Happy Talk

Greetings good citizen,

As might seem obvious, ‘happy talk’ in not one of my mandates…that said, I don’t go ‘out of my way’ to trash talk our badly mismanaged economy either…

(Well, not too far out of my way.)

…Okay, I trash talk the economy all of the friggin’ time, every chance I get.

Left to your imagination is whether or not I am being ‘too critical’, that, good citizen, is for you to decide.

Although I would be the first to admit that I have my, er, ‘biases’.

Naturally, by now some of you are wondering what set me down this trail this morning and the answer is The NY Times:

Off the Charts
Recovery in U.S., Though Lackluster, Trumps Europe’s
By FLOYD NORRIS

Economic recovery in the United States may be slow, but it is steady, while several European economies are either shrinking or stalling.

Graphic: Measuring Recoveries
Euro Watch: Merkel Sides With E.C.B. on Spain and Italy

Now Mr. Norris is well known in the world of economic commentary as one of the ‘serious people’, a proverbial ‘voice of reason’.

So what does it say when he has to resort to frivolous comparisons to distract you from the train wreck that will surely engulf the entire world?

He knows it’s coming. He’d be a fool to deny it. We can only wonder why he uses this space to go ‘rah, rah, sis-boom-bah!’ rather than to warn you of the inevitable collapse of the Euro-Zone. (Followed closely by the ‘mathematical collapse’ of the rest of the global economy. Understand, good citizen, as long as ‘the greater fool exists’ it will be ‘game on’ no matter how ‘bad’ (ridiculous) things get.)

YOU, the average individual, will literally start giving out ‘dope slaps’ to people who cling to outmoded realities.

(Understandably, you’ll be handing out these dope slaps with your pistol in your other hand…in case chucklehead takes offense.)

You think things are strange now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
But, naturally, I digress…moving on:

Economix Blog
Is Simple Demography Behind Weak Economy?
By DAVID LEONHARDT

How important are demographic trends to the great growth slowdown of the last 12 years?

Throughout the Western world, as life expectancy increased, the number of children the ‘average’ family produced has decreased.

But pointing to the dwindling number of births in advanced nations has no bearing on our current unemployment crisis.

Bonehead is pointing to a drop in demand that is NOT (as is obvious by our rapidly rising population figures) due to a lack of customers but due rather to a lack of PAYING CUSTOMERS thanks to the GLOBAL RACE TO THE BOTTOM!

Which, naturally, arose from the ascendancy of global capitalism.

This should provide ample proof of how ‘toxic’ capitalism is yet the slavers among us still need to be convinced.

Don’t be hoodwinked, good citizen, there is an ample ‘customer base’ out there, the problem is capitalism has no use for them, capitalism has labeled them ‘surplus’!

So what about it good citizen, has capitalism made YOU ‘redundant’?

If you’re anywhere near ‘average’, it has several times already…and every time you’ve had to scramble to find a new way to ‘make yourself useful’ to worthless employer.

Ironically, half of these jokers didn’t even have a viable business model, they created ‘nothing jobs’ in order to mask the wholesale cannibalization of our economy!

A process that continues to this day…

Okay, so we have two well known and respected NY Times economists, neither of whom has felt the need to warn us of the pending collapse of the Euro-Zone and what that means for the rest of the global economy.

Do you think perhaps they will get ‘blindsided’ by the collapse, like the financial crisis snuck up and caught both of them unawares?

Yes good citizen, any ‘old time Yankee’ like me remembers when ‘snuck’ was a word…a word that disappeared when the FUCKING RABID CAPITALISTS AT MICROSOFT ‘farmed out’ the dictionary in word to India!

For all I know ‘snuck’ is a bad word in Hindi…so they ‘erased’ it.

Along with dove, the ‘past tense’ of dive. Maybe ‘Doves’ are sacred?

It is also a damning testament to our weak educational system that apparently NONE of the English Majors out there took MicroSoft to task for cavalierly altering our native tongue.

Or perhaps the blame lies with our badly broken justice system which seems totally incapable of punishing a corporate felon no matter what they do.

Just a few tidbits remain:

A strong Canadian dollar weighs on the auto industry as contract talks start

This, like the Euro, boggles the mind. How the fuck does the currency of a nation with only 27 million people trump the almighty US Dollar…probably the same way the flipping Euro does, fraud!

This is just another example of how capitalism perverts value!

Often to a disturbing degree:

The Kalashnikov factory in Russia is humming thanks to American buyers

Why do you suppose people are snapping up Kalashnikov’s here in the US? Are they fearful the turban wearing people of our society are gonna suicide bomb them when they least expect it?

That’s what the corporate owned media would like you to think…but you’re supposed to leave the killing to ‘Homeland Security’.

Or, more accurately as may be the case, are people arming up because they increasingly sense that our ‘internal security apparatus’ has adopted an ‘us vs. them’ mentality?

Probably being downplayed elsewhere but lately, in this neck of the woods, there has been quite a string of incidents involving men in uniform behaving badly.

The incidents often involve ‘officer brutality’…which once again calls into question the effectiveness of the ‘screening process’ these gun-toting apes are subjected to.

And like rape, for every incident that makes the news there are a hundred you never hear about.

But my, that ‘blue wall’ is effective.

Um, probably just me. I think police serve to protect the interests of the public although it would seem today’s police are selected for their ‘attack dog’ like obedience.

Which is to opine their willingness to attack on command is more desirable than their ability to deal calmly with the public.

I will once again state that I am NOT ‘anti-cop’ but I am definitely anti- the people who run and set policy for our law enforcement services…mostly lawyers and their ‘ilk’.

Lastly:
Amtrak’s Acela train service is dominating travel in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor.

And once again this story needs little explanation from me; the price of fuel combined with the increasing belligerence of Homeland Security makes this story completely ‘self explanitory…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Happiness...

Greetings good citizen,

Everybody knows most of what we consume from the corporate owned media is propaganda…

Which makes what I pump out a variety of ‘anti-propaganda’.

Is anti-propaganda any better than propaganda?

It is, after all, two sides of the same coin.

So it is that we have the ‘loosely closeted’ Libertarians over at Alternet struggling to get their message straight:

If you're on welfare or Medicaid or unemployment insurance or food stamps or some combination, it was obvious years ago that right-wingers hate you. But on Fox and Friends Weekend this morning, Michelle Malkin (and at least one of the hosts) reminded us that right-wingers consider you a contemptible inferior being if you "merely" pull down a paycheck:

... in the interview, Malkin slammed President Obama's supporters. "Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them," she said.

That, to Malkin, is a withering putdown. Ha ha ha! Pathetic loser -- all you've ever done is work for a living!

Perfect evidence of why our entire financial sector is a mis-assembled abomination.

Without the grunts there wouldn’t be any paychecks to sign! If nobody does the damn work, nobody gets paid and they ALL ‘starve!’

So how is it that conservatives justify their ‘short-sightedness’?

Make no mistake about it, it is exactly this variety of short-sightedness that has destroyed the global economy!

And if you don’t think the global economy is FUBAR then economics is totally incomprehensible to you.

And again it is a simple thing, easy to understand. It is when you start projecting false motives to the actor’s actions that you produce the results you see today.

But that’s just the tip of the conservative iceberg. Turns out conservatives are ‘Happier’ than the rest of us!

Finally, there is the related argument that the conservative tendency to rationalize politically or economically unequal social systems — to overlook how the other half is forced to live, either through simple dismissiveness, or affirmation of the fairness of free markets and meritocracies — also confers happiness. In his New York Times op-ed, Brooks dismissed this argument, associated with New York University social psychologist John Jost, but that’s not so easy to do. In a 2008 study in the journal Psychological Science, Jost and Jaime Napier showed that conservatives were happier than liberals in nine countries beyond the United States (including Germany, Spain and Sweden) — and further demonstrated, through statistical analyses, that the rationalization of inequality was a key part of the explanation. “Meritocratic beliefs account for the association between political orientation and subjective well-being to a significant degree,” wrote Napier and Jost.

Naturally what ‘slick’ overlooks here is there is more to life than simply being ‘happy’. And it is NATURAL to worry, we’d all be dead if we didn’t.

There is another part of the conservative rubic that Bobo ignores, how happiness is often the ‘side effect’ of stupidity!

Morons are happy most of the time because they DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER!

If it were up to conservatives all children would be lobotomized at birth making the planet one big ‘happy’ place! Full of mostly dead humans.

So if someone is ‘too happy’ it is a fairly safe bet that they are more than a little ‘simple’.

And don’t get me wrong, simple is fine as long as you have someone competent looking out for you.

Turning to a more serious subject we have this story about how the super rich are ‘covering their tracks here in the land of ‘captive government’.

We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called “dark money” – funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather parties, candidates or conventional political action committees (PACs). These non-profit groups – which Washington insiders often refer to generically as 501(c)s, after the section of the federal tax code regulating them – use the money to pay for allegedly educational “independent” ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors’ identities and is acutely controversial.

As public opinion becomes more focused on the fact that our electoral system has been hijacked by the money interests, the very people the government was established to PROTECT US FROM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Understand, good citizen, if we didn’t NEED to protect ourselves from the predations of the powerful, we wouldn’t NEED a GOVERNMENT AT ALL!

This is why I developed A Simple Plan. It removes the levers of power from the hands of the self–interested.

Oh, back to the beginning and the crack about ‘propaganda’. I watched the 1937 film Captain Courageous last night and it’s just the kind of film Hollywood would produce to show that the wealthy were merely a ‘victims of their own circumstances’.

Hooey!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thieves

Greetings good citizen,

Half hour into today’s trading session and you can’ make heads nor tails out of the Dow. The number says it’s up but the chart looks like it’s dropping like a rock…probably have to wait a while to get a grip on its direction.

Um, I am always disturbed when I encounter the day’s offering on my mail server’s homepage such as stories like this one which jump out at you when you arrive.

Police have added the patrolling of farmland — sometimes on horseback — to their list of daily tasks. Farmers in some areas are teaming up to carry out nighttime patrols on their own. In villages near farming areas, several thousand paramilitary Civil Guards, regional and local police are even setting up checkpoints to sniff out not drugs or drunken drivers but stolen fruit or farming equipment, like copper wire used in irrigation systems. The Civil Guard says sometimes its officers mount "cage operations" — sealing off whole villages to check cars and trucks for, say, pilfered pears.

The stolen goods are mainly for resale: The food ends up in small roving street markets and the metal goes to scrap dealers. Last year alone more than 20,000 thefts were reported at Spanish farms. The Interior Ministry says it has no comparative figures from other years, or for so far in 2012. But authorities and farm groups blame the thefts on Spain's economic crisis and say they are a big enough problem for the patrols, which began last season, to stay in force this year.

Here in Sant Climent, a village of 4,000 just outside Barcelona in the northeastern Catalonia region, the loot this time of year is cherries — dark red, shiny and sweet — dangling like ornaments from stubby trees in orchards rising up the slopes of a river valley. They're everywhere, with people selling them from their front doorsteps and on stands inside bars for €8 a kilo ($4.50 a pound). A drawing of a cherry adorns the mayor's business card.

Again, it’s difficult to tell which is more disturbing, the economic forces behind the rising thefts from farms or the media taking pains to make it clear that the ‘theft’ is NOT for ‘personal consumption’ but for ‘personal enrichment’!

Left to your imagination is why people are stealing shit in the first place?

Do YOU know the answer, good citizen?

Why are people stealing what they would ‘normally’ buy?

Could it be because our commercial model is broken?

Bizarrely, it’s been broken from the outset…but the freakazoid capitalist will never admit that. They prefer to call this failure ‘structural unemployment’, that the system, out of necessity, fucks a certain percentage of the population.

And their explanation of this phenomenon is just as lame, the old, ‘it’s that way because that’s the way it is!’ Or the wheel-out the old standby, ‘full employment is impossible’.

Again, wrong by dint of the missing phrase/word. Full employment is not ‘profitably’ possible.

Hire ‘everyone’ and the profit margin for the owner falls to near zero.

So what happens when that couple of percent ‘structural unemployment becomes/accounts for tens of millions of people?

It is what it is, right?

Nope, there’s no need to fear; the endless sunshine of the spotless mind will save us all!

"We are united in our resolve to promote growth and jobs," the draft says, declaring that the leaders will announce the "coordinated Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan" to achieve those goals, although the draft does not provide details of the plan.

"Strong sustainable and balanced growth remains the top priority of the G20, as it leads to higher job creation and increases the welfare of people across the world," the statement reads. It throws its support specifically behind greater government spending as a response to a worsening global economy, saying that countries with the resources "stand ready" to take fiscal action.

The plan says the Obama administration pledged to prevent sharp tax increases and government spending cuts from kicking in at the end of the year, as scheduled under current law, to avoid sending the U.S. into another recession.

Here’s a curious mental puzzle for you good citizen, how many of you think President Obama WANTS TO BE ‘re-elected’?

Were I standing in his shoes, I’d take the money and run.

Hell, I’d vote for Mitt! Let him fulfill his father’s dream/ambitions.

What do you think the ‘probability’ is of the G-20 nations returning to unbridled growth?

How about slim to nil. They COULD pull it off for a few months but once the heating season returns in earnest that ‘pipe dream’ goes ‘poof’!

That’s what’s driving the whole collapse, we no longer have enough energy to support a growing global population…

So the people whose power relies on the control of our energy supply have decided to extend their reign by ‘right-sizing’ the population.

How fucked up is it that ‘right-sizing’ is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a single billion, give or take a billion…

Killing off the other six billion is an ‘ambitious’ undertaking to put it lightly.

I propose all we need do is, er, ‘eliminate’ the >One percent and re-shuffle the deck so I is more equitable.

Sacrificing all of that labor is terribly wasteful but those in power now have never cared about how wasteful they have been.

They murder freely whenever it is ‘in their interest’ to do so.

And that’s who is ‘yanking your chain’ this very minute, good citizen.

Don’t forget to get out and vote! (They rely on YOU buying the lie!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Circling the Drain...

Greetings good citizen,

I, er, ‘assume’ that most of my readers also keep abreast of other sites that follow the ongoing, er, ‘collapse’ of our civilization.

Not to make anyone nervous (although you should be) but Mr. Panzer of Financial Armageddon Fame (both the book and the website) has been making some really hard hitting points lately

Like today’s offering:

Q: How does it end?

A: At some point confidence is lost, and people don't want to own the (Treasury) paper. I mean why in the world, when the inflation rate has been 2.5 percent for the last 15 years, would you want to own a five-year note today at 80 basis points (0.8 percent)?
If the central banks ever stop buying, or actually begin to reduce their totally bloated, abnormal, freakishly large balance sheets, all of these speculators are going to sell their bonds in a heartbeat.

That's what happened in Greece.

Here's the heart of the matter. The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding. If you had a (former Fed Chairman) Paul Volcker running the Fed today 7/8— utterly fearless and independent and willing to scare the hell out of the market any day of the week — you wouldn't have half, you wouldn't have 95 percent, of the speculative positions today.

He has also been vocal about lying government statistics that provide a highly optimistic picture that doesn’t bear any resemblance to reality…

Which is to point out what you have known all along, you can’t make accurate decisions without reliable information.

The part that should really piss you off is how the government has been ‘covering up’ the growing ‘economic desert’ by manipulating the employment numbers.

The ‘not in the workforce’ numbers are PURE FICTION for two reasons, one is they are way too LOW, there are MORE unemployed than the official figures recognize and the second part is the factor they use to classify the long term unemployed as ‘discouraged’.

Somehow, you are supposed to believe that these people , if they ‘persisted’ would eventually find jobs that don’t exist!

There’s no magic that the number of ‘discouraged workers’ has skyrocketed since they first started keeping track back in the mid 90’s…

Here’s another tidbit from Mr. Panzer’s article:

Q: But the unemployment rate is falling and companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 are making more money than ever.

A: That's very short-term. Look at the data that really counts. The 131.7 million (jobs in November) was first achieved in February 2000. That number has gone nowhere for 12 years.

Another measure is the rate of investment in new plant and equipment. There is no sustained net investment in our economy. The rate of growth since 2000 (in what the Commerce Department calls non-residential fixed investment) has been 0.8 percent — hardly measurable.

(Non-residential fixed investment is the money put into office buildings, factories, software and other equipment.)

We're stalled, stuck.

The size of the workforce has actually been shrinking but they managed to ‘stabilize it around 131 million (to avoid panic…)

Weirdly, since few people are ‘aware’ of how many workers we ‘should have’ [roughly north of 211 million] nobody seems to notice that the size of the workforce has ‘stagnated’ while the population continues to grow in leaps and bounds…(more or less.)

Worse, Mr. Williams of SGS reports:

No. 421: GDP Revision, January PCE Deflator and Durable Goods Orders 
March 1st, 2012

GDP Revision Was Little More than Statistical Noise, Yet 4th-Quarter No Longer Is Comparable with Prior Periods

Income Revised to Show Ongoing Surging Salaries and Wages of “Unknown” Nature

Fed’s Inflation Target (PCE Deflator) Is A Poorly Regurgitated CPI Measure

Durable Goods Orders Fell Net of Plunging Aircraft Orders 

Imagine yourself on a sinking ship THOUSANDS of miles from land and ask yourself, “How long can I ‘tread water’?”

Because despite all of the ‘Happy Talk’ good citizen, this sum bitch is goin’ down!

What will absolutely shock you is how quickly money turns to shit. Yesterday you had something that at least resembled ‘purchasing power’, today you got zip!

Inexplicably, yesterday’s one dollar item is today’s, (er, this morning’s) ten dollar item, it will be this afternoon’s twenty dollar item and it will be out of stock (and priced out of sight) by sundown…

The ridiculous news will be that the ‘out of stock condition’ is a permanent one.

Sadly, skulking off in the night isn’t going to be an option unless you think through quite carefully ahead of time.

Once things start to fall apart it is going to get mighty dangerous faster than you would believe was possible. If you aren’t mentally prepared to kill as necessary, it is unlikely you will survive for long.

The hard choice will be when to kill and when not to kill and you only have a heartbeat to make a choice…while it is cruel (it is also wiser) to ‘err to caution’.

Remember, you only get to ‘choose wrong’ once!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Chumped

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are up this morning in the usual game of ‘hot potato’ the media uses to keep track of the economy.

If you wonder ‘who is buying is this whacko market’ it is most likely YOU.

You are still contributing to your retirement account, aren’t you?

Could it be that only the top 5% is responsible for the erratic action in the stock markets over the past 5 years?

They’re probably the only ones (still) contributing to a retirement plan after everybody else got burned by the fraud that was Enron.

Speaking of fraud, what’s up with this bull shit?

Or more pointedly, what the fuck are these morons smoking?

At stake is about $150 billion, the bulk of which would go to middle-class families and the unemployed. If Congress does not pass the measures, economists say, it would significantly weaken growth from already-damped levels anticipated early in the new year.

“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a slowdown over the course of next year,” Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told reporters last week. “Not only do we have the European crisis spilling over and hurting U.S. trade and confidence,” he said, but the United States economy also faces “homegrown shocks.”

There are two reasons for the renewed pessimism. First, economists say that temporary trends increased growth in the fourth quarter and may not continue into next year. Second, the economy faces significant headwinds in 2012: some from Europe’s long-lingering sovereign debt crisis, and some from domestic cutbacks beyond the control of President Obama, whose campaign would like to point to a brightening economic picture, not a darkening one. Even the Federal Reserve is predicting that the unemployment rate will remain around 8.6 percent by the time voters go to the polls in November.

Hard to say good citizen which ‘variety’ of happy talk I find more offensive, articles like this that admit up front the figures are ‘distorted’ (and therefore useless) or the type that is totally baseless (which is to say ‘an opinion’, at best.)

Just because YOU’RE, er, ‘Happy’ doesn’t mean it will make me happy too!

(This is even less likely if you were ‘paid’ to share your ‘happy thoughts’ and those happy thoughts first had to ‘pass muster’ with a clueless editor!)

We’re all supposed to be, er, ‘relieved’ that new claims for unemployment have finally stopped rising.

And most of us would agree ‘it’s about time!’

But if the last two ‘jobless recoveries’ are any indication it only means we have, for the moment, caught up with an ever descending ‘floor’.

Why do I say ‘ever descending’? Because they are still off-shoring jobs, that’s what happens when you keep writing new free trade agreements.

Which is to ask, ‘Why do YOU think the (so-called) experts believe the recent spate of economic ‘good news’ is a ‘false dawn’?

Little did Japan suspect when it opined the ‘Business is war’ that they’d end up losing to the capitalists (again.)

Once again the Corporate owned media ignores the FACT that the labor force today is smaller than it was in 2000.

But they probably don’t want to have to explain how THAT happened…

Remember, Globalization = Good (for the owners of product manufacturers, not for consumers!) The ‘cost savings’ come entirely from what they DON’T pay the employees!

Trade Protectionism = Bad (Because it frees up an otherwise captive audience!)

Which is to point out heaven help us all if we ever discover another planet capable of supporting our species or how the ‘expense’ of space travel will become trivial compared to the benefits ‘raped’ from a helpless consumer!

How useful is it to our oppressors that our media is subservient and our people are, er, ‘gullible’?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the so-called experts are the ones whose elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top!

Worse, most of them are told what to think/believe.

Which explains why most people’s eyes glaze over the moment they are told they are about to hear ‘expert testimony’.

There is only one ‘expert’ and even he is a work of ‘fiction’.

And the TV just confirmed the above statement, the Dow, as of noon-time, is up 41 points.

Although that certain fictions do have beneficial aspects to them…

So, good citizen…you KNOW this isn’t ‘over’ by a long shot, in that respect, the, er, ‘experts’ are right.

The latest batch of heavily massaged data is meaningless as far as what comes next is concerned.

And what IS coming next, good citizen as we pass the one year mark in the Mayan calendar countdown to destruction?

It’s still a little to ‘muddy’ to tell with any certainty if I’ll still be predicting the end this time next year.

So far the infamous ‘they’ have kept it glued together better than anyone would have thought. (extending unemployment for a record 99 weeks went a long ways towards making this possible!)

But we are approaching the fourth year of an economy almost entirely supported by the ‘public teat’…how much longer will we be able to ‘tread water’?

Ironically the answer is ‘infinitely’ if they can only dig up a justification to keep paying unemployment benefits forever!

(Remember, all money is, in the final analysis, ‘funny’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(Post script: Okay, I can’t leave you hanging with an ‘all money is funny’ but the system is going to collapse anyway without providing a reason.

Ironically, it all comes back to the ‘chump factor’. Why work if you can get the milk for free, right?

BUT, if nobody works there won’t be anything to ‘get’, so how do you, er, ‘justify’ an environment where only a few carry the rest of us?

Do we make ‘work’ the sole domain of criminals [meaning only lawbreakers are required to work?] That isn’t a good idea because most criminals turn outlaw for the reason that it is a lot less ‘work’ for a far greater ‘reward’.

Extending unemployment ‘indefinitely’ would create a logjam of people trying NOT to be ‘chumped’.

If MOST people got there’s for nothing, those who were constrained to putting up with the boss’s useless grief a dozen hours a day would cease putting in the necessary effort, causing production AND quality to fall precipitously.

This is why under A Simple Plan EVERYBODY is guaranteed a job, because we ALL bear the load, ‘equally’. [And if you don’t want to, you will be left ‘on the outside looking in’ which is another way of saying ‘exiled’.]

That said, we are only just beginning to see the effects of ultra-extended unemployment can have on those, er, ‘lucky’ enough to hold onto their jobs…

Or are they the chumps?

Time will tell.

The return of $100 oil

Greetings good citizen,

In case you didn’t notice, Oil has passed the $100 a barrel mark again (You may have no place to go but it’s dark most of the day this time of year and unless you’re part polar bear, the furnace is calling for heat at regular intervals as well.

Stumbling around in the dark and the biting cold is not only dangerous; it’s also unhealthy…but those who profit from this situation consider this to be YOUR problem.

Front page story in the local rag yesterday: the local food bank is tap city! They’re making an emergency appeal to area residents for donations NO MATTER HOW SMALL!

But wait! What’s that up on the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? it’s an economic recovery! (so long as you don’t scrutinize the numbers too closely…)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. claims for jobless benefits hit a seven-month low last week, while permits for future home construction rebounded strongly last month, bolstering views the economy was gaining traction.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday, from 393,000 the prior week. Economists had forecast claims rising to 395,000.

Separately, permits for residential construction rose 10.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 653,000 last month, the Commerce Department said. However, new home construction fell 0.3 percent to annual rate of 628,000 units.

U.S. stock index futures edged higher on the claims data, while prices for Treasury debt fell. The dollar fell against the euro.

Um, for the non homeowners out there I feel compelled to point out that some communities make you pull a building permit if plan to do more than just repaint your residence.

You don’t need a permit to erect a new mailbox but you do need one to place/replace a tool shed!

So before you think there are a bunch of construction crews out there, consider the financial state of the US consumer and think again.

Chances are good a majority of those permits are for replacement roofs.

There’s probably a figure that tells us what ‘percentage’ of permits are for repair of existing structures and what percentage is for new construction.

Considering the housing market, I suspect most permits are for needed repairs to existing buildings.

How about the ‘other’ good news that new claims for unemployment are down?

Need I remind you that the size of the current workforce is still smaller than it was before the dot.gone bust of 2001?

You want to talk about ‘grasping at straws’?

How sad is it good citizen that even the good news seems desperate when examined ‘in context’.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The media isn’t presenting the facts ‘in context’.

Is this a problem, good citizen?

Apparently it isn’t as long as the money is good…

But we are rapidly approaching the day when the money won’t be any good at all…

And if you haven’t spent any time considering what you’d do when realize you don’t have enough in your pocket and none of your plastic is acceptable…what will be your next move, panic?

And if the guy standing between you and what you need makes two of you it is likely that you’ll decide to ‘punt’.

Which is usually the correct instinct.

He who laughs and runs away lives to fight another day…if he’s fast enough.

What should ‘concern’ you is your, er, opponent’s brain is squirming just like yours is.

He doesn’t want to kill you (today) but he KNOWS if he doesn’t do something to ward you off that you’re inclined to grab what you want and damn the consequences.

Then he’ll have to kill you (because he’s already called the cops on the last three guys who ran off with shit and they haven’t shown up yet…so he KNOWS it’s up to him!)

Worse, the asshole boss has a policy of docking the cost of whatever goes missing from the paycheck of the guy working when the loss occurs.

And if he can’t figure out on what shift the loss occurred he docks all three!

How’s that for an unwritten ‘condition of employment’?

So he’s already worried about what’s gonna happen when the boss finds out he got ripped off…you threatening to make off with whatever is only the icing on a shit cupcake for this poor bastard!

So, after you’ve turned and ran away (hopefully still mobile, you don’t want to be walking around when this happens.) [You’ve also faced your antagonist until you were out of reach, even if this meant walking backwards to your vehicle.] you’ve survived one battle, what remains to be seen is if you’ll make it home and how long you’ll survive after that?

Yup, when civilization ‘collapses’ it will quite literally drop out from under your feet. A Safety net you’ve grown accustomed to will ‘vanish’ as it is prone to doing when you find yourself out in the wild and on your own…

What’s ‘Happy talk’ gonna do for you then?

Are you curious to see what ‘big action’ OWS has planned?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Escalation (of the class war)

Greetings good citizen,

Power corrupts and you know the rest. Every day we deal with the decisions of people with too much authority and not enough brains.

Which is to ask who thought THIS was a ‘good idea’?

Um, we can only speculate that it is a good thing for the rest of us that the prohibition against videotaping cops was just recently overturned or the mere act of posting this on the web would be a crime!

Clearly, these kids we doing no harm (and you can bet your backside there’s a job opening at the Jefferson Memorial for the position of ‘head of security’…which, disturbingly enough, was probably a political ‘plum’ handed out by some politician’s chief of staff!)

What do you suppose the new Park Service police officers uniforms should look like? Which is to ask how you ‘offset’ the big bulls-eye the asshole in charge just painted on his people?

Understand good citizen, wars are fought over this kind of ‘oppression’, better known as tyranny.

Bizarrely, it wouldn’t be the first time a minor political appointment has gone horribily and disastrously wrong.

But if we consider the powder keg the conservative movement has become, this sort of outcome starts to look inevitable.

How many of you DON’T think the conservatives are just spoiling for a fight?

In the beginning of the video we see the ‘nice’ police officer come and ‘warn’ the kids they will be arrested if they ‘protest’ at this National monument. They aren’t doing anything, none of them has a sign or a placard denouncing anything!

If anything they are guilty of being the correct age to engage in a political protest.

AFTER the cop ‘warns’ them they do exactly what any kid would do, they start doing what the cop told them not to do!

You see, their parents made the common parrental mistake of telling these kids they had rights and one of those rights was due process, that they couldn’t be arrested for nothing.

As we can see in the video, these kids got a reality check.

Guess what, you CAN be arrested for ‘disobeying’ a cop! (A cop who KNOWS he’s perilously close to trampling YOUR rights just to make his boss happy!)

So what did WE learn here today good citizen?

Either you roll over and play dead or you go ‘all in’.

These, er, ‘officers’ have just set a very dangerous precident. The next time people start ‘dancing’ at a public monument, some of them will be armed and ready…and it will turn into a firefight.

Just think good citizen, the revolution will begin when we start dancing in public!

Which is to ask just how far off the deep end have our overlords gone?

Up ‘til now we’ve pretty much let them get away with murder…and that is the very next line to be crossed, murder: personal.

The question good citizen is whether or not (now that you know it is coming) you will stand there and take it or whether or not you are willing to give it right back?

We do have numbers on our side.

They, unfortunately, ARE the law, which is what needs changing.

Speaking of laws and escalation the foolish GOP in Utah has decided to make the already murky issue of money even murkier.

Now, however, Utah has passed a law intended to encourage residents to use gold or silver coins made by the Mint as cash, but with their value based on the weight of the precious metals in them, not the face value — if, that is, they can find a merchant willing to accept the coins on that basis.

You think $2 bills were a flop, watch what happens here, it will be a fiasco!

This is a situation ready and waiting for the greater fool to come along.

Doesn’t this bring us directly to the point I often use, where the merchant first checks the ‘spot price’ before proceeding with the transaction?

How much ‘time and energy’ will be wasted verifying the unknowable? If the quote is off you could be out thousands if the transaction is large enough.


Worse, it is a ‘two-edged’ sword.

Let’s suppose for a moment our merchant uses two quoting services just to be, er, ‘safe’ and he gets two wildly divergent numbers…what does he do? Proceed, hoping the number that benefits him the most is accurate or does he decline the transaction and demand a more ‘stable’ form of payment?

What would the customer do? Go next door to see if that merchant is willing to be more ‘reasonable’?

Talk about a pickle!

Anyway, we arrive at today’s dose of ‘happy talk’ where reality is twisted beyond recognition…

After years of being outgunned by Japanese rivals, the American auto industry has made small cars a central part of its strategy, seeking to capitalize on a fundamental shift in the preferences of consumers in an era of fast-rising gas prices.

By refocusing on small cars and de-emphasizing the gas-guzzlers that had long sustained the industry, General Motors and Ford in particular are preserving jobs and positioning themselves to prosper. Their efforts are already paying off in the marketplace. Ford’s tiny Fiesta is the best-selling subcompact in the United States this year, and G.M.’s Chevrolet Cruze outsold every other compact car in America last month except the segment-leading Honda Civic.

They are selling fewer cars than ever (because ‘working American’ is still an endangered species AND they ARE NOT ‘giving’ the fucking vehicles away!)

Do you suppose the ‘buying public’ (as few of them as there are) is taking comfort from the fact that the ‘New Chevrolet’ has ‘hencho in China’ stamped all over it?

Which is to ask how much of this is being driven by sky-high gas prices combined with the growing danger presented by ‘conspicuous consumption’?

Which is to point out that the people buying these over-priced econo-boxes COULD afford to buy new Hummers but that wouldn’t be ‘prudent’ for reasons that have little to do with ‘frugality’.

Lastly, we arrive at a topic that has been so overshadowed by other horrendous global events as to have ‘disappeared’ from the news cycle now that the campaign season is getting underway.

In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.

As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.

I’d defend Mr. Krugman by pointing to the ‘muzzle’ he wears as a nationally syndicated columnist. He has to be exceptionally careful of what he writes or it won’t get published at all.

The truth be damned, you can only push the advertisers so far!

Which is to once again ask how unfortunate it is for our society to have the dissemination of information rely on a ‘for profit’ business model?

This would not be the case under A Simple Plan and ‘unemployment’ under ASP would be non-existent…because ‘profit’ is calculated differently than it is today.

Yes good citizen, Mr. Krugman is correct in observing that ‘solving’ the capitalist created ‘employment crisis’ has been a ‘low priority’ for the people responsible.

Now that they are arresting people for assembling in groups larger than three, we are all ‘on notice’.

Happy Memorial day good citizen, how ironic is it that the evidence we have been seeking just happens to turn up today?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

How long can you tread water?

Greetings good citizen,

Here in the land of ‘spin’ where almost everything you see, read or hear has to be passed through a major bullshit filter, we encounter this story that asks How long can you tread water?

The ‘average’ US consumer is buried under a mountian of credit card debt. Over the past three years people have shied away from hitting their cards because A.) they were already max’d out or B.) the amount they had available was insufficient to buy ‘goodies’. Credit cards have reverted to their ‘original’ use/selling point…’emergency cash’.

Most of you are aware that prices are spiraling upwards, some would even say they are ‘out of control’ but the ‘creative accountants’ that use wishful thinking to keep our financial sector solvent disagree.

According to them inflation is almost ‘immeasurable’.

So good citizen, I ask you, not for the first time and definitely not the last, how long can you tread water?

Ever since the United States emerged from the recession, economists have been watching for signs that Americans are spending again.

The most recent data show that revolving credit was up 2.9 percent in March compared with February, only the second monthly increase since late 2008.

This year, evidence is building that they are — with every swipe of their credit cards.

In the most recent quarter, covering January to March, American Express, MasterCard and Visa all reported increases in card spending. Business and consumer spending in the United States helped propel that growth, along with global growth and an increase in merchants that accept cards.

So, is the US consumer ‘recovering’ or are they instead, ‘up against it’ again and resorting to their credit cards to ‘stretch’ their anemic paychecks?

In a related story Mr. Williams over at SGS has the following to report:

No. 368: April Inflation, Retail Sales, Trade Deficit
Subscription required

May 13th, 2011


• April Year-to-Year Consumer Inflation: 3.2% (CPI-U), 3.6% (CPI-W), 10.7% (SGS)
• Fed’s Dollar Debasement Efforts Boost Three-Month CPI Inflation into 6% to 7% Range
• Official Double-Digit Consumer Inflation Possible in Third-Quarter
• With Rising Prices Dominating Sales Gains, “Core” Retail Sales Were Unchanged in April

This is a piece of the puzzle they don’t want you to connect. That ‘quantative easing’ translates directly into ‘diluting your purchasing power’, something the ‘deflationista’s’ don’t get!

YOU won’t see falling prices. What YOU will see is (madly) shrinking purchasing power, cleverly disguised as irrationally rising prices.

And your employer will claim he ‘can’t afford’ to pay you more…which will mean you ‘can’t afford’ to continue working for him!

Worse, you won’t have the luxury of ‘toughing it out’ until something better comes along, you’ll just have to bite the bullet and stop digging the hole deeper.

The ‘answer’ of when to cut and run lies in your expense picture. When the expense you incur getting to and from your job leaves you with a ‘heat or eat’ decision, it’s time to quit and get your ass down to the local food bank!

If you’re ‘making it work’ by eating bread filled with cat food you should have quit the cheap bastard a long time ago!

Sounds pathetic but this is where the situation is headed.

How sad is it that the most ‘efficient’ way for a company to increase its bottom line is by squeezing YOU the employee/customer?

MOST people aren’t on bread and cat food (yet)

I suspect, truth be told, that the number of people just one medical emergency from homelessness is far greater than anyone imagines…

It is a ‘no brainer’ that a vast majority of us are living ‘hand to mouth’. It cracks me up to hear investment professionals sagely advise that one should have 2 million dollars set aside if they hope to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Bubba, the minimum wage was $1.35 an hour when I started working, even if I saved EVERY PENNY I ever earned, I’d be a million and a half light!

Naturally, one would have to have ‘invested wisely’ when building their nest egg. How sad is it that only a rather substantial inheritance or a lottery hit would provide you with the necessary capital to be sitting on 2 million dollars on the day you are eligible to hang up your spurs.

If not for social security, most of us would be faced with abject destitution upon our ‘forced’ retirement, thanks to the ‘fuck you, pay me’ commerce system we have been saddled with.

Couple that with the ‘unemployability’ of most people over 50 and you’d have a real crisis waiting in the wings!

And if you don’t think that is indeed the case go back and read my opening statement again.

These cold-blooded reptiles lie for a reason! (The truth would get them lynched!)

Hell, I’m predicting necktie parties, real soon!

Are you ready?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

When all else fails...

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s post in yet another tribute to ‘saving your work’. I just accidentally kicked the ‘reboot’ button on the computer and an hour’s worth of work just went down the dumper.

Hope you enjoy this second effort better!

Often, immediately after bitching about something, that topic will inexplicably surge back into the headlines, albeit, wearing a disguise.

It’s the old ‘speaking of shit’ phenomenon

Anyway, hopefully the topic of Egypt isn’t so old that most of you have forgotten what the fuss was all about in the first place.

Anyone paying attention probably noticed that whatever the Egyptians were rioting about, they certainly didn’t get anything they were after.

The ‘president’ (if you can call the only guy on the ballot that.) Handed power over to the guy who ran the military and screwed…with billions in US ‘foreign aid’ sticking out of his pockets.

Only the Western purveyors of ‘happy talk’ could spin this into a ‘positive outcome’.

So what do today’s headlines tell us?

When all else fails drag religion onto it (read the caption below the photo.)

Newspapers brim with other episodes: the Muslim-Christian riot that raged last weekend with the police on the scene, leaving 12 dead and two churches in flames; a kidnapping for ransom of a grandniece of President Anwar el-Sadat; soccer fans who crashed a field and mauled an opposing team as the police disappeared; a mob attack in an upscale suburb, Maadi, that hospitalized a traffic police officer; and the abduction of another officer by Bedouin tribes in the Sinai.

“Things are actually going from bad to worse,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the former international atomic energy official, now a presidential candidate. “Where have the police and military gone?”

The answer, in part, is the revolution’s legacy. Public fury at police abuses helped set off the protests, which destroyed many police stations. Now police officers who knew only swagger and brute force are demoralized.

Aww, does someone need a hug?

The really telling remark in this article is provided by UN schill and presidential ‘candidate’ (more like appointee) Mr. ElBaradei.

Let us return to the photo of the rock fight in progress.

Now, how many of the combatants in the picture are simply out of uniform?

These ‘let ‘em sit in their own shit’ for a while exercises are intended to build popular support for ‘aggressive policing’ when ‘crackdown time’ returns.

The original riots were amazingly free of sectarian violence so it’s sudden reappearance can only mean one thing…US foreign policy is a ‘one trick pony’.

And if it isn’t religion, it’s ‘socialism’!

But wait, there’s more!

At Deadline, U.S. Seeks to Continue War in Libya

Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a president must terminate such operations 60 days after he has formally notified lawmakers about the introduction of armed forces into actual or imminent hostilities. The Libya campaign will reach that mark on May 20.

Though Congressional leaders have shown little interest in enforcing the resolution, James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, was asked Thursday about the deadline at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

He said the administration was examining the military’s “role and activities as we move through the next period of time” and would consult Congress about evaluating “what we think we can and can’t do.”

Um, bullshit like this redefines the terms ‘blind and tone deaf’. On one hand you have the Republicans screaming about deficits and taxes while ‘token’ (Bush’s third term) is working out how to get us involved in yet another quagmire!

Social Security and Medicare are ‘bankrupting’ us but damn we just have to pull out all of the stops to keep that Libyan oil flowing!

Naturally good citizen you are not supposed to see any ‘contradiction’ here.

And I know what you’re thinking…and the answer remains unchanged.

Yes, they actually DO think we are THAT stupid!

Which leads me to my (by now) worn out refrain:

And there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it!

There’s an interesting sidebar to this article concerning the date 1973. How many of you know what happened in 1973 that culminated in the War Powers Act?

Perhaps it would be wise to ask how many of you know what the war powers act does?

It is a prime example of shock doctrine in action and just how far back it goes.

Although, to put the situation in perspective, Gerry Ford had just taken over from America’s first ‘Executive President’ who resigned for abusing his presidential authority.

Prior to the War Powers Act, only congress could ‘approve’ the commitment of US troops to military action. This prevented the president from embroiling the nation in ‘wars of choice’ without congressional approval.

What lead to the War Powers Act? The incident involving the USS Pueblo.

As you can discern from the article, the War Powers Act authorizes the president to commit US forces to action for 60 days without congressional approval.

Which sort of explains the fucked up invasion of a school in Granada when Reagan was president.

Or hell, the invasion of Panama when Bush Sr. was president!

But we digress, somewhat.

Back to the issue of what the original ‘uprising’ in Egypt was about, do you remember?

Rising Food and Gas Costs Push Up Consumer Prices

That is the ‘match’ that threatens to set civilization on fire!

Excluding volatile food and energy, prices ticked up 0.2 percent and have risen only 1.3 percent this year. That's double the gain posted six months ago, but still below the level the Federal Reserve considers a healthy pace of inflation.

The cost of new and used cars, clothing, and medical care all increased, pushing up the core index. Car prices likely increased because of temporary parts shortages caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Most other prices were subdued.

Oil prices have fallen from their peak of $114 a barrel earlier this month to about $100 Friday. The prices of corn and other grains have also declined in recent days.

Note, after ‘backing out’ the two most pronounced factors affecting prices they once again show inflation to be a ‘non-issue’.

Inflation is only a problem if you like to eat cooked food and live indoors with the lights on.

This is like having 83 million unemployed people counted as ‘not in the workforce’.

What the fuck are you counting?

If you stop and think about it, this ‘creative accounting’ happy horseshit has gotten way out of hand.

It is high time we do something about it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Price vs Cost

Greetings good citizen,

It is difficult to cobble together the many multifaceted aspects of life into a single stream of consciousness, thus is it necessary to back away and simplify…which often leads to this kind of incredible bullshit

Oil is over $105 a barrel BUT the so-called ‘experts’ say the public is ‘better prepared’ to handle budget busting increases in both food and fuel prices (probably because we’ve all gotten so much better at ‘magic’!)

Talk about ‘confused’, we have the above article which is essentially ‘happy talk’, making light of a disastrous situation and then we have articles like this which contradict the ‘happy talk’ but are apparently (as far as the stock markets are concerned) ‘irrelevant.’

Oil WAS $104 a barrel yesterday…and the market opened DOWN more than 60 points but finished UP more than 124 points...go fucking figure, eh?

So, do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?

Not if it’s in cans…

In a similarly disturbing development Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages Once again we have an ‘interpretational barrier’ to contend with.

Define ‘a third of wages’? If we ASKED our self-important employer class if they thought what they paid their employees was a ‘gift’ we’d be talking about how 200% of wages are ‘handouts‘, wouldn’t we?

So it is obvious that the ‘third’ mentioned in the article isn’t based on what employers are ‘overpaying’ us.

Which leaves ‘government disbursements’ as a portion of the total payroll picture.

As we have repeatedly pointed out here, the 40 MILLION ‘recipients’ of various forms of ‘food assistance’ are NOT individuals but FAMILY UNITS!

Which leaves us to ponder just how desperate things are getting when one third of total payroll is made up of ‘government assistance’ that the Republican ’deficit hawks’ are trying to eliminate?

Does anyone else see ‘Trouble’ on the near horizon? (note the capital ‘T’)

I appreciate how psychologically unsettling this must appear good citizen. One day we are tramping down the off ramp to Hell and the next we are dealing with seemingly ‘mundane’ economic issues (not that any of this could even be charitably considered as mundane by any rational individual.)

The question begged by this article is not how much more can we spend but how much longer we can maintain this level of support considering how the economy has shrunk below the number of people it needs to support…

This is the shit wars are made of…in case any of you were wondering.

Worse, ‘wars’ waged against unarmed civilians are more accurately described as ‘genocide’.

Just saying…ya know?

In keeping with our ‘open to interpretation’ theme this last piece takes on a decidedly ‘Libertarian’ slant

Working for the Greater Share

Hard to say where Mr. Panzers sympathies lie. This could be a simple case of failing to make oneself clear. The water gets pretty muddy when you stray off of the ‘All economies are local’ path.

Is he criticizing or supporting the decision by local governments to support local commerce?

Hard to say…

There are still people out there who think globalization is a net positive.

This doesn’t make any less an idiot, they can think what they like…they just need to be kept a safe distance from the decision making processes.

No irony should be lost on the fact that they think the same way, that those who don’t agree with them should be ‘removed’ from the decision making process.

They only see one side of the puzzle, that globalization results in ‘lower prices’.

They remain to this day blissfully ignorant of the ‘captive audience’ aspect the elimination of domestic sources results in.

Those lower prices come at a cost that is much too dear for any society to pay.

And we are witnessing that bill ‘coming due’ right here and now.

You know my feelings on the subject. No matter how much they protest, this was no ‘accident’ nor was it due to incompetence…except maybe in the Justice Department.

One thing is certain good citizen, we have one fuck of a mess on our hands and there will be buckets of blood before it is all said and done.

The great ‘mis-underestimation’ the political right has made is mistakenly believing that the left will jump on ‘peace at any price’ as soon as it is offered.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us to find ourselves pitted against such a stupid adversary?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What comes after 'Happy Talk?'

Greetings good citizen,

Like everyone who asks ‘what comes after a trillion, I find myself pondering what the next logical progression of ‘happy talk’ is?

It would appear the answer is ‘Silly Talk’ or wishful thinking out loud

The wise do not suffer fools gladly, you would do well to emulate the wise.

One of today’s other, er, news items was how the economy has begun shedding jobs again. (How sad is it that I am on the cusp of joining in that statistic once again?)

Next week I will file a new unemployment claim due to the company I work for ceasing operations…

So my already mostly ‘phantom’ resume will add another ‘phantom’ entry to its already ponderous length.

With that as a given, just how ridiculous do the Bernank’s claims appear?

Top Fed officials now expect the output of goods and services to grow by 3.4 to 3.9 percent this year, up from the previous forecast, released in November, of 3 to 3.6 percent. But their grim outlook for the job market was largely unchanged: 8.8 to 9 percent unemployment this year, only one-tenth of a percentage point lower than its November forecast.

If the Fed’s most optimistic forecast were realized, it would be the fastest annual growth since 2004, when the economy expanded by 3.6 percent. But experts say even that rate of growth would only bring unemployment, now at 9 percent, down slowly — to slightly less than 8 percent by the end of 2012, when President Obama will seek re-election.

The forecasts did not change the view that the Fed should continue the $600 billion program to stimulate the recovery by buying government securities, a step begun in November and scheduled to run through June. The Fed said it based its expectations on an improvement in consumer spending in the fourth quarter, though Fed officials were uncertain how long that would last, according to minutes of the Fed’s last policy meeting in late January, released on Wednesday. [Expected ‘improvement’ during Christmas! WTF, good citizen! Let us not forget that the actually data is VERY HEAVILY ‘massaged‘ these days, just like the ‘balance sheets’ of the bankrupt banks!]

“On the one hand, the additional spending could reflect pent-up demand following the downturn, or greater confidence on the part of households about the future, in which case it might be expected to continue,” the minutes noted. “On the other hand, the additional spending could prove short-lived, given that a good portion of it appeared to have occurred in relatively volatile categories such as autos.” [There has been a recent ’rush’ to replace SUV’s with more ’fuel efficient’ vehicles that has nothing to do with an ’improving economy’.]

At the January meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s main policy arm, voted unanimously to continue the $600 billion Treasury purchase plan, the second round of a strategy that is intended to push down long-term interest rates to ease credit and spur growth. The strategy, known as quantitative easing, has been controversial — critics say it could set the stage for future inflation and asset bubbles — but the Fed has been fairly unified behind it. [‘monetizing’ the debt is driving up asset prices while your purchasing power takes a pounding, it is ‘why’ the stock market keeps rising!]

The minutes indicated that Fed officials saw a diminishing risk of deflation, a protracted fall in prices of the sort that has afflicted Japan for more than two decades. That fear of deflation was a principal factor behind the decision in August to set the stage for the bond purchases.

Wait a minute good citizen, you know like I know the ‘economy’ is toast. If it weren’t for ‘creative accounting’ the banking system would have crashed and burned already!

We’re talking major panic here good citizen, padlocked doors, the whole nine yards!

IF the banking system had to ‘reconcile’ their books the exact same way you and I do, they’d ALL be bankrupt…AND THE BERNANK KNOWS THIS!

So what’s he trying to pull claiming the economy is ‘on the mend?’

(He’s pulling your finger…did you fart?)

This is the Kabuki dance the serious people are all pointing to…but for some unknown reason, nobody is willing to stand up and say ‘hey, what the fuck?’

Our economy, along with the economies of the rest of the developed world, are all smoking wrecks. We all know this but nobody is willing to ‘embrace’ this frightful truth.

That Wile E. Coyote moment economists keep hinting about, we’re there babe!

Is it going to take the total collapse of our supply lines to bring this fact home to the rest of the financially illiterate world?

Apparently so.

So what do we make of ‘Silly Talk’ like tonight’s offering?
This is beyond ‘denial’, it is something more perverted that defies definition.

I leave what to name this travesty up to you, good citizen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lies, damn lies and statistics...

Greetings good citizen,

It’s reasonably ‘safe’ to speak my mind here behind the ‘opt in’ wall that Blogger provides. Naturally, safety comes at a price. I’ve seen readership drop dramatically since I ceased posting on Conceptual Guerilla.

Whatever…I don’t tend to sweat the small stuff.

Which is to point out that there are much larger, er, situations to stay on top of.

Like the relentless torrent of ‘dis-information’ the Corporate owned media continues to spew.

The latest ‘puzzler’ to be pawned off by the professional liars of the CO media is the 4th quarter GDP number, which with unemployment of the charts, comes in at a hefty 3.2%.

The ‘rationale’ behind this incredible claim…’the recovery’ is taking place somewhere else on the planet (but ‘magically’ the US economy is expanding because of it!)

Worse, these same idiots tell us that the Chinese economy continues to expand at more than a 10% annual rate, but, the question remains unanswered. Just who the fuck are they selling to? Name the global economy that isn’t bankrupting itself to provide its citizens with basic services?

(Understand the challenge is literal, name ONE economy that ISN'T busting at the seams...and you can't because they're ALL CONNECTED!)

Must be that ’free trade agreement’ we signed with MARS last month!

OR it could just be more smoke and mirrors

No. 347: 4th Quarter GDP, December Durable Goods, Home Sales

January 28th, 2011

"Advance" 4th-Quarter GDP Estimate Was Meaningless
Durable Goods Orders Fell Fourth Straight Month and Fourth-Quarter Housing Market Conditions Remain Bleak More ...

Housing has been down for what, three years now? (Going into its fourth year)

Isn’t it curious the same ‘happy talk’ crowd totally ignores the single largest factor here and that factor is the LACK OF QUALIFIED BUYERS!

Mr. Williams (of shadow stats) measures the economy the ‘old fashioned way’, this is why his figures don’t ‘jive’ with the bullshit ‘official’ ones.

How can our GDP be 3.2% when the gains in the ‘liars (stock) market’ are due to the Fed pumping up the price of, er, ‘assets’?

If we leave it to the bandits to determine what is or isn’t banditry, the abuse of power will always go ‘underreported’

Worse, the rampant ‘theft’ continues unabated.

We will soon encounter some ‘massive’ imbalances in the commodities markets that will threaten every government, even the most brutal dictatorship, around the planet.

Can this be stopped?

Like everything which has gone before, the answer is ‘yes and no’.

The ‘fuck you, pay me’ crowd CAN be stopped in their tracks BUT the people charged with executing this straight-forward task seem to be in the pay of the criminals, creating a conflict.

So once again we will all suffer needlessly for the greed of a few.


  Zero Total Credit Expansion in 2009-10

Credit expansion in the private sector collapsed after 2008 with the financial sector leading the way  down by contracting over 15% in two years.   The federal government took over as its borrowing zoomed 76% after 2007.  Net-net, however, total credit outstanding has been flat in 2009 and 2010, at least until the end of the third quarter (latest data available).

It seems to me, therefore, that QE1 and QE2 have merely substituted for  some of the "money" that has been destroyed via debt defaults and should not in theory create overall inflationary pressures.  But markets are mostly psychological manifestations and not theoretical structures;  if punters believe new money is pouring out of the printing presses, then they bet accordingly and commodities - to name but one - rise in price.  That's what I call Quantum Finance or, Perception Creates Reality.

Looking at things from a longer-term perspective it is obvious that total debt (i.e. money) and prices should move together: if there is more money chasing goods and services prices will inevitably rise.  Commodity prices have tripled in the last ten years (see chart below - click to enlarge).

which brings us back to today’s ‘theme’, if you will. Allow the criminals to determine what is or isn’t a crime and soon you have all manners of , er, ‘anti-social’ behavior protected by law.

Vigilance is much easier said than done, worse, the ‘guard dog’ is so old it is both totally blind and deaf (along with being toothless.)

Depending on how you look at it good citizen, it is either too late or too soon to replace it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Brain Damaged

Greetings good citizen,
I don’t know what to say but ‘’opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.”

Turns out I’m not the only one who took exception to this piece from today’s NY Times

Posited therein we have this (contested) opinion of a majority of US Citizens:

Almost half (47%) of Americans say China is the world’s leading economic power, while just 31% name the U.S. Three years ago — prior to the global economic crisis – only 30% characterized China as the global economic leader, compared with 41% for the U.S.

Just how strong do they mix the Kool Aide at the NY Times these days? Should we give Mr. Leonhardt a ‘pass’ because he is an economic columnist and is therefore, by default, clueless?

He goes on in the article to defend the United States number 1 status by omitting the fact that he’s NOT comparing apples to apples. The fact that the Chinese Yuan buys four times what a US dollar buys tips the scales decidedly in China’s favor.

The whole charade is an exercise in creative accounting. Truth be told, the cheaper there CAN’T exist because ALL money is ‘funny’.

The cheaper there is a legal fiction created by the financial sector (For the benefit of the elite.)

This fact leads to some extremely disturbing asides concerning the, er, competence of the individuals who manage our affairs…people you and I have zero control over.

Worse, the people who do have SOME authority over these thieves are in the thieves pay!

Did I mention the badly broken ‘justice system’?

Which, naturally, leads us to the disturbing question of just how reliable is the (allegedly) most liberal of the mainstream media outlets?

Two major credit ratings agencies warned Thursday that the United States might tarnish its triple-A credit rating if its national debt kept growing.

It was not the first time the agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service, warned that the nation’s gilt-edged rating might fall into jeopardy.
But the two statements, made within hours of each other, were seized on by deficit hawks as further evidence that the government must reduce spending and debt to avert disaster. That is just what many Tea Party supporters insist.

Okay, so just how big a threat is the 33,000 strong Tea Party? Actually a pretty big one if we consider that the people behind this decidedly unpopular movement are BILLIONAIRES!

So it really doesn’t matter what the rest of us think, this is THEIR land and if you don’t like how they run it, LEAVE.

Hey, wait a minute, isn’t this just what Jefferson warned us about? How someday we’d find ourselves being evicted from the very land our forefathers fought to liberate?

Don’t look now Bud but we’re already there.

Between the thieving banks and the conniving capitalists we have become (unwelcome) tenants in our own nation.

I preach to the choir when I point to the inevitable consequences of ‘doing nothing’.

Speaking of doing nothin’, the same ‘general public’ who (correctly) believes that the Chinese economy has ‘eclipsed’ the doomed US economy is also aware that nothing has been done to correct the economic imbalances that threaten our civilization along with the entire Western way of life.

1933 All Over Again

Until there is reform, significant changes, nothing will work and there will be no sustainable recovery. Trickle down ultimately leads to debilitating and widening social dislocations (homelessness, unemployment, poor health) that are highly unproductive.

The question, quite naturally is whether or not those who hope to escape prosecution for their treachery WANT the current situation ‘corrected’.

Without a 4th Estate that is willing to keep the Elite in check we have no ‘evidence’ that we can use to combat those who would sell us onto bondage for their own benefit.

Not that the evidence isn’t there, out in plain sight for all to see.

I point to it regularly, for all the good it does.

I know I’m hard to share, most people don’t appreciate my level of bluntness, but, with that said, at last look I am the ONLY ONE with a PRACTICAL, WORKABLE solution.

The ‘re-engineering of mankind’ is unnecessary with A Simple Plan.

The sooner we get started, the better off we’ll all be.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Happy Talk (again!)

Greetings good citizen,

Are you ready for another peek as to how close we’re getting to the proverbial drain we’ve been circling?

In as much as we can appreciate how ‘employees’ are required to do what the person cutting their paycheck demands of them, at what point do those demands become ‘unreasonable’?

Is this where we should draw the line? Tax Breaks Bring Hope for Hiring

Isn’t this ‘identical’ to the billions of dollars worth of tax cuts implemented by the Bush Administration that resulted in a net loss in the size of the overall workforce?

Talk about ‘Happy Talk’, the article enumerates a grand total of five jobs this ‘tax break’ will allegedly ‘create’ and the word ‘temp’ keeps popping into my consciousness for some ‘déjà vu’ type reason…

Isn’t insanity DEFINED as doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome?

Let’s not pull any punches here as we ask ‘is Barrack Obama insane?’

I’d opine no BUT I’d qualify that with by adding that I fear the people he listens to are a few cards shy of a full deck…if you know what I mean.

‘Tis the Season to contemplate how this ‘rich man, poor man’ bullshit has overtaken the ‘purpose’ of civilization.

The purpose of civilization is not far removed from the (true) purpose of commerce.

Civilization exists not to protect those who lay claim to all that they see but to protect the interests of the species and provide for their well-being, not just for the few but for ALL.

Treason starts with ‘I cut your paycheck so you have to do what I say’.

The moment this kind of thinking enters the civic arena, civilization becomes a ‘Bum Deal’.

It’s the ‘deal changer’ that re-purposes the focus of society from what’s good for all to ‘what’s good for me’.

As you can see, when the focus shifts, things start to fall apart.

What must puzzle some of you greatly is why nobody in a position of power seems to grasp a simple thing like economics.

They protest that it’s ‘complicated’ but that’s what anybody putting the screws to you always says.

You do what needs doing whether you get paid to do it or not, that is ‘fundamental truth’ number one.

Why do you get paid to do some things and not others?

Sadly, the answer here is too straight-forward, because nobody can figure out how to make a buck off of it. (The number of people willing to pay you to do what they can easily do for themselves isn’t large enough to justify the effort.)

This brings us to fundamental truth number two, there aren’t enough hours in the day for everybody to do everything that needs doing personally…this is where money comes in.

This marvelous little invention makes it possible to buy the things you don’t have the time or the talent to do/make for yourself.

This also creates a different problem. How much should you give up doing yourself and how much should you buy?

‘Ideally’ you’d buy everything, it’s what ‘rich’ people do!

Sadly, without a reliable ‘income stream’ it is not possible to buy all that we need…and worse, there aren’t enough income streams out there so everybody can have their own.

You can neither buy (nor sell) from an empty cart.

Here’s a bit of ‘economics 101’ that most of us are left to figure out on our own. It’s better to be the ‘employer’ than the ‘employee’ but this brings us full circle to that other part of the puzzle, the one where there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ to go around.

To make matters worse, who decides how much money is introduced into the economy at any given time?

You’d think the ‘all knowing’ central bank would have a handle on this but the answer is no, the bankers themselves just make this shit up as they go along!

That’s how the global economy got up to a quadrillion dollars and nobody knew it until it started to fall apart!

This, ironically brings us to ‘fundamental truth number 3’ ‘ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL’.

If your local economy isn’t ‘robust’ enough to support the population it WILL collapse!

Why, in this vast economic wasteland, are some areas doing ‘okay’ while others have been decimated?

Again, the answer lies with the ‘moronic’ banking system.

Money (as I have told you countless of times now) is FAKE! IT IS A ‘MARKER’ OF NO REAL VALUE EXCEPT TO REGULATE ACCESS.

So why is there money here and no money there? Because the moronic bankers put the money there!

For some bizarre reason nobody thinks it is peculiar that South Dakota, the ‘usury capital of the US’ (thanks to W.) is thriving while the rest of the nation watches in horror.

Yep, the most ‘under reported’ phenomenon not heard in the media today is precisely when this nation became a bank.

To listen to the pundits tell it, this occurred back when the Bretton Woods treaty was ratified.

Funny how we simultaneously saved the world from fascism by handing over the global economic system to fascists!

And look what they’ve done with the place since!

Ignorance, suffering and poverty abound everywhere you look, even right here in the ‘mighty’ USA…better known as (Yo)U Stupid Ass!

Money isn’t the problem, it’s never been the problem because, as you can now see, they can print up as much as they want, whenever they want to and its value is capable of defying ‘gravity’ (which should give you an idea about both Zimbabwe and Wiemar Germany. Money only goes ‘bad’ when the idiots want it to go bad because the rest of you are fucking clueless!)

It’s a damn dangerous game and when the plug gets pulled, no one wins.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pauperized!

Greetings good citizen,

We can only wonder how (the irrelevant) stock markets decided to reverse yesterday’s losses during this morning trading, the mysterious uptick hasn’t been attributed to anything (Not that this particularly matters; movements of the markets seldom make sense.)

Nor is the ‘trading day’ over, markets may well end where they started and we’d be none the wiser.

Who cares about the corporate sponsored Kabuki Dance put on for your benefit by the MSM?

Makes you wonder what the ‘real news’ would look like, doesn’t it?

Well, tonight’s first offering is a refutation of ‘the dance’ itself, not that you, Dear reader/Good Citizen is in need of such enlightenment…

No. 330: September Production and Housing Starts: Subscription required: October 19th, 2010

• Third-Quarter Production Growth Slowed and Housing Contracted
• Third-Quarter GDP Should Have Slowed, But the Heavily-Politicized and Guesstimated Series Is Virtually Worthless...

How’s that for ‘short and to the point’?

We are left to ponder if misery can exist in the absence of official recognition?

Would Marie Antoinette have kept her head if she had today’s media to put a positive spin on an otherwise retched economy?

How retched is it?

5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers

Tonight’s second offering is but the most fleeting of glimpses of today’s economic reality. What the writer shares here fails to hammer home what the actual experience is really like.

I have often railed about how much we take things for granted. When we walk over to a light switch, we expect something to happen when we toggle it.

When nothing happens, we are genuinely perplexed! The light switch is a relatively recent invention yet they have become so ingrained into our existence that we expect them to function whenever we encounter one (within reason.)

Naturally, the light switch doesn’t function if there isn’t one to flip, a situation many of the homeless find themselves confronted with. Then there’s the ‘running water’ situation, which also has multiple aspects to it.

You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone.

Worse is the realization that your ‘privation’ (being deprived of these, er, ‘basic necessities’) was caused by some greed head’s decision to ship your job to a third world cesspool! (This assumes you had a marketable skill at some point in the past, many recent grads don’t even have that…which is a whole other can of worms!)

Yes good citizen, it all comes down to choices AND YOU HAVEN’T BEEN GIVEN ANY THAT MATTER!

Knowing what you know today, would you have voted Republican EVEN ONCE over the past forty years?

Many of you are too young to remember (and conservatives conveniently ‘forget’) that the first time anybody EVER heard the acronym NAFTA, it was being touted by none other than ‘The Great Communicator’ (of ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’ fame!)

Don’t know who that is? Probably better forgotten anyway.

No amount of Monday morning quarterbacking can alter the past, but it is even more disturbing to acknowledge that it is already too late to alter the political landscape (via the political machinery provided) too.

You won’t get to ‘vote’ for who will run things or what laws you will forced to live under; history has shown we are used to being the victims of tyranny.

MAYBE future historians will ask how, in such an interconnected society, we let it all slip away? Why didn’t we use the resources available to us to unite against this obvious threat?

Like any of us had a choice!

Our ‘problem’ in a nutshell is the same one we’ve always faced, Treason.

It is far too easy to ‘buy off’ those elected to defend the public from the criminals among us.

Worse, the criminals have an astounding number of, er, ‘defenders’.
It is not until the criminals start to prey upon the people who ‘thought’ they enjoyed the criminal’s protection that the cries for justice are heard.

Yes, once upon a time politicians would run on ‘Law & Order’ issues, now that there is going to be a huge uptick in, er, ‘criminal activity’ they’ll be at it again.

Unfortunately you will NOT be given the option of prosecuting the criminals responsible for the increase in ‘social unrest’.

And that’s beyond being a damn shame.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

GD What?

Greetings good citizen,

With, er, ‘eye-popping’ boldness the MSM, (reinforced by their main ‘meat puppet’, the POTUS) broke the news that the very ugly economy ‘expanded’ at a 3.2% clip during the first quarter of 2010.

The very first sentence of this article states that, according to the Commerce Department, the economy has ‘expanded’ for three-quarters in a row.

Naturally good citizen, we, the average idiot, have absolutely no clue as to what, specifically, has expanded? The only thing that is apparent is whatever it is they are measuring has no bearing on the true ‘state of the economy’.

Understand, these are the same people that allow the bankrupt banking system to mark three quarters of the contents of their balance sheets to ‘fantasy’ so they can pretend to be solvent.

If the government can let the banking system ‘pretend’ it is healthy, why not apply the same ‘fuzzy logic’ to the rest of the economy?

If we simply ‘pretend’ that everything is all right, it will be, won’t it?

Sadly, no.

Well, good citizen, when the lies become too blatant, the seeds of revolution are sown.

Hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that most people aren’t buying this nonsense. There’s ‘happy talk’ and there are lies…

Well, guess which one we have here?

Consumers Help Drive U.S. Economy to 3.2% Growth Rate

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: April 30, 2010

The United States economy has expanded for three-quarters in a row, the Commerce Department said on Friday, helped along by consumer spending. Now the question is, Will the jobs follow? [Capitalist dynamics clearly state there has to be an uptick in demand to justify hiring of more ‘overhead’. So the ‘mystery’ is how can a tapped out consumer be driving demand for more products/services? Short answer, they can’t…so what is the Department of Commerce looking at? (you know the answer good citizen and it’s NOT ‘good news’.)]

The broadest measure of the overall economy grew at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010, the Commerce Department reported. It had expanded 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.2 percent in the third quarter. [The ‘bad news’ here good citizen is these so-called ‘gains’ are directly tied to the government ‘stimulus’ program…so these figures do not show ‘economic expansion’ as much as they indicate ‘fiscal dilution’. Plain English: The economy isn’t growing, the value of your money is ‘shrinking’!

While the expansion is welcome, it has not delivered the level of hiring needed to recover the ground lost during the recession. [Nor will it, it’s simply not there.]

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday, President Obama acknowledged that many Americans might find little comfort in the numbers because “ ‘you’re hired’ is the only economic news they’re waiting to hear.” [Bizarrely, ‘you’re hired’ (for wages you can’t live on) are NOT the words we’re all longing to hear! But, since the average worker has ‘zero leverage’ in a global economy, they’ll take the job and shut up.]

Still, economists are hopeful that news of solid, continued growth may bolster business confidence and persuade more companies to expand. [Ah! Would that it were ‘genuine’, solid economic growth…but it’s not. It is economic shrinkage dressed up to mimic growth!]

“It’s been a case of, when will they stop worrying and learn to love the boom?” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at ITG, who added that many analysts and companies had underestimated the economic turnaround. [There ain’t no ‘boom’ to love, stupid! Just as there’s no ‘turnaround’ to underestimate, unless you’re talking about that tiny thing in your head…]

After dragging their heels for many months, consumers were at last a major contributor to economic growth in the first quarter. Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, a big gain from the 1.6 percent rate of the previous three months. Purchases of durable goods like cars led the way. [I wouldn’t be cheering if I were you good citizen, the foreclosure rate is still rocketing skyward, driving up the housing ‘backlog’ as well as the number of ‘walk aways’.]

Whether Americans might retrench for the long haul after seeing their homes lose value has been one of the biggest questions about the aftermath of the Great Recession. Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries. [When the uptick in spending is due to the decrease in your purchasing power…it is NOT an economic recovery, it’s rape!]

Economists are hopeful that families will continue to pick up the pace of purchasing and make the recovery more sustainable, although consumers may remain cautious about spending given the tepid growth in job creation and personal income. [Try ‘non-existent’] Consumer sentiment dipped slightly in April, according to a Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index released on Friday. [Gee, ya don’t suppose it could be due to the FUCKING LIES the government/media is spreading about the economy, could it?]

“We haven’t had consumer spending growth this strong in three years,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. “But the caveat is that with real disposable incomes not growing, this was all done through the saving rate. We cannot rely on consumers continually driving down their savings. They need income support from hiring.” [But since there is no demand, companies aren’t going to hire, especially here in the ‘expensive’ U.S.A. How do these LYING FUCKS get away with denying the ‘chicken or the egg circle? Without payroll growth there can be no demand growth! And payrolls aren’t growing. There is NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC! Worse, it is this kind of moronic logic that put us where we are in the first place!]

Small businesses say Americans are loosening up a little after a bewildering period of debt reduction and uncertainty. [More ‘fucking lies’…Joe consumer has whipped out his credit card again, because he is both desperate AND hopelessly stupid!]

Nate Evans, who owns a pottery-making business with his wife, Hallie, in New Albin, Iowa, said sales in 2009 were the worst ever but that business was just starting to pick up. The Evanses sell their wares from their Allamakee Wood-Fired Pottery home studio as well as in galleries in nearby states, and at craft shows in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

“I felt like the energy of the crowd was better,” Mr. Evans said of the first fair this year, in Minnesota, adding that other craft sellers seemed to agree. “Most of the people we talked to said it was better than last year. Hey, it’s not great, but it’s better than last year.”

Just as Americans stepped up their purchases of autos and other products in the first quarter, companies invested more in capital goods. Business purchases of equipment and software, for example, grew at an annual rate of 13.4 percent, building on a 19 percent increase in the final quarter of 2009. [Um, the only ‘positive sales’ data we have to go by is Intel’s reported uptick in chip sales. Could this ‘expansion’ be driven by the surge in start up collection agencies?]

For the first time in two years, businesses started increasing their stockpiles of goods. This inventory growth accounted for about half of the expansion in the first quarter. In the previous quarter, about two-thirds of economic growth resulted from a decision by companies to draw down their inventories more slowly — that is, not clearing their stockroom shelves so quickly but still not adding to them. [It helps to remember that both ‘expansions’ are essentially ‘accounting tricks’…barely discernable from fraud.]

Additional spending by companies “is very good news, since it indicates businesses are feeling more confident about the expansion to start spending some of their cash,” Mr. Gault said. “If businesses are spending more on equipment, usually that would go along with more hiring, too.” [But that’s not happening as the unemployment numbers remain negative.]

Federal government spending, including some remaining money from stimulus programs, grew at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent in the first quarter. But this was more than offset by continued cuts by state and local governments, whose spending decreased 3.8 percent. It was the third consecutive quarterly decline for state and local spending. [Whoa Baby! Don’t you love how they slip this sort of ‘bad news’ in with the baseless cheerleading?]

“Government spending contracted, for all the ballyhoo about stimulus,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “This recovery is going to have to stand on the backs of private-sector demand, not on government demand, given all the current fiscal challenges.” [Do you hear that? Don’t expect the government to give you a job, you’re gonna be forced to accept what the capitalists offer, even if you can’t live on it!]

Modest expansion in business activity may not be enough to ease the lasting pain of the recession, many economists say. [Say What? You mean this ISN’T the ‘all clear’?!!!] You know and I know that most people’s eyes have glazed over by this point in the article and they have stopped reading several paragraphs ago.]

Hiring only recently began to materialize, with the economy adding 162,000 jobs in March, of which 48,000 were temporary Census-related positions. The economy had shed about eight million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. [What’s this, more ‘creative accounting?’ Supposing it is true, 162,000 is an abysmally low number and it obviously isn’t going to be sustained.]

Job growth hasn’t been as strong as economic growth for several reasons, economists say. Businesses have found ways to make more with fewer resources, meaning that they have been able to meet additional demand for their products without bringing on many new workers. And companies are sitting on a tremendous amount of cash and appear unwilling to spend it. [Try rampant off-shoring, fucking lying reporters!]

“Companies may be reluctant to invest because there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty ahead for them, not just in health care policy but tax policy,” said Paul Ashworth, senior United States economist at Capital Economics. “This isn’t just about the sustainability of the recovery itself.” [What! Didn’t they just crow about increased business investment? Obviously, not all of these so-called ‘experts’ are on the same page!]

Mr. Obama, in his remarks on Friday morning, rejected criticisms that his policies were bad for hiring by talking about tax cuts for small businesses, loans backed by the government and investments in areas like clean energy — policies intended in part to encourage job creation. [In China!]

Even if hiring does finally start to grow at the same rate with demand, the economy is simply not growing fast enough to make a big dent in unemployment, economists say. [What the lying fucks mean is hiring here isn’t going to happen and US workers are basically fucked!]

The nation’s gross domestic product — a broad measure of goods and services produced in the country — is far below its potential, according to projections of where the economy would have been had it followed its long-term trend. [Bizarrely, the ‘long term trend’ is right where it should be given how much of our economy has been/continues to be ‘off-shored’.]

Output would need to grow at least 5 percent annually for several years to get back on track — and perhaps what is more important, to stimulate enough job creation to employ the 15 million Americans already out of work and the 100,000 new workers joining the labor force each month. [Um, did a bunch of people die? Because before a couple of months ago the economy needed to produce 150,000 jobs per month to keep up with new entries into the workforce…just saying, ya know? Ah, what the hell…’statistics’ are ‘flexible’ anyway…what’s 50,000 jobs when you know they’re NEVER COMING BACK.]

Right now, many economists expect the nation’s output to expand 2.5 to 3.5 percent this year. [And I expect it to snow chocolate chip Ice Cream this winter (since we’re talking about totally irrational ‘expectations’…I have as good a chance as they do of being ‘correct.’)]

“Unless the pace of growth picks up significantly, we will see high unemployment rates for years to come,” said Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.

Damn those ‘libruls’, always crying about the economy! What they aren’t telling you is Josh means the economy needs to grow ‘exponentially’ if we are ever to see hiring return to ‘prosperous levels’.

But, if you follow capitalist dynamics, the economy doesn’t grow when workers aren’t paid more than sustenance wages. Only the rich get richer and that doesn’t do a fucking thing for the rest of the economy!

Which brings us ‘full circle’ with the current unsustainable debt driven social model.

Quiz me this good citizen, if someone were to devise a way out of this mess, would you follow?

Yeah, I’m looking at you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner