearly six months,” Mr. Obama said. “I simply cannot allow partisan politics to stand in the way of the basic functioning of government.” [You can’t fault the president, he’s given ‘the party of no’ plenty of slack…What excuse do the Republican’s have for not acting upon 217 appointments? Can you imagine their outrage (and the media’s) if the shoe were on the other foot?]

With lawmakers back in their home states and Mr. Obama spending a quiet family weekend at Camp David, the White House issued the statement announcing the president’s intent to appoint Mr. Becker, and 14 others, mostly to fill positions on his economic and homeland security teams. [Um, you’d think the ‘specific’ positions filled would be of great interest to the public but apparently the press doesn’t think so…]

The White House said the 15 nominees had been waiting, on average, seven months to be confirmed. They are expected to begin work over the next week; the president’s action will enable them to serve without Senate confirmation until the chamber adjourns at the end of 2011.[So why didn’t bobo just seat all 217 positions? In for a penny, in for a pound!]

Republicans, who have cast Mr. Becker as a pro-labor radical, issued a flurry of angry statements. [now there’s a shock, isn’t it?] They wasted little time in reminding reporters that when George W. Bush was president, then-Senator Obama had railed against the recess appointment of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, saying that Mr. Bolton would be “damaged goods” and lacked credibility without Senate confirmation. [Honestly good citizen, is there anyone out there (who isn’t a rabid Republican) that doesn’t have serious reservations about Mr. Bolton’s, er, mental stability?]

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called the president’s move “yet another episode of choosing a partisan path despite bipartisan opposition.” [Um, if that doesn’t redefine the term ‘chutzpah’ I don’t know what does! (Given the ‘bipartisan-ship’ displayed by the Republicans to date!)]

Another Republican, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, said in an interview that he could understand Mr. Obama’s frustration; he said that most of the other nominees were noncontroversial and that his concern was centered primarily on Mr. Becker. “He has a precedent,” Mr. Coburn said of the president, “Others have done it, so I’m not critical of him doing it. But I am critical of the Becker appointment because he doesn’t have the votes.” [Examine that statement and contrast it with the rest of the facts as they are laid out here…217 appointees pending and there’s nothing ‘controversial’ about them EXCEPT that the Republicans in congress have the power to block their appointments…because they can. Now how many of you will have your heads explode when the MSM announces a major Republican victory this coming November? Worse, you had best start preparing yourself mentally for the defacto ‘election by the media’ of local Republican candidates, much like what happened here with Scott Brown.]

Recess appointments are a common tool for presidents frustrated by the confirmation process. Mr. Obama’s action puts him on a par with Mr. Bush, who had made 15 recess appointments by this point in his presidency. Mr. Bush had an especially intense tussle with Democrats over judicial appointees; during the course of his two terms in office, he made a total of 171 recess appointments, although 72 were to part-time positions, according to the Congressional Research Service. President Clinton made 139 recess appointments. [So, why is this suddenly ‘more common than anyone realized’ tool being touted as the unexpected surge in presidential authority? More importantly it points directly to the increasing non-functionality of the government…something the people are NOT being asked to address. Well, should WE fix this good citizen or should we just let the same people who allowed things to get to this point to handle it? Do you smell gasoline? I smell it too!]

With the exception of Mr. Becker, the White House said most of the 15 nominees being installed by Mr. Obama have bipartisan support. Indeed, in a sign that Mr. Obama did not want to go too far in inflaming partisan passions, he resisted using his executive powers to install one of his most contentious candidates, Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor, to lead the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. Ms. Johnsen has drawn the ire of Republicans for her work as a lawyer for NARAL Pro-Choice America as well as her outspoken opposition to the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. [Do the Republican’s fear the indictments they so richly deserve? How ‘brave’ does the president look now?]

Saturday’s announcement is certain to cheer some of Mr. Obama’s strongest supporters, who have been arguing that the president should take on Republicans in a more forceful way. Gay rights advocates were elated to see Chai R. Feldblum, a Georgetown University Law professor who advocates on gay issues, claim a spot on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a result of Mr. Obama’s action. [Okay…so they gave us one specific appointment along with one official denial…which tells us what?]

But perhaps no group will be as heartened as union leaders.

For months they had complained that Mr. Obama was too timid in responding to Republican opposition to Mr. Becker, a former associate general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union. Labor leaders were also unhappy that the labor relations board has been largely paralyzed since January 2008 because only two of its five seats have been filled since then. Mr. Obama also appointed Mark Pearce, a New York labor lawyer, on Saturday to fill a fourth seat on the board. [Is this where the ‘contentious’ appoint was made? The ‘roll over and play dead’ labor board?]

Last month, the Democrats fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a threatened Republican filibuster of a vote for Mr. Becker. Two Democrats, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, joined Republicans in the 52-to-33 vote. [That’s a whole bunch of ‘abstains’ there! If you ask me this whole fiasco is foolishness in the extreme, we shouldn’t ‘elect’ anyone to public office. It’s high time we put the laws beyond the reach of those who would manipulate them for their personal advantage!]

In their letter to the president, Republicans wrote that Mr. Becker, a former law professor at U.C.L.A. and the University of Chicago, “could not be viewed as impartial, unbiased or objective” in labor board cases. A law review article he wrote, saying that employers should not have a voice in unionization elections, angered many businesses and Republicans. But in Congressional testimony, Mr. Becker said that those were his personal views and as a labor board member, he would follow the letter of the law.

Two other candidates who are getting recess appointments, Jeffrey Goldstein, the nominee for a high-level job at the Department of Treasury as under secretary for domestic finance, and Alan D. Bersin, the nominee for commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security, were still being vetted by the Senate Finance Committee.[?] Mr. Obama’s decision to bypass the vetting drew criticism Saturday from the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa. [Mr. ‘Obstruction’ himself!]

Mr. Grassley said Mr. Goldstein was still answering the panel’s questions about his work for a private equity firm, and Mr. Bersin was answering questions about “what appeared to be conflicting information about his documentation and disclosure” of household employees — questions that, the senator said, were “directly relevant” to the positions they will hold.

Um, don’t tell me, we have yet another political appointee who A.) hasn’t paid taxes in decades and B.) hired an illegal alien (totally unaware, of course!)

Oh and in keeping with the great spirit of ‘bipartisanship’ they’re both fucking Republicans! [Don’t know that but just saying, ya know?]

Um, the term ‘hell in a bucket’ comes to mind when pondering the rapid descent into the abyss this nation is taking, thanks to the ‘over-abundance’ of predators we failed to exterminate.

Which leads us to the central question good citizen, just how responsible ARE WE, the average Joe and Jane who don’t and have never had a voice in ‘the process’?

Is this ‘our fault’, could we have asserted our will and nipped this crisis in the bud?

For all of the ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda,’ Monday morning quarterbacking going on, we can say with a high degree of confidence that there isn’t (nor was there ever) a friggin thing we could have (legally) done to alter the course of the nation.

The tools aren’t there (and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it!)

Yup, good citizen, we have no ‘legal avenue’ open to us capable of altering the trajectory of our society…which has been altered by the self-interested, for their own benefit, without our input (save the rubber stamp we handed to our ‘bought and paid for’ elected representatives.)

If you’re genuinely interested in Liberty and freedom, we have to resort to some ‘less than legal’ activities. I belabor the obvious when I point out that WE are unlikely to prevail in THEIR courts.

Tends to be an ‘insurmountable obstacle’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Devil is in the Details

Greetings good citizen,

It is not uncommon for ‘like-minded’ writers to ‘echo’ each others point of view, which is to say tonight’s offering could be considered an ‘echo’ of last night’s post.

While last night dealt with the ‘breadth’ of the global crisis by looking at the slow motion/long term destruction of global civilization, tonight’s piece looks at a specific aspect of the crisis that has yet to be corrected, much less concluded.

As some of you may have noticed, I have taken to making my ‘arguments’ here in the intro rather than saving them for the end. It keeps the articles themselves cleaner and, mercifully, ends these missives faster than would otherwise be the case.

So…I’d once again caution you that many of the ‘dire predictions’ made by other writers should be tempered by the fact that ‘push’ most often is followed by ‘shove’ and it is all downhill from there. Meaning predictions that we’ll be saddled for decades with unmanageable debt should be tempered with the knowledge that this debt will ‘disappear’ once the money is no good.

Understand that money, along with the debts created by money, are entirely ‘conceptual’.

Not to put too fine a point on it but they don’t expect you to pay, they expect you to die!

Just a thought to keep in the back of our mind as you struggle to make sense of Ilargi’s main point.

March 3 2010: Swaps and Robbers

Ilargi: First off, apologies for the publishing hiatus, dear ones. Getting flooded and swamped out will do that to you. I never before spent time in an officially declared catastrophe zone (one notch over emergency, if I’m correctly informed} but I did so over the past few days in French Bretagne, or Brittany for those English readers who are spelling-challenged (there seem to be many of them around here). I’m on a tour, if you hadn’t noticed yet, of TAE readers who had invited me over the past two years. Some, if not all, of them now live to regret their promises.

But so anyway, down to business: swaps. Over the past few days, a number of opinions on them appeared. None too positive, mind you. But what are they worth, both the opinions and the swaps themselves? Let’s look at the short and curly wild boar sort of approach, why don’t we? Since in the end, no matter how complex instruments may be, their fall-out will always be as simple as it is dirty, and it will be those who don’t know CDS from DVD’s who are most affected, not the "brilliant" minds who created the stuff in the first place.

And, to add another chapter to the peak oil versus finance crisis parable, maybe understanding the way CDS have perverted our economies will make people see why peak oil has and [typo?] had nothing to do with our present economic downfall. Not that I hold out much hope, mind you; I sometimes think I’m talking to a crowd comparable best to the Red State parochial faithful, where in the end and down the line G-d does it all. [Consider yourself duly ‘slapped’]

However, I still think that once you start to comprehend what the derivatives markets, and I’m singling out CDS for the purpose, have unleashed into our daily lives, aided and abetted by our very own governments and representatives (think about that one last time!), who find much easier "value" in any sort of program that makes them look better today instead of tomorrow, you can leave that whole peak oil notion behind and focus on Wall Street. [Um, logically, CDS and the failure to regulate them contains zero ‘political capital’ beyond the ‘gratitude’ of Wall Street, which manifests itself in ‘campaign contributions’.]

Unless, of course you think Wall Street bases all of its decisions on peak oil. It doesn't. It’s the fact, instead, that it’s become one giant casino that is responsible for foreclosures, lay-offs, bankruptcies and the even graver consequences we have yet to witness. Our so-called leaders society has gambled itself away, literally, and that is so hard to understand I can't blame anyone for not catching on within the first five minutes. Perhaps once speculators force entire countries to their knees, it will become clearer.

Credit Default Swaps, as they are and stand, have the potential to bring down entire civilizations, and they will too, just to prove their point (and mine). It’s unbelievable to the innocent eye that after the collapse of AIG, the CDS market wasn't ostracized and burned at the stake. Unbelievable, that is, until you realize who's really in power in our societies. If you allow bets, wagers, in your society whose total monetary value adds up to many times the entire world’s GDP, you assure two certain outcomes: First, that these bets will bring down your society at some point and in some way, and: Second, that the people in charge of the bets will take over power until the house comes crashing down. What power does Washington have, with annual US GDP at $14 trillion, while JPMorgan’s derivatives desk has 6 times as much outstanding? When the total derivatives market has numbers like $1 quadrillion attached to it? And then we, the people, hail the winning bets, and bail the losing ones? There’s no way we can win this one. [Nor will it ‘end’ this way, like I say above, you aren’t meant to pay, you are meant to die! They just can be that ‘open’ about their motives…]

It’s like we’re all in the hands of the acid hippie who climbs up to the rooftop convinced she can fly. Feeling good, feeling great and then ..... well, not so much.

Yes, banks can bring down societies, simply because they can control them. And that’s what we’ve let them do. [It’s what our fucktard ‘elected representatives’ have failed to do!] And we’ve let them make us think we were far richer than we are, which got them into making us spend much more than we ever had. All this has perverted our economies, and our lives, to a far greater extent than we presently realize. But the bill is coming due, and you're not going to like it. [This is an extremely inaccurate picture of how it actually went down…although it is an honest interpretation of the ‘official’ media version…]

Here are three views of credit default swaps, by Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times, Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times, and Ann Pettifor at the New Economics Foundation, from which I extracted bullet points. I hope they will give you a better understanding of what’s involved, beyond what I personally have to say. [The ‘bullet point presentations’ are very good, you should ‘click through’ and give them peek.]

There’s going to be lot more to talk about on this topic going forward. A good friend of mine suggested that CDS were created for the specific purpose of avoiding regulatory reserve requirements, both for financial institutions and for countries (Greece!). That’s certainly an interesting point, which I’ll get back to.

Basically, the bullet point presentations leave you wondering just how corrupt the political system is. (Since it is a personal ‘pet peeve’, I endeavor not to ‘blame society’ for the acts of a few reckless individuals…this is why I avoid phrases like ‘our’ political system, it is no more ‘ours’ than it is the Martians!)

Speaking of ‘political systems’ I stumbled across this succinct epilogue to today’s post over at ‘cynical tendency’…

We do not simply need a new government, we need a new constitution, a new electoral system, effective means of exercising choice, reliable access to sound information, breaking up the London Cronygarchies and the will not to change Hardy for Laurel but to radically reorder our chances to control our own futures.

It is observations such as the ones made here by these two writers that make you wonder why we aren’t deep in earnest discussion regarding the ‘disposal’ of the current regime and what to replace it with.

While it is not ‘Ideal’, I suspect we’ll have to tackle these two related problems…individually. First the overthrow and then the replacement. The trick will be keeping the new system ‘clean’.

This is why I designed ‘A Simple Plan’ to be self-reinforcing, it needs all of its parts to operate properly.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Vortex...

Greetings good citizen,

While I gave my self the night off last night, I couldn’t pass up this latest Sign of the times story from today’s NY Times.

I’ve never seen the likes of a story such as this one and it’s not difficult to imagine it happening before on a ‘here and there’ basis, like whole schools systems ceasing operations during the Great Depression.

If things got that bad back then it means this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered the topic of tonight’s offering…

Indigent Burials Are on the Rise

By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: October 10, 2009

Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, with states, counties and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot. [Consider if you will what kind of reflection this mirror provides us with regarding the sorry state of today’s society? How low have we sunk when the poor cannot afford to bury their dead?]

The increase comes as governments short on cash are cutting other social service programs, with some municipalities dipping into emergency and reserve funds to help cover the costs of burials or cremations.

Oregon, for example, has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of unclaimed bodies over the past few years, the majority left by families who say they cannot afford services. “There are more people in our cooler for a longer period of time,” said Dr. Karen Gunson, the state’s medical examiner. “It’s not that we’re not finding families, but that the families are having a harder time coming up with funds to cover burial or cremation costs.” [Part of me wonders if the problem isn’t being made worse by the overall ‘unaffordability’ of life in general. The cost to insure the average individual against all the ‘perils’ life throws at us has squeezed basic income so hard that most people no longer buy either life or health insurance…it has become a luxury they can’t afford. Now with ‘mandated’ health insurance, fewer will have the extra funds to purchase even a rudimentary life insurance policy. Is the ‘solution’ to mandate that protection as well? What are people to eat if they must spend all of their income for ‘mandated minimums’ of health care that provides no service and life insurance that isn’t enough to bury you with?]

About a dozen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, including Illinois, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the state programs provide disposition services to people on Medicaid, a cost that has grown along with Medicaid rolls.

Financing in Oregon comes from fees paid to register the deaths with the state. The state legislature in June voted to raise the filing fee for death certificates to $20 from $7, to help offset the increased costs of state cremations, which cost $450.

“I’ve been here for 24 years, and I can’t remember something like this happening before,” Dr. Gunson said.

Already in 2009, Wisconsin has paid for 15 percent more cremations than it did last year, as the number of Medicaid recipients grew by more than 95,000 people since the end of January, said Stephanie Smiley, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn tried to end the state’s indigent burial program this year, shifting the financing to counties and funeral homes, but the state eventually found $12 million to continue the program when funeral directors balked. [Bizarrely, this is yet another example of privatized profits and publicized losses…before anybody objects, let’s ask why people don’t have either cash savings or some minimal form of life insurance? Could it be because employers don’t pay these people enough (or worse, they can’t provide these people with jobs at all?) In most cases you can’t pay for insurance and eat too!]

The majority of burials and cremations, however, are handled on the city, county, town or township level, an added economic stress as many places face down wide budget gaps.

Boone County, Mo., hit its $3,000 burial budget cap last month, and took $1,500 out of a reserve fund to cover the rest of the year. While the sum is relatively low, it comes as the county is facing a $2 million budget shortfall, tax collections are down 5 percent and the number of residents needing help is expected to grow.

“We’ve had a significant increase in unemployment, wages are dropping, industrial manufacturing jobs go away and companies scaled back or even closed their doors,” said Skip Elkin, the county commissioner. “But we feel an obligation to help families who don’t have any assets.” [Um, it is downright ‘neighborly’ of the county to step up to the plate like this but it ignores who is causing this problem; and only a conservative will point at the victims from the three quarters of the way closed window in the back of their limousines. How come their ass is being carted around like royalty when the people who made them wealthy can’t afford to give their dead a decent funeral? Now whose fault is it? It’s not like the money wasn’t there all along now was it?]

The medical examiner of Wayne County, Mich., Dr. Carl Schmidt, bought a refrigerated truck after the morgue ran out of space. The truck, which holds 35 bodies, is currently full, Dr. Schmidt said. “We’ll buy another truck if we have to,” he said. [One would think leasing such a short term solution would be more practical or simply putting them in the ground…ashes don’t need to be refrigerated and if you’re going to bury the body anyway…why fool around and add unnecessary expense?]

Many places are turning to cremation, which averages a third to half the price of a burial. However, they will accommodate families’ requests for burial.

Clyde Gibbs, the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the office typically averaged 25 to 30 unclaimed bodies each year. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year there were at least 60, Dr. Gibbs said. The office cremates about three-quarters of the remains, and scatters the ashes at sea every few years. [Are we to guess this is done out of the goodness of someone’s heart…which is why the ashes are left to accumulate for a period of years? Suppose you wished to reclaim the remains of your loved one…would the remains be ‘held hostage’ until you paid the fee? This is pretty ticklish stuff we’re dancing with here…]

In Tennessee, medical examiner and coroners’ offices donate unclaimed remains to the Forensic Anthropological Research Center, known as the “Body Farm,” where students study decomposition at the University of Tennessee. The facility had to briefly halt donations because it had received so many this year, said its spokesman, Jay Mayfield. [Well, imagine that, so many ‘donated’ bodies they had to halt donations! Again, what do you suppose the ‘root cause’ of such a bizarre epidemic is due to, poverty or excessive greed?]

The increase in indigent burials and cremations is also taking a toll on funeral homes, which are losing money as more people choose cremation over burial. In 2003, 29.5 percent of remains were cremated; by 2008 the number had grown to 36 percent, according to the Cremation Association of North America, and it is expected to soar to 46 percent by 2015, according to the association’s projection of current trends. [Is this sudden ‘shift’ towards cremation evidence of a new frugality, born of austerity brought on by tight fisted employers…or are we seeing a shift towards practicality where land isn’t ‘wasted’ just to provide a parking space for a corpse…]

Don Catchen, owner of Don Catchen & Son Funeral Homes in Elsmere, Ky., who handles cremations of the poor in Kenton County, said the $831 county reimbursement for cremations was “just enough to cover the cost of what I do — I donate my time.”

In Florida, where counties switched to cremation a few years ago to save on costs, Prudencio Vallejo, general manager of the Unclaimed Bodies Unit of the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office, said cremations were $425, compared with $1,500 for a burial. They have risen about 10 percent this year, Mr. Vallejo said.

“Most people, the first thing that they say is ‘We wouldn’t be coming to you if we could afford to do it ourselves,’ ” he said.

Broward County, Fla., paid for the cremation of Renata Richardson’s daughter, Jazmyn Rose, who was born stillborn on Sept. 25, 2008. Ms. Richardson, 26, lost her job at an advertising agency in July and could not afford to pay.

The county spent about $1,000 on a cremation and pink urn, engraved with the baby’s birth and death date, and a Bible passage. It now sits in the bassinette where she was to sleep.

“I was strapped for cash, I was in mourning, and I didn’t know what they were going to do with her,” Ms. Richardson, of Davie, Fla., said. “I was honored that they went that far to help me.”

Uh, this is one bizarre little tidbit here good citizen, makes you wonder if this is another one of those ‘green shoots’ we keep hearing about. Which is to say the local governments are stepping up to the plate and paying to have the remains disposed of rather than just letting them, er, stack up until ‘somebody’ coughs up the money to take care of the situation.

No irony should be lost on the fact of just who is footing the tab for these services, it’s you, the taxpayer.

Um, make no mistake about it good citizen, the article practically screams that the government is doing everything it can with the limited resources it has to work with.

I’m sure you noticed that nowhere in this article was the ‘source’ of this backlog of people unable to pay for the final arrangements of their loved ones even mentioned. It was left to appear that this um, burden, being ‘unfairly placed’ on the state is the fault of the people who are too destitute (and by extension too irresponsible) to ‘plan ahead’ for this, er, inevitable outcome.

Okay, that’s sad enough, but to have entire families incapable of burying a loved one? Um, are the destitute a much larger segment of the population than we’ve been lead to believe?

Short answer…yes.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I think this article epitomizes the savagery our society has sunk too.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Knees or feet?

Greetings good citizen,

It’s nice having extra ‘downtime’ so I can expand the amount of material I comb through for your reading pleasure. Naturally, simply cutting and pasting someone else’s work in this space doesn’t do you any good, you could just as easily find these pieces for yourself.

My job is to add to the perspective of the original writer, make the piece more interesting.

Tonight’s offering is sure to set some folks teeth on edge without reading further than the title.

Where do you suppose I stand on this issue? Do you care or is it more important to know where you stand? Are you a ‘weak, fearful thing?’

[Hat tip: The Automatic Earth]

Americans have become weak and fearful things

Joe,

Today, a friend forwarded to me a news article with this headline: "Fines proposed for going without health insurance." Here are some things I don't get:

1) If folks can't afford to reroof the Old Manse or buy groceries or put retreads on the Jimmy, how (and why) are they going to get insurance, and

2) If they can't afford insurance, how are they going to afford the alleged fine, and

3) Who is the Insurance Police, who's going to rat me out, and

4) Why did The Bastards wait until the whole country is unemployed to pull this shit, and

5) Who elected these boobs -- wait, I have a long-standing soft spot for boobs; make that "idiots" -- anyway, and supposedly to act in our interests? Not me.

My elected representatives so far stand mute on these salient and vexing points.

I tell ya, I'm glad I'm old and won't have to watch much more of this nonsense go by. Although, my Ma's 85 and going strong, still tearing up trees and throwing rocks, I seriously don't think I can take it. I'll blow the beans out of my pressure cooker one of these days.

And you? Well?

Jim

------

Jim,

It's like this ole buddy. Mandatory insurance can be made to sound worse than it is. Especially given that the word mandatory scares the hell out of Americans, even though we already have mandatory drivers license and drivers insurance, income tax, building permits, school attendance, vehicle registration, home insurance for mortgages, personal identification, security scanning at airports, income tax filing, dog licensing, sales taxes, etc. (Looking at this short partial list, I can hear the libertarians locking and loading as we speak.)

For example, Spain, which is now considered to have the best overall health system in the world, has mandatory health insurance. So do many other countries, though they do not think of it in those terms, and though they are often technically purchasing it from the government at very low costs, which they perceive (and rightfully so) as a tax. This helps offset the government cost of insuring retired, poor, unemployed and others who cannot afford insurance. The government covers these people anyway, but must recover the cost. (What a novel idea for running a government! Knowing how you are going to pay for things.)

A U.S. "public option" (we are not even allowed to utter the term socialized healthcare, or even universal healthcare, because anything universal, which is to say fair to all, is a goddamned commie plot -- the cold war lives on in our capitalist state indoctrination) could cover everyone unable to afford insurance by providing it at extremely low cost. So low that even people below the poverty level, and thus qualify for supplemental income tax rebates, would have insurance. It would simply be deducted from their $500 tax rebates or whatever. So they would never even see it being paid for.

The insurance companies love the mandatory part, which would deliver millions of new customers into their hands and let them set the price. But they hate any so-called public option, which would give those poor customers an alternative. So they've done a pretty good job of torpedoing the public option. Good enough to scare Obama off it for a while, even though any such public measure of his would always have been a half measure and still depended upon the insurance corporations to exist. Now it's back, but who knows what it looks like now, or will look like when the fight is over.

And insurance companies especially fear the possibility of a national health card, which inevitably comes with any sort of government sponsored public healthcare. It's just too damned efficient. For instance, in France, doctors have no files, just a card reader and an Internet connection that links to the patient's permanent files and scan images. But it also tracks costs, fees and billings. And in France (or Germany, I forget) if the doctor is not paid within 72 hours, the insurance company is fined. Health insurance companies in Germany are totally non-profit, but sell other insurance -- auto and home -- for profit. They see providing efficient health coverage as a good leader item and a chance to show off their performance to customers. A public option is the first step toward such a system, or something similar. But I suspect we will never see a national health card. These thugs in America would never stand for it. They like to count their money unseen.

Elected officials, the strong liberal ones at least, are mute on this because to say anything resembling the above is political death. The brownshirts who worked them over at town hall meetings at the behest of the healthcare industry would not be so easy on them next time, given what's at stake for the capitalist overclass. Which is to say the healthcare industry's corporate criminal cartel.

And besides, they own the joint. Our government is now a corporate criminal enterprise extorting the wealth productivity of the people. The people are so used to it and so conditioned they no longer know how to ask questions or extrapolate outcomes. They just react in fear of any new public proposal that would change the status quo. [Or so it would seem…]

As for the mandatory part and the fines, that is a red herring if ever there was one. People who have a hard time paying for healthcare (and who doesn't?) get scared out of their britches by such threats. That's why the Republicans put it in there. To scare people away. First you take a good and reasonable thing like universal healthcare, and turn it into a scary authoritarian mandatory thing with grave punishments. Put some stink all over it, something obvious and odious. Make it a burden AND a threat.

That is one of the poison pills for the bill. There will be others to come. After the death panel thing, and the way the people swallowed it, we already know the outcome. Hell, one of the anti-healthcare lies being circulated around here right now is that Obama wants to have mandatory abortions of anyone born with low IQ or is otherwise substandard. Which is OK with me because it would spell the end of the Republican Party.

But whatever they do, there will be no rounding up and fining of the underemployed, unemployed or broke. That's 50 million people these days. Any effort would be mostly a paperwork exercise, at this point. And besides, they do not want your body. They want your money. Thug's work the neighborhoods where the money is, not where it ain't. We live in an extortion based criminal enterprise masquerading as a government, so one shudders to think of the paperwork liens that could be placed on homes, etc. They are paperwork too, but have the strength of law behind them. The commissariat judges who provide the legal muscle for the cartels.

All of which is moot as long as medical and pharma costs in this country are astronomical and still rising, making doctors, executives and major shareholders in the crime syndicate richer than ever. And as long as drone missiles, 400 military bases and two ongoing wars keep draining an already looted public treasury that is forced to run international indebtedness anyway.

Whenever we see something like the mandatory health insurance covered in the media, it is there for effect, not to inform us. It is there to cloud the issue and scare the piss out of people toward the ends of the corporate state. To make them fearfully ask the wrong questions and miss the real issue.

The real question is this: When are we going to rise up against our government and the criminal cartel that owns it?

And with each passing day I am more convinced that the answer is -- never. That takes true inner convictions and ideals, not to mention courage. The real thing, not political rhetoric and ideology. Convictions are measured by actions. And true convictions are arrived at through the clear-eyed self-examination and deep questioning and personal sacrifice of individuals. And defining one's self as something necessarily other than the state. We failed to do so too long ago. We are now state property. A mass of people rallying and surging back and forth in response to state manufactured pseudo events and faux choices. If I still loved this country I would weep for it. But I've watched us too willingly acquiesce to this fate for too long. I don't think we have the reservoir of cultural, moral, spiritual and political strength to turn things around. Or even conceive of what can be, other than what we've seen. Instead, we are issued empty terms as convictions, such as democracy and diversity.

Surely though, the noisy pseudo drama of pseudo choices will go on in a pseudo democracy. If I were a younger man, it might possibly be instructive, in a chilling way. But a guy gets tired of learning the same old lesson year after year, decade after decade. The lesson being that Americans have become weak and fearful things. Ignorant of any sort of real self agency in shaping their country's government.They embrace the notion of "working within the system." Then too, the consequences for doing otherwise are dire. Our corpo-government crime syndicate makes that very clear. In a mob neighborhood, everyone is afraid.

In closing let me say, by all means go ahead and blow the beans out of your pressure cooker. I did. And I found that it left me with a clearer head (or maybe a less cluttered delusion of my own, who is to say? But either way, now the decor inside the old cranium allows me to sleep better at nights). People will call you nuts, say you've gone over the brink. But I find that there is plenty of fine company down here at the bottom of the cliff.

In art and labor,

Joe

PS: I hear on the BBC this morning that the US is still number two (behind Switzerland) in economic output. The difference between the quality and security of our lives and that of the Swiss can be seen as a measure of what is siphoned off by the cartel. Evidently there is quite a bit of wealth being produced by the people left to steal, leaving public amenities and the people to run on pure debt. Thus, don't expect our criminal overlords to let up on us any time soon.

So what do you think good citizen? Are American’s ‘washed up’? Are we so weak and fearful that we all forgot who runs this country…or who defends it? [Our kids! Sadly, commanded by their kids.]

There are all kinds of ‘considerations’ that factor into the larger equation but in the end we return to the same old place that those who battle tyranny and oppression always end up, facing the same old question: is it better to live on your knees or die on your feet?

Sadly, if you live on your knees, you’re already dead.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Autopsy

Greetings good citizen,

If unemployment is a meaningless ‘lagging’ indicator then why did the markets surge more than a hundred points yesterday on ‘better than expected’ jobs data?

In what can only be called bizarre beyond belief, the ‘monthly’ unemployment data isn’t drawn from number of weekly claims, where the weekly number comes from…the monthly data comes from the ‘phone survey’.

Thank you, Paul Krugman, for pointing that small, but significant, distinction out…unfortunately, my head is still threatening to explode. What fucking idiot thought THAT was a ‘good idea’? Don’t tell me because the answer is obvious, if it wasn’t a politician, it was a ‘pollster’.

Why does this idea suck? Because you have all the data you need from the new claim filings, the ‘phone poll’ can be gamed, both ends against the middle, depending on desired outcome. If you’re trying to sell a stimulus program, you poll Michigan, which has the highest unemployment rate in the nation…if you need to convince the public that your policies are working, you ‘poll’ either Dakota, which both enjoy some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.

It would also tend to provide a very ‘skewed’ number like the one we got this time around.

275,000 indeed, after four straight weeks of filings in the 550,000 range!

Ironically, the ‘real’ unemployment number is roughly the same as the data provided by the phone survey…if you add an extra zero to the end. We’ve been loosing roughly 2 million (plus) jobs a month for the past six months, numbers that were roughly equal to the losses in the last 3 months of the Bush Administration.

Perversely, this would jive very closely with the ‘real’ number of foreclosures over the past year, roughly 15 million.

But I digress. This topic is like having hot coals dumped on my head every time it comes up. I’m sure the ranting and raving is getting tedious and saying ‘I can’t help myself’ has become a pretty feeble excuse.

Onwards to tonight’s offering with a foreword provided by the source that pointed me to this piece, Some Assembly Required.

CKM writes:

Autopsy: Where did it all go wrong? No, not the credit spree. Not even the hallucinatory housing bubble. The first foot wrong was pretending that manufacturing was something that underpaid teens in sweatshops in foreign countries could do, while we became a knowledge and service economy. Wealth comes from making things. Real things. Trade means trading the things you make for things someone else made. If you don't have things you made, then you make debts. We got real good at that. Shipping our jobs and our factories to our trading partners was not globalization, it was stupid.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for Our Future as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

When things are going wrong it is often good practice to go back and review the basics, and start again. In baseball you go back to batting and fielding practice. To master a musical instrument you practice your scales every day.

Things have gone wrong with our economy. So let's go back to some basics and see if we can figure out where we went wrong. Let's start with the most basic of basics in an economy: wealth comes from making things that you can trade with others.

It is a simple concept worth repeating: if you make something you can trade it for things other people make. As you make things and trade them you build wealth. In an economy making and trading things creates good jobs and brings to the people income and goods they need. [Notice he DOES NOT mention ‘money’ once because money isn’t ‘wealth’, money merely ‘represents’ wealth.]

So obviously manufacturing is the key to a healthy economy. Trade means fairly trading the things you manufacture for things that others manufacture. And it is a simple jump from there to understanding that if you don't make things, you have to borrow to be able to pay for things other people make, or you go without. You can borrow and borrow -- until you can't.

Everything else in the economy flows from the manufacturing. [Including the services that support manufacturing operations…] When it comes down to it you can't have a healthy service sector unless you are manufacturing items to sell and trade because you can't pay for the restaurant bill or insurance or hotel room or lawyer or even the doctor if you don't make something to sell and trade. And mostly you can't keep buying the things made elsewhere. You can only borrow for so long.

But somehow, as a country, we have lost sight of this most basic idea. Instead of maintaining and promoting manufacturing we say it isn't important anymore. [There is a rather ‘insidious’ reason for that which I’ve pointed too thousands of times.] We say that we have instead transitioned to a "post-industrial" service economy and/or a knowledge / information economy. (What does that even mean -- instead of making and trading, we serve and think? And borrow I guess.) [It doesn’t particularly matter ‘what it means’ because, to date, nobody, including us, has succeeded in making a ‘service economy’ work. It’s never been done.]

I read an important post about this yesterday, It's All About Jobs! by Leo Hindery, Jr., Leo W. Gerard and Sen. Don Riegle -- a CEO, a labor leader, and a former Senator. They come to us from these different sectors of society to warn us that giving up our manufacturing has meant giving up our jobs. They wrote,

"Importantly, we need to be just as worried about the fact that our economy has mostly hemorrhaged jobs in the very sector -- manufacturing -- that must grow in order for us to move permanently away from debt-financed consumption as the principal engine of economic growth. And it is the current and now decades-long persistent manufacturing jobs collapse that unites the three of us as friends and as colleagues, despite coming from very different backgrounds."

And how do they feel our country's "transition" away from a manufacturing economy is working out for us?

"Just since this recession began, manufacturing has lost 13% of its workforce; manufacturing industries now represent a meager 11.7% of GDP; people working in manufacturing now account for only 8.7% of the jobs in the country; a quarter of the nation's 282,000 remaining manufacturing companies -- 90,000 in all -- are now deemed severely "at risk"; and we have run an average annual trade deficit in manufactured goods of more than $500 billion over the past five years."

What do they say we need to do about this?

"Congress and the Administration, working together, need to immediately enact a robust industrial policy that puts American workers first and is comparable to the policies of our major trading partners. And then we need to integrate this policy with efforts to be the world's dominant manufacturer of green technologies and components, which offer us such enormous opportunities." [Carts and horses here boys. A quarter of a million strong manufacturing sector isn’t going to support a 150 million strong ‘service sector unless we start compensating manufacturing help like bankers!]

So again back to basics: Trade requires giving and getting. And you can't trade for things without having things to trade. Which means that you have to have manufacturing. The more you have manufacturing, the stronger your economy. Pretty basic, no?

As I said above, it is a basic that if you don't make things to trade you can, for a while, borrow to buy the things that others make. And for some time, since we started this transition to the "post-industrial" economy we all have been borrowing to buy the things we need. Individual, business and government debt started increasing rapidly at the same time as people started believing that we were undergoing such a transition. Our trade deficit has shot up through the roof, and now we collectively now owe a tremendous, massive debt to others. [A debt so massive it has become impossible to pay!]

But guess what? When you have a lot of debt, someone is making a lot of money. In The Quiet Coup, Simon Johnson writes,

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. [A number that will never (legitimately) be seen again.]

Paul Krugman has noted a similar trend,

On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies -- giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

Ethan Porter, reviewing Kevin Phillips' book, Bad Money, drives the point home,

In 1950, manufacturing contributed 29.3 percent to the GDP, and financial services 10.9 percent. By 2003, the totals were almost reversed: manufacturing made a 12.7 percent contribution; financial services, 20.5 percent.

[. . .] All this is a fancy way of saying that we don't make things anymore. We import most of our products from overseas.

So what they are saying is that what we have been doing, namely packing up our factories and sending them to the trading partner countries, isn't "trade" it is something else. (The word "stupid" suggests itself.) And as a result of doing that we have a massive, massive "trade deficit." We buy things but we don't sell enough things because we don't make enough things anymore. And over time this means we get poorer and poorer. We borrow more and more, which drives up profits in the financial sector -- while the borrowing continues. That can only go on so long.

So here is the question that we face: what are we going to do about it? And by we, I mean We, the People. So what's the plan? What is our plan, our strategy, our policy for rebuilding and maintaining our manufacturing base? We obviously have a national financial strategy (a strategy that involves even more borrowing to execute) but none for getting back to the basics of creating wealth by manufacturing things. [Um, bizarrely, this is not ‘up to us’, the ‘owners’ decide where THEY want the work done, regardless of the harm this inflicts upon society as a whole.]

Having a national policy for manufacturing is about as basic as it gets. China does. India does. Japan does. Russia does. France does. Germany does. Et Ceterastan does.

What is America's manufacturing policy? What is our strategy? What is our plan?

The answer to this troubling issue is we don’t have a plan, just as we no longer have usury laws. With a couple of ‘strokes of the pen’ the money grubbing weasels wiped out worker protections in favor of what we now call the ‘global race to the bottom.

Nor is the ‘protection’ of our manufacturing sector up to ‘us’ the average citizen because the legal system in the country is designed to ‘protect’ property rights. Dictating to owners where and how they can conduct business ‘infringes’ on these owners ‘liberties’.

You don’t count, only ‘owners’ do.

It is precisely the government’s ‘mandate’ to protect ownership rights that has cost our society its manufacturing sector. All an owner has to do it complain that they can’t compete and the US State Department will find a third world cesspool for the owner to ‘re-locate to’…at taxpayer expense.

Bizarrely, neither of these practices are illegal. (Even though the State Department has ‘limits’ as to who it will or won’t ‘help’, if you follow what I’m saying.)

The fellow who wrote this piece, Dave Johnson, makes a very valid point, one I have made repeatedly. Sadly, Mr. Johnson seems to have fallen into the trap of believing the common good ‘trumps’ the government’s mandate to protect private property.

This is, admittedly, one hell of an ‘oversight’ on the part of the founders…but the founders were all ‘men of means’ who weren’t much concerned with silly things like the common good.

You’d think somewhere down the line, those we choose to lead us would have smartened up and enacted legislation intended to protect society from the predation caused by the relentless pursuit of profits…but apparently we aren’t there yet.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner