Apocalypse...on the near horizon

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the world bled from the eyesockets today as the global economy continues to hemorrhage cash.

Um, this uncontrolled bloodletting is showing up throughout the economy, especially at the edges of the safety net

Costa Mesa formed a homeless task force last spring and came up with a "carrot and stick approach," said Muriel Ullman, the city's housing consultant. The city hopes to build more affordable housing using federal grant money and county resources and has hired a mental health worker to connect with the chronically homeless. It has also partnered with local churches to set up a storage facility where the homeless can keep their belongings to avoid having them confiscated, Ullman said.

But Costa Mesa has also passed a slate of new ordinances, including bans on parking a bike anywhere but on a city bike rack, smoking in the park and sleeping in the park after dark, she said. The city also spent $60,000 to tear down a gazebo that attracted large numbers of homeless people, asked churches to stop soup kitchens there and hired two rangers to patrol the park.

The mayor last week stoked anger by calling soup kitchens nuisances and asking the city to investigate some decades-old charities there. Critics say that Costa Mesa is "just trying to get rid of our homeless, but what we're trying to do is help those who want help and if somebody doesn't want help — and they have refused help on numerous occasions — we want the courts to deal with them," Ullman said.

Communities throughout the sun-belt have stepped up enforcement of vagrancy and other laws in efforts to keep the homeless at bay.

Because…if you’re gonna be forced to live ‘outside’ you’d best be doing it where it’s warm (ish)

Which is not to say that homelessness is primarily a southern phenomenon, it is not. There are plenty of homeless who call the frigid north home.

Hell, I was watching Alaska State Troopers on National Geographic (a subsidiary of NewsCorp…sadly) and they were, er, complaining about the homeless population.

So it’s NOT ‘isolated’ and it’s not, er, minimal or by any means ‘temporary’.

What is causing large numbers of citizens into the streets good citizen?

I know the answer…and so do you.

And if you’re not a brain-fried conservo-whacko then you know the growing homeless problem is a symptom of the Global Race to the bottom.

Which is driven by…(can you give me an Amen?) Global Capitalism!

You heard the Mittster, those people (certainly the homeless) think they’re ‘entitled’ to live indoors and eat regularly (fucking moochers!) They believe society owes them a job that pays them a wage they can live on! (How fucking totally ridiculous is that? How would people like Mitt be able to afford homes around the world and the staff to run them if he actually had to pay people LIVING WAGES?)

Now, if that isn’t bad enough…let’s take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the ‘future’ of space exploitation (oops) exploration

The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight.

Officials declared the launch a success. In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions.

Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011.

The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six.

one point six BILLION buys an awful lot of cookies, don't ya think?

And then the fucking freemarket Republicans have the fucking blazing BALLS to complain about 'the deficit'!

Um, geez louise, who foots the tab for this little captive audience?

One guess and it ain’t Santa Claus, it’s You and me!

Not only did the >One Percent abandon the shuttle program but they are going to abandon NASA itself in favor of what, 5 guys in the desert with a fucking laptop?

You already know why there isn’t a ‘moonbase’

It's because the fucking greedheads couldn’t figure out how to line their pockets from the hostile environments offered by ‘near space’!

Once we figure out how to visit other solar systems (quicker than a lifetime of space travel or spending the next century in suspended animation) all of those twinkling lights up there become ‘Real Estate’…with all that entails.

Which should freak you out a little considering the cluster fuck it’s become here on earth!

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.

Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services.

For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to wealthy bondholders. But carrying charges on these have mounted to a point where they now look risky as the economy sinks into debt deflation. Cities are defaulting from California to Alabama. They cannot reverse course and restore taxes on property owners without causing more mortgage defaults and abandonments. Something has to give – so cities are scaling back public spending, downsizing their school systems and police forces, and selling off their assets to pay bondholders.

Um, because of this {ahem} bullshit there won’t be a Real Estate Market in the future. In fact it was shit like this back when private ownership of property first became ‘lawful’ (it wasn’t always so kiddos…) that put a significant damper on Real Estate for centuries.

Worse, this whole scheme of using property taxes to fund municipal functions, it’s that sort of thing that blew up in their faces.

Which is to point out that NONE of this is ‘NEW’.

The shame of it all is that they keep on pulling it…and they keep getting away with it!

What cha gonna do good citizen?

Seriously…what ARE YOU gonna do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Freefall or Dangling?

Greetings good citizen,

Another day, another step closer to the brink…

Our lead story has to do with something that has crossed all of our minds given the headlines for the past couple of years. Should any irony be lost on how the title attempts to paint this phenomenon as an ‘ongoing’ problem?

And this isn’t ‘misleading’, the homeless have flocked to the nation’s more ‘temperate’ regions since the European invasion created homelessness! No irony at all should be lost on the fact that homelessness didn’t exist before the property owning Europeans arrived on the scene!

Phrased this way it makes the ‘colonization’ of the Western Hemisphere sound like a ‘bad thing’, which would lead to accusations of being ‘ungrateful’ for all of the technical advances that are currently threatening to make our species extinct…all so a few could be rich.

Now tell me again how ‘wonderful’ the advancement of civilization has been (and it has been ‘wonderful’…for a few.)

Naturally, the tendency to dismiss such accusations as ‘sour grapes’ sort of pales in the dim light of FUCKING EXTINCTION!

But I digress.

Having shifted the ‘Overton Window’ a few degrees back from its current ‘My way or the Highway’ setting you should now have the proper mindset to ask why situations like this even exist.

Los Angeles Confronts Homelessness Reputation

The article claims there are 50,000 homeless in the Los Angeles area, a metro district that covers 40 square miles.

The first question that pops into your head should be the ‘accuracy’ of that, er, ‘estimate’ considering how ‘inhospitable’ the climate is across the rest of the nation at this time of the year?

If we temper the fact that not everybody who loses their home ends up on the streets, and counter that with the fact that most ‘shelters’ turn people away because they’re full (and then some.) It leaves us to wonder if anyone has a grip, much less a solid understanding of the homeless situation that has plagued CAPITALIST SOCIETY since its inception!

Does the ‘solution’ to this crisis lie in building permanent housing for a fraction of the homeless. (The article proposes to build 12,000 units for 50,000 people.)

No irony should be lost on the fact that there is at least that much vacant housing stock in the greater LA area alone! (Naturally, killing two birds with one stone would never occur to pillagers of public funds, even in the ‘failed state’ of California.)

Perhaps we should count ourselves as fortunate that Halliburton hasn’t been contracted to solve this, er, ‘problem’…

They’d ‘house the homeless’ right quick and they’d do it on the cheap too…which is not to say cheap to the taxpayer. Nope, the taxpayer would still pay dearly but the voiceless homeless would ‘pay’ too!

Which brings us to tonight’s second offering where Mr. Krugman admonishes us to put things in their proper perspective…

Block Those Metaphors

Assuming you don’t want to read the article yourself, he is telling us that the CO media frequently uses ‘improper metaphors’ to describe our economic situation.

Like a system of commerce that is suffering from a dire shortage of paying customers can be ‘jumpstarted’. It ain’t gonna happen no matter how much ‘happy talk’ you use to describe the situation or how often you point to the meaningless Stock Market.

It will take much more than ‘jaw-boning’ to fix what ails this nation.

The ‘bad news’ is the only thing our self-professed ‘betters’ seem prepared to do is ‘talk’.

The road to recovery starts with the arrest and conviction of the criminals responsible for this disaster! (And these two-faced, self-important morons would be only too happy to prosecute the victims of their own ‘deceptive practices’.)

Herein lies the problem of letting the criminals run the Justice System.

Considering the eventual ‘consequences’ of allowing such a situation to continue, you don’t suppose we should do something about it, do you?

That ‘cliff’ I refer to in the opening? It is the leap that leads to ‘Banana Republicdom’.

Again, no irony should be lost on the fact that the last time humanity found itself in ‘bondage’ to its self-professed ‘betters’ it also happened without A.) a choice or B.) a fight.

People thought they were free until they weren’t.

Then the killing started.

Is history about to ‘repeat’ itself? Picky assholes say no but in the end the ‘difference’ between now and then will be like picking fly shit out of pepper.

Worse is this revelation that “Tax Cuts Are Theft”. [Hat tip: Some Assembly Required]

Understand good citizen that much of what is happening today is a direct violation of the longstanding ‘human social contract’.

Those who don’t abide by the rules will have their membership in society ‘revoked’.

A Simple Plan merely re-enforces long standing initiatives that have kept the peace over the centuries. This too is a key factor of any proposal for building a ‘sustainable’ society.

Those how say such a task is impossible want to cheat you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Penalty for Treason

Greetings good citizen,

I rage constantly about the ‘mis-management’ of our society by our capitalist overlords. Now that capitalism has achieved its ‘inevitable outcome’, all one has to do is google ‘homeless’ for an incredible eyeful of ‘fuck you, pay me!’

As the first snowflakes of the season fly outside my own window (fortunately too few to amount to anything.) many of you have loved ones who are too proud or to distant for you to help, much less save.

Just to give you an idea as to how ‘close to home’ this issue is for me, my own twin and her son are living out of her car up in New Hampshire and my $5 an hour job prevents me from doing anything to help her. Hell, I’m a half a step away from joining her!

Which is to say I have problems of my own to sort out, what little I have only goes so far.

Contrast this with yesterday’s rant about the Stock Markets; are you beginning to feel a little ‘ripped off’ yet, good citizen?

Thanks to our ‘captive government’ the New Deal has become a ‘Raw Deal’.

We are once again faced with having to ‘re-write’ the social contract and I think this time the ‘Anti-Exploitation’ law will be the centerpiece of any new arrangement.

The people will no longer tolerate being held hostage by criminals.

Not that there will be a ‘society’ to save. The criminals (mistakenly) think we will all perish without their boots on our necks.

Conversely, we are all eager to replace their boot with our own rope around THEIR necks!

Yes, good citizen, it must seem like I have a ‘thing’ for hanging but understand that the penalty for treason is death by hanging. Since ALL corporate types and their criminal legislators are ‘guilty’ of enriching themselves at society’s expense, their crime, quite naturally, is treason.

Did they off-shore jobs while laying off domestic workers? Treason!

Did they close domestic facilities only to import from foreign manufacturers? Treason!

Did they hide their profits in off-shore tax havens? Treason!

Selling your own people down the river for personal gain, Treason!

Repeated failure to accurately report abuses of public trust? Treason!

Failure to protect the public from the predations of the ‘criminal class’? Treason!

And the penalty for treason is death by hanging!

These are crimes against humanity good citizen, most of them ‘audacious’ beyond belief! The ‘failure’ here rests in a corrupt judiciary that needs to be made an example of.

Naturally, nothing is going to happen if these facts don’t get any traction and people remain ‘woe is me, there’s nothing to be done!’

The people ARE the Law and woe unto those who flaunt the domain of the people!

It STOPS the moment YOU decide to put a stop to it!

Until then,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner