Accountable

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s ‘milestone’ for the financial markets appears to be more evidence of the criminal’s favorite pass time, fraud.

IF you think the economy has ‘recovered’ I’ve got some nice ‘drainage challenged’ real estate you’ll be interested in…

In the meantime, to consider stories such as this one anything more than ‘jaw-boning’ is a tragic error.

TOP NEWS
As Worries Ebb, Small Investors Propel Markets
By NATHANIEL POPPER

After millions of people all but abandoned the markets after the 2008 financial crisis, individual investors are pouring money into stock mutual funds for the first time in years.

Left to our imaginations is precisely who this ‘small investor’ is? He certainly isn’t the newly re-employed worker, stoking up for retirement. We already know 90% of ‘new jobs’ aren’t even full time and 80% of those pay minimum wage! So WHO is this ‘small investor’ they are referring to?

Could the answer be as unfortunate as Wall Street, in it’s usual fashion, is merely transferring funds from real estate hedging vehicles back to mutual funds, ‘ringing the cash register’ so to speak?

Because you don’t need me to tell you that this is not cause for rejoicing! This is sticky fingered Wall Street churning (and helping itself) to money that was already there.

So, small investor recovery? Hardly, small investor fleecing is more like it but Wall Street has this ‘truthiness’ problem where honesty only creates hard feelings.

Just because the ‘deterioration’ of the employment situation has slowed doesn’t mean it is ‘improving!’ (But that’s the message the meatheads would have you believe. That ‘less-worse = better!’)

It’s the same idea of when the economy contracts, that return to stability is sold by the pundits as ‘recovery’ when in fact after ‘leveling off’ for a brief period, it falls again and the talking heads pretend it’s a mystery.

But it’s not. There was a headline in the local rag the day before yesterday that one of the city’s largest employers is laying off half of its workforce AND sending the work to its plants in China and Mexico.

Still feeling ‘optimistic’, Bunky?

It seems every time they declare ‘the recovery is at hand’ I feel compelled to jump in and cry foul!

And it looks like they got me again.

The question is did they get you?

For every nineteen people who reject hogwash like this there is one who embraces it. Maybe not as quickly as they used to, they are starting to catch on to the fact people are laughing at them behind their backs…

Understand good citizen, the corporate owned media HAS TO report the economy is on the mend, even if it isn’t in order to quell social unrest and dampen ‘animosity’ towards ‘our betters’.

But as I am tiring of pointing out, no amount of jaw-boning is going to alter the facts on the ground.

Our economy (or that limp dishrag that passes for our economy) is broken and nobody has done a single thing to repair it…nobody!

So ‘recovery’, such as it is, amounts to a lesser rate of descent. We merely aren’t sinking as fast as we once were.

What do you suppose should happen to the employer who cut 70 out of 150 jobs and sent the work off-shore?

One of my other ‘hobby-horses’ has been the need to redefine what constitutes a ‘crime’.

Under our current goofy calculus, the owner can send the work wherever he pleases. He is seen as ‘owning’ the work.

But isn’t he also a citizen and doesn’t that citizenship carry a responsibility to the society he lives in?

He’s quick enough to demand justice (or the protection of society) when disaster strikes…so how come he feels no obligation to keep the society that protects him healthy and vibrant?

Because, until such feckless acts like the global race to the bottom are criminalized, our ‘global’ economy (and all but it best connected participants) is doomed.

Not the kind of world I want to raise my kids in and I’m sure many of you feel the same way.
This ‘competition’ baloney is all fake. Worse, it is the old canard of ‘I can teach a monkey to do your job’ writ large!

Which is to point out that the ‘quality problems’ that served as an excuse to cover early job exports have resurfaced in the cheaper there, indicating the problem didn’t lie with the craftsman but with management.

Which tells you what, good citizen?

It’s time to hold management accountable.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Re-think

Greetings good citizen,

As we start a New Year it might be helpful to re-think some of our beliefs (because the people pitching so-called ‘solutions’ have their heads up their asses!)

Thus is today’s offering a vivid example of precisely that phenomenon (I’ll explain after the excerpt.)

Robots Don't Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do

Worrying about automation distracts us from the real problem: misuse of corporate profits.

December 31, 2012 |

Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

This disconnect between profits and prosperity began in the 1980s with permanent plant closings that cost production workers their middle-class jobs. It increased in the 1990s as major US corporations scrapped the career-with-one-company norm that had prevailed for salaried employees, and it became common even for college-educated people with a couple of decades of work experience to find themselves on the wrong end of the pink slip. Then in the 2000s, as US corporations accelerated the globalization of production activities, the jobs of all members of the US labor force, no matter what their level of educational attainment, became vulnerable to competition from qualified people in lower wage areas of the world.

The article ‘essentially’ asserts the truth, although it is a stretch indeed to think how automation ‘creates’ jobs (it always ends in ‘net’ job destruction, otherwise it wouldn’t be doable.)

Um, again, the sights are set a bit too low as far as pointing to the true culprits here as well. The front line supervisors do what they’re told, just as unit managers are merely glorified ‘yes men’.

You need to venture into the boardroom and then follow the link to Wall Street, that’s where these irresponsible marching orders originate.

It’s also where the legislation that permits such foolishness starts.

Want to find out who destroyed the US economy…look at who was behind NAFTA…and its primary champion, Ronald Reagan.

Funny how much of what is wrong with today can be traced back to the Reagan Revolution…and the ‘rise of the >One Percent.’

More disturbing are the commercials trying to sucker you into going back to school for a job that most likely doesn’t exist.

Have you seen the college ad that speculates we could ad 20 million new jobs if we only ‘prepared’ for them?

Sort of short for the fucking 230 million working aged people who need work, isn’t it?

This is what I mean, we need to strengthen our grip on ‘reality’ before we become reality’s ‘road kill’.

I’m pretty sure good citizen that the only place on the whole net that you will find pointing to this factor is right here…everyone else either clueless and doesn’t care or assumes you already know and have come to terms with it.

Speaking of the origination of irresponsible concepts we could ‘follow the money’ into the Ivory Towers of Academia to learn who is behind the Randite/Friedman school of economic idiocy.

Rumor has it ‘twas the renowned monopolist Rockefeller…funny (and not necessarily ‘humorous’) the things you can do with ‘money’…

Which only strengthens my case against the current laws governing the uses of money today.

In a ‘more equitable’ world assholes like Rockefeller would be unable to ‘buy legitimacy’ for his pet prejudices.

In a more equitable world you wouldn’t be able to buy the truth either…

But, naturally, I digress…
If I were to share one thing with you good citizen it would be the ‘awareness’ that those who lord over us as our ‘betters’ stopped caring about the welfare of society long ago and focus only on what is good, to and for, THEM.

The ‘fatal myopia’ that I have warned of repeatedly has become so widespread and rampant as to become uncontrollable.

Small comfort that will be when the preppers go on the offensive after squandering their store bought existence…

Again, money gone horribly wrong (but you won’t hear that from Faux News.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dream On!

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while the ‘Libertarian Book Review’ stumbles upon a worthwhile article usually defined by the articles willingness not to kick capitalism in the chops too hard. [Libbies LOVE capitalism!]

I can only assume they have to run a couple of articles like this one to throw off the stench of rabid conservatism that lies just beneath their faux liberal sympathies.

Worse, they hate liberals so much they don’t use the term! The call themselves 'progressives' instead...(like the Nazis.)

But that’s another matter to be dealt with later. On with the article!:

5 Ways Most Americans Are Blind to How Their Country Is Stacked for the Wealthy

1. Americans believe that the poorest 40 percent own about 10% of the wealth.

Most people greatly underestimate the level of inequality in our country, guessing that the poorest 40 percent own about 10% of the wealth, when in reality they own much less than 1% of the wealth. Out of every dollar, they own a third of a penny.

2. Entitlements are the problem.

No, they're not. The evidence is overwhelming. Social Security is a popular and well-run program. As summarized by Bernie Sanders, "Social Security, which is funded by the payroll tax, has not contributed one nickel to the deficit, and according to its trustees, can pay 100 percent of all benefits owed to every eligible American for the next 21 years." Dean Baker calls it "perhaps the greatest success story of any program in US history." [Truth be told, good citizen, if it weren’t for ‘government handouts’ we WOULDN’T HAVE AN ECONOMY!]

3. Welfare benefits are a drag on the economy.

Critics bemoan the amounts of aid being lavished on lower-income Americans, making dubious claims about thousands of dollars going to every poor family. But despite an ever-growing need for jobs and basic living necessities, federal spending on poverty programs is a small part of the budget, and it's been that way for almost 50 years, increasing from 0.8 percent of GDP in 1962 to 1.2 percent of GDP in 2007. [SEE ABOVE: WELFARE BENEFITS ARE THE ECONOMY!]

4. The American Dream is still alive, if you just work hard enough.

The Horatio Alger tale has been a popular one for conservatives, but the OECD, the Economic Policy Institute and the National Journal all came to the same conclusion: the future earnings of a child in the U.S. is closely correlated to the earnings of his or her parents. This lack of mobility is more prevalent in the U.S. than in almost all other OECD countries. [George Carlin, may he rest in piece, nailed this one, “you have to be dreaming to believe in the American Dream!”]

5. Prison puts away the bad guys.

Despite a falling violent crime rate in the U.S., there are now, as noted by Adam Gopnik, "more people under 'correctional supervision' in America -- more than six million -- than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

Um, good last point but you know that premise is faulty because I saw a politician on the TV just last night (and he wasn’t wearing prison orange!)

Like I said, the writer makes a good point (and the only reason the LBR ran it is because he did everything but point at the ‘cause’ of all of these woes…capitalism and it’s mismanagement of money/resources!)

Scarier still all of a sudden the LBR is brimming with ads for ‘doomsday preparations’.

When 12/21/12 comes and goes (as most of us expect it will) we can only wonder what will be the next ‘doomsday trigger’ that will jump out of the woodwork.

Another ‘chicken little’ perhaps? (killer asteroids are everywhere!)

Worse, this doomsday bullshit is becoming BIG business…fostered, once again, by predatory capitalism!

Ironically, it’s bullet point number 4 that most of us have become ‘disenchanted’ with…NOBODY believes the claim that we all have a ‘million dollars in each arm, all we have to do is work it out!’

It doesn’t take long even for the morons among us to work out that you will NEVER get ‘rich’ working for somebody else!

How many of you DIDN’T know that?

Good, stupid people aren’t welcome here.

Everybody knows but nobody does anything about the stranglehold the criminal wealthy have on the resources we all need to live…until now.

Life itself has forced our hand good citizen. Will we just stand there while the selfish rich kill our children?

I think not…but I could be proven wrong, TV and movies have you all shaking in your socks because the One Percent ‘know all and see all’…their ninja assassins are prepared to strike down anyone who challenges their rule.

The hapless objector will never see it coming nor will his/her murderer ever see ‘justice’…(because ’right & wrong’ are the sole domain of the One Percent.)

Like the Israelis, no one has the authority to tell them they’re wrong…not even ‘spirit on the sky’, because they are his ‘chosen people’…thus are they free to ‘murder at will’ AND claim it is ‘divine vengeance!’

I don’t know about you but it seems to me we got a little problem here…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

We're Saved! ('scroomed' is more like it)

Greetings good citizen,

In a ‘too good to pass up’ headline, I jumped on an article titled ‘Romney ‘vows’ to deliver country from economic travails.’

He, like all conservo-whackos, has been lying his ass off from the get go. So imagine my surprise when I clicked through (wasting one of my ten shots) to find not A SINGLE PROPOSAL, CONCRETE OR OTHERWISE to support this stupendous claim.

He’s gonna ‘save’ us but it will be via fucking magic!

But you too can check for yourself and see if I missed or omitted anything.

You’ll notice that I didn’t ‘excerpt’ any of the long-winded article that lavishes praise upon an unworthy presidential wannabe.

Which only serves as proof where the corporate owned media is coming from.

More, er, ‘curious’ is the fact that Clint Eastwood, er, ‘performed’ at the RNC doing an ‘empty chair act’ where he took the (unchallenged) incumbent to task for all of his unfulfilled campaign promises…(including the ones he didn’t make in typical conservo-whacko style.)

The conservo-whackos would really like to blame the economy on Obama but we all know it was his predecessor’s fault.

And the party of his predecessor stonewalled every attempt to rein in Wall Street…so that’s why we should all go out and vote for Bain Capital this November.

American employers NEED to be ‘freed’ from oppressive government regulation and the ceaseless demands US workers.

What part of ‘If you can’t live on what I pay you, it’s not my problem’ don’t they get?

But increasingly we are seeing that the ‘problems’ employers choose to ignore (underpaid employees) have a way of becoming the government’s headache.

All because of the fake ‘competitiveness meme’.

One of these days the ‘high priests of freemarkets’ are gonna swing for their false teachings!

It ain’t about ‘competition’. It’s the same as it’s always been; it’s about ‘market share’ and ‘locking the doors’.

What few people remember (because our schools don’t go there) is that back in the ‘bad old days’ you couldn’t buy or sell (anything) without the King’s express permission.

This is a situation the well connected turned to their advantage at once!

You didn’t have to compete, you didn’t even have to worry about things like product quality if you could control who was granted ‘the king’s permission’.

Now a days things have changed…a little. The thieves on Wall Street can force you to sell your company to your ‘competitor’ through their control of YOUR share price!

Works very much like the ancient ‘permission of the king’ bullshit did.

Which also lies behind the ‘return of monarchy meme’ I often float on these posts.

If you know what you’re looking at you can almost see our modern ‘Royals’ peeking out from behind their ‘freemarket’ thrones. They are just busting for the day when we will all be forced to kneel before their greatness.

I’d die first…(and pinhead will be more than happy to accommodate me or anyone else who feels likewise.)

[Although I am not above kneeling if it helps to steady my aim…I’d rather kneel than miss!]

You can see an ‘infamous quote’ in the making right there…‘If I kneel, it will be to steady my gun/aim!’

It is far better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, good citizen.

And that old saying comes directly from what’s headed in our direction in the not too distant future.

I’d even opine that the royals are already in their places, having used capitalism’s predatory nature to carve out new ‘empires’ for themselves.

What they have yet to do is re-establish their thrones (and in the process, command the respect their position demands.)

Somehow their crimes against humanity are viewed as ‘great accomplishments’ among their peers…

The thing you need to keep in mind is YOU are NOT among their ‘peers’.

That noted, having voluntarily exempted themselves from penalties of civil society, they will NOT be afforded any of the benefits when they are brought to justice.

How unfortunate is it that they are putting all of their hopes in a criminal justice system that they control…but won’t when the executioner comes for them?

Simply put good citizen, you can’t take the ‘good’ parts of civilization and ignore the bits that interfere with your running roughshod over your brothers and sister.

When you do that, society and civilization itself dies.

If we are not ‘good citizens’ then we are bad ones.

They’ve already made their choice, how about you?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Busted!

Greetings good citizen,

Um, I will once again let the corporate owned media provide their decidedly twisted version of what’s going on before sharing what it ‘looks like’ to me:

[10:30 AM EST]

Stocks Decline Anew on European Worries
By REUTERS 34 minutes ago

Wall Street opened lower despite improving labor market data, as poor demand at Wednesday’s Spanish bond sale heightened fears about funding difficulties for weaker euro zone countries.

Now, maybe what I’m seeing is ‘anticipation’ but markets around the world once again ‘spiked’ sharply higher right around the same time the NYSE opened…and, mind you the Dow was still 20 points in the red as of this report.

I also provided the ‘time reference’ because the numbers will (naturally) differ by the time you read them.

And, as usual, the ‘cheerleaders' continue to shout ‘recovery’ when such an event is, er, 'highly improbable' (at least in the conventional sense.)

But isn’t this morning’s offering a classic example of public servants behaving badly?

"We certainly have no problem with individuals coming to Las Vegas spending their own money...however this is a case where you have government officials off the backs of other people enjoying a lavish party," said Geoffrey Lawrence, deputy policy director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank in Las Vegas.

Lawrence said he hopes consumers and government critics don't associate irresponsible spending with Las Vegas. That's what happened in 2009 after Obama said corporations shouldn't use federal bailout money on luxury trips to Las Vegas.

A year later, Obama said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college." Convention business dropped after his remarks and city officials blamed Obama. Later that year, the GSA employees were attending $30,000-hotel room parties in suites outfitted with multiple wet bars.

"There will be some negative implication that you shouldn't come to Vegas ... but that's just foolishness," said Phil Ruffin, who owns the Treasure Island hotel-casino on the Strip. "They didn't need to spend that foolishly."

Ruffin added: "I'm just sorry they didn't spend it here. We could have used the business."

Mumbled the panhandler on the street…

We need to put this situation into ‘context’ (if we take it as a given that there are NO DEMOCRATS anymore, just people who are ‘duped’ into thinking there are.) It is common knowledge that all (or at least most) of the ‘responsible’ civil servants in Washington were ‘driven out’ during the Reagan Revolution and replaced with ‘loyal conservatives!’

People who are still there today being, in many cases, hired by conservative appointees.

We just need to establish WHY these civil servants would behave so badly, especially this close to a presidential election that the Republicans are LOSING despite their other candidate (Obama) not even actively running.

You may notice the (decidedly conservative) USA TODAY, the news source for Mail.com’s homepage makes repeated reference to Obama’s, er, ‘negative comments’ regarding the nation’s former gambling Mecca.

Now the head of the GSA apparently resigned over this and two of his top deputies were, er, ‘terminated’.

EXCEPT, the person who gets to pick their replacements is…what?

A fucking conservative! (Worse, he’s proud of it!)

Like I said many times before, the ‘D’ after his name is meaningless, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and swims like a duck, it’s a duck, regardless of what it pretends to be!

And Bubba is a conservative who has consistently given his ‘fellow conservatives’ a pass instead of taking them out to the woodshed, like they deserve.

Which is to opine that this November’s elections, should they occur, will be yet another ‘watermark’ election, never in the history of this nation has an incumbent so UNPOPULAR secured re-election.

It remains to be seen if things will get that far…there is still an ‘oil crisis’ and a debt ceiling/government shutdown to contend with BEFORE November.

BUT, the criminals who got Bubba elected have a vested interest in insuring that he gets a second term.

They think that by then there won’t be enough evidence left to convict them.

This, sadly, assumes that there will even be a trial…which is highly unlikely under ANY circumstances.

Who knows what the future holds? I certainly don’t…but the ‘signs’ sure as hell don’t look very promising if we keep heading down this one-way, dead end street (especially if they keep resulting in stories like today’s offering…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

>One Percent

Greetings good citizen,

You may recall that in yesterday’s post I noted the Dow’s ‘nosedive’ towards negative territory, but it must have been an, er, ‘aberration’ because the Dow closed up for the week!

Which brings us full circle to the topic du juor of yesterday’s piece, the lying lies of the corporate owned media.

Is there ANY REASON IN THE WORLD for stocks to add 144 points yesterday?

Let’s see what Mr. Williams has to say on the subject

No. 426: Economic Update: Mired in A Protracted Downturn
Subscription required March 30th, 2012

• GNP Growth at 1.8% versus 3.0% GDP
• Real Durable Goods Orders 10% Below Levels Seen in 2000
• Shenanigans in Industrial Production Benchmark Masked Small Downside Revisions to Recent Activity
• Recession Deeper than Previously Estimated

Not only do I find no, er, ‘positive’ news in Mr. Williams analysis, he too has difficulty reconciling the constantly revised data.

And make no mistake about it, the whole so-called recovery has been ‘revised away’ right after it is reported!

Happy numbers to show the folks at home followed a month or so later by the more, er, ‘disappointing’ data as the headline numbers are ‘very quietly’ revised.

Which is to opine, good citizen…and again I will re-iterate, it is just my OPINION that IF WE KNEW how bad things REALLY WERE, we’d be panicking right now!

Worse, good citizen, the reason things aren’t improving is because our so-called ‘elected officials’ aren’t doing their jobs.

At some point in the not too distant future, they really are going to be forced to ‘let the bodies hit the floor’, a shake out where we find out who has been ‘swimming naked’ all of this time.

The danger here is letting the bodies hit the floor WITHOUT, er, ‘repairing’ the ‘economic environment’ first.

Under the current ‘non-existent’ enforcement of business regulation, we could wake up facing a ‘monopolized’ world…one where they will tell us how much they want for their stuff and if you can’t afford it, tough!

There is (nor will there be) any alternative. You buy this (from me) or you don’t get the sumbitch!

The infamous ‘they’ will be dealing from a ‘position of strength’ (already having all of the money they will ever need) they don’t need to ‘talk price’, they don’t even ‘need’ your business.

It’s YOU that will be forced to lick their boots and choose between staying warm and staying nourished (if that is even possible with all the fillers and additives they use to ‘boost profitability’.)

If you’re not ‘afraid’ good citizen, you should be…and you shouldn’t need me to point this out to you.

Here’s the thing good citizen.

We are all aware that > One Percent controls more than fifty percent of ALL OF the wealth. The next 40% is controlled by the top 10%…the remaining 10% of the world’s wealth is divided among the bottom 90%.

What you NEED TO BE AWARE OF is civilization, like money, is a ‘legal construct’ we AGREE TO abide by…as long as it is TO OUR ADVANTAGE to do so.

Increasingly, it is being seen by more and more people as NOT being to their advantage to, er, ‘obey’ the civilization agreement.

This will prove out during this summer’s ‘energy riots’.

Where the price of energy will skyrocket, thanks to ‘political wrangling’ between Washington and the Middle East, such as today’s announcement that the president has determined that there is ‘enough oil’ to place sanctions on Iran.

Which is being done to ‘appease’ AIPAC…

But I digress…

WHEN the public starts to despair over the price of heating their home in a (still) broken economy and keeping food on the table. (Because a gallon of home heating fuel cost more than $6.) people, a vast majority of them, will be unable to afford to go to their part-time, minimum wage jobs, keep the lights and the furnace running AND put food on the table.

And the politicians of this country will just shrug and say, “there’s nothing I can do about it! Go ahead and elect somebody else, they won’t be able to fix it either because we ALL take our ‘orders’ from the > One Percent.”

And that’s the trouble we’re all facing good citizen, a ‘ruined economy’ thanks to the selfish few that we ‘failed’ the regulate effectively.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shit that makes you go 'Hmmn'...

Greetings good citizen,

Once again our ‘investors’ seem to be stricken with ‘irrational exuberance’. The Dow is up over 100 points on news that the number of ‘new claims’ for unemployment dropped for the fifth week running.

So the logic goes, fewer lay-offs means the sky high unemployment rate will drop…the fact that people have been unemployed for almost two years and are finally exhausting their claims has nothing to do with this tragic misinterpretation of the data.

Using this same logic, what would the number of new claims dropping under 10,000 tell us? Nothing because it is impossible? (under the current system) or that there’s no way to know because social cohesion would collapse long before that happens…

Naturally it is not the first time the markets have made a big deal out of a largely meaningless statistic.

There is absolutely NO correlation between fewer lay-offs and more jobs.

None!

So why do some of the smartest people the world has ever known keep feeding us bullshit?

The housing market can best be summed up in one (albeit compound) word, over-built, yet we continue to get THIS tripe!

The consistent decline indicates that companies are laying off fewer workers and that hiring is picking up. When applications drop consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.

In January, the economy added a net 243,000 jobs, the most in nine months. And the unemployment rate dropped for the fifth-straight month, to 8.3 percent. The economy has added an average of 201,000 jobs a month for the last three months. [snip]

Construction began work on 508,000 single-family homes last month, a 1 percent drop from December and the first decline in four months. A big rise in volatile apartment construction helped offset the decline in single-family homes.

Still, the number of December single-family homes was revised up strongly to show builders started 513,000 homes, a 12 percent gain from November.

Once again we are compelled to ask ourselves are they STUPID or do they simply think we are?

It’s one of the two good citizen and I highly doubt they think it's them, so…

This brings us where, good citizen?

It brings us right back to a place you must be getting awfully sick of returning to.

It returns us to the ‘what are you gonna do about it’ spot, doesn’t it?

Well, what are you gonna do about it? Same thing you always do, I suppose, nuthin’

It’s just another ‘stick in your craw…' well, don’t look now boys and girls but it’s starting to look like a fucking forest in there!

You’d better do something about it quick or ‘somebody’ is gonna start tossing matches around in there!

Don’t want your craw catching on fire now, do ya?

If it was ‘generally right’ or only ‘kind of optimistic’, you could afford to let it slide but these are whoppers that downright dare you to call ‘em on it…and you don’t.

Every week it’s the same bullshit.

I guess the old conservative formula makes it necessary, ‘keep repeating until true’

The worrisome part here good citizen is IF they keep telling us the economy is improving (when we know for a fact it is not) then most of us won’t be prepared when it collapses.

Now I ask you good citizen, who ‘wins’ in that situation?

It sure as hell won’t be YOU!

WHEN the economy collapses a LOT of shit is going to be ‘abandoned in place’

Worse, the already corrupt beyond belief justice is ALREADY foreclosing on properties the owners HAVEN’T defaulted on!

The (guess who?) corporate owned media is treating this as a minor ‘boo-boo’, the sort of ‘mistake’ that could happen to anybody but there have been dozens of incidents!

Who is going to protect YOUR rights when the ‘new sheriff in town’ is on Blackwater’s payroll?

Well, you can already see where this is headed, it’s headed towards the big show-down out in the parking lot.

The one where the tough will be sorted out from the wannabes and the name of the game is, once again, winner take all (yeah, that includes yours!)

If you’ve got a problem with this arrangement, one of jug-head’s boys will give you a bullet in the vitals…and the problem goes away!

There’s only one word to describe what’s coming and that word is ‘grim’.

If you intend to come out of this with your hyde, you have to be the grimmest bastard on the face of the planet…

Now,like that cutesy cough drop commercial, let me see you ‘war face’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Horse-pucky!

Greetings good citizen,

There must be something to Ilargi’s latest post where he warns of “The report that will Blow up the Euro-zone.”

Because this morning markets around the world are bleeding from the eye sockets (again)

But the article outlining today’s troubled markets seems to be suffering from schizophrenia:

Wall Street stock indexes opened weakly Monday ahead of a European Union summit as Greece and Germany sparred over budget measures for Athens. [I guess you could call down a 120 ‘weakly’; although eighty years ago this would have been cause to jump out of your 7th story window!]

E.U. leaders were to sign off on a permanent rescue fund for the euro zone and to agree on a balanced budget rule in national legislation. But traders sensed some hesitation.

"Resolution for Greece is now up in the air, and that's causing some concern," said Alan Lancz, president of investment advisory firm Alan B. Lancz & Associates Inc. in Toledo, Ohio. "We could give up the gains we've seen so far this month if there ends up being no progress." [snip (the blogosphere has warned repeatedly that the ‘cure’ for Grecian situation wasn’t large enough, their eviscerated economy simply can‘t afford to pay back what it supposedly owes, it’s as ‘simple’ as that!) this is also where the article dives across the median into the realm of ‘happy talk!]

Consumer spending in the United States was flat in December as households took advantage of the largest rise in income in nine months [a fucking half a percent!] to boost their savings, setting the tone for a slowdown in demand early in 2012. [That’s not the song they were singing in December! Last month they were proclaiming ‘the consumer is back!’, like Christmas had nothing to do with it, idiots!]

Wall Street ended little changed on Friday as investors saw dips in the market as an opportunity to buy into what has been a strong first month of 2012.

Omitted from this report was the additional disclaimer that the Doctors think the insanity may be ‘temporary’…(but what do they know?)

Current market conditions make insanity a ‘prerequisite’ for being an ‘investor’…

Which really doesn’t tell us anything since we long ago determined that the stock markets are and have been, totally divorced from reality.

Which brings us to another disturbing phenomenon…that bar that keeps getting elevated, the bar of ‘shock and awe’.

Markets dropped 700 points (when TARP didn’t go the way they wanted it to) only to recover, ‘within a few hours’.

With the bar ‘set’ at 700, where would they have to go to ‘shock’ the average (which is to say clueless) consumer?

We’d probably say double that would shock most of the clueless (although a repeat of the 700 point drop would likely send most into mental ‘vapor-lock’ [I’m trying to think but nothing happens!] over the ‘real world implications’ of such a dramatic event. (Even though the market is 11,000 points ‘over valued’ and the current 12,000 [+] point valuation is more a reflection of the weakness of our currency than of the strength of our economy!)

Which is why all of this is so disturbing, good citizen. They yank our chains mightily and we still fail to recognize that the ‘joke’ is on us!

Oh how they must howl with laughter over our collective stupidity!

Still, it is a phyrric victory at best…who wants to spend their entire life surrounded by clueless dolts?

Yet this doesn’t stop them from regularly playing the rest of us for stooges!

Even after it stops being, er, ‘amusing‘.

Which is to point out how cathartic calling bullshit on someone can be! If you want to stop the relentless barrage of horse-pucky our politicians keep flinging it’s as simple as crying bull shit when you hear it!

Don’t be shy, speak up! If the bull-shitter (and your typical winger) CAN’T back up what they claim, your charge of Bull Shit stands! (And we ALL win for a change!)

If enough of us stand up to the few (who must privately laugh themselves silly over their claiming the mantle of ‘seriousness’ for themselves) then, maybe, we can turn this disaster around!

He who claims to ‘never joke’, IS a joke! Which is to call them what they are, ‘jokers’.

What the one percenters must find absolutely hilarious is how the rising market (which pays off their politicians) is being touted as an indicator of the ‘return of prosperity’ (albeit, a prosperity no one can see) when the only ones getting fat are our sell-out politicians!

Are these assholes the ‘Masters of Smoke and Mirrors’ or are the rest of us simply ‘too polite’ to shut these grifters down?

Few are ‘fooled’, our standard of living is NOT reflected in the lofty stock market, which has become cause for ‘civil unrest’.

Criminals are a curse on every society but criminals at the helm of a society are intolerable!

And I’d be doing you all a grave disservice if I didn’t point out that this isn’t the first time our society suffered from a rotten and corrupt head.

What you should all marvel over is how rapidly it returned, only fifty years after it ‘pretended’ to go to sleep…although the guilty party themselves reckon it was only forty years…

Which is to say this time ‘we won’t be fooled again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Creative Accounting...

Greetings good citizen,

As usual markets are tanking now that it has become apparent the proposed ‘rescue plan’ for the Euro Zone is a day late and a dollar short…

But that didn’t stop the Dow from breaching 12,000 again!

Think about the abysmal state of the economy, good citizen and ask yourself by what ‘logic’ could the Dow, er, ‘Financials’ be over 12,000 points?

Perhaps we could reflect on how pathetic it is the only remaining industry in the US today IS the financial sector.

As I have opined repeatedly, if not for creative accounting we’d be bankrupt.

Here, Mr. Williams shares his analysis of the latest (captive) government figures:

No. 396: 3rd-Quarter GDP, October Confidence, September Durables Orders and Home Sales October 27th, 2011

Consumer Confidence and Sentiment Sink to Levels Never Seen Outside of the Worst Recessions

No Economic Recovery Is in Place or in the Works

Third-Quarter GDP Gain Not Statistically Meaningful

GDP Nonsense:  Consumption Surged 1.7% While Disposable Income Collapsed 1.7%?

Consumption up, income down…somewhat ‘counter-intuitive’ but Mr. Panzer supplies us with this informative graph

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the ceaseless off-shoring of our jobs has been creating an economic desert so large that the ‘safety net’ is collapsing under its own weight.

When government ‘transfer payments’ make up 25% of GDP, you got problems.

Mind you, this problem is, in the short term, ‘self-correcting’.

Unfortunately, this situation WILL NOT take care of itself, at least not in a good way.

A massive rally in US equities today led by financials as there was relief that Europe will be bailing out the sovereign debt of some of their members, and most importantly of all, the large European and US banks.

The US GDP came in well. Intraday commentary was provided, and it was a hollow victory as household income continued to decline.

I think the stock rally may have more to go, but it might take QE3 to take it much higher into year end. And if we do get QE3, we then go into bubble watch as financial assets inflate at the expense of the real economy.

This is what happens when one applies monetary stimulus to a broken economy.

It is no surprise that Jesse agrees with the sentiment that the stock markets are, er, ‘divorced from reality’.

Don’t you wish you could ignore reality too? (And get rich doing it!)

Ah, to be an investor in capitalist utopia, especially these days where if you make a bad bet, the public is right there to ‘bail YOU out!’

It must be frightening to suddenly become aware that you’ve been played for a chump all of these years. The only thing worse is suddenly waking up from the ‘conservative dream’
Where a non-existent ’benevolent’ corporation rewards you handsomely for spending your entire life as their vassal…

Where reality is if you don’t own the company, you’ve been pitched over the side long before you can collect your (full) pension.

And when you DO go to ‘draw your reward’ you find the fund didn’t perform as well as, er, ‘advertised/anticipated’, so now you are faced with managing on a whole lot less than you originally expected.

Who knew EVERYBODY would invest in Enron?

That’s the problem with ‘creative accounting’. You’re assured that everything is all right until you go to collect, then all of a sudden all you have is a pocket full of IOU’s!

And there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it…

(Which is why I advocate stringing the bastards up now, Before they make us track them to the ends of the earth!)

A ‘promise’ is a powerful thing…it is what keeps cops on the job and teachers in the classroom.

It even keeps you returning to your worthless job, day after day, to catch a fresh bucket of shit to take home with you. (Because that’s how your boss thinks it needs to be…which is WHY he’s the boss and you’re not!)

Well good citizen, what do you do when that promise is broken?

They have NO INTENTION of providing you with even a fraction of all of the things you were promised in exchange for busting your ass every day of your adult life.

How does that make you feel?

Now ask yourself how long you’re gonna let them play you for a chump?

There IS a better way!

A Simple Plan, an idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The beat goes on...

Greetings good citizen,

You don’t need me to tell you (again) that the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace. The disturbing part of this process is what those responsible for this disaster hope to gain?

Have they (like suicide bombers) been promised 72 virgins upon the successful completion of their, er, ‘mission’?

As it turns out we can only wonder what the idiot politicians have been offered to sell their nation’s future to the private sector?

Economists also expressed concern that the austerity program demanded by European and international lenders could end up pushing the Greek economy into a deeper slump, making its debt even harder to pay back. More broadly, critics said they doubted that Europe had done more than postpone a day of reckoning for the euro, with Ireland, Portugal and Spain, as well as Greece, all struggling with slow or negative growth and rising debts.

The passage of the measures, a difficult and possibly debilitating feat for a Socialist Party elected on a social welfare platform, ensures that Greece’s foreign lenders will unlock the next installment of $17 billion in aid that the country needs to meet its debt obligations through August. But analysts in Athens predicted that the existing government might not last much longer than that, suggesting that political and financial uncertainty could continue for some time.

“It’s a giant step in terms of conception,” said Theodore Couloumbis, a vice president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, in Athens. “But it’s a baby step in terms of realization or implementation.”

Greece CANNOT pay which leads to the fact it WILL NOT pay, this circle jerk is being provided to prove that capitalism is not broken, that ‘extend and pretend’ will make it all work out in the end…

At least until the killing starts.

And from the looks of the picture that accompanies the article it’s not far off.

In keeping with yesterday’s established fact, (that the media IS THE PROBLEM), what do you suppose they were thinking when they cooked up this load of mularky?

Because we have two choices here good citizen, this article is either total bullshit OR the STUPID Brigade is much larger than originally suspected.

(Rush Limbaugh’s regular listeners only constitute a tiny percentage of the national audience, well in line with ‘the normal distribution’ of stupid throughout a society.)

Nearly nine in 10 Americans say homeownership is an important part of the American dream, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And they are keen on making sure it stays that way, for themselves and everyone else.

Support for helping people in financial distress over housing is higher than support for helping those without a job for many months.

Forty-five percent of the respondents say the government should be doing more to improve the housing market, while 16 percent say it should be doing less. On the politically contentious issue of direct financial assistance to those having trouble paying their mortgages, slightly more than half of those polled, 53 percent, say the government should help. And almost no one favors discontinuing the mortgage tax deduction, a prized middle-class benefit that has been featured on some budget-cutting proposals.

The first thing to remember with polls is most of them are unreliable, (most of the time not enough people are polled.) I have been asked to participate in polls only to be told I was ‘ineligible’ after being asked a few demographic questions.

Most polls are reported as ‘All Americans’…although if the poll includes anything it is usually just the number of people asked.

But honestly good citizen, what are these people smoking? WHO do they think is going to buy their homes from them (even if they somehow manage to pay them off?)

Worse, there aren’t a lot of ‘smart people’ looking to turn their homes around for LESS than they paid for it.

We did have that…um, decidely misleading report the other day that home prices were ‘on the rise’…

What do you suppose caused that?

What we’re seeing there is the same thing that’s measured when the filthy rich go shopping at ‘high end’ retail outlets.

Who owns the most desirable property?

(The filthy rich)

And who buys property from the filthy rich?

(Other filthy rich bastards!)

So if housing prices are increasing (in Bel Aire) is it ‘safe to assume’ that downtown Detroit is ‘rebounding’ as well?

Only if you’re an idiot!

Soon good citizen we will have to adopt a ‘no news is good news’ policy and start, er, ‘punishing’ the corporate owned media for lying to us.

Despite their assertions to the contrary, it ISN’T ‘harmless’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Not for nothing...

Greetings good citizen,

I have long ‘bemoaned’ (whined, vetched, you get the picture…) the base ‘dishonesty’ resorted to by the government when it comes to economic reporting.

As I, er, ‘predicted’ when this whole shit-storm started, the infamous ‘they’ (I have a brother-in-law this vague term drives insane…and you guessed it, he’s a conservative.)

Little exercise in logic here, do any of you REALLY not know precisely who ‘THEY’ are?

Anyway, if we take the ‘plutocracy’ and our ‘captive government’ as ‘givens’, it is THAT ‘they’ we’re referring to, the ones who have gained great fame by putting a ‘positive spin’ on every reported news item. Them fuckers there…yeah, those ones!

It is ‘those fuckers’ who, as predicted, have (via blatant looting of the Treasury through the Federal Reserve.) er, ‘engineered’ a THIRD CONSECUTIVE ‘JOBLESS RECOVERY’.

Not to belabor the obvious but what, precisely, is a ‘jobless recovery’?

We’re told the stock markets continue to climb because of economic activity ‘elsewhere’.

The problem with that LIE is THE WHOLE FUCKIN’ PLANET IS ON ITS ASS!

There isn’t a single ‘economic indicator’ that explains the otherwise irrational rise in stock prices, it’s all been ‘quantative easing’!

This brings us full circle to the issue of who, precisely, ‘owns’ 99% of all available stock and what is it, precisely, the stock markets tells us besides how rich the already wealthy are?

‘Stock valuations’ have NO BASIS IN REALITY, but you knew that, right?

Let’s shift perspectives here for a moment and ask another simple question, given what passes for ‘wealth’ in our fucked up system, why are YOU busting your ass (basically for nothing)?

The only thing you ‘get’ for your efforts is the, er, ‘opportunity’ to return the next day for even more abuse.

And you do/put up with it BECAUSE the alternative is even worse.

Now how much does that SUCK?

But I ‘preach to the chior’ as far as the wretchedness of our circumstances is concerned.

You all know intimately the degradation we must all endure for the, ‘luxury’ of living indoors and eating regularly.

Which is precisely what a psychopathic Libertarian considers such basic human rights, they are a luxury (that you don’t deserve!)

But we shouldn’t be too surprised, many ‘famous’ scholars ‘couldn’t concieve’ of society without slavery.

How ironic is it that they also ‘couldn’t concieve’ themselves as slaves?

They, like their Libertarian/Conservative counterparts were much ‘too valuable’.

If these ‘worthys’ were made slaves, who would concoct bullshit like this?

It would be useless to rage over such trivia. We are into the THIRD YEAR of the fucking (but they don’t dare admit) ‘New Normal’, so naturally the ‘unemployment rate’ is falling.

They don’t pay benefits ‘forever’…which is going to cause some deadly serious problems in the not too distant future.

The ‘sand in the ointment’ here is the, er, ‘inference’ that hiring is actually ‘up’ (again, somewhere…likely over the damn rainbow!)

Again, it’s the ‘new normal’, I remember there being pages and pages of help wanted ads, now ALL of the help wanted doesn’t fill a half a page!

Understand, that was ‘prior’ to the Internet. For all of the strides we’ve made, there still isn’t a computer in EVERY household, so telling us that there are thousands of jobs ‘online’ (which nobody keeps up to date) is worthless.

Of course, if you WANT TO WORK ‘bad enough’ you can find a computer that you can use to search for work.

Naturally, there is no correlation between ‘wanting to work and the availability of work’.

Yet another ‘sticking point’ that has deadly potential for the not too distant future.

Speaking of which, the US media is sticking with its story that the ‘revolts’ sweeping the Arab world are an expression of the strong desire for ‘democracy’ (as opposed to ‘freedom from oppression’ which is definitely NOT the same thing.)

Worse, it is the ‘tipping point’ where the global economy will first come unraveled. It’s more than a bit ironic that the greatest source of wealth in our modern world is located in such an economically repressed region.

Which is not to say there isn’t a reason for this, albeit a feeble and racist one…but the ones with the guns makes the rules!

Which is to once again point out that war IS NEVER ‘the answer’.

Not for nothing good citizen but I can’t help but notice that our own house is in a serious state of, er, ‘disarray’.

The collective ‘we’ need to get our shit together and put the brakes on the idiots who are driving our civilization over a cliff (largely to escape prosecution!)

Hard to say what’s sadder, the fact that it is this obvious or that we aren’t doing anything about it?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Meanwhile, in the 'Other America'...

Greetings good citizen,

I spotted something really disturbing today, evidence of the ‘two America’s’ certain political candidates have campaigned on in the past.

How unsettling is it that the ‘two America’s’ meme has faded in tandem with our endangered ‘working class’?

The America you see on the Six O’clock news every evening ISN’T the one you live in, it’s the fantasy land created by the corporate owned media.

I found today, for the first time, someone other than myself pointing to exactly this phenomenon…and it was like a slap in the face!

I’ve grown used to being ignored, only a faithful, open minded few follow my seemingly random ramblings.

I’m not accusing anyone of being a copy cat or (heavens forbid) actually paying attention to me. All I’m saying is you read it here first.

Which is to say reading this blog isn’t a ’total’ waste of time…not that I achieve my insights alone…

I have to give credit where credit is both due as well as ‘overdue.’ If not for the best damn aggregator on the web, my posts would be far less enlightening.

Anyway, first up tonight we have this chilling ‘accident looking for a place to happen’

It’s hard to say which is more disturbing here, the potential for life altering tragedy or the huge liability suits that are sure to follow?

Or will municipalities be allowed to hold themselves harmless in much the same way they are going to hold themselves ’not responsible’ in the, er, ‘mis-appropriation’ of public employees’ pension fund contributions?

While the first article provides us with a glimmer of ‘things to come’, tonight’s second offering gives us a sharper view of the divide between the oligarchs and the rest of us.

In a January 2009 ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, then President-elect Barack Obama said fixing the economy required shared sacrifice, "Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game." (1)

For the past two years, American workers submitted to the President’s appeal—taking steep pay cuts despite hectic productivity growth. By contrast, corporate executives have extracted record profits by sabotaging the recovery on every front—eliminating employees, repressing wages, withholding investment, and shirking federal taxes.

How did this happen? I don’t think anybody would be surprised to learn that much of what goes on in Washington is, er, ‘unreported’ by the corporate owned press.

This is why I advocate making media outlets the first targets/starting point for the coming revolt.

Need more evidence? this should do ya!

Three years after our horrific financial crisis, caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.
But none of the mainstream, corporate networks covered it. Not CBS, ABC, NBC or MSNBC.

Ferguson told Reuters:

“The biggest surprise to me personally and biggest disappointment was that nobody in the Obama administration would speak with me even off the record — including people that I’ve known for many, many years,” Ferguson said backstage.

This is the ‘American malaise’ writ large good citizen. The people who are supposed to keep us informed have instead kept their silence to keep the paychecks coming.

I’ll say it again good citizen, there is no such thing as a ‘free press’ in a capitalist society!

Now the pricks are ‘polluting’ the blogosphere. You’d be tempted to say ’trying’ but most ’mainstream’ sites are closely watched/monitored by the ’(un)reality based community.'

Which is to say dis-information at its finest!

And you’d be a fool to think otherwise.

Which brings us to the tightrope we publishers in the blogosphere walk every day.

How much of the ’truth’ do we share with you our readers without risking our credibility?

Which is to ask, just because some asshole ’claims’ to be a member of the (oh so skeptical) ’reality based community’ WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY KNOW?

A question that you must answer for yourself good citizen.

Yes, it is worse than it appears, good citizen. It is this very same ‘reality based community’ that is responsible for the unfathomable electoral victory of the decided minority political party. ONLY 1 IN 5 SELF-IDENTIFIES AS A REPUBLICAN! How the fuck can they win ANY election?

Which is neither here nor there in the larger scheme of things.

In case any of you were wondering why I am calling ‘game on’ at this particular time, a picture is worth a thousand words IF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT!

Not only is this what the (corporate owned) media refuse to draw attention to, it is also what the so-called ‘reality based community’ refuses to admit.

At times like these good citizen, wisdom is often having the fortitude to follow your own convictions.

Think what you want of me but THINK, damn you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Through a picture, darkly...

Greetings good citizen,

Being Super Bowl Sunday (I never watch televised sports, I’d rather watch paint dry) but that once again puts me in the ‘minority’.

Still, there won’t be much of an audience out there today so I’ll make today’s post relatively brief.

Conspicuous by its absence is the media’s coverage of alternatives to the status quo. Even the current ‘puppet show’ being exposed in the Middle East is being played like nobody over here is paying attention.

Which isn’t precisely the case because it’s just another example of ‘there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it’ given the current circumstances.

What does the world expect us to do, march in the freezing cold to protest our government’s underhandedness?

Protesting post Patriot Act is an extremely risky proposition. If I’m gonna risk being renditioned, I think I’d pick a more worthwhile cause than which dictator would our government supports.

They are too many criminals at large right here to be concerned with the criminals overseas.

Which bring us to tonight’s offering where the woman who was unaware that Africa was a continent advises the rest of us about how disastrous the policies of the Obama Administration are…

Like no one knows that our current troubles were caused by the last utterly corrupt Republican administration.

Which is to ask how unfortunate it is for the rest of us that conservatives care more for ‘truthiness’ than they care for the truth.

Not that I completely disagree with the former Alaskan governor, Mr. Obama is proving to be what everyone feared John McCain would become, George Bush’s third term.

Which is to belabor the fact that the Party designation of a particular candidate is meaningless if they all agree up front to take their marching orders from the same group of elites that have been running things since the Kennedy Assassination.

But anyone who brings THAT subject up is also guilty of wearing a tinfoil hat!

So the ‘reality based’ set just ignores the string of ‘coincidences’ that have taken place since then.

This is, naturally, perception management at its finest.

Make them believe the truth is lies and people won’t know what to believe.

It has, so far, worked like a charm.

So, what does your mind tell you?

Not the ‘voices in your head’, silly but the gaping wholes in the official version of everything.

Your mind is telling you constantly that things don’t add up, that you’re not being shown the whole picture…but you can’t think of a good reason for them to lie to you.

Or can you?

There’s a reason why your hemorrhoids never quite heal.

Not exactly a pleasant mental image but it makes the point.

So, will it only be conservatives who will be ‘prepared’ for the ‘dark future’ that is coming?

Highly unlikely.

One lie stacks up on top of the previous one and pretty soon you have no idea which end is pointing up.

Didn’t I promise to make this post brief?

Mustn’t break my word!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A Head scratcher?

Greetings good citizen,

It appears I pulled the trigger a bit prematurely yesterday. After posting about the bullshit unemployment numbers, weren’t the beauties of the Corporate owned media on the air calling yesterday’s drop in overall unemployment a ‘head scratcher?’

Like these lying fucks DON’T KNOW what happened?

Exhaust your benefits and BANG, you are suddenly ‘out of the workforce’, it’s ‘magic’ (fuck you!)

Yet pundit after pundit expressed their ‘puzzlement’ over the poor performance resulting in a drop in the ‘gross’ unemployment percentage.

You KNOW they think/treat you like you’re STUPID but are THEY that stupid too?

People call one another ‘stupid’ all the time but what they usually mean to say is the other person is ‘mis-informed’. When I call someone/a class of people stupid, I mean it literally, that the person/group in question is incapable of EVER understanding the matter at hand.

It is truly a case of ‘nothing go up top’. Ignorance can be fixed, stupid is permanent.

[Purloined from Some Assembly Required]

Red Herring: 'Structural unemployment' explains unemployment by saying the workers are not skilled enough. Yet if every open job in the country were filled, 80% of the unemployed would still be unemployed. Let 'structural unemployment' never pass your lips again – it blames the victims and apologizes for the overlords decimating America in the chase for profits.

Leave it to the best aggregator on the web to not pull his punches!

Not disturbing enough, good citizen? Mr. Panzer provides us with a more ‘grounded’ perspective Naturally, following the above link with bring you to This story

It's curious that since the ‘Reagan Revolution’ we have been hearing the ‘tale of two America’s’ being told over and over again yet none of our worthless ‘elected officials’ has done anything about it…strange, isn’t it?

Stranger still is this headline New Mexico: Tens of Thousands Without Natural Gas Service; State of Emergency Declared How the fuck does this happen?

And if that’s not fucked up enough for you it gets worse…

Our entire ‘way of life’ is centered on ‘cheap and abundant’ energy, when energy is no longer EITHER ONE (Neither cheap OR abundant) our entire social structure will collapse.

Pick your poison here good citizen, without energy, communications go out so YOU CAN’T order more of whatever it is you think you ‘need’.

But, more succinctly, once the price of energy becomes prohibitive, you can’t afford to get it there even if you are still capable of placing the order! (Carrier pigeon, smoke signal, fucking solar powered CB radio…)

Of course, the military won’t suffer from a ‘lack of funding’…defense is job number one. What you need to understand is defending YOU isn’t the primary directive, it will be the criminals who stole everything that will be demanding protection…and the boobs will do it…because stupid is as stupid does.

You really do have to keep an eagle eye on the bastards in charge of the fucking printing press, they will literally ‘rob you blind’.

And this, my friends, is the part of the game that most of you don’t get.

Those who have ‘hijacked’ our government (and by default the Treasury) are grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down…and they’re sticking the rest of us with the ‘cost’.

Sure, they ‘pay’ for what they take but the money is ‘free’ to them, thus are YOU denied the enjoyment of the goods they consume…goods that they got for free!

The ‘cost’ of their fraud is mostly realized in the ‘lost opportunity’.

Worse, their willingness to ‘squander’ money that they get for free only serves to drive up the price YOU must pay if you want some too!

Now that’s what they call a real ‘win-win’!

Not only do they get theirs for nothing but they also get to gouge YOU while robbing you/us blind!

So good citizen, what am I going to write next?
Aw, come on! This is easy! I’ve been saying it for months now.

Okay, I’ll give you a hint…what do you do with rope?

Now you get it, don’t you?

It sickens me to see our civilization torn apart due to sheer recklessness.

Sure we can pick up the pieces but only after a long and bloody power struggle carried out by mental midgets that are totally unworthy of leadership.

The most you can hope for is to murder this type of tyrant in his sleep…not that the role of tyrant is restricted to men. Women have proven to be very adept at wielding power.

Fight for the ‘wise’ leader, undermine the myopic/selfish ones and we should speed the recovery of civilization.

There is one ‘up-side’ to this whole debacle, citizens of the future won’t tolerate fools gladly like our parents did and many of us have.

Our species faces some difficult challenges ahead. We can make it but only if we stop preying upon one another.

We didn’t make it to the top of the food chain to become our own worst enemy. That is why exile is so important to A Simple Plan.

We need to insure that anti-social behavior doesn’t go unpunished.

It worked in the past and it will work in the future. Banishment is not new.

The question is whether or not we are wise enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

Time will tell.

Perhaps now more than ever, if you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Axiomatic

Greetings good citizen,

As we are all well aware, the ‘4th Estate’ has long since been subverted in the service of the oligarchs against the common individual.

While this article has an end of last year date attached to it, it actually didn’t see ‘daylight’ until the first day of the new year, making it a contender for the first ‘distorted’ news item of 2011.

Axiomatically, it is not possible to make rational decisions without accurate information.

Thus I have identified the ‘squelching’ of the lying media as ‘job one’ on the road to a sustainable society.

If reporters are unable to recognize, much less publish the truth, they become the useless pawns of those who would ‘massage’ reality for their own benefit.

If ‘silencing’ the propaganda means burning the corporate owned media to the ground then so be it.

This is truly a better to die on your feet than serve on your knees matter.

They’ve already made the decision that they’d rather die on their feet, we need only accommodate that decision.

Lie number one is the denial that ‘class war’ even exists!

So we have stories like this which ‘distort’ (severely) the reality of the situation at hand.

Follow the link and read the story through, then compare it with the stories you’ve heard about your friends loved ones travails (or even your own story in more than a few cases.)

Let’s begin with the headline:

Career Shift Often Means Drop in Living Standards

Well, Bubba, a ‘career shift’ when you’re 18 is one hell of a lot different than a career shift when your 60! Losing a minimum wage job is inconsequential if you are able to replace it at identical wages, something a typical teenager does regularly.

The bottom of the heap is still the bottom of the heap but is that the case for your typical 60 year-old female?

Let us not ‘shoot the messenger’ here in our efforts to expose the ‘hypocrisy’ of the corporate owned media message that things ‘aren’t so bad’.

Reporters need paychecks too.

Let’s start with some Ivory Tower psycho-babble:

A new study of American workers displaced by the recession sheds light on the sacrifices a large number have made to find work. Many, it turns out, had to switch careers and significantly reduce their living standards.

“In many cases, these people are not very happy,” said Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the study. “They’re the winners who got new jobs, but they’re not really what they want, and not where they want to be.”

Ah yes, would that it were a ‘perfect world’ and our dream jobs were simply right there for the asking! All one need do is pick up that sow’s ear and whamo, turn it into the silk purse you always wanted!

Which is to point out that the ‘primary problem’ here is not that of someone who worked their whole life in a certain field only to be ‘downsized’ as they approached retirement. No that’s not it at all! The primary problem here is ‘expectations’, one of champagne tastes on a beer budget! But wait, the psycho-babble continues!

The study, conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, was based on a survey of Americans around the country who were unemployed as of August 2009 and re-interviewed about their job status twice over the next 15 months.

As of November 2010, only about one-third had found replacement jobs, either as full-time workers (26 percent) or as part-time workers not wanting a full-time job (8 percent).

And of those who successfully found work, 41 percent had switched into a new career or field.

Some of these may have been workers who retrained for new fields they wished to enter, but many seem to have taken their new jobs out of desperation. Only a minority of those displaced workers changing careers — 22 percent — said they had taken a class or a training course before finding their new job.

The ‘problem’ with Ivory Tower studies is they aren’t, er, ‘realistic’. Where do you suppose the ‘desperation’ these job seekers felt came from? Could it have been the overwhelming desire to live indoors and to eat regularly?

More, er, ‘interesting’ is how only 22% of these displaced people admitted to being ‘desperate’. How ‘accurate’ a figure do you think that statistic is?

Do you suspect somebody pulled this number out of their ass to support the ‘it’s not so bad’ meme they’d have you believe?

For THAT is the true goal of this article. To convince you that things ‘aren’t that bad’. Once we get to the ‘not particularly typical’ victim of downsizing, all we see is ‘happy talk’:

“Look, I am really happy to have a job — that’s the main thing,” said Sue Bires, 60, who was laid off from a job managing homeowners’ associations in Orlando, Fla., in September 2008. She initially had another job lined up with a different realty association in Orlando, but when that fell through, she moved to Austin, Tex., to stay with a friend. She filed for bankruptcy and took a job at a call center.

But she now earns $30,000, far below the $45,000 she was paid when she was managing properties.

“It’s competitive out there, even for the lower paying jobs, especially when you’re 60 looking for a job in a young town,” Ms. Bires said. “So I’m grateful to have a job where the people are nice and I have a little bit of flexibility in my hours. That’s especially important now, since retirement is looking like a long way off.”

Like Ms. Bires, most of those forced to switch careers generally seemed to downgrade their job status.

Geez, imagine that! Most people FORCED to switch careers FIVE FUCKING YEARS SHORT OF REACHING RETIREMENT, ‘seemed to’ downgrade their ‘job status!

Nothing to see here good citizen. How much you want to bet they’re using the term ‘call center’ as a disguise for what it really is, a collection agency?

Yes, there’s no ‘story’ here. This ‘scrappy’ woman took the bull by the horns and landed a job, doing something few people are willing to do, but hey, it’s money!

Nearly 7 in 10 of the survey’s respondents who took jobs in new fields say they had to take a cut in pay, compared with just 45 percent of workers who successfully found work in their original field.

Of all the newly re-employed tracked by the Heldrich Center, 29 percent took a reduction in fringe benefits in their new job. Again, those switching careers had to sacrifice more: Nearly half of these workers (46 percent) suffered a benefits cut, compared with just 29 percent who stayed in the same career.

Wait a minute Slim, a fucking THIRD of people that DIDN’T change careers fields STILL SUFFERED a cut in benefits?

But hey, it’s only a third! Hell, things ‘aren’t so bad’ after all, are they?

Many of those who found work in a different field say they have come to terms with the limited opportunities, but they are reluctant to see their new job as a calling.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve switched careers, since I’m not exactly sure this is a career, but I’m definitely doing something different,” said Adam Kowal, 30, of Royal Oak, Mich.

Interesting that we’d get a peek at the situation out in the heart of the ‘economic desert’, even if we have no clue what Adam is doing for cash…knocking down houses perhaps?

One can appreciate his ‘confusion’ over whether or not his current ‘situation’ is actually a ‘career’.

After being laid off from a job as a quality control supervisor at a department store warehouse and losing his house, he moved his family across the state to live with his mother. Unable to find similar work, he initially took a “soul-sucking” temporary job on an assembly line making auto parts, and is now working in a kitchen at a high school.

His hourly wage has fallen from $15 an hour at the warehouse to $10.50 an hour washing dishes and preparing food, and he has gone from having health insurance coverage for his whole family to no benefits. He, his pregnant wife and their 4-year-old son are now on Medicaid.

“I’d love to go back to what I was doing,” he said, or even into what he described as his true passion, full-time screenwriting. “But when I talk with the unemployment office here in Michigan, they tell me the chances of going back and using the same skill set I had before are pretty farfetched.”

Not exactly ‘encouraging’ if you ask me but the message is still that the people in the article are ‘getting by’.

Do you see a single condemnation of these heartless (unidentified) corporations? Were either tasked for tossing these individuals out in the street?

Read it through again…not one is there?

Worse, there isn’t a single mention of the hundred of thousands who are living in their cars (if they’re lucky enough to still have them) or in some relative’s unfinished basement or worse, locked inside a homeless shelter with people who should be institutionalized every night!

Which is to say, good citizen, that things ARE INDEED much worse than this ‘feel good’ article would have you believe.

How ‘typical’ do you think the stories of these two people are in light of over five million homes being foreclosed upon over the past twelve months?

Did they search ‘far and wide’ to unearth these ‘study participants’ or were these two stories ‘cherry picked’? (Because if this is ‘as good as it gets’ Bubba, we gots trouble!)

I will once again reiterate that it is NOT my intent to tell you WHAT to think (that’s the fucking Republican’s job), it IS my goal to give you something to think about!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

As the nation collapses...

Greetings good citizen,

Um, what kind of ‘signal’ do you suppose the Dow closing up 350 points after the Republican’s recaptured the House sends?

It sure doesn’t look like the Wall Street bankers are afraid of the Republican’s [Tea Partiers in particular] taking away their punch bowl, does it?

It seems ‘owning’ a media outlet gives one the power to spread whatever lie you like as the truth...so much for ‘free speech’.

The freedom to lie your ass off isn’t nearly as comforting…but maybe that’s just me.

First I’d like to present this article as a segue into tonight’s main event.

Imagine if you will, a ‘criminal organization’ so vast that is has, er, ‘co-opted’ the legal mechanisms of each country to their will.

‘Paranoid delusion’ you say? So, how do YOU explain it?

Which is to point out that there is very little, if any, ‘difference’ between a cartel of criminals and an ‘entrenched elite’.

These ‘organizations’ operate in their own interest; nothing else concerns them. Worse, both act to, er, ‘reduce the effectiveness’ of law enforcement.

Thus we arrive at tonight’s ‘main event’.

As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution

Not to be a nit-picker here but would discount the word ‘our’ in the above statement quite heavily. Chances are, when the shit starts, it’s going to be over some personal grievance and not ‘for the greater good’ that it will eventually be sold as.

We SHOULD burn every corporate media outlet to the ground, just on general principles but when it finally does happen I’m willing to bet there will be a ‘disgruntled (former) employee’ behind the crime.

I am staunch supporter of ‘righteous revolution’ and the author quoted here has hit all the high points. He even delves into some of the, er, ‘vexing details’ I don’t bother to go into but I pasted a couple of ‘examples’ below:

Government exists to serve economic power. In the U.S. and globally, economic power is concentrated in business, namely the large corporations whose profits account for more than ten percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Corporations can't operate without the government. They are codependent, yet independent of and barely responsive to the nation. A nation goes on with or without its government, with or without the big businesses we take for granted. We are not the government that serves those companies. They are parasites, vampires, hideous monsters that underpay and overcharge us and get fat on the spread. Who are we then?

We are their victims. We are weak and pathetic. But only by choice.

We can wait for the system to collapse of its own accord, for the rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to build, for chaos of some sort to expose and destroy it. But implosion might take a long time. And when it happens, we may find ourselves even more powerless than we are now. [Time is indeed ‘of the essence’]
They -- the hardcore, racist, undereducated, fundamentalist Christian, anti-civil liberties Right -- are preparing to step into the breach, to seize power. They can't wait to unleash their venomous hatred on the city-dwelling commie hipster fags they despise. They are armed. They recognize that the system is doomed. They've seen this coming. They're organized and willing to merge their disparate brands of conservatism under a common
leadership. Most importantly, they get it. They don't need to be convinced that everything is in play. They're putting it in play. [Look no further than the delusional ‘Tea Partiers’ for proof of this statement!]

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-the-worlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with "mainstream" gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the "Godless," "secular" United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Revolution, though bloody and terrifying, would have been easier than the slow convulsions of collapse. So it will be here. [Literally, the sooner it begins, the sooner it will be over.]

If the U.S. government is going to collapse anyway, it behooves us to first replace it with something that can stand in its place. Unless we act, we'll have to deal with a post-collapse scenario, in which we'll have to fend off roving criminal gangs, hoodlums, predatory corporations, oppressive residual government entities, and an emboldened political right. [In other words, a nightmare beyond your imagining.]


Though small in numbers, anarchists and "deepgreen" anti-civilization environmentalists are highly influential in what passes for the American Left, publishing well-regarded books, magazines, and blogs that inspire many people. Deep-green types fantasize about a collapse scenario that will save the world without anyone having to lift a finger. They imagine an involuntarily deindustrializing economy that allows the earth to heal while people gather to form small clans and low-impact villages based on ideals of equality. Here is a quote from Jan Lundberg, a deep-green proponent of "peak oil" theory: "New social norms and tribal law will help break from the past and possibly outlaw incipient reversion to the failed system of exploitation of people and nature. In any case, the 'new' model of sharing and cooperation will outdo in productivity any vestiges of the old models of selfishness and trying to insulate oneself or one's family from the surrounding changed world."

Talk about your nightmares, then there’s this to consider:

The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn't think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach niggers a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn't fit into their vision of what and who is right. Anarchists may opt out of revolution, but counterrevolution will come to them.

We all (intellectually) know that we were ‘born to die’, all roads lead to the ‘dirt nap’, the objective, such as it is, has been not to ‘hasten the inevitable’. Now try to balance that against what’s at stake:

To paraphrase a woman who spent time in prison for her radical activities in the 1960s, once you choose the path of committed citizenship, of true patriotism, of standing up for yourself and your fellow human beings and other living things who can't speak for themselves, your journey can end in only one of three ways: victory, prison, or death.

Then consider the alternative. Once you commit your self to apathy, laziness, and tacit consent to mass murder and rampant injustice, your miserable, wasteful choice can end only with death.

So, what’s it going to be good citizen…live on your knees or die on your feet?

The choice is yours…and regardless of what you decide, the ‘final destination’ remains unchanged.

I want to point out that revolution is not, er, 'unique'. Humans have revolted against 'injustice' throughout history. The disturbing part is how every revolt to date has been 'hijacked' by the self-interested, usually before the revolt itself gets underway.

With that cheery thought, thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

I don’t usually do ‘PS’s’ but I feel you need to see this piece that displays the dark side of candidate Obama that we didn’t see on the campaign trail.

Sleep…if you dare.

Until the Fat Lady sings...

Greetings good citizen,

My hopes for our civilization grow dimmer with each passing day. It has become apparent that the quicksand of greed has consumed what little bedrock there was holding up the foundation of our society.

We are in ‘uncharted waters’ here, good citizen. By the ‘hard and fast’ rules of commerce, our civilization has already passed the ‘point of no return’.

Tonight’s offering is only true if ‘the rules’ are followed. (Our current financial system is ‘fried’, there’s no way to repair it without writing off huge amounts of debt.)

What should be obvious to us all is ‘the rules’ no longer apply. We’re currently skating along in a ‘nobody’s doing anything about anything’ mode where we all pretend there’s nothing wrong (mostly because we can’t fix the problem on our own!)

As the wiser heads among us opine, the banking sector is still strangling to death with the public sector close behind.

As he points out, the housing sector will not ‘recover’ in the former industrialized West, EVER! (Um, neither Mr. Whalen nor Mr. Panzer actually says this but it is ‘implied’.)

Since the banking system is supported by ‘perpetual’ mortgage payments on properties that are hundreds of years old…wages need to keep ‘pace’ or the whole artifice collapses, as we have so recently witnessed.

No buyers means no price support…lower prices equals less ‘income’ all the way down the line.

So, to paraphrase the title of the article: And You Thought Last Time Was Bad...

Like death itself, there is no way to avoid collapse---we have merely sidestepped the inevitable for the moment.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this whole fiasco is the ‘too little too late’ part where absolutely NOTHING has been done to stop the ‘race to the bottom’.

Sadly, when the ‘cause’ of this fiasco is finally addressed, it will indeed be ‘too little, too late!

Naturally, I marvel over the fact that ‘Neutron Jack’ is still alive! (Perhaps we should be more amazed that he’s still ‘at large’…)

‘Turn the earth to glass and still commit no crime…’

Unfortunately, the print media isn’t the only source of global insanity. I apparently don’t have many readers in the UK or the BBC would have debunked (instead of reporting) how British schools are teaching pre-schoolers to be more ‘entrepreneurial’.

They are teaching these youngsters the mechanics of commerce in hopes that they will grow up to be more ‘self-reliant’.

Naturally, what these FUCKTARDS are missing is the principle reason why we don’t already live in ‘capitalist utopia’…

FUCKING MARKET SHARE!

What part of ‘there isn’t enough market share to go around’ don’t these idiots get?

Oh well, stupid is what stupid does…

Worse, ignorance can be fixed…stupid is permanent!

Again, we have to believe that the real problem here is the perpetuation of ignorance by those too stupid to know they are doing anything wrong.

Most of you have no idea how frightening it is to realize your entire world is held together by little more than ‘myth and superstition’ (enforced at the point of a gun.)

You’re actually supposed to buy into these little ‘fantasies’ (without the benefit of the fucking ‘ruby slippers’!)

It is important to understand good citizen that most of what you’ve been taught to believe is a self-serving LIE!

The other part that is paramount for you to understand is that the liars are in charge!

Nothing changes until you recognize this truth!

The mis-management that is bag and baggage with capitalism is not nor will it ever be sustainable. No system based on infinite resources is!

Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that if resources were indeed ‘infinite’ there would be no need to ‘buy’ them from anybody, would there?

We have to put an end to this vicious exploitation of our fellow humans if we are ever to advance beyond being our own worst enemy…

The reasons we DON’T kill one another on sight are getting fewer all the time…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Structural Baloney

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you come across something that confirms you aren’t the only one whose thoughts travel along a certain pathway.

A Simple Plan would solve the unemployment ‘crisis’ tomorrow and in a stunning admission, Paul Krugman AGREES

That ‘miracle’ aside, he also admits the major obstacle to correcting the unemployment situation is the, er, ‘political will’ to do so.

You see, the capitalists wouldn’t have any problem with cutting the workweek in half nor would it be any skin off of their nose if the workforce doubled as a result.

What would frost the capitalist’s cookies is that this is only ‘half’ of the solution…if we are to cut people’s pay in half we must also reduce how much they are required to lay out by a proportionate amount.

The first half is ‘painless’; it is basically twice the number of workers for the same amount of pay. It is the second half that is going to take some, er, ‘belt tightening’ on the part of the, er, ‘profit compensated’ crowd.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the obvious place to ‘cut’ this expense is already ‘reducing itself’…that is the amount of pay the average worker has to shell out for shelter.

Under A Simple Plan, shelter is a ‘gimme’, you NEVER pay for it…conversely, you can never buy nor sell it either. Which is cool because you don’t need to save for ‘retirement’. That’s a ‘gimme’ to. (Bizarrely, retirement was one of the principle arguments for ‘home ownership’, your ‘ever appreciating’ home WAS your retirement account!)

My how some things change!

Anyway, how did our Nobel Laureate do?

All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand — full stop.

Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it’s actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act. [The ‘pittance’ this would ‘cost’ in dollars is but a fraction of what doing nothing will cost in blood!]

In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.

[Were we to ‘address’ our unemployment problem, we would end up ‘shifting’ that problem to ‘exporting nations’, something we must do anyway before the ‘export model’ collapses! (Due to ‘peak energy’.)]

Who are these wise heads I’m talking about? The most widely quoted figure is Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who has attracted a lot of attention by insisting that dealing with high unemployment isn’t a Fed responsibility: “Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs,” he asserts, concluding that “It is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem.” [It’s an obvious ‘lie’ to claim that we are suffering from a ‘skills mis-match’ when many of the most qualified workers are actually suffering from ‘over fifty disease!’]

Now, the Minneapolis Fed is known for its conservative outlook, and claims that unemployment is mainly structural do tend to come from the right of the political spectrum. But some people on the other side of the aisle say similar things. For example, former President Bill Clinton recently told an interviewer that unemployment remained high because “people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open.”

[Good ol’ Bill Jefferson! Best Republican president we’ve had since Lincoln! Don’t let that D after his name fool you, like his sidekick ‘Barrack’, Billy boy is a dyed in the wool Republican from the word go.

Need proof? Look at who he ‘hangs out with’…]

Well, I’d respectfully suggest that Mr. Clinton talk to researchers at the Roosevelt Institute and the Economic Policy Institute, both of which have recently released important reports completely debunking claims of a surge in structural unemployment.

After all, what should we be seeing if statements like those of Mr. Kocherlakota or Mr. Clinton were true? The answer is, there should be significant labor shortages somewhere in America — major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers.

None of these things exist. Job openings have plunged in every major sector, while the number of workers forced into part-time employment in almost all industries has soared. Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category. Only three states, with a combined population not much larger than that of Brooklyn, have unemployment rates below 5 percent. [It should come as a mystery to no one that those three States are A.) Red and B.) Specialize in Banking!]

Oh, and where are these firms that “can’t find appropriate workers”? The National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for many years, asking them to name their most important problem; the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.

So all the evidence contradicts the claim that we’re mainly suffering from structural unemployment. Why, then, has this claim become so popular? [Like he doesn’t know, working as he does for the ‘willful ignorance’ people!]

Part of the answer is that this is what always happens during periods of high unemployment — in part because pundits and analysts believe that declaring the problem deeply rooted, with no easy answers, makes them sound serious.

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

[Funny how a little thing like the prospects of ‘global subjugation’ changed everything, isn’t it?]

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society. [Worse, doing ‘nothing’ is a ‘non-starter’, you can’t leave millions of people out in the cold with no place to turn because they WILL destroy those who abandoned them!]

So what you need to know is that there is no evidence whatsoever to back these claims. We aren’t suffering from a shortage of needed skills; we’re suffering from a lack of policy resolve. As I said, structural unemployment isn’t a real problem, it’s an excuse — a reason not to act on America’s problems at a time when action is desperately needed.

While I find such articles, er, ‘refreshing’, I am also ‘disappointed’ that Mr. Krugman wasn’t more specific about how to solve the crisis.

This is why I repeat that there is ‘No way out’ of this mess under capitalism. It can’t be done…it can be ‘postponed’ by things like Jubilees (debt forgiveness) but this does nothing to correct the underlying problems that brought us here in the first place.

This brings us full circle to the issue of why they don’t ‘forgive’ everybody’s onerous debts tomorrow.

They COULD do it very easily…but there’s a ‘downside’. Just how diligent would you be paying back future debt knowing they were able to ‘walk away’ from what you owed before?

The, er, ‘incentive’ to pay would go right out the window if they let you off the hook free and repossessing most of what you bought on credit is a non-starter!

Nobody is going to want it after you are done with it nor would they be willing to pay half price for used junk!

So even a Jubilee is, er, ‘problematic’…sets a bad ‘precedent’. Worse, how long would it be before people started ‘demanding’ Jubilees?

Now the whole idea of ‘credit’ goes right out the window and we are faced with the daunting prospects of a ‘gift economy.’ This could very rapidly erode the ‘work ethic’ and result in…you guessed it, another highway that leads directly to ‘economic collapse’!

Naturally, the purpose of these little ‘thought experiments’ is to illuminate rather than to confuse.

A.S.P. provides a concrete method for addressing the ‘population factor’ which has become more ominously labeled the ‘surplus population’ by die-hard capitalists.

Just another reason why capitalism should be abandoned as soon as possible!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner