Problem, What Problem?

Greetings good citizen,

It turns out if you keep playing with the web address tool you can eventually get something it will accept…which is why the ‘new’ (firewall-less) site is not Civics 101 but Civics 202.

A Simple Plan remains behind the firewall for the moment while I let the new site ‘come up to speed’.

How ironic is it that A Simple Plan has twice the number of Russian readers than it has US?

They have seen the worst of both (economic operating systems) and are more open minded than the typical ‘patriotic’ US citizen.

Well, I’m going to see how the new site ‘draws’ before I open up the ‘main attraction.’

Those who have been ‘told’ they already live ‘in paradise’ are oddly resistant to new ideas, even new ideas that ‘fix’ long standing injustices in the old ways…

But we really start walking the tightrope when we get into determining ‘what is ‘injustice’ and ‘who decides’.

It is a mystery to no one that the One Percent decide, they are the sole arbiters of ‘what is just’

It is their viewpoint that YOU are incapable of understanding what it’s like to be them, you aren’t ‘smart’ enough (probably how wealth and brains came to be equated when they have nothing to do with one another!)

So what are to make of our first headline?

A Bold Dissenter at the Fed, Hoping His Doubts Are Wrong
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in Virginia, has warned that the central bank’s efforts to stimulate growth are ineffective.

Economix Blog: The Great Dissenters

One need not be the president of a Federal Reserve Bank to realize (5 years after the fact) that the Fed’s ‘stimulus’ has had zero impact on ‘growth’. But that would be missing the whole point of calling the exercise ‘stimulus’.

What the Fed has been doing has nothing to do with ‘stimulating’ the global economy, what the Fed has done is to stabilize a badly broken global banking system.

How sad is it good citizen that despite trillions pumped in (and billions leaking out as ‘bonuses’) it is still broken beyond repair!

So what are we to make of this Fed President’s assertion?

He’s correct, but what are they supposed to do?

Cut off the stimulus and the global banking system collapses, pretty much immediately.

In a related story we are asked how ‘credible’ this situation is:

James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.

Bank Hacking Was the Work of Iranians, Officials Say
By NICOLE PERLROTH and QUENTIN HARDY

The skill required to execute the attacks convinced American officials that Iran was behind them, likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

After being, er, ‘hoodwinked’ into a ten year long war by one desk of ‘the office for strategic studies’ chasing imaginary ‘Weapons of Mass destruction’ (for which no one was ever prosecuted, by the way.)

We are now being presented with ‘Quid Pro Quo’; we levied sanctions on Tehran so they ‘retaliated’ by hacking the (decidedly corrupt) US banking system…

With all of the chicanery going on in the TBTF banking network, how the heck can they tell? (It was ‘hacked’ and not outright theft or fraud?)

Short answer, they can’t!

For our next trick:

Former Analyst Cooperates in Insider Trading Case
By PETER LATTMAN 9:57 AM ET

Wesley Wang, a former analyst at SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge fund, has given federal agents the names of about 20 people that he said engaged in insider trading.

Or ‘touche’ as they say in fencing!

Of course ‘one incident’ isn’t proof that our whole financial network is corrupt…but it’s been more than one incident, in fact it’s been a long string of them ever since Saint Ronnie (Reagan) ‘privatized’ the healthcare system, unleashing a juggernaut!

Fund Titans Battle Over Herbalife
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 29 minutes ago

Daniel S. Loeb’s Third Point disclosed that it had acquired more than 8.2 percent of the nutritional supplements company. That puts him at odds with his friend, William A. Ackman.

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘titans of capitalism’ have been reduced to squaring off over control of a MLM network?

Well, as they say, you just can’t make this stuff up. That said, how’s that future looking to you now?

HSBC Sale of $9.4 Billion Ping An Stake in Jeopardy
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER 57 minutes ago

The British bank HSBC’s bid to sell its stake in China’s Ping An group is in jeopardy after China Development Bank decided not to finance a large part of the transaction.

Um, not for nothing but 9 billion balloons is still a lot of cake even in these days when everything is measured in billions (millions are for pikers.) Worse, I’ve never heard of the Ping An group (but I’m going to assume it’s not the guys who make the popular brand of golf clubs…although I might be wrong!)

And speaking of trouble from across the Pacific:

A 787 had to be towed back to the gate Tuesday in Boston because of a fuel leak. On Monday, a parked 787 caught on fire.
Dreamliner Is Troubled by Questions About Safety
By JAD MOUAWAD 5:34 AM ET

All Nippon Airways canceled a domestic flight on Wednesday after a computer on board a 787 Dreamliner erroneously showed problems with the aircraft’s brakes.

Capitalism at its finest! Buyer BEWARE!!!

Once again we see the folly of ‘sold to the lowest bidder’ when it comes to producing complex objects that must work in harmony with one another!

The Dreamliner was 3 YEARS behind schedule due to the inability of the engineers to deal with problems continents away. Sometimes ‘tele-conferencing’ just doesn’t cut it.
But hey that’s capitalism for ya, if the product doesn’t float/fly it’s not management’s fault, they aren’t engineers!

Um, does anyone else have a problem with this?

I have no need to fly…and for that I am grateful!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Seriously?

Greetings good citizen,

Sunday night and I’m just getting around to posting…because it snowed, then it rained and then is snowed again…and then the whole shebang froze, making for a miserable clean up.

But my frostbitten backside really gets burning when the ‘disarm-niks’ sit on their high horse, claiming mass murder ‘doesn’t happen’ in cultures that have banned guns.

Naturally these assholes ignore the bombings that replaced the gun attacks.

And if the One Percent decided they wanted us, er, ‘defenseless’ we wouldn’t be talking about their ‘right’ to instruct their lapdogs to collect all of the registered guns, we’d be talking about how long it would take for them to criminalize the ‘unexplained loss’ of a weapon.

Because that’s what ‘bans’ do, they create criminals.

Let’s see what zipperhead has to offer regarding the ‘impossibility’ of tougher weapons legislation as we wonder what side of the political fence ‘Fair Vote’ rides on… Aren’t the Republicans overly concerned with ‘stolen elections’?

Why America Can't Pass Gun Control
Hint: It's not the NRA or a gun-loving culture.
December 24, 2012 |

This article originally appeared at The Atlantic.

The horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the latest grisly episode in what has become a muted debate in the United States: what to do about gun violence and well-armed mass murderers. But we will make a prediction: Even in the face of this national tragedy, President Obama will have little success enacting substantive gun control.

Here's why: Obama can read the political map as well as anyone, and he knows that, just as in the past after previous brutal tragedies, the politics of gun control rest on complicated terrain. Many gun control advocates blame the lack of policy action on America's gun-loving culture and the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA), but that's too simplistic. Already in the wake of the Newtown carnage we have seen aslew of pundits drawing the wrong conclusions, just as they have after previous tragedies.

Sure, Americans like their guns more than other nations, but polls often have shown majority of Americans wanting more gun control, with two-thirds calling for more regulation following the Columbine massacre in 1999. But the political system - including the Democratic Party -- has failed to respond. And it's not because Democrats and Obama are afraid of the NRA's deep pockets, as so many pundits are wrongly concluding. Quite the contrary, the NRA has money because it is powerful, not the other way around. And the NRA is powerful because it is clever at working the clunky architecture of our political system, which gives immense clout to a tiny slice of swing voters in a handful of congressional districts. [snip]

[About the author:]

Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is a political writer, cofounder of FairVote and former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation. Besides Alternet, his articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Ms., Sierra, American Prospect, Truthdig and many others, and he has quoted and interviewed by media around the world, including the BBC, Democracy Now, C-Span, Fox News, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Sirius and many others.

Robert Richie is the executive director of FairVote.

At the end of the day this has NOTHING to do with guns. The shooters in every case didn’t do what they did BECAUSE ‘they could get their hands on guns!’

They did what they did because they had a problem with how they were being treated and saw no other way draw attention to the matter.

EVENTUALLY (because it almost happened this last time…until buttheads like Steve Hill turned up, pointing in the wrong direction, as usual.)

And what almost happened this time? We ALMOST acknowledged that the common thread between the massacres and that was the desperation a sense of nothing left to lose by the perpetrators.

Adam Lanska went into that school knowing ahead of time he was going to blow himself away, making him no different than a suicide bomber.

And, as usual, these ‘desperadoes’ are dismissed as ‘loner lunatics’. Isolated cases that won’t happen again…until next time.

How bad does it have to get good citizen, we are barely making it a month without some new incident of somebody ‘going postal’ because they’ve had enough (of being treated like they are human debris.)

Yeah, it’s pretty sick to be using this type of social backwash to hype my own agenda but don’t you think it’s beyond time for a change?

And I mean real change and not Obamaesque ‘lip service’.

It is only a matter of time before you (or worse, someone you love) becomes capitalism’s ‘collateral damage’.

When a ticking timebomb set off by a capitalist socio-path blows your world away, what are YOU going to go after, the tool the perp used OR THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the longer they ignore this the worse it has become…

And just think this is the DAY BEFORE New Years Eve!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Energy Independence!

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the globe are bleeding from the eye sockets this morning as investors allegedly cope with fear of new taxes.

(Like the problem ISN’T all of the money in our economy is sitting in the bank accounts of the uber wealthy, doing nothing.)

Well, that ain’t the half of it good citizen…seems as though the psycho’s on Wall Street now believe that the US will soon replace Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest energy exporter.

And what the hell, like the Arabs, WE (here in the economic desert) won’t be using it! good thing for the Chinese, huh?

Even if it never crossed your mind to wonder how the Arabs felt about foreigners sucking all of the oil out of their country, you’re about to find out how just it feels!

That increased oil production, combined with new American policies to improve energy efficiency, means that the United States will become “all but self-sufficient” in meeting its energy needs in about two decades — a “dramatic reversal of the trend” in most developed countries, a new report released by the agency says.

“The foundations of the global energy systems are shifting,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the Paris-based organization, which produces the annual World Energy Outlook, said in an interview before the release. The agency, which advises industrialized nations on energy issues, had previously predicted that Saudi Arabia would be the leading producer until 2035.

The report also predicted that global energy demand would grow between 35 and 46 percent from 2010 to 2035, depending on whether policies that have been proposed are put in place. Most of that growth will come from China, India and the Middle East, where the consuming class is growing rapidly. The consequences are “potentially far-reaching” for global energy markets and trade, the report said.

Um, the important thing to keep in mind here good citizen is this is NOT a ‘yippee-ki-yay motherfucker event.

Nowhere in this article does it say we will return to the days of ‘cheap & abundant energy’. Neither the oil shale nor the tar sands are A.) easy to extract or B.) economical to process.

Which is to point out that scarce and expensive energy (which will further shrink markets) will be ‘exportable’ by virtue of its ‘unaffordability’ by the average 'peasant' in the nation that produces it. (But assumedly by then 'puny things like countries' will be 'irrelevant' [to the uber rich.])

Perhaps now you can see the foolishness of allowing the self-interested to control the value of your money!

Maybe now you can see the wisdom in that notion that certain things should never be ‘monitized/commodified’.

But you idiots will pay for water and think nothing of it!

How long will it be before you are buying ‘designer’ air?

We could really go off the reservation over water and our long history of fighting over it but that is not the subject of this post. We are parsing the ‘common good’ vs., the predations of capitalism…because it is capitalism and capitalism alone that allows the capitalist to claim for his (or her) own what belongs to us all.

And guess how we landed in this sorry state of affairs?

By deferring to Kings and Queens…(who put their own interests ahead of the people’s…)

By now the capitalist is foaming at the mouth, raving about the ‘injustice’ of being attacked by an obvious ‘godless commie’ (who would have you all work for the same pay and force you to ‘give away’ the ‘fruits of your labors’ [rather than let the generous capitalist buy them from you for a fraction of their worth…] which is why the capitalist is rich and you can barely pay your bills, which isn‘t the capitalist‘s problem…it‘s yours!)

First point, Anarchy is in NO WAY related to communism, it is a political philosophy, not an economic system…and A Simple Plan is in no way ‘communist’ (which you’d know if you bothered to read it!)

But again I digress…

What does it take, good citizen, to get you to stop shooting yourself in the foot?

Is it that ‘heat of the moment thing’ when the New Boss pulls that last minute change out of his hat, just when victory is within your grasp?

In something that would make a wonderful farce, if it weren’t so tragic, we have perpetually witnessed crushing defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, repeatedly throughout history.

Mostly because the ‘forces of evil’ (a.k.a. greed) never sleep.
Worse, it seems our would be saviors aren’t immune to its influence, and if they are they get killed.

So is it a battle we ‘can’t win’…?

Definitely not…because soon circumstance will dictate that we either choose to start doing things the right way or we head down the path towards extinction…

Which brings us full circle to the growing effects of climate change and the desperate need to stop consuming as much fossil fuel as we can scrape out of the ground and throwing it into the atmosphere.

It is time for A Simple Plan and the sweeping lifestyle changes it will bring.

Simply put good citizen, the ultimate goal of A Simple plan is to make crime no longer pay…across the board.

No more getting fucked by employers, no more getting fucked by merchants, no more getting fucked by politicians and no more getting fucked by criminals…because there is no more money! (read cash)

Your money truly is ‘for you’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Parting thought: Energy Independence (under capitalism) will be virtually meaningless to YOU.

We are long overdue to stop using this badly broken system as the basis of governing our society…which, in case you haven’t noticed, no longer counts YOU…

Like the song says: There ain’t no commies and there ain’t no yanks, just common criminals, with guns and tanks!

Listen Carefully:

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Saturday! (The idiot stock markets are closed so we needn’t trouble ourselves with their irrational gyrations for a couple of days anyway.

Probably a good thing that we are spared this nonsense on the weekends or our heads might truly explode.

But that doesn’t apply to all of us. The ‘new economy’ (retail focused) is a 24/7 enterprise.

It is only a matter of time before the buying and selling of financial securities transitions to a 24/7 activity.

(How sad is it that the markets will crash if they even attempt it?)

But no matter; because we are racing towards a time when it will all be like it was for time out of mind and there won’t be ANY financial markets at all.

But I digress.

The topic of tonight’s post isn’t the financial markets but how those who own them benefit the most from them…and how one individual proposes that we change all that…

There are three categories of policy changes that we need: rules and policies that raise the floor, those that level the playing field, and those that break up over-concentrations of wealth and corporate power. These are not hard-and-fast categories, but a useful framework for grouping different rule changes.

1.Rule changes that raise the floor

• Ensure the minimum wage is a living wage
• Provide universal health care
• Enforce basic labor standards and protections

2. Rule changes that level the playing field

• Invest in education
• Reduce the influence of money in politics
• Implement fair trade rules

3. Rule changes that break up wealth and power

• Tax the 1 percent
• Rein in CEO pay
• Stop corporate tax dodging
• Reclaim our financial system
• Reengineer the corporation
• Redesign the tax revenue system

Um, I keep repeating this but apparently nobody listens (and why should they?)

THERE IS NO WAY TO FIX CAPITALISM USING CAPITALISM.

Error number one here is the word tax. If you need taxes to finance your society, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

How does, er, ‘Zippy’ propose to insure that the minimum wage is (and remains) ‘a living wage’?

A Simple plan accomplishes this by making housing and utilities a ‘gimme’, they are both your ‘rights' as a citizen. You only need money for food and clothing and to compete for little ‘extras’ like seats at entertainment venues and for meals at a hospitality facility.

Um, then there’s the ‘traveling’ piece of the puzzle. Good shoe leather will command a premium because walking will be everybody’s primary mode of transportation.

Each region will deal with the transport issue in ways that make sense for that area (although I can GUARANTEE YOU that a 400 Hp 4X4 will NOT be one of them.)

Personal transportation will become a rarity reserved for ‘special needs/situations’.

Which, tangentially, will help to address the nation’s obesity epidemic (said the three hundred pound moose!)

Wanna ‘see the world?’ Join the fucking Navy! (Or at least the merchant Marine.)

Universal healthcare is also a ‘gimme’ under A Simple Plan…but Bobo doesn’t say how he proposes to enact and enforce ‘universal health and safety standards’…the lack of which accounts for much of the pretense of the cheaper there.

I’ll tell you how this happens under A Simple Plan, Bobo no longer ‘owns’ the company so he no longer gets to ‘dictate’ how it is run!

Then he goes on to repeat one of the oldest ‘talking points’ there is, the ‘invest in education’ bullshit.

Under A Simple plan you learn on the job, the way they used to do it!

Everybody will literally ‘apprentice’ in their given field of endeavor and you won’t have these disastrous ‘misunderstandings’ that are born of miscommunications in the educational process.

You will learn and you won’t advance until you can pass a test on the material!

Thinking about bribing the guy giving the test?

You can’t…your money is for you, and you don’t have any cash…nor is there any way to transfer funds between individuals.

So Bobo’s last proposal, stiff taxes on ‘inherited wealth’ is also a non-starter…

Because under A Simple Plan, when you die your money dies WITH YOU! Your account is erased, nobody gets it!

I’ll bet your thinking…hmmn. Shame that nobody gets that money…maybe if I worked in the book keeping end of the organization I could, er, ‘skim off’ a little bit of the money into an alias that I happen to have…who’d know?

Um the system is self-checking AND if you are caught ‘buttering your own bread’ it is ‘automatic exile’ for you!

Oh, and don’t get me wrong. I suspect there will be numerous ‘accountant types’ who will be convicted of stealing from society and will pay the price…but that’s only ‘human nature’.

Again, Bobo makes the mistake of treating a legal problem as if it were a tax problem and you can’t solve the problem if you don’t attack it at the root!

Here’s my ‘sales pitch’ one more time:

If you want YOUR KID to grow up free in a society where they will be equal to everyone else then A Simple Plan is for YOU!

Now, if you’re hopelessly stupid and think your kid is better than everyone else, knock yourself out and listen to idiots who can’t even get the problem right!

If you don’t start at the beginning you won’t end up in the right place.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mixed Signals

Greetings good citizen,

I often complain about the misleading articles published by the corporate owned media but few are as, er, ‘deceptive’ as articles like this

The next week, the Fed met the market’s expectations, and then some. It extended its plans for maintaining near-zero short-term interest rates into the middle of 2015. And it announced that it would increase its bond-buying to a total of $85 billion a month for the rest of the year, with a focus on mortgage-backed securities, a program aimed at giving the housing market another lift. What’s more, the Fed linked the duration of its loose policies to the state of the job market. As long as the unemployment rate remained unacceptably high, the Fed planned to maintain its expansionary monetary policy, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said in a news conference.

“We will be looking for the sort of broad-based growth in jobs and economic activity that generally signal sustained improvement in labor market conditions and declining unemployment,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Last week, however, the markets gave up ground. The central banks aside, it’s easy to see why the bullish mood might darken quickly. A partial list of dangers includes rising tensions in the Mideast, a contentious election campaign and a looming “fiscal cliff” in the United States, an unresolved and multifaceted financial crisis in Europe, and a global economy that is far from robust.

Mr. Bernanke is chairman of the Fed, not a full fledged Wizard…although the Masters of the Universe often have a hard time reconciling their lofty opinions of themselves with reality.

Let’s see if we can follow his ‘line of logic’ such as it is.

The Fed will buy bonds, supposedly encouraging the banks to make loans to…some as yet unidentified (and presumably under-served) market sector.

Yes, jobs and economic activity normally associated with pay raises…that aren’t happening.

So how the fuck does buying bonds and boosting the share price of stocks ‘help’ the economy?

Short answer, it didn’t help THE FIRST TWO TIMES, and it ain’t gonna help now either!

But we’re five years down the line since the last crisis hit, shouldn’t the consumer have ‘healed’ by now?

Short answer again, no! Here we are five years later and the average consumer is making LESS then they did five years ago!

So why is Dick-head buying bonds again?

Could it be to keep the bankrupt banks afloat?

How sad is it that it is only a matter of time before he dilutes the consumer’s purchasing power so much that a recovery will become impossible.

And not to put too fine a point on it but we’re already there…

So what are you going to do good citizen…because it is only a matter of time before civil war will breaks out and you’ll be forced to choose between the rebels and the One Percent.

Naturally, the One Percent will be playing both sides of the fence. They’ll be ‘recruiting’ rebels only to lead them into ambushes where they will be…’captured’…of course if most of them end up getting slaughtered the One Percent could care less.

The bounty will be paid ‘dead or alive’.

So if some jerk comes up to you and says he can lead you to the rebels…DON’T take his word for it.

If a group of idiots come up saying the same thing, play dumb. Tell ‘em you don’t want any trouble. If they’re real rebels they’ll go away.

If they’re getting paid ‘by the head’, they will be a little too persistent.

You’ll be able to tell the fakers from the ‘hard sell’.

You will probably get some of these none too bright people to tell you how much they’re getting paid…and real rebels are NOT doing it for the money.

Sadly, the average individual isn’t thinking along these lines and will likely be ‘taken in’.

The rebels won’t be advertising. You’re more likely to bump into them when you’re NOT looking to join up.

In fact, once things turn to shit it will be a fairly safe bet that you can strike a blow for liberty by, er, ‘silencing’ those who are being paid to ‘recruit’ rebels.

Again I must urge you to exercise caution. Regular police and military patrols WILL be seeking rebel bands and some of them may try to use the recruitment ploy.

What YOU need to be careful of is how many people you’re dealing with.

It may look like only one or two but it could be a whole platoon that is lurking not too far off…listening.

If the guy pretending to be a rebel looks a little too well armed, he probably isn't the real deal.

Oh and if he looks clean and well-rested...you get my point.

Dangerous times are ahead and you need to be ready…

More importantly you need to be thinking.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lovely Ladies

Greetings good citizen,

Today we tackle the idea that this coming election will be decided by the nation’s female population…as they do, indeed, out number the males AND they’re more likely to vote!

Unhelpful is the fact that a large portion of the ‘conservative base’ is both female and elderly.

However, the largest segment of the female population in the US is militant and liberal.

The GOP’s corporate owned media has the task of convincing us that ‘enough’ men combined with the elderly women of the conservative movement will be sufficient to swing the election in the GOP’s favor.

Despite having a party platform drafted exclusively by men from the Religious Right.

The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”

Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy.

As you can imagine, the article goes on to name names and provide the pedigree of each ‘contributor’…which can only make us wonder who will be drawing up the planks of the, er, ‘progressive’ party platform?

What will Libertarian Lou include to attract the ladies to the progressive banner besides NOT being republican?

Because the way things are going, not being Republican has a lot going for it already!

Twitchier still is how Republicans are predicting armed insurrection if THEIR BOY Obama is re-elected…

While those of us who will be voting for WHOEVER ELSE IS ON THE TICKET that ISN’T a ‘conservo-whacko’ (a category that includes the unchallenged incumbent) are predicting the same thing if their boy Mitt gets the ‘win’.

It's the classic 'Heads I won, Tails you lose' situation...(and we're all getting more than a little tired of it!)

I think I speak for the majority, the 99% if you will, regarding the consequences of a conservative victory this November.

The global economy was DESTROYED by ‘conservative policies’, further conservative, er, ‘rule’ will destroy our society and see a return of slavery to this world!

You’re already some ‘employer’s bitch’…how would you like to see that asshole handed a bill of sale with YOUR name on it?

What, you’d be thrilled?

Naturally, you’re thinking of the ‘upside’…if he ‘owns you’ he has to take care of you.

Take a fucking minute to consider the fucking downside of that.

Once your ‘upkeep’ exceeds your extractive value your more likely to be sold as ‘dog food’ (or perhaps the gross equivalent of ‘soylent green’, the fucking capitalist doesn’t care!) than to be allowed to muddle along in a ‘diminished capacity’.

Say watering the lawn or weeding the flower beds. It is far more likely you will end up ‘feeding the flowers’, literally!

That is what ‘hangs in the balance’ in the upcoming election, the one where all choices SUCK!

Of course, since I have ‘no control’ over the situation, I’m probably ‘exaggerating’ the situation a teensy bit.

But I’m willing to bet that more than a few of you find my ‘point of view’ at least within the realm of belief.

Because of ‘gradualism’.

You remember what ‘gradualism’ is, don’t you?

It’s that series of small, nasty steps the large institutions use to get you to accept the unacceptable.

Once upon a time the, er, ‘government’ used to sacrifice YOUR CHILDREN to ‘appease’ the ‘gods’!

Naturally that was BEFORE the separation of Church and State…now consider if you will just WHO wants to see them ‘reunited’…

Here we are, throwing a lot of shadows on the walls because the truth is only the ‘old’ vote. Kids don’t have (or don’t bother to ‘make) the time’.

And, ironically, there are now more ‘old people’ than ever before (the first wave of the Baby Boom has already retired!)

So how do YOU think ‘cutting entitlement programs’ is going to go?

Which is to ask, just how much faith do YOU have in the ballot box?

The ballot box did absolutely ZERO when it came to protecting your job OR your pension fund!

And we really can’t level the electric gattling gun at either political party…but there is a target right behind those ‘meat puppets’…the > One Percent.

Guess who is ‘responsible’ for off-shoring YOUR job and POCKETING your pension savings?

I know, don’t remind you…but hey, this is all going to be laid at ‘the girls’ feet, isn’t it?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tard-y

Greetings good citizen,

Sorry for the tardy post, dealing with a frustrating problem with my vehicle, spent some serious dollars and it’s still not fixed.

Must not be looking at the correct factors…and trying to get information out of a dealer is futile.

Not that it particularly matters. Won’t need a vehicle after the shit flies and neither will pretty much anyone else.

What shit is that good citizen?

How about trying on a cascading systemic collapse for size:

China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods
By KEITH BRADSHER

The severity of the country’s inventory surplus has been masked by the blocking or adjusting of economic data by the government.

Graphic: Chinese Sales Lag
Manufacturing in China Slows

No surprise here good citizen, even the stock markets tanked mightily today in reaction to this economic hard landing.

No customers has a way of causing these ‘gridlock’ situations.

Piles of finished goods nobody can purchase because they lost their jobs to offshoring…

This is ‘why’ the government (used to) protect the rest of society from monopolies

I think it is a valid question to ask why it no longer does…

But look at what’s coming after November’s ‘theft’:

News Analysis
Mitt Romney campaigned on Thursday in Hobbs, N.M., discussing his energy plan at Watson Truck and Supply.
Giving Reins to the States Over Drilling
By ERIC LIPTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS 9:10 PM ET

Mitt Romney is proposing to end a century of federal control over oil and gas drilling and coal mining on government lands to court western voters and supporters from the energy industry.

Energy is sold on the ‘world market’ meaning no matter where it is found, the price per barrel is set on the ‘open market’ and it ‘doesn’t matter’ if you pumped it yourself, the retailers are going to mark it up to the current price per gallon regardless.

Thus is Willard’s plans for ‘energy independence’ full of shit!

In case you’re wondering (or are just plain absolutely stupid) the reason why energy continues to climb steadily is because the numbers of end users keeps growing!

It also reflects the fact that modern life itself is very ‘energy centric’ you use a lot of energy living a ‘western lifestyle’.

So what’s the Mittster really up to? He’s going to make all of the GOP wannabes sell the oil rights (even if there’s no oil) in all fifty states.

And in many cases this will be a massive fraud…but that’s okay, the justice system is already FUBAR! So none of these politicians will be ‘prosecuted’ for selling what isn’t theirs.

And why does the Mittster want energy independence (that is completely unachievable under capitalism?)

The first 2013 Cadillac ATS left the line at G.M.’s Lansing Grand River assembly plant in Michigan on July 26.
G.M. Has High Hopes for New, Smaller Cadillac
By BILL VLASIC 9:14 PM ET

Three years after General Motors hobbled out of bankruptcy, it is betting that the new Cadillac ATS will become a global contender in luxury cars.

Rapidly vanishing from the global scene is the American Success story…probably why GM is headed back towards bankruptcy.

Apparently they can’t build a car that competes with the Japanese (for monopolistic reasons, they’ve already promised the Japanese our domestic business in exchange for being the ‘guinea pig’ for the bankrupting of western civilization.)

Mind you, ‘the deal’ is between their one percent and ours so everybody else is ‘scroomed’.

Until we start stringing up the one percent from the nearest lamp posts…

Bullshit says you…

You got a better explanation?

What you capitalist attack dogs don’t understand is you’re asking everybody else to commit suicide for your inability to comprehend the mechanics of rampant monopolism!

And naturally, you see nothing ‘wrong’ with this situation:

The company is trying to find ways to show lucrative ads to mobile users without cluttering up their hand-held screens and driving them away in frustration.

Bits Blog: Facebook Speeds Up iPhone and iPad Apps | Deal Will Allow One-Tap Purchases Through Facebook

Let me once again thank my lucky stars that I don’t have a facebook account!

How do such bright people keep coming up with such idiotic ideas?

Could it be because they aren’t particularly bright?

Facebook is proof of the dearth of investment opportunities.

And what we have here is the end result of the ‘death of creativity’:

Economix Blog
Big Income Losses for Those Near Retirement
By CATHERINE RAMPELL 7:25 PM ET

The typical American between the ages of 55 and 64 has a household income almost 10 percent less than it was when the recovery began three years ago.

And this is shocking, why?

Talk about a generation of people who have had the rug pulled out from underneath them and they think the conservatives are the best thing to come along since sliced bread…

Because those worthless assholes really know how to ‘stand up for themselves’.

Which is to say I find it deeply disturbing that reasonably nice people support an ideology that is destroying their way of life.

Leading us back to the old saying, “Stupid is permanent, ignorance can be fixed.”

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Happy Talk

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A process that continues to this day…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a few tidbits remain:

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

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

This is just another example of how capitalism perverts value!

Often to a disturbing degree:

The Kalashnikov factory in Russia is humming thanks to American buyers

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

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

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

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

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

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

But my, that ‘blue wall’ is effective.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Great Divide

Greetings good citizen,

It’s been one for the books already and today isn’t nearly over but that’s on the personal side of the ledger and I won’t bother you with the details.

Let it suffice to say that you’ve got enough on your plate already without my adding to it.

Besides, like most ‘personal problems’, there isn’t anything you can do about it anyway.

I’m supposed to be hosting a birthday party for my teenaged son but instead I’m down here, penning this post.

Probably says something about my ‘parenting skills’, doesn’t it.

But life is full of conflict. The trick is to know where the common ground lies.

We cannot reverse corrupt policies that benefit only a powerful few because our society is fragmented into rival competing groups of us and them. Too many of us care more about the beliefs and agendas of our particular group than the common threats to all groups. To be sure, we are likely to say (and probably even believe) that our primary loyalty is to humanity; that our group is not exclusive; that WE are trying to make the world better for everybody dammit but we cannot because of THEM. But the truth is, when we actually confront the difficult task of finding common ground between us and them, we tend to throw in the towel rather quickly. Sometimes it just seems easier to fight “them” than try to break through our differences in order to build a more democratic and humane political system for everybody. Perhaps some of us even fear that if we sit down at the table to make peace with “them,” the very reason for our group’s existence will dissolve and we would no longer know who we are.

That a mere 400 individuals in this constitutional republic could possess as much wealth as 150,000,000 fellow citizens, and that the government would protect their right to keep it, would be unimaginable in any other context. Our fragmentation is an almost insurmountable barrier to effective political action that would move us toward a significantly more democratic reality. There are so many different contending groups—so many different varieties of us and them—that forging a cohesive majority seems all but a hopeless pipe dream.

Although we live in an irreducibly pluralistic world, we have yet to learn how to function as a pluralistic democracy. Sadly, even those of us who belong to groups that are pledged to tolerance and inclusiveness can drop the ball as readily as those who are self-consciously exclusive. Many commentators of various ideological stripes have lately been sounding the alarm about the apparent erosion of civil discourse in our society, about the toxic negativity of our media and our elections. The level of social polarization -- and the shrillness of our rhetorical warfare -- seems to be escalating. We all feel it. Many of us worry about it. Most of us say that we want it to stop. But too often we ourselves contribute to it--including me.

I think few would disagree with the findings of this article.

Part of the reason we find ourselves sitting in this pile of shit has to do with the largely imaginary rifts opened up by the political rhetoric slingers.

Naturally, the bastards claim they have been ‘taken out of context’ when they are called on their derisive rhetoric but you know damn well they ‘mean what they say and say what they mean and it usually is precisely that, ‘mean’.

Beyond weird is how the > One Percent can convince the rest of us that the majority of us wanna be just like them!

Which is true…to a degree. We all dream of the day when we will no longer need to sweat our obligations but that is a day the will only come if we are both extremely frugal AND extremely LUCKY!

Everybody (with varying degrees of success, which is to say ‘failure’) ‘tries’ to set aside something for a rainy day…but the fucking rain refuses to stop!

(Yet another disturbing ‘commonality’, the ‘average’ schmoe is on a steady ‘bad luck’ diet.)

So, why are we so divided?

Because the corporate owned media tells us we are!

We (sadly) ‘believe’ that most of us are closeted conservatives when only one out of every five actually VOTES Republican.

So how do they keep winning elections?

YOU can’t verify who REALLY WON. YOU are ‘at the mercy and the (ahem) honesty' of the corporate owned media!

EVEN IF 80% of us are convinced they are full of shit, there’s still NO WAY to prove it!

And they aren’t about to produce the actual ballots so YOU can see just how everyone voted.

They don’t have to…and if they did there is no way to tell if a majority of the ballots weren’t forged! (The work of a few minutes in our modern age.)
Thus do we need a different, more positive method for determining the will of the people. The ‘secret ballot’ isn’t it!

If we are to have an ‘accountable’ government we need to have ‘transparency and tracability!

Only the scoundrel needs secrecy!

So the REAL question here is how long are we going to let them get away with lying to our faces?

When will we call their bluff and make them prove we are as divided as they claim we are?

>One Percent of us running the other 99% over the edge of a cliff just isn’t how it’s supposed to go down.

Which is to ask just how much BULLSHIT are you willing to swallow?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mis-directed

Greetings good citizen,

Needless to say the destruction of our civilization proceeds unhindered. In yet another demonstration of serious cognitive dissonance, the corporate owned media once again has the chutzpah to state that the ‘wizards of money’ [The Fed] will now be motivated ‘to Act’…whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean?

Which naturally begs the question of what the fuck they’ve been doing for THE PAST FOUR YEARS?

Anyway, on with this morning’s snapshot:

Jobs Report Makes Federal Reserve More Likely to Act
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Federal Reserve officials are reluctant to provide further stimulus, but the slowing rate of job creation suggests they have not done enough.

Feeble U.S. Job Growth Stokes Fears of Global Slowdown
Economix Blog: Jobs Forecast Shifts the Electoral Outlook

President Obama, at a stop at Honeywell International on Friday said, “Our economy is still facing some serious headwinds.”
Slowdown in Growth Could Reshape Fight for Presidency
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and MARK LANDLER

Friday’s weak employment report was a potential turning point, focusing new attention on the economic implications of the partisan standoff over tax and spending policy.

Interactive Feature: Jobs Remarks: A Comparison
Wall Street Tumbles 2% on Jobs Data

Interest rates are already effectively zero so what CAN the Fed do besides print money?

And you know what happens when they start shoveling money out of the open doors of helicopters, don’t you?

We get Zimbabwe Time (featuring Zimbabwe prices like bottled spring water, only a billion dollars a bottle!)

Yes good citizen, the world becomes a very frightening place when we ALL become billionaires.

Hell, it would be a nightmare if we were all to become overnight millionaires thanks to the gross mismanagement of the people (nominally) ‘in charge’.

But don’t take my word for it, you’re going to find out for yourself, ‘firsthand’ because the fuckers still refuse to fix the economy they broke by exporting pretty much all of Western Civilization’s JOBS!

This brings us to the ‘second half’ of today’s ‘snapshot’.

What the fuck does ANYONE think ‘Willard’ Mitt is going to do differently?

I have heard an ‘empty-headed’ Republican vocally supporting the Romney presidency because he ‘believes’ the old Mittster ‘understands’ business.

I mean, maybe he’s right. He sure took enough of ‘em apart (not that any of them survived being ‘dissected’, after the ‘profitable pieces’ were sold off.)

This is Presidential choice number two…not that it has ever been the President’s job to create jobs.

And at the end of the day, this is what the corporate owned media will come out with.

It’s not the President’s job to create jobs!

But it IS his/her job to PROTECT jobs!

How is BOBO doing in the job protection department?

Federal payrolls are DOWN roughly a million head since he took office but you know conservatives, they HATE ‘big government’…

What’s that? He’s NOT a conservative? Oh, he’s a fucking whacko Libbie, that explains everything! The Tea Party will be rallying around him come November…

What’s that? Oh, the Tea Party thinks he’s ‘not an American’. Well, maybe they can convince Arnold to run now that he’s served his time running California into the ground!

WHAT! The Governator isn’t an AMERICAN Either!

What kind of party are these conservo-loonies running around here anyway?

[All joking aside good citizen, it is time to seriously ask ‘what the FUCK is going on around here?’]

Even more disturbing is how the whack-job conservatives are always blaming things on some imaginary people they call ‘liberuls’.
Seriously good citizen, can YOU point at a single ‘liberal’?

I’ll bet you can’t.

Just a hint but the D after the name no longer identifies ANYONE as being a ‘true liberal’.

Just as the only thing the R after someone’s name tells you today is they are:
A.) Old and
B.) Psychologically unbalanced.

The pop quiz for today is:

‘Would you vote for a political candidate who had signed a ‘no new tax’ pledge?’

If you would then you are demented and should be disqualified from voting because you obviously don’t understand what government is about.

And that’s the hell of it, good citizen.

We have too many voters who are clueless about the ‘purpose of government’, just as they are clueless about the purpose of commerce.

This will not stand.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(Disclaimer: Under A Simple Plan there ARE NO TAXES…but there are also no candidates for ‘elected office’ so you’ll never be asked to vote for one!)

Nanny State

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the globe are bleeding from the eye-sockets for the second straight day but THIS is today’s top story:

TOP NEWS
New York Plans to Ban Sale of Big Sizes of Sugary Drinks
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A proposal that would take effect as soon as next March is the most ambitious effort yet by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration to combat rising obesity.

Isn’t it comforting to see that the > One Percent’s Mayor has his eye what’s important?

Could this latest incarnation of the Nanny State be any less intrusive? How long before ‘robo-conservatives’ start decrying this move as another ‘Liberal attack’ on liberty?

How much worse is it that this asshole is able to claim he’s an ‘Independent’?

By distancing himself from his decidedly conservative roots he is able to blame the much abused but no longer existent Liberals for his unpopular social decisions.

And the editor chose this story as what is ‘important’ to New Yorkers?

Looks like there ought to be a job opening at the NY Times…don’t you think?

Let’s see what got relegated to the ‘inner depths’ of today’s edition.

You don’t suppose THIS would have made a ‘more appropriate’ headline, do you?

Debt Crisis in Europe
Central Banker Sees Structure of Euro Zone as ‘Unsustainable’
By JACK EWING 10:37 AM ET

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, warned Thursday that the structure of the euro zone had become “unsustainable.”

Europe Fears Bailout of Spain Would Strain Its Resources

You don’t suppose the, er, ‘unfortunate choice of words' by the head of the European Central Bank has anything to do with shuffling this story off to the business section, do you?

I mean, calling the world’s fall back currency ‘unsustainable’ is a bit harsh, isn’t it?
Maybe they were reluctant to run a story not centered in the US but, the very next headline tells us what we all already know:

U.S. Steps Up Pressure on Europe to Resolve Euro Crisis
By DAVID JOLLY 36 minutes ago

President Obama has held conference calls with the leaders of France, Germany and Italy to help lay the groundwork for action before a G-20 summit in June.

It is also ‘understandable’ that they wouldn’t want to run with this story as today’s top headline.

The ‘Euro-crisis’ has been bubbling for four years now and nothing they have attempted (or proposed) has proven workable.

What does dummy think will change by adding his two cents?

If he has a solution don’t you think he should try it out on the US financial network first? It’s not like our banking system isn’t on life support.

And naturally good citizen, he doesn’t expect anything to change, he is doing this to provide the appearance of doing something.

If he actually did ‘do something’ it would likely, er, ‘upset’ some important campaign contributors…(who, PS, by the way, are still making sizable contributions to his re-election campaign despite their public dislike for the incumbent.)

He must be kicking back and grinning, ear to ear…just like ‘the great one’ (Jackie Gleason) with a hearty ‘How sweet it is!’

Getting paid tons of cash for NOT doing the right thing!

And NOBODY’S saying a word about it! (Talk about having a muzzle on the media!)

Skipping along we have this little tidbit:

Other Business News
First-Quarter G.D.P. Revised Down to 1.9% Rate
By REUTERS 9:05 AM ET

Economic growth in the United States was a bit slower than initially thought in the first quarter, the Commerce Department reported.

Again, not quite the story you want to run at the top of the paper…although the public would be interested in knowing this little factoid.

But how do you run a headline like that without opening the door for a discussion about why things are going so badly?

Since the ‘official line’ has been to ignore the symptoms leading up to the crash, you don’t want people to start asking questions now…

They might actually expect something to be done about it!

So the question turns back onto YOU…are YOU ‘happy’ with how things are being handled?

Or are you getting fed up with ‘more of the same’ from our deaf and blind political leaders?

Because, UNTIL YOU ‘show them’ you will no longer tolerate inaction, NOTHING is going to change, capeche?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Conversations

Greetings good citizen,

Since the NY Times is cutting way back on the number of ‘free articles’ you can read, I am, er, ‘practicing’ getting my news items from other sources.

Not that this has proven very, er, ‘reliable’. Alternet and RawStory are both driven by different political agendas than the Corporate owned media so their focus is often at odds with the bullshit they pipe into your living room/car 24/7.

So while the, er, ‘second tier’ media outlets quite readily call ‘bullshit’ on the Corporate owned media, they then tend to spin the story with their own ‘agenda’ driving the story…and let’s face it good citizen, propaganda is propaganda.

Which is also my way of apologizing for being a day behind this news item, because the ‘alternative press’ is also often a ‘day behind’ (besides being a little ‘off the mark’ as well.)

Let us examine today’s paltry offering for example:

Republican leaders, including those in 11 states with the highest percentage of uninsured residents, don’t want to fix our broken healthcare system.

The Republican Party again showed its petulant, "party-of-no" face on Tuesday as lawyers representing 26 red states and conservative think-tanks told the U.S. Supreme Court that nobody should be forced have health insurance—even if people carrying insurance end up subsidizing the defiantly uninsured who get ill.

“Could you tell me,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor began, in perhaps the most succinct moment capturing this schism, addressing Paul D. Clement, an attorney representing the law’s challengers, “do you think the states could pass this mandate?”

represent 26 states,” he replied. “I do think the states could pass this, but I….”
But they won’t. The Republican leadership in his clients’ states, including 11 with the highest percentage of uninsured residents in America, don’t want to fix a broken healthcare system. Forget that these states are supposedly more religious than liberal America—they are not their brothers’ keepers. It’s everyone fending for themselves: that’s the America they want.

While they do an admirable job of the ‘he said, she said’ reporting, they don’t deviate from their laser like focus on displaying Republicans in the worst possible light…when we are all well aware of just how rotten conservative whackos can be.

Again, it’s easy to criticize…but this particular issue is much larger than it on the surface appears.

Why are the proxies for the > One Percent playing the ‘rugged individual card’ in this battle over a healthcare plan that they themselves designed?

And one that would piss off one of their main campaign contributors big time if it gets overturned!

It’s every insurer’s wet dream, ‘mandated insurance’…and they already do it with automobiles…so there’s your ‘precedent’ right there!

Compulsory insurance is almost as old as the auto industry itself…and perhaps it is me who isn’t getting it because auto insurance isn’t meant to protect YOU, it’s there to protect THE FUCKING BANKS!

Now, under A Simple Plan there is no insurance of any kind…none.

How can we get away with that? Because money is fictional, it’s make believe.

People do what they do because that’s what they get paid for…and the things they buy with their pay are ‘free’. the resources utilized in producing the item are ‘free’ from nature who, coincidentally, doesn’t have a cash register.

And yes Virginia, you do have to ‘husband’ your resources thus do some things ‘cost’ more than others.

So if you get sick (really sick…like laid up in the hospital sick) it won’t ‘cost’ you anything. It’s what those people do for their pay and there’s no need for you to ‘pay’ them too…that’s the ‘idiocy’ of capitalism!

You often pay twice for what should be, by right, yours for free!

Since I’m already ‘off the reservation’ (again) I might as well task you with another little tidbit that most of you are unaware of…the reason our current social model is ‘broken’.

Under our current capitalist social model you pay for EVERYTHING…and since only a few of us enjoy, er, ‘inexhaustible wealth’ (at everyone else’s expense) the ‘inability to pay’ keeps causing the system to break down…

I mean the ‘fuck you pay me’ scheme even fostered the NEED for an ‘insurance industry’!

But now I digress, we can’t get too far away from the central fact in play here…

That our social model is broken.

No where on the horizon is there a proposal to ‘fix’ our broken model…the only thing we are seeing is a fierce stepping up of the ‘fuck you, pay me demand behind the badly broken model.

Well, I shouldn’t say ‘nowhere’, should I?

Let us return to our original topics, the scarcity of news outlets and their propensity to promote their own agenda (such as I have done here…but I doubt many will deny the need for a solution to our current plight as we can’t ALL be filthy rich, which is the only acceptable solution to the 'fuck you, pay me' crowd…those exceeding rare ‘rugged individuals.’

Um, which is to point out that while we might all be cool with the idea of paying ourselves handsomely, it is not a ‘practical solution’.

Start pumping up the money supply and you will spark a ‘wage/price spiral’ where wages chase prices that chase wages until you find yourself in Zimbabwe, paying a billion dollars for two cucumber sandwiches with a bottle of spring water apiece…

Did I mention that all money is ‘funny’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Incompetent

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday the markets lost no time in surging straight past the 13,000 point barrier, and pushed the NASDAQ to a new record high, on the alleged ‘strength’ of the retail sales report (which was mostly driven by inflation!)

Not that there is anything (beyond agitating for a congressional investigation into the matter) you can do about ‘blatant fraud’ in the financial markets.

Under the category of ‘really now?’ we have this little tidbit to kick off today’s offering:

ON THIS DAY

On March 14, 1900, Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act.

Honestly, good citizen, how many of you thought we were on the ‘Gold Standard’ from the get go? (I know I was under that impression.)

Well, the ‘Gold Standard’ only lasted ‘til 1972 when it was abandoned for an ‘anything goes’, er, can’t quite bring myself to call it a ‘system’, because it isn’t. So I guess anything goes is going to have to stand alone!

Um, you don’t need me to admonish you not to be misled; these new ‘record highs’ are as meaningless as the previous ones were as neither had any relationship with real world economic performance. All of this is only ‘eyewash’ for the economically feeble minded!

On a more, er, ‘sensitive’ topic, it is tough for an Eeyore like me to start bashing (and this isn’t the first time) the team who is supposedly on the same side I’m on…although there is no ‘connection’ between (progressive) liberals and Anarchists, thus the ‘ideological differences’.

While we’re here, there is also absolutely zero connection between (true) Anarchists and those asshole Libertarians who mistake ‘rules without rulers’ to mean ‘no rules’ whatsoever!

But I digress, it is not the Libertarians I’m kicking in the shins today, it’s the so-called ‘progressives’

Apparently the have been ‘toeing the company line’ for far too long!

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?

Yes, Susie makes an excellent reference to ‘the search for excellence’ thinking that is behind the misguided management practices we see today but it seems she doesn’t have a firm grip on the scope of the unemployment situation.

And what will have to be done to ‘realign’ the economy!

It is ‘unsurprising’ to see progressives locked onto the old 40-hour workweek (while totally ignoring the fact that there aren’t enough 40-hour jobs to go around to make even half of our society, er, ‘viable’.)

In order to cut the workweek in half and double the workforce we would need to halve the average living expense in the process! (Under my proposal (A Simple Plan) that involves ‘wiping out’ the Real Estate market, it’s ‘artificial’ anyway.)

I also ‘wipe out’ the entire financial sector but there are other reasons behind that move.

Again, while we’re here, explaining things, I also ‘re-purpose’ commerce to its ‘original goal’ of meeting the needs of society (as opposed to merely ‘enriching its owners’!)

So yeah, the only way to ‘solve’ the unemployment crisis is to cut the work week/day in half…So why are the dimwit progressives stuck on a ‘forty hour schedule’?

Well, we live in a ‘forty hour’ economy (Which is also a grave ‘mis-perception’, a perfect example of ‘middle class myopia’!)

Which brings us full circle to another decidedly disturbing ‘elephant in the room’,

Who stands for the workers and where the hell are they?

Understand good citizen, that the ‘middle class-knowledge worker’ does NOT consider themselves a ‘worker’, they think of themselves as ‘professionals’ who provide a ‘service’.

It is bullshit like this that has caused the ‘working class’ to disappear from the public lexicon!

There are the ‘poor’ (which are generally acknowledged to be the former ‘working class’) there is the ‘middle class’ (who consider themselves the ‘professional next door’) and there are the ‘rich’ who those middle class professionals all work for (even in retail!)

Is it any wonder our nation doesn’t work, all of the workers have been ‘wiped out’!

Which you and I both know isn’t true. There are still plenty of hardworking people keeping the lights burning and making the trains run on schedule.

How fucking sad is it that these hard working people don’t have ANY political support in the current government?

Just another thing to chew on while you’re trying to figure out if you’re a worker or not…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The dim future...

Greetings good citizen,

The pundits, ‘talking shit’ (as usual), ‘predicted’ markets would be ‘up’ with the, er, ‘alleged resolution’ of the Greek Crisis.

And what do you know, the pundits were…WRONG! (But that surprises no one.)

Well, when I saw the actual, er, ‘disappointing’ performance of the global markets, this article caught my eye.

They will also wrangle over whether to increase the firepower of their bailout fund — a move that is still vehemently resisted by Germany.

No final decisions are expected on these issues Monday, but the talks will set the tone for how the eurozone plans to deal with an economic crisis that continues despite recent market calm.

Ministers will also examine the next steps for Greece's euro130 billion ($171 billion) rescue, including the first aid installment and shoring up the banks.

How sad is it good citizen that what you see here is more than half of the whole thing?

Which is to point out that the Euro-zone (like the rest of the West) doesn’t have a ‘future’ to look forward to.

Look up and take note of the italicized text.

I’m gonna say it one more time, slow and in English…the so-called ‘investors’ ARE NOT LIKE you and me! They are as ‘ALIEN’ to us as the ONE PERCENT is!

Fortunately, a little further along, I encountered this article which provides us with more insight into the ruinous Euro-zone situation:

Problems at banks led to steep declines in lending. The weakest banks in Europe — Greek banks and those identified by European regulators as being short on capital — cut new lending by 14.6 percent in the last six months of 2011, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The remaining, healthier banks cut new lending by 6 percent.

The European Central Bank’s emergency loans, as well as more decisive action by European political leaders, led to a steep decline in the rates that banks had to pay to issue their own corporate bonds, to borrow money from other banks for short periods or to obtain American dollars, according to the data.

But, Mr. Cecchetti said, “this definitely does not mean we are out of the woods.”

“Financial conditions have improved, but they are still strained,” he said. Many countries are still trying to return to the same level of economic output they had before the financial crisis began, he noted.

“There has been basically no growth in advanced economies in five years,” he said.

Elephant in the room time again! If nobody is ‘creditworthy’, who do you lend to? Worse, how do you ‘profit’ from lending when the borrower’s cost keep climbing exponentially, reducing their ability to pay? (Peak Energy, which boosts the cost of EVERYTHING, across the board!)

Now, tell me again that you don’t believe in collapse…

Worse, good citizen, the ‘window of opportunity’ is closing and it is already going to be devilishly difficult to establish sustainable systems as it is. (Which is to opine it will be tough even without a determined [and decidedly self-interested] minority fighting it every step of the way!)

But I think that last sentence sums things up nicely, don’t you?

There has been basically NO GROWTH in the Advanced Economies in FIVE YEARS!

Now, who needs me to explain WHY that is?

Is it because of the United States, who readily attacks anyone who so much as looks like it is going to lift a finger to protect the people that elected them?

No, and all of this ‘hype’ about an American Empire is just more bullshit mis-direction. There’s an Empire out there all right but it has NO ‘nationality’, it obeys (nor fears I might add) no government.

This Empire ‘owns’ all of the governments that matter…which bodes very poorly for the majority of us. Psychos who are rich enough to ‘own’ governments usually use those offices to protect themselves…no matter how many (of their own) people get killed in the process.

‘Paranoia’ drove Stalin to murder 25 million…and the ‘new boss’ will be no different.

Why do you suppose we are suddenly seeing, er, ‘legislation’ legalizing the murder of a nation’s own citizens?

Well, the kings were famous for dispensing ‘capital punishment’ on a whim, if anything displeased them, the solution was always a hand wave away, ‘kill it, kill it now!’

And there wasn’t (and worse) ISN’T a fucking thing you can do about it!

Who among us can question The President?

According to those ‘flag waving patriots’ (who call themselves conservatives) the President (especially a Republican president) is ‘infallible’ and is therefore, beyond reproach, never mind question.

Worse, state sanctioned murder automatically falls under the cloak of ‘State Secret’, they can’t tell you the answer for fear of ‘jeopardizing’ National Security…

Like a lot of things that have slid into oblivion, (thanks to the corporate owned media) the government’s newly acquired right to murder YOU on a whim has more or less (permanently) ‘escaped’ the news cycle.

If the government murders YOU (OR a loved one) it is ‘automatically’ a State Secret and it would be a crime itself to have to answer for its actions!

Can you say ‘fucked’?

I knew you could…and I also know will demonstrate just what that means to the cowards who voted for this vile legislation!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'American' Empire? (not!)

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s hiatus resulted in today’s frustration over (re-) learning how to type on a ‘proper keyboard’ once more.

Which is to say I spent yesterday ‘resurrecting’ the computer that has lain in pieces down in the ‘man cave’ since last fall. (Blew the CPU, but what do you want for a hundred bucks?)

But that’s neither here nor there, we have larger fish to fry, don’t we?

In yet another display of exceptional myopia the book promotion agency that doubles as a mouthpiece for the ‘progressive’ arm of the long defunct Democratic party gets it ‘wrong’ once again…

Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream.

This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by definition be at someone else’s expense.

In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for "more" -- for individual accumulation of wealth.

Yet another, er, ‘common mistake’ of the thinly disguised alternative press is to circulate the notion that there won’t be any ‘retroactive retribution’ (that will be delivered sooner than most of you would imagine!)

Then there is the curiously myopic illusion that the Empire was that of the sole remaining ‘superpower’, the crippled and crazy USA.

Here is a nation that is running amok in every which direction, killing the natives of other lands with impunity while claiming that ‘God’ had granted them the right (and let’s not forget the ‘solemn moral obligation’) to protect unbridled capitalism around the globe!

(And all of this from a nation headed by a ‘socialist’, not that those leveling such charges have a freaking clue what a socialist is!)

But that’s the media for you! They have reality so twisted around that they need both hands and a hunting dog just to find their asshole!

You, the average citizen, need to set this nonsense aside!

We aren’t ‘at war’ with a cadre of crazed, ideologically challenged fringe right wing militants, hell bent on establishing a Christian nation, under (their) ‘god’.

Nope, what we’re up against is an ‘Ancient Enemy’ that has been around as long as civilization itself (and before you get it wrong again, understand that the Devil has been around longer than civilization and is no more real than his ‘nice guy’ bookend. (Who has proven to be mighty helpless for an ‘almighty’ being…)

That ‘Ancient enemy’ is the one who is always questioning both your patriotism AND your ‘worthiness’…most because they are so ‘unworthy’ (and the only way to defend their worthlessness is to ‘invent’ an even less worthy…er, (wait for it!) Class!

Yes good citizen, I detest ‘beating around the bush’ as much as the next guy but the unjustly rich have done such a fine job of convincing you that the ‘problem’ IS NOT their predations, their unjustified and selfish self-enrichment (at YOUR expense)

This is not the collapse of the ‘American Empire’, it is the collapse of both Western civilization and (in case you haven’t noticed) the entire ‘rule of law’ concept!

Somewhere down the line, our self-professed ‘betters’ have decided that what we, as a society, NEED is a ‘return to ‘basic values’. A return to a time where (almost) everyone had a place and nobody DARED to question it…because the KING could have you executed with a snap of his fingers (and on a whim!)

It was more than a ‘Freudian slip’ going on when ‘Bush, the Lesser’ stated that things would be much easier (for him) if he were a dictator…

Think about it good citizen, ‘dictator’ is just another word for ‘king’…

How about you good citizen, would you be willing to give up this messy crap we call ‘democracy’ (even though what we suffer today couldn’t be more removed from ‘real democracy’ if they tried…and they have tried!) in order to welcome back a new royalty?

The French accepted a return to Royalty after violently deposing of their king and killing off their royal family…so we have, er, ‘proof’ it is possible.

But such a thing being possible DOESN’T make it any more desirable.

The first thing we need to set right is our shattered legal system.

Their mission is not just to ‘crush’ the (semi-educated) Middle Class but to obliterate it!

And, (again, in case you hadn’t noticed) they intend to ‘re-write history’ so that freedom is redefined as being the mercy of the king!

God help you if you cross the king because the king will soon assume his ‘rightful place’ as ‘god on earth’…

And if that happens, our species is doomed!

Thanks for letting me inside your head (‘cuz the king would never permit it!)

Gegner

Lottery System

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we are confronted with ‘if this is what a college degree does for you then who needs it’ conundrum. Interestingly enough, this particular article straddles the dubiousness of both economic AND journalism degrees!

First we look at what ‘Modern Economics’ endows its followers with then we can follow up with some ‘critical reading skills’ which is a skill journalism school supposedly endows its students with…

In their book “Freakonomics,” Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt explain, among other things, the odd economic behavior that guides many drug dealers. In one gang they described, the typical street-corner guy made less than minimum wage but still worked extremely hard in hopes of some day becoming one of the few wildly rich kingpins. This behavior isn’t isolated to illegal activity. There are a number of professions in which workers are paid, in part, with a figurative lottery ticket. The worker accepts a lower-paying job in exchange for a slim but real chance of a large, future payday. [snip]

Okay, wait a minute slim…why is Bobo on the corner, breaking the law in the first place?

Did he take a ‘wrong turn’ on the career path of life? Did his ‘gang affiliation’ somehow preclude him from seeking honest work? I mean just look at all of the ‘entry level positions’going begging today…all NONE of em!

What fucktard ‘overlooks’ is ‘less than minimum wage’ is still better then ‘no wage’.

And the official figures repeatedly omit those who don’t (and never have) collected unemployment because they never had a ‘legitimate wage’ job…

You gotta pay in BEFORE you can collect!

Another thing fucktard overlooks is that the criminal world mirrors the corporate world, it’s not what you know but who…the guy on the corner has no ‘illusions’ about his future, he’s just doing what he can to ‘get by’.

If there’s no ‘legitimate work’ then you have to take work on the other side of the fence, it’s all about survival…not ‘illusions of grandeur’ (as numbnuts would have you believe!)

Hollywood is, in some ways, the model lottery industry. For most companies in the business, it doesn’t make economic sense to, as Google does, put promising young applicants through a series of tests and then hire only the small number who pass. Instead, it’s cheaper for talent agencies and studios to hire a lot of young workers and run them through a few years of low-paying drudgery. (Actors are another story altogether. Many never get steady jobs in the first place.) This occupational centrifuge allows workers to effectively sort themselves out based on skill and drive. Over time, some will lose their commitment; others will realize that they don’t have the right talent set; others will find that they’re better at something else. [snip]

Here we see the ‘it’s just a means to an end’, pitch in play. Those who ‘really want it’ will persevere in the end. Which isn’t the case at all! Again it is not ‘what you know but who…’

This puts the lie to that other old capitalist bromide ‘there’s always room at the top!’ the fuck there is! The top keeps getting smaller all the time as the foolish bastards continue to undermine the public’s faith in all varieties of currency, and by extension, organizations!

These idiotic journalists keep making the capitalist arguments that simply DON’T EXIST!

These people aren’t ‘striving to get ahead’, they’re taking what’s offered because it’s the ONLY game in town…and let me tell you, ‘DESPERATION is a TERRIBLE thing!’

Trying to mask it as ‘clever business strategy’ is something the fucking Libertarians would come up with!

Now, many economists fear that the comfortable Plan B jobs are disappearing. Technology and cheaper goods from overseas have replaced many of the not-especially-creative professions. A tax accountant loses clients to TurboTax; many graphic designers have been replaced by Photoshop; and the small shopkeeper by Home Depot, Walmart or Duane Reade. Though a lottery economy is valuable to various industries, the thought of an entire lottery-based economy, in which a few people win big while the rest are forced to toil in an uncertain and not terribly remunerative dead-end labor pool, is unfair and politically scary. If large numbers of people believe they have no shot at a better life in the future, they will work less hard and generate fewer new ideas and businesses. The economy, as a whole, will be poorer.

Ah me! What can you say in the face of such ‘profound stupidity?’ First they lay out the case against globalization and the global race to the bottom and then they propose we do absolutely nothing about it! Bemoaning the loss of ‘hardworking low wage strivers’ as a sort of self-inflicted wound!

Um, this article is titled something along the line of ‘Harvard Grads in the mailroom’ and the general thrust of the article runs along the idea that not EVERY Harvard Grad goes straight to Wall Street.

Well Bubba, what about the countless millions who DON”T FUCKING GO TO HARVARD?

What about them? (I’m going to guess people who can’t afford to pay $50,000 a semester tuition are NOT his concern…)

It’s not clear what today’s eager 23-year-old will do in 5 or 10 years when she decides that acting (or that accounting partnership) isn’t going to work out after all. The best advice may be to accept that economic success in America will come as much from the labor lottery as from hard work and tenacity. The Oscars make clear that there is only so much room at the top. In a lottery-based economy, you need some luck, too; now, perhaps, more than ever. People should be prepared to enter a few different lotteries, because the new Plan B is just going to be another long shot in a different field. The role model of our time should be an actress who was never nominated for an Oscar. Hedy Lamarr did well enough on the screen but, just in case, she spent her free time developing something called frequency-hopping spread-spectrum. It’s a wireless-communication technique still in use in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Not bad for a fallback.

I’d LIKE TO kick ‘fucktard’ in the nuts for providing us with only a single ‘success story’ but, in his defense, there probably aren’t a whole lot more.

So is it ‘the best advice’ that ‘economic success’ will come from what might be more straight-forwardly be labeled as ‘luck’ than hard work and tenacity?

Well, the ‘win some lose some’ philosophy only works during periods of social stability…and the current period is rapidly coming to an end on a global basis.

How sad is it good citizen that the Libertarians among us are willing to ‘roll the dice’ with the future of our species…

How frightening is it that the typical Libertarian also believe it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?

I once again ask you, quite candidly, is this the best our ‘education system’ can do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Left Justified

Greetings good citizen,

The right demonizes the government as the entity that, er, ‘prevents’ profitable commerce…the thought being we’d really make a lot more money if we didn’t have to obey all of those ‘intrusive’ governmental regulations…

While the left despises the government for being the ‘play-thing’ of the privileged…

And neither of them are ‘wrong’ (although only the left is ‘justified’ in its disdain…the right’s ire is ‘pretend’ at best and an act at worst.)

Which is to ask how sick is it that the right keeps proposing legislation intended to steal the few rights you have while they simultaneously ‘fail to prosecute’ crimes against society?

Who REALLY gives a fuck about ‘gay marriage’? It’s not even a particularly ‘good deal’ for the gay when it’s all said and done. But the right lead the charge in the ‘defense of marriage’ baloney that followed…after a Massachusetts judge issued a ‘surprise decision’ during the 2004 presidential election cycle…when, ‘coincidentally’ a Massachusetts Senator was in the race for the oval office, running against an extremely unpopular Republican incumbent.

And for the third time in as many elections we ended up with a ‘photo finish’ that was decided by the ‘electoral college’.

Ironically, one thing is currently crystal clear, that we ARE NOT as ‘equally divided’ as the corporate owned media wants us to believe, thanks to the widespread support received by the OWS movement.

What has become increasingly apparent is that our entire ‘political process’ is no longer under our control. The people who pay for the message get to dictate what that message is…

And lately it has become disturbingly clear that we have been lied to and those lies have cost us dearly.

Globalization was supposedly done ‘for us’ but now it is apparent it was done ‘to us’. It was NEVER about ‘lower prices for you’, it was always about higher profits for them!

Higher profits reaped from the benefits they didn’t have to pay their ‘new’ employees!

Wednesday the Internets went dark to protest ‘Chinese Style’ censorship under Republican sponsored legislation. (Ironically, it was the same Republicans who suddenly opposed their own bill, making the Democrats look ‘stupid’…but if we accept that there are no Democrats then the ‘sock puppets’ representing the Democrats are, by definition, er, ‘stupid’.

Today we are being urged to call our State Attorney General’s office to voice our opposition to the OBAMA administration’s latest attempt to railroad a ‘uniform settlement’ through congress that will, literally, legalize theft…if you’re a banker or an investor.

Um, who ARE these, er, ‘morons’ that CALL THEMSELVES ‘democrats’ and who, precisely, do they represent?

What does this sort of nonsense portend for the upcoming presidential election cycle?

Why is this bootlicking coward running ‘unopposed’? (Which is to ignore the fact that his ‘opponents’ from the opposite political party are all ‘bad cartoon characters’!)

Left is right and down is up, right?

This is NOT the state you want your politics to fall into…

YOU are being MANIPULATED, good citizen…and this is NEVER a ‘good thing’.

How do we ‘free’ ourselves from this trap?

How do we ‘sort out’ the truth from the convenient lies?

Sadly, it is not as simple as automatically rejecting the ‘near truth’ of the corporate owned media and accepting, even generally, the assertions of the, er, ‘free internet’. (Which is to point out that there are more than a few ‘sell-outs’ on the ‘net’!)

Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one (and that doesn’t make them right!)

Worse, there is no shortage of ‘dis-information’ out there…and only a little ‘mis-direction’ goes a long way.

We all tend to be prone to making ‘snap judgments’. (The old making up our minds before all of the facts are in.)

It’s staggering to consider all of the mayhem this trait is responsible for, doubly staggering is the amount of regret this has caused.

But that’s ‘the strength’ of the right, you end up fighting yourself so they don’t have to!

It’s like the STUPID ‘fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here’ excuse, how the fuck are all of those dirt poor Muslims supposed to get here, row?

It’s one thing to urge you to action and quite another to keep you from blowing your own foot off!

The fog of war is a terrible thing good citizen and a little ‘mis-direction’ can go a mighty long way!

Which brings us to another of today’s headlines

What do you suppose is up with that? Somehow, I suspect you know what the answer is…

Which brings us back to our original argument, if you take my meaning, along with my assertion that only the left is justified…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner