Degradation

Greetings good citizen,

Seems the so-called ‘alternative press’ isn’t completely dominated by clueless libertarians. Some of the so-called ‘progressives’ do indeed cling to traditional liberal values.

(and Anarchists are nothing if not liberals!)

So it is that I present to you this argument as further evidence of the destruction of our society.

Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight.

Take the case of Gary Williams. Williams just spent 30 days in jail, because on two occasions a San Francisco police officer found him slumped over, asleep, on a milk crate. He did not have any camping gear with him -- not even a blanket -- yet he found himself charged with public nuisance, unauthorized lodging, and obstructing the sidewalk, his lawyer, Andrea Lindsay, tells AlterNet. The first two are misdemeanors, which carry up to a year of jail time each. On Monday, Williams pled guilty to one count of unauthorized lodging after the judge warned him that he could end up in jail for two years. The plea deal Williams opted for means he's banned from the two blocks where he used to reside and will be on probation for three years.

"This is a dude who ended up in jail for the heinous crime of sitting," Paul Boden, organizing director for the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) tells AlterNet. "When poor people stand for their rights, they sit in jail."

Your typical conservative believes the homeless and destitute are ‘well provided for’ and the people you see in the street ‘choose to be there’.

You see, good citizen, it is ‘inconceivable’ to the conservative mind that capitalism can fail anyone.

If you fail at capitalism (so conservative wisdom goes) it’s YOUR FAULT!

This, as most of us know, is a boldfaced lie.

Truth be told the first few times capitalism was tried it failed miserably…to the point where ‘the survivors’ had to be rescued from those who, er, ‘played the game by their own rules’.

Which is to point out (once again) that capitalism isn’t designed to meet the needs of our whole society, it only ‘takes care of’ those who control society…

And the short definition of cheating others to help yourself is a word those who indulge in this practice dislike passionately.

Do you know what word it is?

Sort of synonymous with the term ‘hang ‘em high’ is the word ‘treason’.

So what do we do with the ‘just doing my job’ crowd (in this case the cops)?

Cops don’t make the laws though, do they? (Well they do on the streets but that’s not the topic at hand…) it’s the politicians who can’t manage resources (the capitalists) keep cutting from them.

Yes, good citizen, campaign contributions do have a ‘cost’ and most times that cost is lower taxes (for the business community.)

After ‘giving away the store’ to the wealthy few, those who rely (somewhat) on public opinion for their jobs begin to fret that if one of ‘those people’ makes trouble, the incumbent will be viewed as ‘weak on crime’.

So we end up with the BS described in this article.

The difference is Mr. Politician can always find ready funding for more policing, he can’t get more than his share of ‘alms for the poor’.

As we all know, life under the ‘corporate agenda’ is far less safe (for everyone involved) than when life was ‘more equitably’ managed. (You may now shed a silent tear for FDR.)

Worse, good citizen, at the end of the crazy train, who do we find?

Why by gosh, by gum, it’s the shareowner!

All of this (madness) is occurring to, er, ‘produce’ (boost/maximize) ‘profits’ for the poor, hapless shareowner…

Which is to once again ask that rhetorical question, isn’t it time we take capitalism (along with those who control it) and throw it on the scrap heap?

In fact we are long overdue for a major overhaul of our ‘proven defective’ economic system.

I’d even accept the task of changing it over, knowing full well that I won’t get anything for my trouble except a far more equitable and humane society.

Even I, the new system’s creator, would be unable to ‘cheat’ the system. (Under the new system even the creator would not be ‘above the law’.)

But I digress…

It should be interesting to follow the rest of this series (not that I intend to devote my future posts to them) to examine the ‘decay’ in the leadership of our society.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Global Dominance!

Greetings good citizen,

As you may have noticed (and I missed it) the stock market rallied sharply into the close yesterday in ‘anticipation’ of today’s favorable job market report…despite the fact that the job market still sucks, it’s how they count the unemployed that looks favorable…(to the bean-counters on Wall Street.)

Which is to ask, once again, how long we will tolerate the practice of doing the incredible to satisfy the greed of the impossibly stupid few?

Let’s see if (after editing) you can detect the ‘common thread’ between these three issues ?

The child poverty cliff.

Between 2007 and 2011, the percentage of American school-age children living in poor households grew from 17 to 21%. Last year, according to the Agriculture Department , nearly 1 in 4 young children lived in a family that had difficulty affording sufficient food at some point in the year.

The baby-boomer healthcare cliff.

Healthcare costs are already 18% of GDP. Between now and 2030, when 76 million boomers join the ranks of the elderly, those costs will soar. This is the principal reason why the federal budget deficit is projected to grow.

The environmental cliff.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped 3 percent in 2011 and are expected to jump another 2.6 percent this year according to scientists, putting the human race perilously close to the tipping point when ice caps irretrievably melt, sea-levels rise, and amount of available cropland in the world becomes dangerously small.

Well, how about it good citizen, is anything smacking you in the ol’ cranium here?

What do these three factors have in common?

Seems unfair to point to ‘capitalism’ when communism and totalitarianism are also guilty of producing such outcomes, doesn’t it.

To which capitalism’s defenders would exclaim that their beloved commerce system of choice is at least ‘no worse’ than any of the…er, ‘alternatives’. (Which, in case you didn’t know/notice…all THREE operate on capitalist monetary values and systems. Doesn’t matter what your government calls itself if the whole fucking world operates under the capitalist system!

And here you were, believing that there were ‘competing’ social platforms out there!

There aren’t!

Now are you asking yourself the $64 million dollar question, Why was I kept ignorant of this?

It’s because they want you to believe ‘the other’ is responsible for your woes (when the real culprit is the capitalist!)

This is what the average citizen is kept ignorant of, that ‘global domination’ was achieved (by capitalists) long ago. WWII was just their first clumsy attempt to consolidate their power by usurping control of the world’s governments.

In retrospect, it worked brilliantly. (Because they succeeded in creating the global ‘security state’ where their actions remained hidden behind the cloak of ‘national security’.)

Scarier still is the ‘emergence’ of the practice of exterminating their detractors by remote control.

You don’t get your day in court because we can’t be raising the issue of who are you to be prosecuting us without a reason? Without risking a global uprising of the billions who are getting fucked by these ‘global capitalists’.

Funny how the simple act of questioning governmental action can get you branded a ‘terrorist’ without evidence?

And your subsequent murder will be called a ‘public good’…

I’m going to cut this short so you won’t lose sight of what has been revealed to you, good citizen.

Consider your position and act accordingly.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Not I

Greetings good citizen,

The NYSE opened moments ago but it seems ‘the action’ is in Washington this week rather than on Wall Street.

Where we are, once again, having a ‘fight’ that shouldn’t be happening.

DECEMBER

Democrats led by Obama and Republicans led by House Speaker John Boehner say it's critical to reach a deal this month. Yet both sides appear dug in over taxes. And their two plans are far apart on how much to cut spending while the economy is still recovering from the last recession.

So far, Boehner said, "we're nowhere." If compromise were easy for this bunch, they wouldn't be in this jam. A good chunk of the fiscal cliff — the automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" — is an artificial deadline created by Congress in hopes of forcing itself to come up with a deficit-cutting plan. It arrives at the same time as the expiration of the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts and other temporary tax breaks scheduled to end unless Congress extends them. Together the taxes and cuts would equal close to $700 billion in deficit reduction over 2013.

Congress could vote to override all this and essentially freeze taxes and spending where they are now while the economy heals. But Obama and lawmakers, especially Republicans bent on budget-cutting, see the fiscal cliff as the critical moment to overcome inertia on the nation's long-term debt crisis.

How ironic is it good citizen that, if the two parties involved were on more ‘amicable terms’ NONE OF THIS would be happening?

But no, the Republican’s (suffering from their usual ‘post election amnesia’) have decided to make the rest of the nation regret allowing Republicans a place on the ballot!

(We should seriously test these people, if not for psychosis then for competency!)

Do we need to pass legislation that bars psychopaths from holding elected office?

WHO would disagree with mandated testing? (Besides Republican’s and their backers?)

Same thing with the ‘fiscal cliff’.

Although perhaps the first question that we’d need to address is WHY we keep returning to this same spot every few months?

Is it because the government is incapable of ‘managing money’ or is it this broken economic model the One Percent prevents us from abandoning?

Understand good citizen, the only time a nation EVER ‘pays off’ its debts is when it is liquidated!

Supposedly the former Soviet Union drown in a sea of ‘red ink’, which ‘disappeared’ once the Soviet Union was no more. (One of those weird things regarding changes in management…even when the old boss becomes the new boss…and nothing but the packaging changes.)

Did I mention that our civilization is SEVERELY ‘mis-managed’?

And the only way to correct this is to throw out the old regime and establish a new way of doing things.

It’s not that hard and we DON’T need to re-invent the wheel, we just need a new way of restoring justice, perhaps we can even reach that surprisingly elusive goal of ‘justice for all’.

But no, we keep letting the psychopaths among us decide what needs doing and how it needs to be done.

Did you know there’s a test for that now?

Have YOU noticed the corporate owned media is ignoring this important medical breakthrough?

Being capable of screening for psychosis HUGE! It SHOULD alter the course of human destiny…unless the psychopaths are allowed to, er, ‘prevent’ their detection (and summary demotion/exile from society.)

But I digress…

More disturbing to me is the ‘line in the sand’ over ‘new taxes’.

How about going back to Old taxes?

A MAJORITY of the nation agrees that the >One Percent isn’t paying their ‘fair share’ (neither at tax time nor at the payroll office.)

Those millions they keep for themselves are all raises YOU never got and lower prices you don’t pay.

WHY do we let these people FUCK us like this? (Worse, why does the government let them get away with it?)

Is it because someday we hope to be able to fuck our fellow citizens the exact same way?

(That’s the ‘excuse’ the conservo-whackos are sticking with…we all want to fuck the public so we can be rich! [thus do we deserve the screwing we get!])

Is this the kind of society you WANT to belong to?

Not I said little goat gruff!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Reflexive (knee-jerk)

Greetings good citizen,

It seems like only yesterday the ‘great communicator’ (who was hard pressed to stay awake during cabinet meetings) was telling us, after 220 years, that we had finally arrived at ‘Morning in America’ (we should dig the bastard up and hang him, just on general principles!)

Do you know what the last election proved? The people who bought the ‘Morning in America’ horseshit (the so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’) are all DEAD!

And by today’s conservo-whacko standards, St. Ronnie would be a flaming liberal!

Which brings us to the shortest day ever and where we are now, something akin to ‘Midnight in the garden of supreme evil…’

Our utter lawlessness at the top has reached crisis proportions, thus do the ‘fiscally responsible’ (read self-interested thieves) propose we:

1. “Fix” means cut: When they say “fix” Social Security, they mean cut Social Security. Fixers want to convince the public that a well-managed, hugely popular program that does not add to the deficit (it’s self-funded) is somehow in crisis and requires intervention in the form of various cutting schemes.

2. “Reform” means rob. When the say “reform” the tax code, they mean “make taxes even lower for the rich.” The wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes in the United States, which is a major reason there is a large deficit in the first place.

3.“Bipartisan” means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens. But the group is really just a coalition for the greedy, unpatriotic rich.

4. “Concern” means covet. There was a time, a couple of generations ago, when business leaders would not dare to go public with their desire to increase income inequality and stick it to hard-working Americans

5. “Fiscal conservative” means economically confused. Longtime Wall Street executive Steve Rattner, one of Obama’s auto bailout czars, has been using his influence to attract tycoons from the financial industry to the Fix the Debt movement.

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that’s a tough sell when you’re advocating policies that mainly benefit…yourself.

No irony should be lost on the fact that our failure to prosecute the criminals responsible for the first global depression 80 years ago has led to the criminal looting of our civilization today, unfortunately labeled as ‘bank bailouts’.

Well good citizen, we’ve been 'bailing out the banks' for the past five years (while basically gutting the global economy) and we’re still not done.

When do you suppose it will be time to shut down the banking industry and institute a more responsible system?

Will that be never (because nobody is ‘smart enough’ to figure out a different way? Or so the criminally rich would have you believe.)

Step one, before we shut down the banks is we have to lock all of the criminals up, starting with the ones in charge of our so called ‘justice system’.

In a bizarre juxtaposition, possessing a law degree will bar you from ‘practicing law’, actually ‘practicing’ what you have been taught will become an ‘exile offense.’ (Because the law is the people’s domain and NO ONE shall claim to speak for all of the people! Which is a direct violation of the human anti-exploitation law.

Understand that ‘lawyering’ is something most politicians do and as a profession is almost universally loathed.

Again, while some make a good living for themselves, most rue the day they decided studying law was a good idea.

All they have to show for that decision is a mountain of student debt.

(Which collides ‘face first’ with the notion that ‘more education’ is the solution to our massive unemployment problem and desperately unbalanced economy.)

Just because you study to become something doesn’t mean there will be a (good paying) job available after you graduate (and wasn’t that the whole point of going to college in the first place?)

Your ‘hard won’ degree will likely get you a job…as a barrista at Starbucks…where the tips (like the coffee) suck.

So it will be a doubly bitter pill to slave your life away, scraping and saving to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach (forget marriage, neither of you can afford it) only to reach retirement age to find that the cupboard is empty.

Yup, after they ‘reduce the deficit’ (not by raising taxes or cutting the trillions they are spending on drone warfare…no!) by shredding social security and pauperizing those who have spent their whole lives paying into the system.

What do you suppose they will do with the ‘savings’?

They’ll pocket them of course!

And they’ll flip you the bird if you say anything about it!

(Are we testing these motherfuckers yet?)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Justice?

Greetings good citizen,

Here it is fifteen minutes before markets open and I’m back to old tricks of posting first thing (Well, it’s not the VERY FIRST thing I do…) and, as usual, today’s top story, a veritable outrage, is reported without rancor, in fact, it has become so common that it now seems this is how what passes for our ‘justice system’ operates.

Pay the fine and PROMISE to NEVER do it again…although, if memory serves this is the umpteenth time this particular miscreant has been fined for fiscal ‘wrong-doing’…

Which is to ask, good citizen, Where does it stop?

TOP NEWS
DealBook
UBS Is Reported to Be Near a Deal on Rate Rigging
By BEN PROTESS and MARK SCOTT

The Swiss banking giant UBS is expected to pay American and British fines of more than $450 million to settle claims that it reported false rates to increase its profit, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Worse good citizen, the ‘whopping’ 450 million dollar fine is just a fraction of the damage their falsehood has inflicted, so calling this justice is really a stretch.

Push come to shove they should pull the bastard’s charter and lock the doors!

Which, naturally, shines the spotlight on the other side of this situation, a society being held hostage by obvious criminals because of the JOBS that would be lost if justice were served!

But wait good citizen, it gets better!

Robert Greenwald, head of the progressive internet video and documentary film company, Brave New Films, recently traveled to Pakistan, supported financially by hundreds of BNF donors, to witness first hand the stories of families who have had innocent loved ones killed by U.S. drone attacks. Greenwald is challenging both the morality and the factual effectiveness of the U.S drone program as we learn more about the failures and questionable policies. The U.S. claims that drone missiles are aimed at potential terrorists but because the ground rules of who can be targeted is both vague and has been loosened, the number of innocents being killed has risen sharply. Furthermore, the information that is used to target people appears to be the result of a system of bribery at the local level, which is of questionable reliability.

It wasn't until April 2012 that John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism adviser admitted for the first time publicly, that our government has been using drones in Pakistan, and later Yemen, to attempt to kill those they consider as potential terrorists. This was the first public acknowledgment, despite the fact that the program had been going for at least several years. Still far more information was withheld in Brennan’s announcement about the program, than was revealed.

So we have bankers playing ‘pick your own fine’ and we have the military, whacking people indiscriminately and calling them ‘terrorists’ after the fact.

Worse, the average individual is powerless to ‘gainsay’ any of this, the eight hundred pound gorilla of ‘national security’ is wheeled out and paraded up and down the square and nothing gets done about it!

Which, if you have even one oar in the water, displays what a disturbing degree the ‘lack of accountability’ has taken on.

How long can you hide atrocities behind the veil of ‘national security’?

And at what point does it become, er, ‘unsafe’ to remain a member of such a society?

(Asked the man who is already living in a society that has suspended his right to review the evidence against him (habeas corpus.)

Hell while we’re shoveling dirt into the Republican’s grave we should include the other thing ‘Bush the lesser’ will go into the history books for and that is for abolishing the federal statute against usury!

But if we decide to document the crimes of the conservo-whackos we will need a lot more space and time than I’m willing to devote to the task!

But the real issue here is how it has become a ‘non-crime’ to be murdered by remote control…which weirdly started with the Israelis and their use of helicopter gunships to ‘assassinate’ political opponents.

The fact that they ‘bought’ those gunships from the US is just a massive coincidence…(or so they’d have you believe.)

Which is to roll this dialogue back to yesterday’s post and speculate just how many members of the political process as well as those in the military who would be found ‘unfit to serve’ if they were to be tested for the genetic markers that indicate psychopathy?

The idiots in charge of the drone program are most definitely ‘emotionally hard of hearing’ if not completely deaf…an accusation that could be fairly leveled at all who have ‘gone along’ with this atrocity in silence as the program has expanded.

Well, before a Scud come cruising through my window I’m going to post this bad boy so YOU get to consider it and it doesn’t remain a sordid bit of mental masturbation.

You know and I know something needs to be done to put a stop to this!

This is a fine time to realize that neither you nor I have the tools to put that action in motion.

Go ahead and call your congressman, let me know how that works out for you…

It won’t…and I’m not psychic (proven fact given my numerous failed predictions!)

The system, no matter how you slice it, don’t work…but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bondage

Greetings good citizen,

Did the markets close ‘up’ yesterday because this morning the Dow was back over 13,000 for no reason whatsoever! (Which is to assume that the markets ‘rallied’ yesterday towards the end of the session.)

And yeah, people are back to their old tricks, going ‘in the hole’ for Christmas because they believe the electoral rhetoric that assured them the economy was ‘improving’, when it isn’t.

So, in a not too surprising ‘repeat’ of the old ‘boom-bust’ cycle, people will spend what they don’t have followed by a renewed raft of foreclosures/repossessions…and we’ll all be the worse for it.

But as Jon Stewart (of Comedy Central fame) sarcastically put it, at least there isn’t a bill of sale with your name on it (yet)

I’m sitting here wearing clothes made by modern-day slaves and probably so are you. I’m lit by studio lights assembled in countries where workers who try to organize are imprisoned, as are many of the lights in your home.

We rationalize all the products of distant slaves we use – after all, we don’t have to look into their faces like Jefferson did – but it’s still just a rationalization.

The stark reality is that we in America didn’t “end” slavery. We simply exported it.

And it’s so much more comfortable for us to criticize Jefferson and his peers for agonizing over – but still using – slave labor 200 years ago, when we don’t have to look into the faces of today’s slaves who are toiling and dying at this very moment to sustain our lifestyles.

It’s the ugly truth good citizen, the one they don’t want you to know about…that ALL CAPITALISM is ‘predatory’ (which is why it NEEDS slavery to operate!)

You education ‘omits’ this basic fact because the only thing separating you from one of those slaves is a law the fuckers can rip up whenever it suits them.

And when they decide to rip up that law, you instantly become something the oligarchs’ fear more than anything else; you become somebody with nothing left to lose!

Worse good citizen, every day we inch closer and closer to the day when the slave market re-opens and your kids go up on the block to the ‘highest bidder’.

What are you going to do when that day comes?

Grab your favorite ‘peace now’ banner and go march in front of the Statehouse?

Will the cops NOT arrest you for creating a ‘public nuisance’ because your cause is just and they know it?

(They will if they want to keep their jobs!)

You’ve been around long enough to know how this fuckaroo works. First you have to act up and then you have to take out whoever tries to stop you…because there’s no such thing as ‘half-way’.

People ‘died’ fighting for the forty-hour workweek. They were ‘killed’ (read murdered) by guys who were ‘just doing their job’.

It’s an indelible stain on our society that those murderers were never prosecuted for their crimes, it also makes the beginning of the end of what passes for justice…pretty much anywhere on this planet.

Which is to point out the unethical exploitation of others through money is another form of ‘slavery’ we aren’t even close to ending.

Capitalists don’t like it when we refer to ourselves as ‘wage slaves’…because it’s TRUE!

Capitalists, like cops are NOT you ‘friends’. They do what they do because that’s what they are paid to do. (They try to trick you because it makes their job that much easier, once the key turns in the cell it’s ‘fuck you, idiot!’)

Ironically, A Simple Plan and the Human Anti-Exploitation Law will be the first time in human history that slavery will be truly outlawed…and attempting to ‘enslave’ anyone is an instant one way trip to exile (a decidedly nasty place.)

Naturally there will be those ‘twisted’ bastards who will charge that those who run A Simple Plan are ‘exploiting’ the rest of us; but their ‘compensation’ is not under their control so their actions don’t benefit themselves personally.

But I digress…

Once again we should flip this issue over and explore the ‘real implications’ of Modern Slavery.

Why would Bwana ‘hire you’ for a salary he can keep in his pocket when he can ‘buy’ a slave for a fraction of that?

And when the slave is ‘used up’ he just cuts it loose to fend for itself, what happens to it after that isn’t their problem…just like employees!

Yet another ‘plague’ visited upon our society by rapacious capitalists…and our ‘legal system’ turns a blind eye to the problem.

Well good citizen, what are you sitting there for, you didn’t win Powerball and you’re already a month late to the revolution!

Snap to it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wisdom

Greetings good citizen,

The markets are doing their damnedest to hold on to yesterday’s gains, which is troubling by itself. But, it becomes even more disturbing when you factor in the idea of Are we, as a species, getting dumber?

Crabtree’s central thesis to back his claim up is, according to PopSci , that “each generation produces deleterious mutations, so down the line of human history, our intelligence is ever more impaired compared to that of our predecessors.”

He argues that you can see evidence of this process in humans sense of smell. Now, humans are largely guided by intellect when it comes to what we eat, for example. Humans have “far fewer olfactory receptors than other animals,” according to Crabtree. Dogs, on the other hand, have more olfactory receptors (the neurons responsible for smelling things.)

“Once you place pressure on intellectual abilities, and take it off of olfactory abilities, the olfactory genes deteriorate,” PopSci quotes Crabtree as saying.

But other geneticists have raised questions about Crabtree’s work. In an interview with The Independent , geneticist Steve Jones said that Crabtree’s paper was like “arts faculty science...Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any. I could just as well argue that mutations have reduced our aggression, our depression and our penis length, but no journal would publish that. Why do they publish this?”

I am making a leap here and ‘assuming’ Mr. Crabtree is basing his findings on the ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ premise.

However, we don’t really have a good definition for intelligence (or wisdom for that matter, not that anyone values that, er, ‘virtue’ any longer…)

Intelligence can provide us with a hundred ways to fling ourselves against a brick wall…it is wisdom that tells us to go around the wall.

But are we getting dumber?

Theoretically the answer is yes (following the ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ theory.)

Look at how much hogwash the average individual is forced to swallow to remain a viable member of civil society.

First he has to ‘make himself useful’ (usually at his own expense.)

Then he must buy everything he needs to survive from people who have no right to sell it to him!

But that’s ‘okay’, that’s their business, you not supposed to concern yourself with things that aren’t your business…even when they directly effect how YOU live!

So the ability to ignore YOUR best interests has to be suppressed so somebody else can act in THEIR best interests…and FUCK YOU.

This is where they wheel out the old ‘nobody said the system was perfect’ bullshit on you…and who tells you this, the same dickheads who are getting a marginally better deal than you’re getting!

Keep you nose clean and MAYBE you can be one of them!

Wait, did you just feel your IQ drop another ten points?

Have you abandoned all hope of ever possessing even a shred of wisdom?

Wisdom tells us to ‘go around the wall’…

So maybe it’s time to ‘wise up’!

They only fuck you because you let them.

How friggin’ sad is that?

Well good citizen, now they want to fuck you without having to pay you at all…and there ain’t a fucking thing you can do about it…except go around the wall.

What is wisdom telling us to do here?

The ‘goal’ is to ‘level the playing field’ and in order to achieve that we have to stop giving and start TAKING!

It really is ‘simple’ as A Simple Plan.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dream On!

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Entitlements are the problem.

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

3. Welfare benefits are a drag on the economy.

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

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

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

5. Prison puts away the bad guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many of you DIDN’T know that?

Good, stupid people aren’t welcome here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Wicked...

Greetings good citizen,

Again it is curious to note that the (Madly inflated) Dow has dropped 600 points since this time last week and apparently this is NOT NOTEWORTHY!

Um, since the only noticeable useful information to be provided by the stock markets are as a gauge of the One Percent’s feelings regarding global affairs in general, perhaps they are supposed to be ‘sulking’ over the loss of their ‘alternate’ candidate.

An unhappiness that will certainly be as shortlived as it is undeserved.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of the public that the media plays us for stupid regarding the One Percent’s ‘relationship’ with the world’s largest purchasing organization (who regularly pays through the nose for literally EVERYTHING! )

Nation Building: Public Talk, Secret Action
In the final days of the presidential campaign, President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that it was time to reap a peace dividend as America’s wars wind down.  Nation-building here at home should, he insisted, be put on the agenda: “What we can now do is free up some resources, to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges.”

Setting aside just how slipshod or even downright disastrous Washington’s last decade of nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, the president’s proposal to rebuild roads, upgrade bridges, and retrofit the country’s electrical grid sounds eminently sensible.  After all, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives America’s infrastructure a grade of “D.”  If, in the era of the $800 billion stimulus package, $1 billion at first sounds paltry, ask the mayors of #Detroit, Belmar, New Jersey, or even New York City what that money would mean to their municipalities.  America may need $2.2 trillion in repairs and maintenance according to ASCE, but $1 billion could radically change the fortunes of many a city.

Instead, that money is flowing into the oil-rich Middle East.  Unknown to most Americans, thousands of State Department personnel, military advisors, and hired contractors remain at several large civilian bases in Iraq where nation-building projects are ongoing; hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been flowing into military construction projects in repressive Persian Gulf states like Bahrain and Qatar; and the Pentagon is expanding its construction program in Central Asia.  All of this adds up to a multifaceted project that seems at odds with the president’s rhetoric.  (The White House did not respond to TomDispatch’s repeated requests for comment.)

Just as the, er, ‘progressive media’ has predicted, the Republicans, supporters of tax cuts for the uber wealthy, are also HUGE ‘patriots’ in their support of military spending.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t distort the economy beyond recognition…but that’s one of the ‘side effects’ of predatory capitalism (over-concentration of money at the top of the social ladder, leaving wretched poverty below.)

What’s that? Still don’t think we need to replace the rules regarding money and its single useful purpose to society?

Again I will remind you that ALL money is funny…the only true cost is opportunity cost, the things we COULD HAVE DONE with those resources had they not been squandered to feather somebody’s personal nest.

In most cases a whole lot of nests would be a lot nicer than they are if those resources had been utilized in a wiser fashion.

Unfortunately, in these trying times it is difficult if not impossible to come to agreement on what constitutes ‘wisdom’.

Wise to me is outrageously stupid to a conservo-whacko! (who would rather not do anything with the resources in case the military needs them later!)

“Let society lounge in its own cesspool, the military will pay ‘top dollar’ for those resources that you want to waste on people who neither deserve or appreciate them…”

How do you deal with ‘whackos’ like that?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘holy military’ (conservo-whackos literally ‘worship’ active duty service personnel, after they’re discharged they become ‘fucking civilians’ again so ‘fuck ‘em!) was established to protect us ALL.

But again I belabor the obvious when I point out that when it comes to conservo-whackos, ‘nothing go up top’ (may as well be a block of wood.)

They think what they think because that’s what they think!

Worse, they believe what they believe because somebody else told them that how things should be…so please don’t ask them to explain it, believing it is difficult enough!

But I digress…and I sincerely apologize for parading around on my favorite hobby horse in front of you all, shamelessly.

And you have to admit, it is difficult to cement your attention on the issue of ‘austerity for you’ while we waste billions on a military that serves the interests of the One Percent, coming from someone who preaches that ALL money is ‘funny’.

But my point isn’t ‘false austerity’ nor is it a bloated, useless military. It is GROSS MIS-MANAGEMENT!

And the real kicker is there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it!

And I’m sure, by now, some of you want to slap me for reminding you AGAIN precisely how ‘powerless’ you are…

Well, I’m right here…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Beneath it all...

Greetings good citizen,

Every few months I feel compelled to restate the mission of this blog, which, due to its subject matter, is widely considered a ‘Doom and Gloom’ site.

How sad is it that it isn’t my purpose to frighten anyone nor am I intent upon twisting your mind toward my way of seeing things. (Although part of my mission involves, er, ‘educating’ you in the finer points of my creation, A Simple Plan.)

That said, some of you might find that education bordering on ‘indoctrination’.

I can be rabid when the feeling moves me and I’m forever racing ‘off the reservation’, a fault I readily admit.

Um, to opine that my posts are, er, ‘unbiased’ would be exactly that, an opinion. We’re all biased and there’s no getting away from that fact.

The editor of the local rag was ‘editorializing’ on the subject of biased fact checkers just last night…and you know why the conservative liar was crying about that subject, don’t you?

Yes indeed good citizen, the closer we get to the election the more it looks as though Ol’ Mitt is gonna pull off an ‘upset victory’ much Like W. winning Florida due to ‘hanging chads’.

And they’ll pin it on ‘waitresses’!

But I digress.

We all know those waitresses are working in dives across the nation, just waiting for a One Percenter (like Mitt) to waltz in and sweep them away from the drudgery of being a working class drone.

Billionaire, Princess, same difference.

And, bizarrely, YOU are expected to BELIEVE that it was that sort of BULLSHIT that swung the election in favor of the man who gave HALF OF US the fucking MIDDLE FINGER less than a month ago!

I don’t know how they expect this to play in Peoria but I’m fairly certain it won’t go down well with the decidedly non-conservative 80% of the NATION!

Especially when we have seen first hand how the bullshit with the banks went down.

But again, I digress.

Let us return to the topic that underlies the foundation of modern civilization, a topic that will ultimately bring an end to life as we have come to know it, peak oil and those whose power derives from fossil fuel.

We seem to hear two versions of the story of limited oil supply:

1. The economists’ view, saying that the issue is a simple problem of supply and demand. Substitution, higher prices, demand destruction, greater efficiency, and increased production of oil at higher prices will save the day. [HA!]

2. A version of Hubbert’s peak oil theory, saying that world oil production will rise and at some point reach a plateau and begin to decline, because of geological depletion. The common belief is that the rate of decline will be determined by geological considerations, and will roughly match the rate at which production increased.

In my view, neither of these views is correct. My view is a third view:

3. An adequate supply of cheap ($20 or $30 barrel) oil is no longer available, because most of the “easy to extract” oil is gone. The cost of extracting oil keeps rising, but the ability of oil-importing economies to pay for this oil does not. There are no good low-cost substitutes for oil, so substitution is very limited and will continue to be very limited. The big oil-importing economies are already finding themselves in poor financial condition, as higher oil prices lead to cutbacks in discretionary spending and layoffs in discretionary industries.

The government is caught up in this, as layoffs lead to more need for stimulus funds and for payments to unemployed workers, at the same time that tax revenue is reduced. There can be a temporary drop in oil prices (as there was in late 2008), as recession worsens, but eventually demand rises again, oil prices rise again, and the pattern of layoffs and increased governments financial problems occurs again. [snip]

What the Economists’ View Misses

The economists’ view misses the fact that it is external energy that makes the economy operate the way it does. (See my earlier posts, here, here and here.) If energy products are higher priced, energy importers can afford less of them, and there is a tendency of their economies to shrink back to what their economies can afford—fewer employed workers and fewer government programs. I talk about the connection between employed workers and energy consumption in The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment and Recession.

Back to the beginning, where I was explaining the objective of this blog.

I can’t help it if the truth sucks…that said I am also not telling you that ‘all is lost’ (although it might be if we don’t, er, ‘rid’ ourselves of those who were born thinking they are the only ones who deserve to live here. The rest of us are ‘excess baggage’ to be disposed of however and whenever necessary.

Worse, the only thing saving our sorry asses in their indecision about how many of us to keep around!

Although there is a building consensus that they should exterminate us wholesale and then let the few that survive breed the ‘servant class’ back up to full strength.

Pretty gloomy, but it doesn’t have to turn out this way.

There are alternatives to the eminent return of a ‘slave economy’ and the bloodshed this will cause.

We just need to bring everyone associated with this ‘New World Order’ (more commonly known as ‘The One Percent’) to Justice…after we purge the now corrupt beyond belief justice system.

The situation IS salvageable…but you need to have faith.

It all starts with small steps and A Simple Plan points the way!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hand Selected and Spoon Fed

Greetings good citizen,

Um, as disturbing as it is, I often complain about the STIFFS who ‘write for a paycheck’. Although half of the time I sympathize with them, they are no different than any other ‘paycheck hostage’.

I don’t care if your way is easier, I’m paying you to do it MY WAY!

And other nonsense we ‘non-stakeholders’ regularly put up with.

But…and some things are ‘unforgivable’, sometimes you just have to wonder how these fuckers sleep at night because NOT ONE ‘mainstream media outlet’ reported this story

Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein said Wednesday police handcuffed her to a chair during her eight-hour imprisonment following her arrest outside the second presidential debate.

“For most of the time it was just [running mate] Cheri Honkala and myself,” Stein told Democracy Now anchor Amy Goodman. “Yet they felt the need to keep us in tight plastic restraints tightly secured to metal chairs.”

Stein and Honkala were arrested Tuesday while sitting in the street to protest their exclusion from this year’s presidential debates between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. They tried to enter the debate hall at the host site, Hofstra University, but were denied access because they lacked the necessary credentials

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1qjFK)

[Deep Sigh…]

Well good citizen, is this something you’d expect to find in the country you were raised to believe in freedom and equality…or is this the kind of BULLSHIT you’d expect to find in some tin pot DICTATORSHIP?

We aren’t talking some obscure demonstrators from OWS, we’re talking actual, on the ballot in all fifty states, presidential candidates!

What are the FUCKING >One Percent trying to hide (besides an alternative to two sides of the same coin?)

Um, should we be ‘surprised’ by this? Dennis Kucinich wasn’t invited to the presidential debates last time and despite some squawking from the alternative press, nothing was done about that either.

Which is to say it’s probably time for another piece on ‘fatal myopia’.

What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you want to know then all you have to do is look at the presidential race through the eyes of the corporate owned media…

Two guys who both answer to the same masters.

It has occurred to me that since Obama has become identified as a ‘do nothing’ president, The >One Percent are offering up the Romney-Ryan show to justify his second term.

Not that I’m voting for the worthless…(fill in your own blank.)

How sad is it that until this article I didn’t even know who the Greenies were running. (Never mind that they had been taken hostage by the >One Percent!)

While I am all for sustainability, my ‘greenness’ is tempered by practicality. I’m unwilling to sacrifice large numbers of humans on the alter of some ‘unachievable balance’ and carrying capacity estimates that are guesses at best.

Perhaps my biggest, er, ‘issue’ with the greens is their lack of awareness that economics is deeply tied to politics and their ‘values’ are predominantly capitalist.

I don’t know who it pisses off when I exclaim that predatory capitalism (and ALL Capitalism is predatory) must go, but that’s my position and I’m sticking with it.

The planet isn’t big enough for one capitalist and the rest of us.

Which is to express my support for the ‘Gone Galt’ project of transplanting this planets, er, assholes um, I mean ‘good people’/capitalists to their very own colony on the Moon!

Once there they can sort out who will do the heavy lifting for them…it won’t be our problem anymore.

And we MUST send them all, no matter how vigorously they protest that we NEED them to ‘take care of us’…

Since they are the self professed ‘best and brightest’ of us all they should easily overcome the, er, ‘oxygen deficit’ that will occur when we don’t send along any additional supplies.

This will also solve the problem of feeding them once they’re there too.

But let us not get too wrapped up in the details. They have long insisted they are better than the rest of us, maybe it’s time we put that claim to the test!

It was disturbing enough that the moderators basically ignored the one candidate who wasn’t a stooge for the One Percent…but at least they didn’t arrest him!

Although the War Criminal had ‘uninvited attendees’ to his campaign events arrested…which probably ‘set the precedent’ for this atrocity.

This tracks back to ‘authority’ good citizen, under whose authority did they arrest legitimate candidates for national office and detain them for 8 hours?

One would THINK there would be several job openings at THAT Police Department/Government agency by this time tomorrow!

Understand good citizen, a cop is YOU with a gun and a blue suit!

You can’t walk around and arrest anybody you like because you don’t agree with what they’re doing, can you?

Then why aren’t those security personnel under arrest awaiting charges of kidnapping and hostage taking?

Oh, wait…it’s because Obobo ignored his mandate and went for giving insurance companies a gift rather than prosecuting W, the war criminal!

Um, when it’s YOU being ‘illegally detained’ it will be far too late to do anything about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: do not ignore the elephant in the room, you are also being deprived of hearing alternative voices, so blatant has the ‘pay to play’ atmosphere become!

The deplorable state of what passes for justice in our society is sadly secondary…although it is primary to our society's restoration.

Is it class war now?

Greetings good citizen,

I jumped on the Romney story the minute it broke last night…imagine my surprise to see it is the ‘talk of the town’ this morning…

Naturally, they had that other stuffed shirt (Donald Trump) ‘defending’ him on the Today show this morning.

The part that should make your head explode, good citizen, is that the >One Percent ARE GOING to make this idiot our next president…

Don’t go calling this ‘class war’ good citizen but you know that is just a ‘liberal excuse’ they throw out there whenever they hear something they don’t like.

So tell me, can you say un-be-fucking-lievable?

President Barrack Obama's campaign quickly seized on the video, obtained by the magazine Mother Jones and made public on a day that Romney's campaign conceded it needed a change in campaign strategy to gain momentum in the presidential race.

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney is shown saying in a video posted online by the magazine. "There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

"Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax," Romney said. [Because they have NO INCOME asshole!] Romney said his role "is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Romney's campaign did not dispute the authenticity of the video, instead releasing a statement seeking to clarify his remarks. "Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy," spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said. "He is concerned about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government."

Right…

How do you suppose they got that way Mitt? How many of them did you personally make ‘redundant’ by off-shoring their former job?

The private remarks are the latest in a string of comments from the multimillionaire Republican businessman whom Democrats have criticized as out of touch. During the primary campaign, Romney insisted that he was "not concerned" about the very poor, said he knew what it felt like to worry about being "pink-slipped," and said that his wife drove a "couple of Cadillacs." Aides to Obama's campaign said the latest video would help them continue to make the case that Romney doesn't understand the concerns of average Americans.

Voters say they believe Obama has a better understanding of their problems and concerns than Romney does. A CBS/New York Times poll showed 60 percent of likely voters said Obama understands the needs and problems of people like them, while 37 percent said he did not. For Romney, the same question found that 46 percent felt he did understand people's needs, 48 percent said he didn't.

Really? Does anyone believe a guy who believes the ‘average’ middle class household income is in the quarter of a million dollar range ‘understands their problems?

Who the fuck did they poll to come up with these numbers? The Ronald Reagan Home for the terminally senile? (more commonly known as the RNC Headquarters...)

Be that as it may, the article goes on in an attempt to ‘clarify’ Romney’s tactless tax remark by camouflaging the issue:

Many of the Americans who owe no income tax are reprieved because basic exemptions — such as the "standard deduction" — took their taxable income below the cutoff levels. The other half rely mainly on a variety of tax breaks, such as the credit that helps offset child care costs.

Because THE TRUTH is a lot uglier…they don’t pay taxes because they don’t make that much money!

Hell, for the past six years I didn’t pay Federal income tax because I earned spit! (But I paid into my SSI and FICA…unlike the One Percenters who stop paying in after they hit roughly a hundred thousand in annual income.

Guys like Willard stopped paying into SSI and Medicare in late January or early February of each year. Hedge fund nitwits stop paying in after their first paycheck…if they pay at all.

But that’s not the disturbing part here good citizen, the disturbing part is they are going to put this asshat in the White House regardless of how you vote.

Look at the ‘defense’ they are putting up on his behalf:

These Americans range from the very poor to solidly middle-class families with jobs, homes, cars and vacations. The Tax Policy Center says "relatively few nontaxable households" have incomes exceeding $100,000; families that make between $50,000 and $100,000 often owe no income tax because of breaks for their kids and for education.

Americans who pay no federal income tax still often pay an array of other taxes. They include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, sales taxes, property taxes and state and local taxes. A handful of extremely wealthy families do not pay federal income taxes. This summer the Internal Revenue Service reported that six of the 400 highest-earning households in America owed no federal income tax in 2009.

Still, many are low-income Americans. According to the August 2010 AP-GfK poll, a majority of Americans who make less than $30,000 a year are Democrats. But 27 percent identify as Republicans, and 15 percent say they're independents. About 57 percent say they will vote for Obama, while 38 percent back Romney. About 43 percent identify themselves as conservatives.

As you well know, there has been a huge problem this election cycle with, er, ‘untruths’ flooding out of the corporate owned media on the behalf of their supporters, the conservo-loonies.

Worse, it is these same lies that will be used to justify his being named the winner.

You’ll hear, after the fact, numerous claims that the American people educated themselves and ‘chose the best man’.

Not that I’m voting for that (other) conservative doormat either. I’m looking at the alternative candidates and you should be as well.

I think ‘Rocky’ stands a good chance of beating both mainstream candidates and will, if necessary, hold new elections so he can get a Congress he can work with.

Which is to suggest the unlikelihood of his surviving until the inauguration, that’s how psycho the conservo-loonies are!

Yup, just how far are we going to let them push us good citizen?

Well don’t look down because ‘you’re standing in your grave.’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Economics or Law?

Greetings good citizen,

Watched Doomsday Preppers on National Geographic last night, contemplating the whole time how much of this (nonsense) was due to the channel being owned by Newscorp?

More interestingly, the preppers themselves were revealed to be conservo-whackos (by dint of their bumperstickers, never mind being STUPID enough to go on national TV with their so-called ‘secret stashes’ of weapons, food and cash.)

And these people did the term ‘conservo-loonie’ proud! They were doing it all wrong and were being praised for their efforts by the show’s ‘independent judges’.

Actually, I am personally thankful for the preppers efforts, they will become the supermarkets that will provide temporary relief from eating whatever you can chase down with a stick and beat to death after the collapse.

For people obsessed with cop shows they appear to be completely ignorant of just how easy it is to get ‘the drop’ on somebody.

And after they tear that gun out of your surprised hands you only have moments left to live…and those will be the moments it takes for you to give up the location and how to disable the booby traps protecting your stash.

And you WILL tell them because YOU want to live.

Heck, comply quickly enough and they just might decide to spare your life…if only to have you take some of the risk out of hunting down future supplies.

Not all ‘hoarders’ will be ‘pushovers’ and as time goes on the job will only get more difficult.

But that is not the topic of today’s post.

Like the headline says, it’s still about the economy…

“This is one of the reasons wages haven’t been growing,” he said. “People are taking jobs they didn’t take in the past, moving from sectors like construction into jobs at lower-paying, big-box retailers.”

There were a few slivers of encouragement in Friday’s report. Using the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes part-time workers who want to work full time as well as individuals who are not looking for jobs but indicate they want to work, the unemployment rate fell to 14.7 percent from 15 percent.

The pace of government layoffs seems to be slowing, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School and director of the school’s Center for Human Resources. As the private sector added 103,000 jobs in August, governments cut just 7,000. That is down from 21,000 in July, and well below the average of 16,000 reductions a month since March. Federal employment actually increased by 3,000 in August, to 2.8 million, the first monthly increase since February 2011.

There was only slight relief for the long-term unemployed, defined as workers out of a job for at least 27 weeks. Their ranks fell by 152,000 to just over five million in August, and they account for 40 percent of all unemployed people. Among workers with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate fell to 12 percent from 12.7 percent, but that remains far above the 4.1 percent unemployment level for workers with a college degree or more.

Still, there were plenty of other signs the economy was still treading water. Average hourly earnings paid by private employers ticked downward by 1 cent in August, to $23.52, while the length of the typical private sector workweek remained flat at 34.4 hours. Both measures have barely budged from where they were six months ago.

This slightly longer than generally permissible snippet was taken from the tail end of the article.

Funny to see all of the ‘hands in motion' here as they examine the public sector side by side with the private.

The Feds can ‘shazaam’ money and hire as many people as they want…below this and government is totally dependent on tax revenue and ‘grants’ for specific purposes.

City and states are laying off because their tax base has been gutted by the global race to the bottom.

No employers means no employees living in their once prosperous communities.

You’d think politicians would want to avoid that sort of thing but apparently we have a new breed running for office…

A breed that knows there is a lot to be had for those willing to do as their told without asking any questions.

Sadly, this new breed thinks their new masters will protect them from having their necks stretched for treason…and this is totally untrue!

If it suits these masters purposes, they will have them strung up themselves! (if only to buy themselves a few more precious minutes of ‘run time’.)

But I digress…it’s not about being ‘sold out’ (although in the end it is ALL about that!) It is about the badly broken economy the massive unemployment problem the idiot capitalists have created!

Here’s a simple proposition I’m sure everybody can understand. When your commerce system excludes ‘too many’ people, your civilization collapses.

For all of this 8%, 12%, hell, 5% unemployment, the REAL rate is closer to 50%!

Worse, you can’t tolerate a 50% unemployment rate and expect your society to remain cohesive.

For too long the working have been taught to despise the unemployed as lazy freeloaders despite being the victims of predatory capitalism.

So when non-workers achieve parity with workers a conflict erupts.

And guess what else has been bubbling right under the surface of this cauldron? The ‘I can get any one of those people out there to do YOUR job!’ threat.

Coupled with the other famous taunt: Be happy YOU even HAVE a job!

Now the unthinking conservo-whacko worker doesn’t realize the guy in the street doesn’t want HIS job…well, I think you can see where this whole thing is headed.

[He wants something that doesn’t exist, a job of his own!]

They don’t say ‘blood in the streets’ for nothing…although, supposedly, we have a robust ‘justice system’ to prevent things like this from ‘getting out of hand’.

Boy, are they gonna be surprised!

As I have stated repeatedly, we don’t have a ‘money problem’ (because money is fiction, albeit a very dangerous one) we have one pisser of a legal problem! (with criminals in charge of the justice system.)

Thanks for letting me inside our head,

Gegner

Fooled Again!

Greetings good citizen,

It appears the people have been ‘taken in’ once again. This time by the man who ran as an opponent of Austerity…just as Obama ran against the high-handed tactics of the oligarchs…before revealing himself to be one of their ‘lapdogs’.

Since this article was generated by the Corporate Owned Media it is hard to tell what the true ‘facts on the ground’ are here.

They very well could have had a funeral for a boy killed on a motorbike just as there very well could have been an incident of reckless driving that same night, but neither seem to have any connection to the riot.

The second sentence of the snippet below tells the real reason:

Hollande's government has identified the northern quarter of Amiens as one of 15 "priority security zones" across the country, which will be established from September.

The emphasis will be on tougher policing rather than on schemes to alleviate the impact of record unemployment and falling real incomes for the poorest sections of society.

Figures released Tuesday showed the French economy flat-lining in the second quarter of the year and most economists expect a further deterioration as Hollande's government cuts spending in most areas in order to reduce its budget deficit in line with eurozone requirements.

Trade unions battling job cuts across French industry have already warned of a "hot autumn" of protest unless the government eases up on the austerity drive.

Hollande on Tuesday promised a tough response to the unrest in Amiens.

"The state will mobilise all its means to combat these violent acts," Hollande said. "Security is not only a priority for us, it is an obligation."

Once again we see an opportunity to remind the foolish, those who would trade their freedom for security deserve neither!

What will these ‘law and order’ types do when the general public revolts in reaction to their implementing the austerity plans of the oligarchs (who surrender NOTHING.)

Up hold ‘the law’, even when it is the ‘law of man’ that is in direct opposition to the interests of the people?

Again, it is difficult to say which is more disturbing, the evidence that the ballot box contains NO SOLUTION to our oligarch problem or the fact that the government is now focused on fighting the very people it was established to protect?

This is serious bullshit, good citizen!

We too are rapidly approaching another ‘illusion of participation’ election cycle where we are being given one of the worst ‘non-choices’ I have ever seen.

The incumbent is a lapdog of the One Percent while the challenger is a bonafide member of the One Percent.

Worse, it appears as though our ‘overlords’ have already decided they’re going to ‘give’ the election to one of their own, the public be damned!

Once again playing their strongest card, the ‘what are YOU gonna do about it’ card.

Well, what ARE you gonna do about it?

Are you gonna cheer as Willard and his cohorts divvy up the Social Security trust fund among themselves via that corrupt paper shredder we call Wall Street?

When your benefits no longer cover your expenses and they throw you out into the streets (to die) it will be a piss poor time to decide you should have done something about the stolen election.

If you wait until you’re on death’s door to pick up a gun you’d best be intent on putting yourself out of your own misery.

It is beyond pathetic good citizen to KNOW that this coming November will be a test of the HOW STUPID ARE YOU question.

Worse, there are no ‘good’ choices in the US elections.

Makes you wonder if the people of France aren’t asking themselves the same question, just as the people of Greece and the people of Italy with their ‘bank appointed’ leaders.

You look at these factors and marvel over how anyone can believe that the Eurozone hasn’t already collapsed.

Is this just another example of the ‘How Stupid are you’ test!

But wait, it’s easy to keep up ‘the appearance of normal’ even if that’s only true for ‘the One Percent’. So the ignorant public is to be forgiven their mistaken impression that everything is fine ‘across the pond’ just as the peoples of the Eurozone remain blissfully ignorant of the everyday problems of the average ‘American’.

This is a perfect example of the old sod, ‘appearances can be deceiving’.

Things may ‘look’ all right but reality is a different story altogether.

Ironically, that clock is already running. How long it will take for reality to overtake the false impression being fed to us by the One Percent?

You won’t know until the One Percent are ready to reveal their deception.

But if you look closely, the signs are everywhere!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Criminally Insane

Greetings good citizen,

Talk about a fucked up world, the Dow is up as of this moment and the only thing keeping it there is the ‘safe haven’ phenomenon…people consider US bank stocks the ‘safest’ investment out there because they have the ‘full faith and backing’ of a decidedly corrupt US government!

Or at least that is what the latest bungled banking crisis has proven.

Makes you wonder how long it will be before people realize the government is even more corrupt than the banking system?

Perhaps the more interesting question is how many of the politically ignorant will get roped in by the lies of Libertarianism?

But hey, our ruling class would shit a brick if any of that wealth redistribution stuff happened over here. Which is why “this is a center-right nation” has been a favorite Fox News talking point for over 10 years. It’s only now—after Occupy Wall Street forced their hand—that the media is finally willing to admit that it might be bullshit.

But libertarianism? Our ruling class is totally fine with that. Smoke your reefer and sodomize whomever you please, just keep your mouth shut and hand over your Social Security account.

When a Red like me wants to argue for something like universal healthcare or free college tuition, we can point to dozens of wealthy democratic societies doing just that. The Stalinist left is nothing more than a faint memory. But where (are) the libertarian Utopias?

I have made no secret of my intense dislike for Libertarians, who are nothing more than thinly disguised, social Darwinist, Randites.

In my humble opinion the whole article is a fairly accurate, if somewhat ‘lenient’ description of the Libertarian movement.

When you see idiocy like this, you know you’re listening to a moron: “The libertarian line: “No, no: the problem isn’t that we’re too capitalist. It’s that we’re not capitalist enough!”

Seriously? Rape the planet until it can’t support anyone, eat the unproductive until there’s no one left to breed with anymore and wail at the moon as you die alone of starvation because there is nobody to cook for your rugged individualistic ass!

If someone says “I’m a Libertarian’, hit ‘em over the head with the heaviest object you can find and don’t stop until their ears bleed (profusely)

Because the motherfucker has just admitted that he has absolutely NO PROBLEM with EATING YOU!

That’s what it means to be a Libertarian!

And if you know someone who spouts this pro-capitalist bullshit, forward this post to them, then sit back and listen to the back-pedaling.

There’s ‘freedom’ and there’s ‘fucked up’ and Libbies are FUCKED UP!

The whole idea of a generation (or even an individual) ‘gone Galt’ is a serious mental defect only the One Percent could praise.

But now we’re talking a whole different breed of ‘defective’.

So yeah, there is a close relationship between the >One Percent and the Libertarians (also known as the ‘Rabid Capitalist wannabes’.)

Neither gives a fig for the bulk of humanity, who in their mind deserves what happens to them because they don’t fight back.

Which leads us to the difficulty we are in today. We don’t execute the > One percent out of hand today because they have ‘rights’, rights they regularly deny the rest of us but we’ve been brought up to believe that it is ‘due process’ that separates us from the animals of this world.

It is only when the situation gets out of hand as it is today that due process should be temporarily swept aside.

Yes, it is extremely dangerous to even suggest forfeiting the rights of others but they swept them aside first by repealing Habeas Corpus.

By denying you your legal rights to question your imprisonment, they forfeit their right to a trial or a jury of their peers!

Did I mention this is going to get extremely ugly before it’s over?

It is the little things like this that have led me to conclude that the objective of throwing our civilization into its own cesspool is to kill off as much of the ‘surplus population’ as they can.

As much as many of you may not agree with that assessment.

I think the ONLY thing saving us from abrupt nuclear obliteration is the uncertainty factor. The fuckers don’t want to poison the WHOLE planet, killing off their own (largely worthless) progeny

Nor are they keen to kill off the ‘hired help’, the enablers who make ‘the good life’ possible.

So the sledgehammer is out…unless we ‘mud-people’ start getting the upper hand.

Just an opinion here but if we can’t rein in our (criminally) insane then perhaps we don’t deserve to survive as a species.

But how sad will it be if we allow the criminally insane to decide for the rest of us?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thieves

Greetings good citizen,

Half hour into today’s trading session and you can’ make heads nor tails out of the Dow. The number says it’s up but the chart looks like it’s dropping like a rock…probably have to wait a while to get a grip on its direction.

Um, I am always disturbed when I encounter the day’s offering on my mail server’s homepage such as stories like this one which jump out at you when you arrive.

Police have added the patrolling of farmland — sometimes on horseback — to their list of daily tasks. Farmers in some areas are teaming up to carry out nighttime patrols on their own. In villages near farming areas, several thousand paramilitary Civil Guards, regional and local police are even setting up checkpoints to sniff out not drugs or drunken drivers but stolen fruit or farming equipment, like copper wire used in irrigation systems. The Civil Guard says sometimes its officers mount "cage operations" — sealing off whole villages to check cars and trucks for, say, pilfered pears.

The stolen goods are mainly for resale: The food ends up in small roving street markets and the metal goes to scrap dealers. Last year alone more than 20,000 thefts were reported at Spanish farms. The Interior Ministry says it has no comparative figures from other years, or for so far in 2012. But authorities and farm groups blame the thefts on Spain's economic crisis and say they are a big enough problem for the patrols, which began last season, to stay in force this year.

Here in Sant Climent, a village of 4,000 just outside Barcelona in the northeastern Catalonia region, the loot this time of year is cherries — dark red, shiny and sweet — dangling like ornaments from stubby trees in orchards rising up the slopes of a river valley. They're everywhere, with people selling them from their front doorsteps and on stands inside bars for €8 a kilo ($4.50 a pound). A drawing of a cherry adorns the mayor's business card.

Again, it’s difficult to tell which is more disturbing, the economic forces behind the rising thefts from farms or the media taking pains to make it clear that the ‘theft’ is NOT for ‘personal consumption’ but for ‘personal enrichment’!

Left to your imagination is why people are stealing shit in the first place?

Do YOU know the answer, good citizen?

Why are people stealing what they would ‘normally’ buy?

Could it be because our commercial model is broken?

Bizarrely, it’s been broken from the outset…but the freakazoid capitalist will never admit that. They prefer to call this failure ‘structural unemployment’, that the system, out of necessity, fucks a certain percentage of the population.

And their explanation of this phenomenon is just as lame, the old, ‘it’s that way because that’s the way it is!’ Or the wheel-out the old standby, ‘full employment is impossible’.

Again, wrong by dint of the missing phrase/word. Full employment is not ‘profitably’ possible.

Hire ‘everyone’ and the profit margin for the owner falls to near zero.

So what happens when that couple of percent ‘structural unemployment becomes/accounts for tens of millions of people?

It is what it is, right?

Nope, there’s no need to fear; the endless sunshine of the spotless mind will save us all!

"We are united in our resolve to promote growth and jobs," the draft says, declaring that the leaders will announce the "coordinated Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan" to achieve those goals, although the draft does not provide details of the plan.

"Strong sustainable and balanced growth remains the top priority of the G20, as it leads to higher job creation and increases the welfare of people across the world," the statement reads. It throws its support specifically behind greater government spending as a response to a worsening global economy, saying that countries with the resources "stand ready" to take fiscal action.

The plan says the Obama administration pledged to prevent sharp tax increases and government spending cuts from kicking in at the end of the year, as scheduled under current law, to avoid sending the U.S. into another recession.

Here’s a curious mental puzzle for you good citizen, how many of you think President Obama WANTS TO BE ‘re-elected’?

Were I standing in his shoes, I’d take the money and run.

Hell, I’d vote for Mitt! Let him fulfill his father’s dream/ambitions.

What do you think the ‘probability’ is of the G-20 nations returning to unbridled growth?

How about slim to nil. They COULD pull it off for a few months but once the heating season returns in earnest that ‘pipe dream’ goes ‘poof’!

That’s what’s driving the whole collapse, we no longer have enough energy to support a growing global population…

So the people whose power relies on the control of our energy supply have decided to extend their reign by ‘right-sizing’ the population.

How fucked up is it that ‘right-sizing’ is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a single billion, give or take a billion…

Killing off the other six billion is an ‘ambitious’ undertaking to put it lightly.

I propose all we need do is, er, ‘eliminate’ the >One percent and re-shuffle the deck so I is more equitable.

Sacrificing all of that labor is terribly wasteful but those in power now have never cared about how wasteful they have been.

They murder freely whenever it is ‘in their interest’ to do so.

And that’s who is ‘yanking your chain’ this very minute, good citizen.

Don’t forget to get out and vote! (They rely on YOU buying the lie!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Acceleration

Greetings good citizen,

As is my custom from time to time I will lift the data from Mr. Williams SGS site for a less biased look at the, er, ‘State of the Nation’…

Below you will find just the posts for the month of June…maybe it’s me but if I’m not mistaken the volume of alarming data is increasing.

No. 448: May Industrial Production Subscription required June 15th, 2012
• Manufacturers Cut Production, Trying to Reduce Excess Inventories Versus Slack Demand More ...

No. 447: May CPI, Real Retail Sales, Real Earnings Subscription required June 14th, 2012
• Softening Inflation Pattern Is About to Reverse
• May Year-to-Year Inflation: 1.7% (CPI-U), 1.6% (CPI-W), 9.3% (SGS)
• Real Retail Sales and Real Earnings Revise Lower More ...

No. 446: May Retail Sales, PPI Subscription required June 13th, 2012
• Revisions Eviscerated Recent Retail Strength
• May Sales Fell 0.8% Against Initial April Reporting
• PPI Decline Reflected Oil Price Drop Compounded by Adverse Seasonal Factors More

No. 445: SPECIAL COMMENTARY - Review of Economic, Systemic-Solvency, Inflation, U.S. Dollar and Gold Circumstances Subscription required June 12th, 2012
• Economic and Systemic Crises of 2007/2008 Continue
• Don’t Blame the Economy on Europe
• Global Markets to Turn Against U.S. Dollar
• Hyperinflation Outlook Updated
• Gold Remains the Ultimate Hedge More ...

No. 444: April Trade Balance Subscription required June 11th, 2012
• Trade Data Suggest Negative Contribution to Second-Quarter GDP More ...

No. 443: Employment and Unemployment, Construction, M3, PCE Deflator Subscription required June 1st, 2012
• May Payrolls Up Just 20,000 versus Initial April Estimate
• May Unemployment: 8.2% (U.3), 14.8% (U.6), 22.7% (SGS)
• Annual M3 Money Supply Growth Slowed Further in May
• Construction Spending Stagnation Continued in April
• April PCE Deflator Dropped Below Fed’s Target More ...

Probably just a lot of activity slated to occur mid-month but of the 6 posts displayed, five of them were posted in the past 5 days…
Almost five years after the original crisis the global banking system is still crumbling…because nobody is forcing the bankers to take their losses.

Naturally we have ourselves a fine little ‘catch 22’ going on here. The banks can’t liquidate because there’s nobody to sell to…actually there be a bunch of deep-pocketed rentiers just itching to get their hands on the ‘overstock’ in the housing market.

They’d snap it all up in a heartbeat IF they could get the government to ‘guarantee’ them that they wouldn’t be forced to sell their holdings later on (to break up ‘monopolies’)…or to insure that they wouldn’t be forced to renovate a property before it was ‘absolutely necessary’.

(They’d also ‘hold out’ for favorable tax treatment like not having to pay taxes on properties that weren’t fully rented.)

and then there’s the ‘making it worthwhile’ part of the puzzle. What good is being a ‘slumlord’ if you can’t charge your tenants dearly? You don’t want them saving their money and moving out, you need them to keep paying YOU every spare nickel they get!

Because you see good citizen, in a world that no longer needs workers, collecting rent is going to be the ‘only game in town.’

How much of a ‘game’ it will be depends on how much inequity the future society will tolerate.

We have already turned a blind eye to quite a bit (falsely believing our turn would soon come.)

Now that it is becoming apparent our turn will NEVER come our patience is wearing thin.

Our kids are pauperized while we patiently wait for raises that are decades overdue.

Go ahead and tell me you aren’t still waiting…no, I guess you’re not. Instead your sitting as quietly as you can, not drawing any attention to yourself because you know you’re LUCKY to still HAVE a job!

How the fuck did we come to this good citizen?

How long will we continue to ‘live on our knees’ while our future and the future of our children is sold off piecemeal to foreigners?

How long are you going to let them get away with it?

All economies are LOCAL good citizen! If the local economy can’t support YOU, YOU can’t afford to live there!
And if the local ‘rent collector’ won’t let you get our head above water, you should kill them in ‘self-defense’…it is YOUR RIGHT!

Funny how all of these posts dance/end up with violent endings.

But if you don’t stand up for yourself and more importantly, your defenseless children, they (and you) will become the ‘victims’ of violence.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fried (as in cooked)

Greetings good citizen,

Did I mention that it’s over? Put a fork in it baby because she’s ‘done’, toast in fact!

We (some time ago) entered the Alice in Wonderland phase of collapse where the residents of the shattered lands begin to realize just how badly broken their cozy little society really was.

Yesterday I was treated to an editorial in the (decidedly conservative) local rag that had me asking myself the same question I regularly ask myself regarding conservatives…

How do you argue with a broken mind?

Understandably, ‘editorials’ are mostly ‘opinion’ and we read them to learn what (and sometimes how) others think.

Well good citizen, this editorial was (chapter and verse) straight from the ‘conservative play book’ which states a single ‘indisputable’ fact, that more tax cuts will solve everything.

Oh and the other ‘conservative canard’ of Tax and Spend Liberals (as opposed to borrow and spend conservatives!) was also there, in case you’d forgotten.

Anyway, numbnuts went on to say our current, er; ‘foundering economy’ was due to excess taxation that went towards entitlement programs…

And, in a brazen display of cognitive dissonance, this ‘retiree’ had the chutzpah to complain about rising healthcare costs forcing ‘rationing’ within the healthcare industry!

Which is to say he demands his healthcare but he doesn’t want to pay for it.

How the hell do you argue with someone so…STUPID?

Let’s back up a moment to a perfect example of ‘cause and effect’…(but the >One Percent don’t want YOU thinking about this:)

For decades after WWII our lifestyle and income improved consistently. It got so you could count on getting a raise in pay EVERY year (if not every six months!)

And people planned accordingly! They began to plan their lives around raises they hadn’t even gotten yet.

And then the 80’s hit and Reagan got in office.

And what did we get? No more raises and runaway inflation!

What caused them? Slashing taxes!

Yup, slashing taxes dried up salary increases (although it didn’t dry up inflation.)

Why did slashing taxes dry up salary increases? Because (thanks to the fucking Republicans) owners were allowed to keep the bulk of what they bilked society for!

Back when the top tax rate was 90+ percent the employer had two choices of what to do with ‘his’ profits, he could pay his help better (literally ‘buying’ their loyalty) or he could hand it over to Uncle Sam, who would gladly find a use for the money.

Yes good citizen, ‘happiness’ is a high marginal tax rate!

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the rich already have everything they want, paying themselves more serves NO USEFUL purpose…but the chiseling greed-heads won’t give YOU and extra nickel because they can hire labor that still lives in a mud hut for pennies a day.

Worse, the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and each time (truly) expecting a different outcome…

But then we have these other disturbing stories from the, er, ‘alternative media’.

And you can be sure some will cry ‘foul’ for pointing to this ‘bad apple’ case.

But the evidence continues to build that the people we hire to ‘protect and serve’ are doing neither.

And many suspect the reason for this lie in how these assets are being ‘managed.’

And this brings us back to the ‘crux’ of the situation. It is not a ‘financial crisis’ but a legal one!

Which reminds me (back to the topic of ‘put a fork in it’) the headlines this morning said stocks opened lower due to the ‘lack of a resolution’ in the Greek debt crisis. (Which would be more accurately stated as the ongoing failure to bring the international bankers to justice, but there it is!)

Markets, if you bothered to check, displayed the (still) disturbing phenomenon of spiking upwards that roughly corresponds to the opening of the NYSE worldwide…the only ‘exception’ to this was the NYSE East located in London…

Big surprise, huh?

By now most of you are used to hearing ‘chirping crickets’ around here. Beyond the occasional spammer there has been no ‘dialog’ in the past three years…but that won’t stop me from asking:

What evidence are YOU seeing that things are not ‘as they should be’ in YOUR neck of the woods?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner