Change

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the globe traded sideways today as the markets once again showed a definite ‘lack of direction’.

I’m currently reading Michael Lewis’ book titled ‘Panic’ and it sort of hit me between the eyes how the stock market went from right around a thousand to the current thirteen thousand figure around the same time the US’s manufacturing capability was being off-shored wholesale.

Which is to point out that the stock market is basically one gigantic fraud and the Justice Department simply pretends it isn’t happening.

Which is disturbing enough but now the Justice Department is ignoring other, more troubling things and once again, there isn’t anything we can (legally) do about it.

Talk about your timelines. When I was dating my wife the Dow had just breached the 2000 level. I just recently celebrated my 22nd Wedding anniversary and not so terribly long ago the stock market was only two thousand points.

Since that time my entire career ‘disappeared’ from these shores. Sure, there are still some small shops out there (cutting each other’s throats for what little work is left.)

And for some bizarre reason the stock market, with record unemployment and the lowest labor participation rate since WWII, is over thirteen thousand points.

And it rose 225 of those points last Friday when the Fed announced another trillion-dollar giveaway program that is going ONLY to the too big to fail banks.

FOR THE THIRD TIME (since our financial markets went insolvent.)

And the pundits can’t figure out why the recovery is essentially non-existent.

I mean they’re pumping trillions of dollars into the coffers of people who already have more money than they can possibly spend. Raising the question of ‘why’ the One Percent’s government is giving the already super rich even more money when a full half of our nation’s population doesn’t earn enough to feed themselves!

Well good citizen, every coin has two sides and here’s one of them!

Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren’t even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?

Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters, they’re relying largely on one slice of America — middle-aged white men — and alienating just about everyone else.

Start with Hispanics, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they become an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney-Ryan by a larger margin than they did six months ago.

YOU’D THINK Mr. Reich has a damn good point, wouldn’t you?

After this latest fiasco they’re saying Mitt’s own father wouldn’t vote for him…but that doesn’t matter.

In fact, even if NOBODY voted for them the ‘Gruesome Twosome’ will be our next commander in Chief and trusty side-kick.

Because the ballot box is broken.

Sure, it wouldn’t ‘hurt’ the oligarchs to let their other boy win again. Hell, he’s obedient enough.

But the agenda isn’t moving forward fast enough and the shit is almost ready to hit the fan!

They don’t care if coming events make Republican’s look bad, they’ll never have to hold fake elections again.

If they are going to cement the yoke of monarchy around our waiting necks they’re going to have to be quick about it.

As well as brutal.

They have to let the public know that ‘justice’ has returned to the land and that their newly minted royals are dispensing justice.

But understand good citizen, the sudden interest in prosecuting criminals won’t be ‘retro-active’, it will be ‘pro-active’…basically exterminating anyone who MIGHT object to the restoration of god given leadership.

I’m sure you all know that the kings of old were all appointed by God. It’s part of the reason the original royals inter-married with one another extensively…in (stupid) attempts to keep ‘the lord’s bloodline’ ‘pure’…

Always trying to strengthen the claim to the throne…although all of this in-breeding did little to improve the quality of leadership those Chosen by God provided.

And here we can see the seeds of animosity that were harbored by God’s appointees against God’s chosen people.

Again, the reason for this is simple. They don’t want you to think they want you to accept…

It doesn’t matter if it’s ‘good for you’, you’re missing the point. It’s GOOD FOR THEM, that’s what matters!

Worse…after the shiny newness wears off they’ll get tired of all of the intrigue that will return with a vengeance.

It seems nobody remembers why the Kings of Old (willingly) walked off of their thrones and ducked safely inside their treasuries.

It’s because they were sick to death of always being the ‘target’. If this one wasn’t trying to kill you, his brother was.

And the ones that didn’t want you dead were perpetually trying to crawl into bed with you.

How’s that for some gruesome choices?

Again I close with the question of ‘is this how you want it to end, good citizen?

Of course you don’t, that’s why you need to get behind A Simple Plan, ASAP!

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

'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

Red Herring

Greetings good citizen,

It seems I was mistaken to think the debt ceiling wasn’t important enough to keep congressional staffers chained to their desks, monitoring ‘public opinion’…

And naturally there is another ‘compromise’ in the works.

Does anyone think that Wall Street DOESN’T want the nation to default?

The media wants you to think that but this is a ‘Red Herring’. Wall Street is really interested in avoiding prosecution for the mess they’ve made of the global economy…(which, as I have frequently pointed out, doesn’t exist!)

You want a Kabuki Dance? Check this out:

Bankers have deluged Congressional staff members with research reports outlining the bleak consequences of a default, or even a downgrade of United States government debt by the major rating agencies. And in corporate America’s version of grassroots mobilization, Allstate e-mailed 45,000 employees urging them to call their local members of Congress and demand a deal.

Hedge fund managers, normally among Wall Street’s most secretive tribes, have been stepping out of the shadows, too.

Marc Lasry, a major Democratic fundraiser who manages the $14 billion Avenue Capital hedge fund, said he spoke to half a dozen members of Congress from both parties on Thursday and Friday with blunt warnings that failure to compromise on the debt ceiling risked permanently damaging the nation’s financial standing.

What’s the ‘best case’ scenario here? That Washington crashes and burns! (While Wall Street melts back into the slimy shadows it sprang out of.)

“Every time Wall Street raises its head, there are a lot of people ready to chop it off,” said one senior banking industry official.

But as the deadline approached, anxiety began to take hold. A turning point came on July 11, when top officials from some of Wall Street’s most powerful lobbying groups filed into an ornate conference room opposite Mr. Geithner’s office on the third floor of the Treasury Building to make their case about the danger of inaction.

Just imagine, good citizen, if this were true.

These are MAJOR campaign contributors here, if they REALLY wanted to avoid default (like such a feat were possible in a finite world) the political ‘lapdogs’ would be doing whatever it took to make their master’s wishes a reality.

How sad is it good citizen that there is NO POSSIBLE ‘fix’for our shattered economy that doesn’t involve a complete ‘reshuffle’ and reboot of the entire economic system!

Which is precisely what will happen once the laws protecting the old economic order are swept away.

Sure, many of the ‘old players’ will come out of the reshuffle just fine…but some won’t.

Who’s your Daddy? (Same as it ever was!)

Then we have this bullshit, which pretends there is still such a thing as a Democrat

The same is true today. In our recent Web survey of 2,000 respondents, voters respond strongly to Democratic messages on the economy only when a party leader declares, “We have to start by changing Washington. ... The middle class won’t catch a break until we confront the power of money and the lobbyists.”

Why is that?

You do not have to look very far. If there is an article of faith among contemporary center-left leaders, it is that investment in education will pay dividends with increased productivity and increased income. And yet the evidence is piling up that the economy is not working for the middle class. Productivity and education increase but wages do not follow.

When presented with vivid descriptions of income inequality in America, people are deflated, rather than empowered to bring change. In surveys, they tell me that they think the politicians and the chief executives are “piggybacking off each other.” They think that the game is rigged and that the wealthy and big industries get policies that reinforce their advantage. And they do not think their voices matter.

Isn’t this the same question I asked a few posts back…actually I don’t recall putting it in the form of a question, it was more of a statement.

And the statement made the point of the total absence of sanity in today’s political dialog…no ‘question’ about it.

As we recently witnessed in Wisconsin, the 'scam artists' ran 'true believers' in the recall elections.

What we don't know is how deep this corruption has spread over the past thirty years?

Is there still such a thing as a Democrat?

I seriously doubt any true supporter of the public interest would pass the 'party machinery sniff test' so necessary to receiving the 'party endorsement'.

Which brings us full circle to what I consider the ‘crux’ of our current problem…the corporate owned media.

Without ‘reliable sources and objective reporting’ you wind up with the media circus we have today…with parts of the media pointing the finger at other parts with zero effect.

Our new motto has become ‘Trust No One’.

It is more than a little incredible that since Republicans are responsible for this toxic environment we find ourselves in that voting for more Republicans (according to guess who) is the answer to this conundrum?

It becomes even more ‘mysterious’ when the 1 in 5 factor is taken into consideration.

Can you say ‘puppet government?’

Which is really neither here nor there, what DOES matter is what are you willing to DO about it?

Because this circus won’t end until ‘the Rubes’ stop paying attention…

The mission at hand good citizen is to restore justice and the ‘rule of law’ over the recent incarnation of ‘the rule of man’.

It doesn’t start at the point of a gun but with the tip of a pen.

Are you game?

Because you’re ‘playing’ whether you want to or not!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner