Interesting New Year!

Greetings good citizen,

Well, here we are again, another year older and not a single wit wiser (not to mention that most of us are a good deal poorer…)

The NY Times tells us that Wall Street finished the year pretty much in the same place it started yet Mr. Williams of Shadow stats fame provides us with this indisputable data

No. 410: Special Commentary, GAAP-Based 2011 U.S. Financial Data 
December 28th, 2011

Actual 2011 Federal Deficit Topped $5.0 Trillion

U.S. Government Debt and Obligations Top $80 Trillion

Long-Term U.S. Insolvency/Hyperinflation Remain Virtual Certainty

As usual, the, er, ‘disturbing’ portion of the commentary has been served up last.

Yes good citizen, despite strident claims to the contrary, the very real threat of ‘Hyper-inflation’ continues to haunts us.

Libertarians like Mish Shedlock still point to ‘deflation’ as the devil haunting our tracks yet there has NEVER, (like not even once) been an instance where prices dropped so low that commerce ceased to function.

But that’s a ‘misleading’ description of deflation…

What these ‘serious people’ are warning us of is the ‘drying up’ of credit!

The thinking here is you simply won’t have the money to purchase staples AT ANY PRICE.

This decidedly twisted way of viewing things ignores the same factor ‘gold bugs’ routinely ignore.

The ONLY reason people pay the ‘asking price’ for anything is because it is cheaper than the price of simply taking it.

Right now, as in at this very second, the blunted and stubby ‘arm of the law’ is likely to reach out and slap you should you decide to take the more ‘economical route’ while shopping.

But in the not too distant future you will become the law…more disturbingly, EVERYBODY will become their own personal ‘law enforcement’ unit.

And there will be no, er, ‘arbiters’ of right and wrong…the winners of these disputes will be the quickest on the draw (as well as the most ruthless in ‘target selection’.)

Did I mention ‘Happy New Year’ yet?

I didn’t think so, despite it already being declared that 2011 was a ‘bad year’…

Funny we are only hearing this now, at the end of the first year where they stopped claiming there was an (imaginary) recovery underway!

Oh, and that it was not merely ‘billions’ pumped into the fraudulent banking system but trillions!

Conservatives were upset enough over the 700 billion that their last sitting president tossed at the banks. Where is their outrage at this figure mushrooming by a factor of 35?

More disturbingly, this was done by a conservative central bank head!

(But, naturally, that has nothing to do with anything…)

Which draws us back to our original topic…which was the inevitable collapse of the global financial system.

What? You didn’t get that out of Mr. Williams brief commentary?

Like my humble self, Mr. Williams is unable to provide us with the ‘exact date’ (although I’ll stick my neck out and predict it will happen before next summer! A ‘prediction’ that has absolutely nothing to so with the Mayan long count calendar.)

Those bold enough to click through the ‘adult content’ firewall should hold few illusions about how the world operates and who is in charge of it.

But I’m ‘projecting’ again, am I not?

What I admire the most about you, gentle reader, is that you are no fool!

Thanks for keeping it real!

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you an ‘interesting’ New Year…and it’s always interesting if you know what you’re looking at!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Kick in the head...

Greetings good citizen,

It is difficult to remember (and THEY sure as hell aren’t going to remind you) that once upon a time there was an ‘alternative’ to ‘working for the man’.

Understand, especially when you see articles like this one that they continue to ‘pretend’ you have a choice.

You do not, they have seen to that.

Unemployed workers have long suspected that the gaping holes on their résumés left them less attractive to employers. But with the country in the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, many had hoped employers would be more forgiving.

“I feel like I am being shunned by our entire society,” said Kelly Wiedemer, 45, an information technology operations analyst who said a recruiter had told her that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.

Legal experts say that the practice probably does not violate discrimination laws because unemployment is not a protected status, like age or race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a hearing, though, on whether discriminating against the jobless might be illegal because it disproportionately hurts older people and blacks.

Like the last two ‘economic downturns’ the US economy ‘shrank’ while the labor force grew. We are rapidly approaching the point where we have as many workers counted as ‘not in the workforce’ as those who are.

Before this latest, er, ‘downturn’ we were already very close to ‘equal’ (if we backed out the taxpayer supported public sector and the military.)

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’?

Couple that with ‘creative accounting’ you get a real pickle!

Sort of redefines ‘extend and pretend’.

While many corporate media articles point to the high employability of the over fifty crowd, most of us are experiencing exactly the opposite…we’ve come to call our condition ‘over fifty disease’ (which is, unfortunately, terminal) [pun intended.]

What better way to save on pension funds than to throw people who are in their prime contributing years out of the workforce?

While you are expected to believe this is a ‘coincidence’, it is not.

Sure, you’ll still draw a pension but it will be a fraction of what you would have gotten if you hadn’t been forced out due to the, er, ‘lousy economy’.

And whose fault is the lousy economy?

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’?

Which brings us full circle to the mystery of why the officers of EVERY US based multinational aren’t swinging from the flagpoles in front of their corporate headquarters?

Understand that ‘legal’ shares the same criterion, as ‘sane’ with whatever the ‘majority’ thinks is right being the determining factor.

How sad is it for the rest of us that a rather ‘warped’ minority currently gets to decide this critical social factor?

Which is to say, in truth, there isn’t a jury in the land that would convict you for meting out justice in such a manner. (As long as one of THEIR judges didn’t interfere.)

Which bring us to the other ‘unspoken complaint’ of how the wealthy ‘won’ the class war by buying the government…but that was just a battle, we have not yet begun to fight!

But they know that…which makes what’s coming that much more frightening because SOMEBODY has done some serious underestimating…

Which is also neither here nor there as far as the larger picture is concerned.

What is of paramount importance is the, er, wiping out of this treasonous element from our midst.

Those who would throw our entire civilization under the bus (primarily) to extend THEIR rule do not deserve to survive!

Not that we will get them all, some will run and the others will be ‘assimilated’ when the mechanisms that gave them power are dismantled.

It is somewhat bizarre to call what is happening now an ‘opportunity’ but when they ‘make their move’ the Internet will shut down and nobody knows when service will be restored.

That’s why I posted A Simple Plan online, so you could read it NOW and tell others about the ‘third way’, one that puts ALL OF THE PEOPLE in charge because the law stands alone!

This is a feature I seldom address because few of you understand its importance. We lost our freedom once ‘interpretting the law’ became a commodity that licensed practioners made their living off of, if you could afford a good lawyer, you could ‘buy’ yourself some justice.

This is NOT how it is supposed to be, the laws belong to us ALL, just as they apply to us all.

There is no such thing as a ‘special understanding’ of the law, that is a lie that has been used by cheats everywhere to rob us of our freedom AND justice!

That is why under A Simple Plan NOBODY will be permitted to make their living by ‘interpreting the law’ just as NOBODY will have the title ‘judge’, nobody is worthy of it.

YOU ARE THE LAW good citizen, the LAW IS whatever we all agree to…and I think I speak for the majority that most of us didn’t agree to what we are currently cursed with, a land where justice is for sale to the highest bidder!

If we are to enjoy the rule of law, we must set it free from those who have taken control of it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Wrong Conversation

Greetings good citizen,

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a fourth book, my second non-fiction piece.

As time runs out (and it surely will) it is unlikely to attract enough attention to alter the course we’re on but, by my way of thinking, it will only take a small cadre of ‘true believers’ to set society back on the right track.

Hell, look at the progress made by the original ‘Sons of Liberty’ and the difficulty the oligarchs have had ‘bastardizing’ their legacy, initially through complacency and then through deceit.

The key to this whole fuckaree lies in money and whether you realize it or not, money is still very much ‘open to interpretation’ (which SHOULD scare the fuck out of you!)

Isn’t the oligarch’s main argument centered on ‘taxation’?

They even revived a (clueless) ‘Tea Party’ to combat paying their ‘fair share’. How ironic is it that the nation’s wealthiest people are behind the so-called ‘tax revolt’?

The important part to keep in mind here good citizen is this IS NOT about money, it’s about CONTROL (because whosoever controls your money controls YOU!)

Which is to point out like so many others have tried (and failed because they too are clueless) we aren’t having the ‘right conversation’ in this society of ours.

We’ve become so preoccupied with the symptoms (thanks to the clueless) that we have ignored the disease!

Which is to point out the highly ‘artificial’ nature of the calamity that threatens to utterly destroy our civilization.

NONE of what is coming is real OR necessary.

The part that should piss everybody off is the fact that all of this is one giant rip-off!

I won’t tell you what I think we should do to the responsible parties (and there are a considerable number that share the blame.)

Worse, the assholes are doing this KNOWING that the loot won’t do them any good.

Like I have said numerous times before, this isn’t about money, it is about ‘stretching out’ their power beyond its ‘natural’ end (and the only way to do that is to kill off a shitload of the ‘surplus population’.)

And guess what good citizen? If you work for a paycheck, YOU are a member of the ‘surplus population’.

Think about it good citizen, the ‘wealthy’ need only a few ‘useful idiots’ to do the ‘grunt work’ of keeping the lights on and the planes in the air. A few hundred to work the ‘plantation’ that grows their food and the feed of their livestock.

Naturally, a few doctors and enough guards to keep the grunts at arms length and we’d have, er, ‘oligarch’s Utopia!’

Worse, it would probably be modeled on Plato’s vision of the ideal society, where there was a ‘place’ for everyone and everyone knew their place. (As frightening as that would be in reality.) Social mobility would be a total non-starter, if you were born a grunt, you’d die a grunt and like it.

Yeah, in oligarch Utopia, money would be unnecessary, as the currency of the realm would be life itself. If you did what you were told you got to live another day.

THAT good citizen is the ‘danger’ we face from letting socio-paths manage our affairs.

They don’t need us nearly as much as they fear us.

If given the opportunity, they’d kill off as many of us as they could and take their chances with the rest.

Which is a really bad plan because the survivors aren’t likely to be particularly ‘forgiving’.

But one quick look around is enough to tell you what terrible planners the oligarchs are.

While they (remarkably) get things done (they are very capable at delegating,) they leave the execution of their goals to those they delegate the task to (who are, unsurprisingly, much more competent than they are.)

And now we come full circle to ‘useful idiots’.

It’s sort of an interlocking thing, isn’t it? It is not possible to fix our badly broken socio-political system if we are unable to have a rational dialog on the subject.

Now think about why certain parties are VERY interested in preventing that dialog from taking place?

Because if we EVER began having an open discussion about the way things SHOULD BE the miscreants responsible for the current fiasco would be behind bars before the day was through!

There is one VERY IMPORTANT fact the, er, con men running this scam NEED you to remain ignorant of, they need you to remain ignorant of the fact that WE (meaning all of us) ARE THE LAW!

As long as they keep you convinced that you are powerless, you will remain powerless and their reckless disregard for the well-being of our species will continue unabated.

And you don’t want THAT, do you good citizen?

I didn’t think so.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Human Social Contract

Greetings good citizen,

Most ‘major’ posts are setting down their ‘predictions’ for next year. Odd duck that I am, I’m filtering those predictions through the lens of the ‘Human social contract’.

Here, Ilargi provides us with an admittedly purloined top ten list that doesn’t stand up too well under the social contract prism.

I am sure most of you are scratching your head, wondering just what the hell I’m yapping about. There is no such thing as a formal ‘human social contract’ that has the force of law anywhere on the fucking planet. The only thing that comes close are a few religious tenants the might get you ‘ex-communicated’ if your are found guilty of breaking them.

Worse is the general ‘who gives a fuck’ attitude most people have towards this gaping omission from our legal statutes.

It’s like that tune by ‘The Clash’ back in the 80’s titled ‘Know your rights’.

You had precisely 3 of them…and the canny musicians gave each in turn as well as how each could be negated by the elite on a whim…

Which is to point out the frightening obvious. When it comes to ‘rights’ you have precisely zero.

So why don’t you kill the next person who crosses your path on general principles?

Ah ha! Now we’re getting somewhere! We all ‘agree’ not to fuck with (murder, maim, molest) those who don’t threaten us with such undesirable outcomes first.

It’s the ‘I’m okay, You’re okay’ contract that makes civilization itself possible. If you can’t trust people any farther than you can throw them, you can’t form a working society.

Now we get down to the real ‘nitty gritty’, what does this society ‘owe’ you for not attacking it or endangering its safety?

Is the answer ‘nothing’?

There are many who operate on precisely this principle (Fuck’ em all and the dumb ones twice!)

Sadly, ‘society’ has come to protect those who, er, operate under the ‘buyer beware’ system. Mostly because those who would screw you into the woodwork for their own gain have made ‘justifiable homicide’ illegal.

This is an extreme violation of the basic human contract…and it was only voided by ‘promising’ that ‘justice’ would be done, IF the system were allowed to work as intended.

What do you suppose the big flaw in this system has become? The ‘average person’ has, for a very long time, been unable to afford to bring a wrongdoer to court to seek justice.

You see, the (fucking) capitalist turned ‘justice’ into a ‘for profit’ venture. This in turn made it profitable to break the law (as well as the social contract) because the average victim couldn’t afford to seek justice!

This would NOT happen if wrongdoers faced being killed out of hand for their crimes. (But this tends to leave a lot of unanswered questions, as dead people tell no tales.)

What am I saying? A legal system that prevents you from seeking justice is itself unjust.

Perhaps part of the problem lies with the question ‘What is Justice?’

But I digress considerably from the point I’m trying to make.

We need to back up a couple of steps and return to the question of what does civil society ‘owe’ you, the law abiding citizen?

Let’s start with the single most basic question, what’s the point of being a member of society if that membership DOES NOT include THE IMPLICIT PROMISE of participation in that society? If your participation in a society does not GUARANTEE that you will be allowed access to what you need to survive, then membership in that society is USELESS!

What’s the single scariest feature of Libertarianism? The central concept of Libertarianism is that NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING!

And that is flat wrong! If this were true, Libertarians wouldn’t exist, they’d all be DEAD!

We keep returning to the ‘message of the season’ which tells us in no uncertain terms that the ‘business of humanity is NOT BUSINESS, the business of humanity IS HUMANITY!

Yet, somehow, most don’t seem to be able to grasp this simple concept…mostly because it conflicts with their instinct to grab as much as they can, as fast as they can, and screw everybody else!

And THAT’S not nice!

For that matter, neither is this, (it is not the charts but the commentary) that make this link worth following, it’s a dose of Jesse at his finest!

The human social contract, good citizen, it’s the reason we don’t kill one another on sight!

Most of you haven’t thought about it much but we really DO need to have this ‘bargain’ we are all forced to comply with ‘etched in stone’ somewhere.

Otherwise, your right to basic human dignity will continue to be violated by anyone with deeper pockets than your own…

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

The 'Lawless' Land

Greetings good citizen,

Just when you think things can’t get any weirder…

I’ll temper that with “One day does not a ‘sell-off’ make.” Which is to point out that we’ve already witnessed how these people are capable of talking themselves into (or out of) just about anything.

We can only wonder when they will announce the pending ‘Alien Invasion’? (Which is no more incredible than all of that babble about invisible ‘green shoots’…)

Is it just me or does the whole situation seem to be getting out of hand?

Wall Street in Broad Sell-Off

Article Tools Sponsored By
By JACK HEALY
Published: June 15, 2009

Hopes for an economic and financial rebound have lifted Wall Street off its back this spring. But on Monday, investors took cover in a broad sell-off as they faced the prospect that any recovery could be slow and halting. [The article was posted around 2:00 in the PM so there are certain inaccuracies in it and some omissions, such as the ‘sell-off’ like the rally itself, was on ‘light volume’.]

In a sharp about-face, stocks slid, and the prices of oil, gold and other commodities sank in early trading. Government bonds regained some ground, and the dollar, which has been weakening against other currencies, climbed higher after Russia’s finance minister expressed confidence in the greenback. [By the end of the day, this little Russian ‘drama’ also performed an about face.]

Markets in Europe and Asia sold off, and the undertow swept through New York in early trading. [Markets around the world sold off today, which isn’t particularly unusual…]

Shortly before 1 p.m., the Dow Jones industrial average was down 196 points, or 2.2 percent, its largest daily slide since late May, and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 2.5 percent. The Nasdaq composite index was 2.6 percent lower. [All three indexes rallied somewhat by the close, something else that isn’t particularly unusual either.]

Unlike the wrenching declines of last year and this winter, big banks and financial companies were not leading the markets on Monday. Industrial companies and producers of basic materials like chemicals, steel and plastics fell the most as traders wondered whether the recovery was more distant than many had hoped. [Which tells us what good citizen? It tells us that the consumer is expected to remain ‘broke’ for the foreseeable future.]

A report on manufacturing conditions in New York State released Monday was weaker than economists had expected, blunting the optimism of those who hope the economy’s declines were reaching a definitive bottom. Conditions in the industry got worse at a faster pace in June than a month earlier, according to the Federal Reserve’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey, falling to negative 9.4 points as orders remained low and shipments fell.

Talk of reining in stimulus spending from global finance leaders also seemed to spook investors, raising concerns that the world economy was not yet ready to stand on its own feet. [We can only wonder what their first clue was…could it be the massive losses in ‘net worth’ the nation keeps racking up?]

During a weekend meeting in Italy, finance ministers of the Group of 8 developed nations discussed how to undo bank bailouts and big government deficits as economic conditions improved and inflation started to creep back in. For many investors, it was apparently too soon to broach the subject.

Some analysts say the markets are beginning to drift as investors face the question of: What next? The financial system is no longer veering into the abyss, but unemployment is still rising steadily, consumers are wary about spending and investors are unsure about how rising gasoline prices and higher mortgage rates could affect any incipient economic recovery. [What do you suppose the media’s first clue was to the investor’s ‘uncertainty’? Do you suppose it might have been the ‘low volume’ of trading through the three-month rally? The market has tacked on 35% of mostly ‘air’.]

“It’s remarkable — here we are, 40 percent off the lows and 40 percent off the highs, trapped in the middle,” the chief market strategist at LPL Financial, Jeffrey Kleintop, said. “The stock market’s trapped in a tug of war here.”

The Treasury Department also said that foreign demand for long-term financial assets fell in April. Net purchases by foreigners of stocks, notes and bonds obtained by foreigners was $11.2 billion in April, down from $55.4 billion in March.

Nobody can point to a genuine improvement in the economy yet these bozo’s have been buying for the past three months, fully aware that the global situation isn’t improving…

Makes you wonder how the ‘reality based community’ is handling all of this, are their teeny-tiny heads ready to explode?

Which is to point out something else I bitch about all the time but haven’t, to date, pointed at directly. We have re-defined the term ‘uncharted waters’ over the past couple of years.

Nothing is behaving ‘as it should’, which leaves us ‘where’ precisely?

Dare I point out the reason things are suddenly ‘nonsensical’ is directly related to the fact the ‘rules’ are being ‘re-written’? (Rules established for hundreds of years no longer apply.)

Would I be sticking my head in a noose if a went a step further and pointed out that none of our elected officials are involved in these ‘rule changes’, they are all being handled by ‘political appointees’?

Would you yawn and remark, ‘Same as it ever was’?

Let’s take a couple of more steps off the reservation and consider if the ‘rules’ of science ever ‘bend’ never mind break?

Does it get a bit more frightening if we substitute the word ‘rule’ for the word ‘law’?

In science, laws are not ‘flexible’…a given set of actions will produce the same outcome, every time. Well, guess what, if you screw with the laws of Nature (and by extension, society) you can create some seriously bad, um, unintended consequences.

We’ve seen this enough times to know that the failure to punish ‘unacceptable behavior’ provokes/encourages more unacceptable behavior. There’s a ‘natural rule’ that never changes if you suspect I’m comparing apples to oranges by comparing the rules of science to the rules of society.

I shouldn’t be ‘messing around’ with comparisons because the important issue here is not whether it’s ‘okay’ to bend the rules every once in a while, the real problem is letting the self-interested do such things ‘at will’.

One of the most frightening aspects of Orwell’s ‘1984’ is there were no ‘rules’, so it was impossible to know when you had overstepped the boundaries. If they said you were guilty of something, you had no way to defend yourself.

No rules AND the old edict of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ were still in play!

Which means not only was anything you did potentially illegal, but your ignorance of that fact didn’t save you from summary execution!

Bizarrely, many major corporate entities have ‘over-stepped’ the ‘normal’ rule of commerce…but they haven’t been (nor is it likely they will be) prosecuted.

Worse, in almost every case, the ‘normal’ penalty for their crime would have been ‘liquidation’.

Bankers that screwed millions of homeowners on their mortgages as well as hundreds of millions of mutual fund investors (401k account holders) got rescued, not put out of business as the laws currently read.

And nobody in our ‘rule making body’ has done a single thing in either direction…it’s as if we don’t have any laws to handle these situations even though we all know we’ve had them on the books for centuries.

Some idiot was on the radio today saying they were trying to put some new regulations in place before the ‘window closed’ on the crisis…

It’s been two fucking years and they haven’t done anything, worse, the proposed new legislation is next to worthless!

We are (allegedly) a ‘nation of laws’, until ‘entrenched wealth’ can actively circumvent the enforcement of the law, then we become a ‘closet aristocracy’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner