Sustainable Future

Greetings good citizen,

Here, in the ‘aftermath’ of the election we find some disturbing indications regarding what it means to be ‘progressive’

Mind you this divisive mindset ISN’T coming from the decidedly twisted conservative side of the fence…it comes from the (Libertarian leaning) ‘progressive’ politicos.

If you aren’t ‘down with brown’ then you’d best find someplace to hide, honky! (because you’re about to be made politically irrelevant…)

And one would have to admit, this isn’t how, er, ‘democracy’ is supposed to work.

Just one more reason why we desperately need to overhaul what we do and why we do it.

The latest ‘cage match’ between the Conservo-loonies and the Tax & Spend Libruls is all the proof anyone needs to see that we are going off the political rails into ideological warfare…a war only the very rich can A.) win and B.) afford.

And our source of ‘intellectual reflection’ (C.K. Michaelson) points out, the issue is deeper than just the stewardship of our one and only home, it is about the survival of our (entire) species (and not just the few who have laid clam to what we all need to live!)

To that end any new social model needs to be ‘sustainable’…which could explain why the current pinheads are driving our civilization over the cliff.

They are indeed trying to kill off as much of the ‘surplus population’ as they think they can get away with.

YOU have been led to believe that the planet is ‘over-populated’ rather than grossly mismanaged.

Most of you believe we need to reduce the human ‘footprint’ to a more manageable level…and are you aware of what is behind that backwards kind of thinking?

A deeply entrenched desire to ‘preserve’ (predatory) capitalism!

Worse, it is the, er, ‘desire’ to make money, er, ‘meaningful’ once more!

While I have failed to sell A Simple Plan to the general public on the basis of Justice and Equality, maybe I could garner some support by drawing on one of the other ‘pillars’ of its creation…sustainability.

By design A Simple plan dramatically reduces energy consumption…by, er, ‘making it unnecessary’ to commute. It will also build new structures designed to conserve energy by using geo-thermal building techniques, reducing the usage of both heating and cooling resources.

Note how I avoid the term ‘cost’…because NOTHING ‘costs’ ANYTHING! The ONLY real costs are ‘opportunity costs’ and squandering those should be avoided by careful planning!

How difficult is it to understand that we could reduce what the world spends on ‘anti-terror’ to ZERO if we’d simply treat people better?

Worse, why is that concept a ‘non-starter’?

Am I a ‘dreamer’?

I don’t think so…I (perhaps mistakenly) believe most people think as I do but their ‘practical side’ gets in the way of their (very weak) desire to ‘do the right thing’.

We must stop voting for ideologies (especially the ones that preach hatred!) and start voting for equality and justice!

Albeit those abstract concepts are difficult to quantify even if they are universally understood.

And this is where we run into problems. When people start to ‘quibble’ over the definition of universally understood concepts.

It is not unusual for these quibblers to become ‘lawyers’ (a profession that is outlawed under A Simple Plan.)

It is the current failure to evaluate the common good from what’s good for the self-interested that has led us to where we sit today, on the verge of social collapse.

We can’t continue to allow the self-interested (read >One Percent) to decide what is ‘good’ for the rest of us.

Good luck finding someone who disagrees with THAT statement of fact (that ISN’T a freakazoid Libertarian!)

Correct me if I’m wrong good citizen (because if I am wrong and the majority of our species is ignorant and greedy then we are already doomed!)

But (fortunately) this is not the human race I encounter every day.

So the problem must be confined to the ‘people (wrongly) in charge’.

And it has been, unfortunately, my experience that people elevated to that level of trust are usually shiftless and untrustworthy.

So what should be a simple exercise of doing what is IN YOUR BEST INTEREST becomes an exercise in not wanting to be the ‘odd man out’!

(So get back in the corner as start fucking yourself, like everyone else is!)

It seriously doesn’t get much sadder than that good citizen,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pig Lips

Greetings good citizen,

If you thought the wheels were ready to come flying off this rickety old broken down economy wouldn’t you step up the spending to prepare for a time when you couldn’t spend even if you wanted to?

Worse, wouldn’t the nincompoops who monitor and misdiagnose the economy all of the time say it was something stupid like the consumer is through deleveraging’…so now we can all take on more debt and everything will be just marvelous…(until we find ourselves overextended again!)

For the first time since the Great Recession hit, American households are taking on more debt than they are shedding, an epochal shift that might augur a more resilient recovery.

Many American households had cut back spending on cars, food and other goods.

For two of the last three quarters, American households’ total outstanding borrowing on things like credit cards, mortgages and auto loans has increased after falling for 14 consecutive quarters before then. Some economists even see an end to the long, hard process of deleveraging — as they refer to the cutting of debt relative to income or the nation’s economic output. That process, they say, has been a central reason for the extraordinary sluggishness of the recovery.

“We’re at an inflection point,” said Kevin Logan, the chief United States economist for HSBC. “Debt is less of a burden” for households, he said.

Closely watched economic figures released Friday underscore households’ nascent sense of strength. Despite tepid growth and still-high unemployment, consumer confidence has soared to a five-year high, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. And economic growth numbers for the third quarter showed household spending picking up pace as well.

Let’s look at the facts for a moment good citizen, prices are rising and nobody is getting pay increases…add the push to the shove of a family has to live and you’ve got ‘increased debt!’.

Now wait a minute, numbnuts SAYS people are taking on debt to finance things they were doing without…like transportation.

You know ‘wheels under your ass’ is part of the equation that makes up the debt cycle, right?

You get a job so you can have the things you need to live. If you can’t get to the job you don’t get paid and a whole avalanche of bad things happen. So spending money on cars is considered a necessity (despite being charged an ‘excise tax’…which translates directly into a ‘luxury tax’ because the butt-head capitalist thinks you don’t NEED a car to get to work!

You COULD ride a horse!

Now, almost nobody rides horses as ‘basic transportation’ these days yet everybody gets charged excise tax on their automobile as if they did (or could if they wanted to.)

Just another example of the flawed thinking that has led to the mismanagement of our civilization.

You know, the capitalists do get ONE THING RIGHT…it is the assertion of ‘how can we expect you to do the big things right when you can’t manage to do the little things correctly?’

Which is to opine that we have overwhelming evidence of their incompetence…what’s taking so long putting corrective action in place?

And you’d (rightly) ask ‘What corrective action?’ Belaboring the obvious fact that nothing is being done to correct the imbalances throughout our civilization so nothing is ‘getting better’ regardless of what these scatter-brains say!

So what about you, good citizen? Do YOU think the tapped out US consumer is ‘on the mend?’

And would your belief do anything to affect reality?

Short answer, no.

How long would you continue to ‘believe’ while the situation continues to go ‘downhill’? As poverty rises and desperation becomes widespread would you allow yourself to be ‘deluded’ by those paid to lie to you?

As this train wreck progresses we are increasingly going to see pigs wearing so much lipstick you won’t be able to tell what the hell they are.

And THAT will be pointed to as more evidence of the non-existent recovery!

Um, enough is enough and it’s time to put this post to bed.

You deserve a break,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Whacko!

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Monday/Tuesday to you! (For many of you it’s Tuesday/Tuesday because your capitalist bosses have become stingy about giving you, er, ‘unnecessary’ paid days off.

Columbus Day USED TO BE a holiday (back when the tax rate on people who earned more than a million a year was over 90%…now that the pricks pay lower taxes than you do they suddenly can’t afford to pay YOU for holidays anymore! (Hint, they no longer need the ‘write off’ your holiday pay used to represent!)

I mean understand the logic behind high marginal taxes. Either treat your employees better OR we’ll take it from you and pay it out in welfare!

And understand, poverty has always been a problem but it was NEVER as bad as it is now.

Which isn’t absolutely accurate. Back before the New Deal kids went without shoes because their parents didn’t earn enough money, but those kids had a warm house and food in their stomachs!

But after the New Deal that variety of grinding poverty ‘almost’ disappeared…because the capitalist had his feet held to the fire. Either pay your employees or Uncle Sam will do it for you!

And it worked…at first.

Business owners learned they could get the unions to cheat their own people if they cozied up to the mobsters who ran them.

This turned into a two-edged sword because it gave the union a bad name and it let the capitalist play ‘hardball’ with the help.

But nowadays the boss doesn’t have to worry about the unions anymore…because once the bosses bought the justice system, they didn’t need to play footsie with the mob anymore.

They had (have) the judges in their pockets.

Now they can let their stooges in the financial sector pull stunts like this one:

I.M.F. Forecast Discourages Investors
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 34 minutes ago

The International Monetary Fund lowered its world economic growth outlooks for 2013 and 2014.

why do you suppose the IMF is lowering it’s already abysmal projections for the foreseeable future?

Could it be because we are ALL JAPANESE now?

Which is to ask if Japan isn’t the latest economy to join the ranks of the World’s Banana Republics?

But what’s up with this?

Japanese Car Sales Plummet in China
By KEITH BRADSHER

Japanese automakers have cut manufacturing by up to half in China after violent anti-Japanese protests over disputed islands in which Japanese-brand cars and even their owners were targeted.

More curious is what the US car buying public is making of this phenomenon? Don’t the Chinese KNOW that the Japanese produce the highest quality cars in the world?

(Not that the typical American would recognize quality if it bit him on the noggin!)

Ask your typical US Japanese car buyer what quality is and they’re likely to respond ‘shiny!’

Some might respond ‘reliable’ not that the typical US Japanese car buyer understands this concept because they have NOTHING to compare it to!

All he knows is what the Japanese tell him…and he believes it! (He also thinks his own experiences are ‘outliers’ and therefore not typical.)

But we digress because the Chinese aren’t attacking ‘Japanese quality’ there are attacking Japanese aggression!

But let us move on:

Draghi Sees a Ray of Hope for Euro Zone
By JACK EWING 3:04 PM ET

Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, along with a growing number of economists, argue that there are tentative signs that adjustments are beginning to pay off.

Why is it the high priests of money are the only ones capable of detecting the ‘fruits of their labors?’ (Especially troubling because the average person believes the central bankers are full of shit…and the average person isn’t wrong!)

Yet this idiot (like Bernanke) sees the ‘green shoots’ of recovery everywhere while the facts at hand tell us all that the economy is still locked in a ‘death spiral’.

Yes, Mario sees ‘blue skies’ while the average citizen is being torn apart in a tempest of epic proportions:

Greek Leader Greets Merkel as Protests Rage in Streets
By RACHEL DONADIO and NICHOLAS KULISH 35 minutes ago

Greek authorities sought to shield Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany from protesters angered by painful austerity measures during a visit to Athens aimed at showing solidarity with the country.

And yet what is the ‘first inclination’ of the typical US observer? He thinks the Greeks haven’t given the austerity measures enough of a chance.

Because the typical Fox News viewer doesn’t remember that this ‘bailout’ of the Greek economy is entering its forth year.

But fear not…soon the typical Fox News viewer will get their own opportunity to try out ‘austerity’ first hand as the cities they live in collide with the balanced budget features of their city and town charters.

How does your town ‘live within its means’ when the owners of commerce have off-shored the reason the town existed in the first place?

Short answer is they don’t.

And you learn a lesson in civics 101, that your safety and your children’s welfare are directly proportional to your community’s ability to support itself.

Now ask yourself if a capitalist ‘has the right’ to export a community’s foundation to make themselves ‘richer’?

Let’s take a look at someone who got wildly wealthy by taking hundreds of community’s ‘engines’ and sending them to China:

Jack Welch Will Stop Writing for Fortune
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY 10 minutes ago

Mr. Welch made his decision after the magazine ran articles critical of his suggestion that the Obama administration had manipulated the monthly jobs numbers from the Labor Department.

Apparently the retired head of the world’s (former) largest manufacturer and also the former largest corporation…because GE is neither now, didn’t learn anything from his twenty years at the helm of the company Thomas Edison founded.

Except how to throw hissy fits when people point out the truth!

If only he has decided to keep his mouth shut thirty years ago when he dismantled the most successful company ever established for his own personal greed.

But no, instead we have this conundrum to ponder:

Wall Street Pay Remains High Even as Jobs Shrink
By SUSANNE CRAIG and BEN PROTESS 4:57 PM ET

Total compensation rose 4 percent last year to more than $60 billion — an amount surpassed only by total pay in 2007 and 2008, according to a report.

What? There are fewer brokers but the ones that remain are making MORE MONEY?

HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT WORK IN AN OBVIOUSLY BROKEN GLOBAL ECONOMY?

Can you say thievery?

Because that’s the only rational explanation…and where is our justice department?

Killing innocent civilians!

And you think we’re going to ‘bounce back’ from this?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Apocalypse...on the near horizon

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the world bled from the eyesockets today as the global economy continues to hemorrhage cash.

Um, this uncontrolled bloodletting is showing up throughout the economy, especially at the edges of the safety net

Costa Mesa formed a homeless task force last spring and came up with a "carrot and stick approach," said Muriel Ullman, the city's housing consultant. The city hopes to build more affordable housing using federal grant money and county resources and has hired a mental health worker to connect with the chronically homeless. It has also partnered with local churches to set up a storage facility where the homeless can keep their belongings to avoid having them confiscated, Ullman said.

But Costa Mesa has also passed a slate of new ordinances, including bans on parking a bike anywhere but on a city bike rack, smoking in the park and sleeping in the park after dark, she said. The city also spent $60,000 to tear down a gazebo that attracted large numbers of homeless people, asked churches to stop soup kitchens there and hired two rangers to patrol the park.

The mayor last week stoked anger by calling soup kitchens nuisances and asking the city to investigate some decades-old charities there. Critics say that Costa Mesa is "just trying to get rid of our homeless, but what we're trying to do is help those who want help and if somebody doesn't want help — and they have refused help on numerous occasions — we want the courts to deal with them," Ullman said.

Communities throughout the sun-belt have stepped up enforcement of vagrancy and other laws in efforts to keep the homeless at bay.

Because…if you’re gonna be forced to live ‘outside’ you’d best be doing it where it’s warm (ish)

Which is not to say that homelessness is primarily a southern phenomenon, it is not. There are plenty of homeless who call the frigid north home.

Hell, I was watching Alaska State Troopers on National Geographic (a subsidiary of NewsCorp…sadly) and they were, er, complaining about the homeless population.

So it’s NOT ‘isolated’ and it’s not, er, minimal or by any means ‘temporary’.

What is causing large numbers of citizens into the streets good citizen?

I know the answer…and so do you.

And if you’re not a brain-fried conservo-whacko then you know the growing homeless problem is a symptom of the Global Race to the bottom.

Which is driven by…(can you give me an Amen?) Global Capitalism!

You heard the Mittster, those people (certainly the homeless) think they’re ‘entitled’ to live indoors and eat regularly (fucking moochers!) They believe society owes them a job that pays them a wage they can live on! (How fucking totally ridiculous is that? How would people like Mitt be able to afford homes around the world and the staff to run them if he actually had to pay people LIVING WAGES?)

Now, if that isn’t bad enough…let’s take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the ‘future’ of space exploitation (oops) exploration

The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight.

Officials declared the launch a success. In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions.

Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011.

The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six.

one point six BILLION buys an awful lot of cookies, don't ya think?

And then the fucking freemarket Republicans have the fucking blazing BALLS to complain about 'the deficit'!

Um, geez louise, who foots the tab for this little captive audience?

One guess and it ain’t Santa Claus, it’s You and me!

Not only did the >One Percent abandon the shuttle program but they are going to abandon NASA itself in favor of what, 5 guys in the desert with a fucking laptop?

You already know why there isn’t a ‘moonbase’

It's because the fucking greedheads couldn’t figure out how to line their pockets from the hostile environments offered by ‘near space’!

Once we figure out how to visit other solar systems (quicker than a lifetime of space travel or spending the next century in suspended animation) all of those twinkling lights up there become ‘Real Estate’…with all that entails.

Which should freak you out a little considering the cluster fuck it’s become here on earth!

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.

Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services.

For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to wealthy bondholders. But carrying charges on these have mounted to a point where they now look risky as the economy sinks into debt deflation. Cities are defaulting from California to Alabama. They cannot reverse course and restore taxes on property owners without causing more mortgage defaults and abandonments. Something has to give – so cities are scaling back public spending, downsizing their school systems and police forces, and selling off their assets to pay bondholders.

Um, because of this {ahem} bullshit there won’t be a Real Estate Market in the future. In fact it was shit like this back when private ownership of property first became ‘lawful’ (it wasn’t always so kiddos…) that put a significant damper on Real Estate for centuries.

Worse, this whole scheme of using property taxes to fund municipal functions, it’s that sort of thing that blew up in their faces.

Which is to point out that NONE of this is ‘NEW’.

The shame of it all is that they keep on pulling it…and they keep getting away with it!

What cha gonna do good citizen?

Seriously…what ARE YOU gonna do?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Snowjob

Greetings good citizen,

Markets were predominantly down in industrial nations and up in developing nations. Does this mean there is a recovery going on in the lesser developed nations?

I seriously doubt it. What we’re seeing is the same thing we’ve been seeing for the past forty years. A dearth of investment opportunity that is making the few there are look good.

Are there any customers for those investments?

No (but they have to do ‘something’ with the money.)

Again, the corporate owned media doesn’t what to explain what their One Percent masters are doing. They’d rather let you guess or better yet, ‘imagine’ what the rich and the shameless have up their sleeves.

Sadly it is a gambit such as this that leaves the state of play in our society seriously lacking.

[Dinesh D’Souza]
The second point is that if you look at anti-colonialism is India, it has taken two forms. There was a socialist anti-colonialism of the first 40 years and there’s the free market anti-colonialism of now and you can just ask yourself empirically, which one works better. When I was growing up in India, we’d learn about the five-year plans and how much we improved the previous year and so on. And this was all copied from the Soviet Union and it was as economic disaster and it deprived a whole generation of (crony capitalist) Indians of their birthright.

[The Indian economy is one of the most corrupt in the world.]

So the problem between me and Obama is that he’s following this kind of third-world collectivism. It’s all about redistributing this income. It is completely ignorant about the concept of economic growth. India on the other hand recognizes the stupidity of all of this and started imposing liberalization, modernization, free market and you could see India now having growth rates that are comparable to Malaysia and Singapore and China. So look we’ve had this debate, we can look around the world to see that it is the free market that is allowing countries that are previously colonized to come up in the world. For Obama and the sense of implementing the discredited policies of fifty which he gets essentially from his father’s failed dreams.

Talk about a clueless dirtbag! Being a college president does not mean he isn’t an idiot!

In fact, this movie of his proves the point.
Better to keep your mouth shut and have people ‘think’ you’re a fool than to open your mouth and prove them correct!

But Mr. Hedges has his own point of view to share:

SK: Chris Hedges, how do you respond to that?

CH: Well, his father left him when he was two and met him once when he was 10. You know Dinesh comes out of the Christian community of the state of Goa. There are all sorts of pockets including the Sikhs who comprise 40 percent of the Indian army and the British, who allied themselves to their colonial rulers and did the dirty work for their colonial rulers. And I look at this film and Dinesh’s stance is essentially like that. You know it is the stance of the Judenrat. It is those who feel that if they obsequiously bow before the power of white supremacy and white imperial supremacy and are willing to express and they can get away with it because of course they are not white, racist opinions that white supremacists feel or the white power elite feels but is unable to utter. They can somehow ingratiate themselves and enter into that world of white power.

I sort of drop you into the middle of an, er, ‘discussion’ of the new movie due out next month that is basically a hatchet job against President Obama titled, ‘2016’

Thus do we have the above, er, ‘observations’ being shared…by a man who isn’t necessarily ‘defending’ the current POTUS.

No, Mr. Hedges instead uses the film to point out the ‘emptiness’ of intellectual thought in this country at this time.

Worse, most of the movie is comprised of boldfaced lies…but even the sitting president would be unsuccessful in having Mr. D’Souza charged with ‘defamation of character’…because the movie was ‘blessed’ by the One Percent.

In case you still don’t believe how bad things have gotten.

And you have to agree, Mr. D’Souza is the most reprehensible brand of ‘Uncle Tom’ there is!

Which is to point out (once again) that the privileged few have been getting bolder and bolder as we draw closer to the ‘end game’.

Let’s just say that they no longer care that the public at large has noticed their ‘what are YOU gonna do about it?’ attitude.

They KNOW what YOU’RE gonna do…nothin’.

You have people and things you’re trying to protect…and as long as ‘playing stupid’ keeps them from throwing you out on the streets…well, stupid it is!

Don’t know…don’t want to know.

The fucked up part is that’s what most of the poor slobs currently being labeled as ‘freeloaders’ did to land ‘em where they’re at now.

And when the time comes, it will be how it hammers you too.

Sort of a ‘bolt from the blue’.

But don’t despair good citizen because we have reached the ‘tipping point’. The useless freeloaders now comprise a majority of the population!

And somehow Ol’ Mitt will still win!

Go figure?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bombs Away!

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets finished in the red this afternoon…although not significantly. Which only means they have yet to detonate the ‘scuttling charges’ they have planted throughout what passes for our ‘economy’.

Some of you may have noticed I am posting at a different time, that is because I am trying to ‘maximize’ my post’s ‘hang time’ by shifting to when Blogger starts a new day…right around 8:00 PM locally.

I started last night and it seems to be working…so far.

That said, it’s tough to get anything meaningful out of blogger data tracking as it appears to be continuously updating, not just day to day but hour to hour!

Anyway, without setting out to do so it looks like this week’s ‘theme’ is class war and isn’t today’s top headline all about the effects class war is having upon our crumbling civilization.

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

Uned-ju-kated white men is dying young cuz them working stiff jobs don’t offers no in-sure-ants!

So when they turn up in the emergency room, the doctor lets ‘em die rather than busting his butt trying to keep ‘em alive…

(Although he gets paid regardless. It’s that fight with his supervisor he’s trying to avoid.)

But we can’t call THAT ‘class war’…noooo.

The >One Percent wants you dead but they don’t want you to be able to prove it’s their fault that YOU didn’t get the treatment you needed in a timely fashion.

Because guess who owns the for profit healthcare industry? It sure as shit ain’t you or me!

And guess who’s pay is tied to the profitability of the unit he works for?

Think Daktari doesn’t stick it to ya if you’re uninsured?

Next time one of those fuckers is pinned in his car under a telephone pole, waiting for a minimum wage tow truck driver to free him…maybe the driver should remember that the doctor WOULD NOT hustle to treat him if the shoes were on the other foot.

How about that? The corporate owned media even has the chutzpah to say the reason for the rising death rate is ‘unclear’.

Seriously? What do YOU think is causing it?

And isn’t it a sin that we find ourselves right back to the beginning of the circle, fighting over essentially worthless ‘money’.

You (and yours) are being allowed to DIE because of your inability to pay, with essentially worthless dollars.

The fat cats don’t need it, they’ve already got more than they can spend. So why are people being denied treatment (and left to die) because they can’t pay (the insane prices the for profit healthcare industry charges?)

Worse, we can’t even charge the healthcare industry with ‘criminal neglect’, not with the court system the way it is now.

Did I mention that the ‘cold war’ has been raging for the past twenty-five years?

Nobody remembers that you never heard the acronym HMO before the Reagan administration.

In fact, Reagan is responsible for ‘privatizing’ US Healthcare and the subsequent dismantling of a once robust public hospital network.

Just one more reason to vote for the conservo-whackos…let’s see what else they can ‘fix’ for us?

Of course, I’ve already told you that despite the political mis-steps of the past week, the Romney/Ryan ticket will be triumphant come November…because that’s what ‘the masters of the universe’ want.

And it will be ‘sold’ to us by the corporate owned media as one of history’s greatest political upsets; a phenomenon that will remain ‘unexplained’ because the resultant revolt will eclipse the entire issue.

But I digress.

Alongside the healthcare battle zone is another ‘hot spot’ that the average worker has been forced to dance around for decades now and that’s been the ‘hold on to your job’ front.

For the past THREE DECADES you have been getting ‘short-sheeted’ by the minions of the >One Percent by being told ‘Be thankful you still HAVE a damn job!’

Which has all too often been followed up with by a ‘raise’ that didn’t keep pace with the supposedly non-existent inflation rate.

If you got a two-percent raise, YOUR cost for healthcare went up five!

And the next year it was something else.

All the while you’ve been getting nickel and dimed by the town you live in as they cried to override the tax cap to fund the schools and to buy every department head in town a new vehicle.

Or upgrade the computer system or to upgrade the communications system so they could all talk to FEMA at the same time…

I say the ‘minions of the >One Percent because the >One Percent no longer have any business interests in this economy.

The only ones left are their ‘vendors’ (a.k.a. minions.)

The US is just about done being the ‘dumping ground’ for all of the shit they now make elsewhere with ‘artificially cheap’ labor.

I’m telling you good citizen, what we have seen during our lifetimes is nothing less than the ‘crime of the century’.

Never have so many been so ripped off by so few and been so powerless to put a stop to it.

The very real danger here good citizen is that the ‘backlash’ from this deception will destroy our civilization…as the criminals slink off to their luxury hideouts…

Laughing all the way…

Until the bombers show up…

Thanks for letting me inside your 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

Pigs & Ducks III

Greetings good citizen,

News of the collapse of our civilization has now reached the corporate owned media, just to give you an idea of how far gone the situation is.

Observe this headline plucked from this morning’s business section:

Economic Scene
The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption
By EDUARDO PORTER

The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans, and trust in big business overall is declining. We should be alarmed.

DealBook: Assessing the Chances for Criminal Charges

“Eddie” is correct, you’d have to search far and wide to find someone this news, er, ‘shocks’.

We’re all used to it by now.

Worse, we also read what the ‘infamous they’ are prepared to do about it if any of us should call them on their decidedly criminal behavior.

Don’t gather in large ‘unarmed’ groups, you’re just making it easier for the Drones.

We all know our ‘civil disobedience’ will be punished far more severely than how their criminal actions will be dealt with…

Which brings us to the last line in today’s offering.

What do you think the chances are of ‘justice’ being done?

The consensus is ‘slim to none’.

All the have to do is claim ‘everybody is doing it’ and they’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a chicken feed sized fine.

That’s what blows most people’s mind…who said Crime doesn’t pay? Steal a billion and they ‘fine’ you a couple of million! (But you get to keep the billion…and you ‘walk’!)

WTF!

Um, good thing there aren’t billions just laying around waiting to be stolen or everybody would be doing it!

Sure beats the bag out of busting your ass every day for a paycheck you can’t live on!

But stealing billions isn’t an ‘everyman’ sort of crime, is it?

You need to be born into that kind of money, Making the crime that much more heinous.

Bobo is already ‘rich’ (comparatively speaking) but he’s ‘light-fingered’ anyway.

What do you do with a wealthy criminal?

I recommend (public) hanging but hey, I’m not a judge.

They used to hang criminals publicly for its ‘deterrent’ value…although I doubt it actually entered the criminal’s mind that THEY’D ever get caught (especially the ‘privileged criminal’.)

All they have to do is whisper the magic word and all charges against them are ‘dropped’, hell, go high enough and all traces that they were even suspected of a crime vanish as well.

But that’s not how it works for YOU.

If they want you bad enough (depending on how desperate they are for a scapegoat) you’re going down even if you’ve never stolen so much as a paperclip in your entire life!

Given those two ‘constants’ good citizen, what do you suppose the prospects are that anyone will be ‘prosecuted’ for robbing investors?

Isn’t the first test ‘how can they tell?’

Of course I am referring to how there is no ‘rational basis’ for determining the value of a given stock…but if we take that to the next level there also isn’t a rational basis for determining the value of money either!

It’s all a matter of ‘opinion’.

And somehow the opinion of the weirdo has prevailed lately.

Which is why nobody is ‘surprised’ that our entire system of commerce is ‘untrustworthy’.

But fear not good citizen, barter is making a strong come back!

Soon you will be able to trade ‘directly’ for your wants and needs, so you’ll know right then and there EXACTLY what you’ve got.

If you have nothing of ‘value’ to trade then you won’t be able to buy or sell.

And that’s going to kick the shit out of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ supply line.

They won’t be able to ‘re-supply’ if they are unable to pay for their inputs ‘in kind’.

When the bottom falls out beneath money it will be because of its original failing…nobody knows the answer to the question of how many ducks equal a pig…or how many pigs equal a duck (If the pigs are small and the ducks are large!)

Leading us back to our original conundrum.

If a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then why isn’t a buck a buck?

(Because bankers are corrupt…)

Thanks for letting me insider your head,

Gegner

Crazy

Greetings good citizen,

How do you rouse a civil population into recognizing that members of their own tribe have conspired to paint you as the enemy?

Worse, in doing so they commit a serious crime but they are not prosecuted for it.

Let us fill in another detail that is at once frightening and ‘enlightening’. These people are the same ones who have stolen for themselves the luxuries that are rightfully ours.

How do we, the ordinary citizen, protect ourselves from the criminally rapacious among us?

Sadly good citizen, I think we all realize that it is more than a little too late to be asking this question…

The irony lies in our collective failure to recognize that the behavior behind these past incidents is mirrored in the behavior of our modern corporate technocrat.

Those of you who had to work on the recent holiday may recognize that:

Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. [If it is then you’re doing it wrong!] Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.

To paraphrase Yoda, there is no ‘try’ either you DO or you DON’T!

Oh, and PS by the way, I’m don’t give a DAMN about ‘making a statement’ regarding ‘human virtue’.

IF WE LOSE OUR SPECIES IS FUCKING DOOMED!

Often decried as one of the ‘renegade philosophers’ of the past, here are some words of wisdom the rest of us would be wise to heed considering our current circumstances:

“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” wrote the philosopher John Locke, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are there upon absolved from any further obedience.”

Let me clarify this statement for you. You, the hapless wage slave, have no choice but to do as you’re told or lose EVERYTHING you’ve worked your entire life to build.

When the same people who put you in this position decide they can get what you do done cheaper somewhere else, they end your employment and chuck you out on the street.

End of story, what happens next is up to you.

What you SHOULD do is go back and burn the fucking dump to the ground, but you won’t because the ‘trail’ that leads back to you is still a bit too ‘fresh’ for you to claim ‘not me!’

Same thing happens when year after year and you don’t get a pay increase. (Or the raise you do get is immediately taken away by an increase in insurance premiums or the price of food or energy rises.)

This has been going on for three DECADES, and all the while the fuckwads have been crying about how bad the economy is!

Their prices go up but your pay doesn’t…their expenses fall but your paycheck remains frozen solid…although the ‘big guy’ has upgraded his ride, instead of a new Caddy he drives a new Mercedes now.

And you’re paying twice what you used to pay for health insurance ten years ago…now take that and spread it over how many employees the company has.

You’re not talking ‘chicken feed’ here, are you.

Understand good citizen, the big ‘change’ the difference between now and 1929 was back then we were still a largely ‘agrarian’ culture. Most people still had a relative who had a substantial farm. Worse come to worse, you could go there and work the farm for your ‘keep’.

These days, after Grampa Joe sold the farm to developers, you (being the grandchild) got nothing!

Your folks may have parlayed their meager inheritance into a condo in Miami (which they just recently lost their shirts on!) leaving YOU Zike!

Again you got nothin’!

And ‘The Grinch’ don’t care. If you aren’t evil enough to go out there and steal what you need for yourself…the Grinch don’t care about you or ‘your problems’.

And it is precisely this, er, ‘predatory’ behavior that is decimating the institution of ‘civilization’.

If you can’t trust the next guy then it is impossible to even form a civilization.

Perhaps now you can see why I, er, ‘opine’ that we are doomed if we fail to weed out the ‘unscrupulous’ among us.

Naturally, being this close to it, it is easy to see the ‘slippery slope’ that leads ahead.

How do we tell the scrupulous from the unscrupulous?

And all I can point to is 'deeds not words.'

The truth lies not in what they say but what they DO!

Illustration aside, I agree with the final point of this article.

Time to ‘get Crazy’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

One Thousand!

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to the one thousandth post of A Simple Plan! Truth be told I haven’t been keeping track. Blogger tells me when this one hits the net; it will be labeled as post number one thousand.

So whoop de do, good citizen!

And I suppose one thousand posts would be as good a time as any to restate the reason why this blog even exists.

Regular readers may remember me from the original blogger, which, back then, billed itself as a ‘get paid to write site’ based on the popularity of what you wrote. I didn’t go by my current handle then but I’m still pedaling the same ‘ideology’ I was then. So we’re talking the mid-nineties.

Which is to point out that there are a lot more than a thousand posts possibly triple that amount, maybe more.

Like I said, I’m not keeping track.

Posted on Daily Kos for a couple of years before the Libertarians chased me off in that heavily polluted pool, then I joined Conceptual Guerilla and stayed there for about three years.

For the record there is no ‘bad blood’ between Joe and me, he told me he wanted to take the site in a different direction and I respected his request, stopped posting there and started posting here, end of story.

Which brings us back to today and the 1,000th post here.

Same shit, different venue.

But, naturally, (and for me it appears to be consistent thing) I digress…

I was going to explain ‘why’ (my reason) this blog exists, what makes Gegner write?

Um, to say I was born ‘disadvantaged’ would be both an understatement and an exaggeration.

I was never hungry or naked. In this respect I am MUCH ‘luckier’ than my ‘third world’ counterparts who were born (and died) in war torn hellholes where they never stood a chance.

But I found myself at the bottom of the food chain, born to a crippled and uneducated father who had no ‘trade’ to pass on to me.
Ironically, since my ‘trade’ got off-shored, I have nothing to pass on to my son either, an outcome that I find, er, ‘worrisome’.

But it’s not just MY kid who will find himself behind the eight ball when he graduates High School in a couple of years, he’ll have plenty of company.

So this is not a ‘woe is me’ platform where I cry foul for the advantages I never enjoyed because that’s not the point.

This post (and the multitude before it) exists to prove the meme of ‘there’s nothing out there better than capitalism’ is a boldfaced lie!

But is it a lie if you can’t prove there IS a ‘better way?’

Some would say A Simple Plan is ‘unprecedented’ and therefore, ‘unproven’. I would counter that the Native Americans lived under something very close to A Simple Plan and their society flourished for centuries longer than any European civilization ever did!

Um, the more astute would ask how lucky I am to arrive on the scene just as Capitalism enters its death throes?

As you have seen repeated here countless times, nobody can survive in an ‘economic desert’ and capitalism has turn the whole world into a gigantic one with only sporadic oases of wealth scattered around the globe.

It really does boil down to the question of whether civilization exists to help all humans prosper or if it exists to make a few humans wildly prosperous?

We know how things have turned out but we also know this isn’t ‘as advertised’.

Worse, we continue to believe that ‘someday’ it will be ‘our turn’ to live in the big house and play with all of the ‘toys’ until we die…

As irrational as that ‘belief’ is.

Since this model is ‘unsustainable’ it will invariably collapse, and what is poised to replace it, so far, ain’t looking to, er, ‘equitable’.

Part of my ‘goal’ is to point the way to a more equitable future. The rest is centered on raising awareness of the eminent failure of the lifestyle we have all become accustomed to.

The ones who have buttered their bread on both sides are expecting a reasonably smooth transition from their self-destructing ‘free-state’ to the all-powerful slave state.

Which should explain why our bought and paid for politicians are sitting there ‘twiddling their thumbs’ as (what passes for) our justice system sits there, inert.

We all KNOW our civilization is rushing headlong off a cliff, NO ONE denies this, not even the corporate owned media but only a hand full know that this no accident.

That handful has only THEIR best interests in mind, you get what you get (and only after they have determined you deserve it.)

We MUST hunt them down and cast them out or our species is doomed, good citizen.

Some of you think it’s not possible and the simple minded think it’s not desirable but I tell you that the ‘parasites’ among us exist only at the top of our civilization!

Some of you recognize this and it is my intention to show you that you are not alone, others only suspect and it is my purpose is to show you that your suspicions are correct.

If we fail to identify the enemy, they WILL defeat us.

And that’s your ‘thought to ponder’ on this 1,000th post

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Reprehensible

Greetings good citizen,

The fact that I keep stumbling across news items that reinforce my assertions should be enough to demonstrate that I am not some unhinged nutter pulling wild-ass speculations out of my backside (like your typical conservative does.)

The difference is the conservative does it in an attempt to discredit the opposition, (including blaming the Democrats for the adverse outcomes caused by conservative policy!)

Not that there are any ‘real’ democrats anymore.

All that’s left are Libertarians pretending to be democrats…

Geez, how pathetic is that? I digress while I’m defending my sanity!

(And THAT’S pretty damn pathetic!)

Now, back to news articles that I can be accused of twisting out of proportions, we have this article that may be a bit too ‘optimistic’ in its assumption that we could have ‘dumped’ fossil fuels decades ago.

This story is not new. Today, solar energy is picking up momentum. But despite the current numbers and the recent raves, the solar saga, and that of renewable energy as a whole, has been going on for decades. It is a history of false starts and stutter steps.

First, the good news. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), 2011 showed record-breaking numbers for U.S. solar installations. The industry's best year ever saw demand rise by 109 percent over the previous year. With tremendous incentives and benefits for homeowners, and as prices continue to decline, the future looks bright for this alternative energy source.

However a quick glance to the past throws harsh light on the fact that we've been at this precipice before. In 1978, the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued this glowing statement: "Our conclusion is that with a strong national commitment to accelerated solar development and use, it should be possible to derive a quarter of U.S. energy from solar by the year 2000. For the year 2020 and beyond, it is now possible to speak hopefully, and unblushingly, of the United States becoming a solar society."

Um, if the population remained ‘static’ we have enough energy resources to keep the lights and the TV burning.

But that never has been the problem. The problem is getting shit where it needs to be when it needs to be there!

Neither ‘manyana’ or it’s evil twin ‘manyana-ish’ works.

This is the principle cause of ‘cascading systemic failure’, When JIT turns into days and weeks late and there’s no way (or sense) in ‘expediting’ anything.

Remember, one ‘sub-standard’ part is enough to destroy an entire complex mechanism.

Worse, after it fails you have to restart the ENTIRE production cycle over again, this time INSURING the ‘sub’ delivers product that is ‘up to spec’.

The scariest thing I’ve ever heard from a buyer is ‘quality is assumed’.

In a world where quality sources are dropping like flies sprayed with bug killer, you quickly exhaust a very shallow pool of ‘alternatives’.

And remember where ‘profits’ come from under capitalism, good citizen…they come from ‘cutting corners’!

Okay, they also come from overcharging…but the two are NOT mutually exclusive.

In fact it is rather common to be overcharged for junk (like NASA was for the recent failed launch of the private sector rocket!)

But again I digress!

Worse, it is difficult to drive home the urgency you should be feeling about this perilous state of affairs.

Which is to opine that the ‘bean-counters’ should all be shot!

Back-up, there is NO SUBSTITUTE!

But our (even back then) bought and paid for legislators took it into their heads to ‘tax’ inventory if it could be considered a ‘finished good’.

Now if we back up a little, we would find that all money is funny and the purpose of commerce is not to create an ‘artificially rich’ class but to meet the needs of ALL society!

So what ‘good’ came from JIT?

Nada (besides an artificially reduced tax burden…which itself was artificial!)

Worse, food stores, held in reserves after century’s of famine have also been reduced to JIT levels…to promote ‘demand’. (WTF!)

Which is to ask (again) what kind of MORONS do we have running things around here?

Sadly, good citizen, we are about to find out.

Back to our ‘energy independence’ article (and my original point.)

We ‘could have’ weaned ourselves off of our oil dependency decades ago, to the point of having a thriving ‘alternative energy’ sector in our society instead of the ‘stillborn’ rarity we are saddled with today.

Why aren’t we working to ‘stretch out’ our dwindling fossil fuel reserves?

Because of the few who derive their power from the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Who would pay exorbitant rates if there were a cheap and renewable alternative?

Short answer is YOU will because that cheap, renewable alternative has been withheld from you.

I said it yesterday and I’ll repeat it again today, they don’t want you to PAY, they want you to DIE!

The dead don’t vote…nor do they firebomb your factories or your banks…

Just because it is reprehensible doesn’t mean the wouldn’t actually DO it…

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

Shrug

Greetings good citizen,

I watched an hour of TED talks on the Science channel last night and learned that the richest man in the world will NOT be the source of the world’s salvation.

How fucked up is it that we often equate money with intelligence?

I lived most of my life without the, er, ‘benefit’ of cable TV and I am relieved to report that I’m fairly confident I didn’t miss anything ‘meaningful’.

Since I do not subscribe to the idea that money = smarts, I marveled for a few moments as to why the richest man in the world agreed to record what ultimately turned into a cheerleading session.

The end of Bill’s talk told anyone who was paying attention WHY he was doing this…he was stumping his investment portfolio!

He doesn’t give a fuck either!

Once again good citizen we are confounded by the realization that the ‘super-wealthy geniuses’ among us are NOT all that bright (but they are, er, ‘extraordinarily’ greedy and extremely full of themselves!)

And why people, er, ‘confuse’ driving ambition with intelligence has more to do with ignorance. Most people wouldn’t recognize genuine intelligence if it bit them on the ass! So what ‘passes for’ intelligence is more so a combination of (destructive) ‘self-confidence’ and unchecked desire (which has paid off for them at least once in the past) that makes people stand aside, often against their own better judgement…

But I digress (which is a little weird considering this post hasn’t established a theme yet…)

Funny how watching Bill Gates, already rich enough to buy and sell us all, (he most certainly doesn’t ‘need’ the money) on the fucking ‘boob tube’ stumping for investment capital!

Talk about ‘clueless’, how do you communicate to a (moron) capitalist that there is NO PROFIT in saving the world?

Understand (and be very afraid, good citizen) that this is WHY nothing has been done about the long smoldering train wreck that WAS our economy.

Nothing is being done because these idiotic ‘one trick ponies’ can’t figure out how to make a buck off of, well, repairing the damage (not that anyone is particularly interested in actually ‘fixing’ what’s broken…)

Worse, the vultures ‘know’ what needs to happen next but because of all the blood on their hands they aren’t too keen on fixing it…(yet.)

And therein lies the danger, if they keep stretching this thing out they will eventually ‘erase’ the most damning evidence against them so THEIR courts will be free to ‘hold their noses’ and exonerate them.

Think Ford ‘pardoning’ Nixon or Obama failing to prosecute Bush…(both done ‘for the good of the presidency’, of course!)

(Like a freshly ‘white-washed’ executive office is more important than an honest and just government.)

At the end of the day it is all about ‘priorities’.

It’s not about what’s important to the knot-head in power, it is about what is important to the people!

Anyway, my twisted mind keeps returning to the puzzle of ‘what it took’ to make little Billy Gates a multi-billionaire…

And not him specifically, but billionaires in general.

There are roughly a thousand and a half of them worldwide…in a world that is FILLED with grinding poverty!

What the hell is ‘wrong’ with this picture, good citizen?

Even our current President is often quoted as ‘not begrudging’ the rich their wealth…but is it ‘their wealth’?

Understand…’God’ did not come down from heaven and hand Billy a check for $75 billion, you COULDN’T begrudge him that, but Billy made his vast fortune doing the work once and getting paid for it forever (never mind the ‘forced migration’ aspect of the puzzle!)

But then again there are a lot of wealthy people that owe their fortune to, er, ‘what the law allows’…

Like I have said repeatedly, good citizen, we don’t have a ‘money problem but a legal problem…one that will remain ‘insoluable’ as long as the self-interested maintain their vise like grip on the laws we all must live by…

This is why a revolt is necessary. (Because NOTHING is going to change until these people’s bloody corpses are dragged from behind their desks!)

An ‘order’ to quit is ‘insufficient’.

There were other disturbing sentiments expressed on last night’s show, one of the presenters played the reviled ‘complexity’ card (figures he was an ‘economist’…)

Worse, he also presented the ‘false’ idea that there are 10 billion products in a market like NY City…like each one was, er, ‘unique’.

Much of what he was calling ‘product’ was in fact the same thing in a different color/flavor.

Life itself is as simple as shelter (with a place to build a fire), water, food and clothing…done.

Where ‘red nail polish’ fits into this calculus escapes me but the world doesn’t stop if we are ‘deprived’ of ‘war paint’.

So don’t sit still for anyone who plays the ‘complexity card’…he’s bullshitting you to your face! (Ironically, another ‘killing offense’ under the laws of the jungle!)

Perhaps I’m being unfair…not that I think I’m THAT much smarter than the average joe but I do recognize the need to cut the, er, ‘less sophisticated’ among us some slack.

Hell, we all know someone who would find the choice between red and yellow ‘complex’ beyond their abilities…

Which must be how such brazen injustice continues to escape notice…although that huge honkin’ muzzle they had made for the media must help a lot!

So while you’re contemplating how Christ died for your sins, take a good, hard look around you and consider how YOU have repaid ‘the favor’…

Did Jesus's sacrifice REALLY make this world a 'better place' or is that part up to us?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Strike!

Greetings good citizen,

Um, it’s more disturbing than anything else to see the markets (around the freaking world, the ones that are still open anyway) do a near vertical take-off that coincides roughly with the opening bell of the NYSE. (Nothing says ‘rigged’ like concerted action that is otherwise inexplicable!)

But you knew that, so I won’t waste any more time on the subject.

Today’s offering is a ‘sign’ that first reappeared last year…I say ‘re-appeared’ because ‘sympathy strikes weren’t always ‘illegal’.

Our corporate overlords got (their) government to ban ‘sympathy strikes’ because the Teamsters would inevitably go out ‘in sympathy’ with any major employee group.

Under the rubic of ‘endangering the national infrastructure’ they passed legislation to prohibit sympathy strikes in general!

And you see today the ‘end result’ of this legal dodging. Proof that United we stand, divided we fall!

Strikes that used to be settled quickly (because if you didn’t settle a strike quickly it would soon go national.) suddenly dragged on for weeks and months. In some cases they even resulted in lockouts…

And where was ‘our’ fucking government then?

Worse, the, er, prohibition against striking in sympathy (there were whopping fines that enforced this ban) meant there wasn't anybody (read union local) willing to strike in protest over their jobs being sent overseas.

And now here we are, the citizens of a ‘hollow land’, begging for scraps from our corporate overlords.

So what are we to make of this sudden resurgence of unity in the face of adversity?

Teamsters in Alabama went on strike against a giant garbage company--and in Seattle, New York and Ohio, workers joined them in solidarity, in a move that's usually illegal.

Is the answer as simple as the ‘fines’ that were once stiff enough to choke a horse (intended to drain a typical union emergency fund dry in a few days!) are now ‘chicken feed.’ Or have the few remaining unions seen the writing on the wall and decided to (valiantly) die on their feet rather than fade away into irrelevance on their knees?

I think the ‘wimps’ who sold the rest of us out were ultimately forced out of the union leadership across the nation and a new, more militant breed has taken their place!

Sadly it will take decades to ‘organize’ what remains of the civilian workforce…and we will unlikely regain our industrial workforce without a revolution that dissolves corporate charters everywhere!

I lived through the shameful time where the Union rep would stand before us wringing his hands and patiently explain that there was nothing the union could do, the company had the government on their side!

Which is a little fucked up considering WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT!

Ironic how the weasels who make decisions in our name without ever consulting us work directly for the fucking corporations!

How nice it must be to draw a paycheck for performing the public’s work on one hand and watching your campaign war chest being filled by the very people you’re supposed to be protecting the folks who elected you from!

Why NONE of these snakes has been hung for treason remains a mystery…just like the (irrationally) rising stock markets.

Which is to ask what do you do when you see criminal activity occurring right before your very eyes?

How fucking sad is it that the answer is ‘nothing’ it’s not your job.

Yup, the answer is ‘not my job man. It’s not what I get paid to do.’

How sad is it that you are basically being paid to fuck yourself six ways to Sunday?

Let’s start with the 45% of the HOUSEHOLDS (not individuals) who receive some form of government ‘food assistance’.

How long can our civilization last, picking up the slack for fucking employers who refuse to pay YOU enough so YOU can feed yourself?

How the fuck long can that go on?

Did I mention that our social model, the way things are ‘supposed’ to work is FUBAR?

(That means 'Fucked Up Beyond All Repair' for you youngsters who don’t get WWII slang.)

The old folks knew the score but they were too chicken-shit to do what needs doing. That’s why, nearly a hundred years later we are standing in the exact same place where they stood…

And THEY BLINKED!

Let me assure you, it ain’t gonna happen this time.

This time there will be blood.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Truth

Greetings good citizen,

Yet another day dawns over our crumbling civilization while our ‘anonymous leaders’ nod with satisfaction as their plans unfold unhindered…

Funny how the ‘prosperity’ of the post WWII era now looks like a propaganda campaign. We were only ‘prosperous’ because we ‘believed’ we were prosperous, (the man on the TV told us it was so!)

Now that we look back on it, not so much…

More interesting is the sudden ‘re-appearance’ of our ancient foe, Poverty.

Like polio and tuberculosis, the welfare state (allegedly) ‘exterminated’ poverty…but both of these medical scourges are back…and why do you suppose that is?

Because their old friend ‘poverty’ has returned and created fertile ground for these scourges to thrive in!

Then Willy Jeff Clinton killed welfare… and look who’s back!

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious -- qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

While I shake a crooked finger at a former president, the problem goes deeper than that. Poverty has ‘resurged’ because we have failed to abolish capitalism!

I almost wrote ‘predatory’ in front of the word capitalism but that infers that there is a non-predatory variety of capitalism and that simply isn’t true!

There’s just no way you can stack ‘fuck you, pay me’ into a non-predatory outcome!

Remember good citizen, if you can’t survive on what they pay you, it’s not their problem but YOURS!

Odd how this little ditty brings us full circle to the crux of the problem, one that few even acknowledge exists. One where if YOU ‘own’ the, er, ‘media outlet’, you get to decide what is or is not ‘true’.

It’s not that the ‘owner’ of the media can’t stand to look in the mirror, often they understand full well that they are ‘propagating falsehoods’.

But they also understand that if they, er, ‘offend’ their advertisers, they’ll starve.

Thus do we encounter the first line of ‘live on your knees’ cycle. You may know you’re doing the job ‘wrong’ but that’s the way the man cutting the paychecks wants it done.

YOU are in no position to question his judgement (if you want to keep that paycheck coming!) You just do it the way he pays you to do it and you shut up.

One of the most prevalent messages one learns down here on the bottom of the food chain is YOU aren’t being paid to think, you’re being paid to DO AS YOU’RE TOLD!

When outsiders question the (often unwise) methods of the owner that same individual is quick to point to the men themselves and claim that’s they way they WANT TO DO the job…(and it’s no skin off of his ass so long as it gets done on time, correctly!)

Things are set up the way they are because that’s the way BONEHEAD PAID to have them set up! But even the most casual observer knows that…so it is unclear whom, precisely, he thinks he’s fooling.

Which brings us to another serious issue, the ‘cattle in the chute’ dilemma.

For all of our (alleged) ‘freedoms’ you actually get to make very few choices ‘on your own’…which is to point out that your choices are limited by other factors that are beyond your control…

Your job on the back of a rubbish truck does not afford you a fully staffed ocean front estate with which to call ‘home’.

Which leads us to the rough edge of an entirely different problem that we won’t go into right here and now…(but I sure would like to!)

Back to ‘cattle in a chute’…and we aren’t talking ‘rodeo’ here good citizen, we’re talking ‘slaughterhouse’, which, ironically, makes those herding the rest of us to our doom, er, ‘cannibals’.

Despite the fact that they don’t ‘eat what they kill’ (not yet anyway.)

Just wait until they put a ‘price per pound’ on what our betters consider the largest ‘pest problem’ challenging their continued ‘rulership.’

Because at the end of the day good citizen it ALWAYS comes down to the question of ‘how far will you go in order to maintain your current level of privilege?’

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘honest answer’ to that question goes way beyond what would normally be considered ‘depraved’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Extremism

Greetings good citizen,

The European markets are up slightly this morning and one can only assume this is due to ‘bargain hunting’ after two days of plunging share values, which is likely to be repeated here in the US, isn’t it (being the home of the ‘greater fool’ and all?)

Mind you, Asian markets took it in the shorts overnight but that’s because this two day ‘burn-off’ was centered on the (inevitable) slowing of the Asian economies.

Wonder if the goobers in the financial markets are still scratching their heads as to ‘why’ all of their customers stopped buying after they were PRICED OUT OF THE MARKET?

But you know the old saying, ‘Stupid is as Stupid does’…

Thus our first offering provides us with a look at the grass in the other fellow's yard

That is because of strong growth in countries like Brazil, India and especially China, which helped buoy economies in Africa and South America. High commodity prices also aided exporting nations.

Market conditions also favored developing countries. Economists had theorized that the credit crunch and recession would cause a flight to the safety of developed nations. But shortly after the recession, with growth stagnating in countries like the United States and in western Europe, the world’s investors plowed money into emerging markets.

“In the past, economic crises in the rich world had a big and immediate impact on the developing world,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research institution based in Washington. “But this time, the impact was much smaller, and we did not see developing countries follow the United States and Europe into long recessions and slow recoveries.”

Looks like Puss Nuts forgot to add ‘invisible and imaginary’ to the long and slow recoveries the West is, er, ‘struggling’ with.

Er, just a thought but I bet the recovery would go a LOT faster and smoother if we started HANGING financial executives for TREASON!

(Not that there is a way out of this financial quagmire that doesn’t involve paving the swamp over and starting over again from scratch!)

And the sooner we take those first steps towards sustainability, the better off we’ll all be!

Because, in case you didn’t notice, The US (and the rest of the West) wasn’t as, er, ‘lucky’ as the ‘developing world’.

"Extreme Poverty In The U.S. Has Doubled In The Last 15 Years" (Think Progress)
According to the latest Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent of Americans are either low-income or living in poverty in the wake of the Great Recession. And a new study from the National Poverty Center shows just how deep in poverty some of those people are, finding that the number of households living on less than $2 per day (before government benefits) has more than doubled in the last 15 years:

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds. The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million…and the rich are getting richer.

Yes, good citizen, in a nutshell the poverty the developing world has, er, ‘miraculously avoided’ has, in fact, manifested itself here…in the greedy and corrupt West, brought to you by your ‘freely elected’ representatives (who won’t even take your phone call!)

Which is to (once again) point out that it is, er, ‘counterproductive’ to keep pointing to facts that you are all well aware of, You don’t need me to tell you that our, er, ‘method of government’ has been hijacked and is now broken beyond all recognition.

Worse, we all know WHO and HOW this came to pass…and it sickens us all to see that it is, once again, THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

Yesterday being ‘Super Tuesday’, it (naturally) solved nothing as we once again find the nation being RAILROADED into choosing between which ‘flavor of conservatism’ they want to fuck things up worse then they already are!

(And until we remove the law from the hands of the, er, ‘self-interested’, things can only get worse!)

To me, I find it amazing that we keep circling back to this exact same impasse.

How we keep having to ‘re-establish’ the Rule of Law BECAUSE we don’t take the necessary measures to prevent it from returning to ‘the Rule of (the rich) Man.

This is WHY A Simple Plan is set up the way it is, not only does it eliminate ‘the grotesquely rich’ but it also eliminates their ability to ‘buy’ the legal outcomes they desire.

And it has ‘teeth’!

But in order to be effective all, er, ‘systems’ have to have ‘enforceable consequences’.

How odd is it good citizen that people who think nothing of condemning complete strangers to be slaughtered on the battlefield (for [usually] nebulous reasons) are against the idea of ‘dueling’ or personally defending their honor/beliefs?

Then there is the time tested practice of ‘exile’. Why do the criminals keep coming back?

BECAUSE WE NEVER RID OURSELVES OF THEM!

I’ll be quick to add that few who are locked up today would be exile worthy criminals…the ones who deserve exile today like to refer to themselves as ‘public servants’.

Why they are allowed to keep dropping the ‘self’ identifier remains a matter between them and their campaign contributors…

Which is to correctly point out ‘fuck their constituents!’

To rectify this heinous situation we must strip away the benefits of civil society from those who fail to appreciate them.

Just another thing to muse over as we plunge headlong into the abyss…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Living 'Free'!

Greetings good citizen,

I love Elephants in the room and for the past four years there’s been a huge one that the Corporate owned media avoids like the plague!

Once the bonus addled bankers realized they were creating ghost-towns that THEY were ‘technically’ on the hook for…all of a sudden using their ‘strongest weapon’ became an all around ‘bad idea’.

Weirdly, there’s a reason why 25% of the population ‘can’t qualify’ for a mortgage just as there’s a reason why even during good times 25% of us can’t find work! (No irony should be lost on the serious amount of ‘overlap’ that exists between these two groups.)

Sorry about the shotgun blast full of concepts there but our fucked up social system produces a lot of these ‘conceptual overloads’ (and with it sentences like the one above.)

But anyhoo, back to the Elephant in the room of how some people are ‘living free’ and by extension, making the rest of the economy, er, ‘appear’ better than it actually is.

One of Ms. Fox’s clients is Nicholas Cline, 35, a construction worker who fell behind on his mortgage payments in 2009. (He thought he had modified his loan, but the company he was working with has since pleaded guilty to criminal fraud.) The bank that holds Mr. Cline’s mortgage has left him alone, he said. No letters, no calls, no hassles.

“But now that it’s going on three years, what do you do?” Mr. Cline said. “I am living in my house. But the stress of this, not knowing what’s going to happen or when, it’s an unbelievable burden on your mind.”

In New York, the time to complete a foreclosure has almost quadrupled, from 263 days in 2007 to 1,019 days in 2011. Abraham Kleinman, a lawyer in Uniondale who represents homeowners fighting foreclosure, said he counseled a client who felt guilty about remaining in his home so long after defaulting. “He says to himself, ‘I’m sitting here rent free, it can’t go on forever,’ ” Mr. Kleinman said. “But the plaintiff has not been aggressive. As near as I can tell, they’ve put this to the side.”

It is disturbing to note we still have ‘fraudulent’ mortgage originators but we also have the banks themselves, carrying most of these mortgages on their books at values they’ll NEVER see!

Does anyone else need a detective to deduce what this means for our supposedly ‘asset backed’ financial system?

Which is the OTHER elephant in the room…

Has it occurred to you that even (or especially) if you are renting, you’re getting FUCKED?

Just to swap mental gears for a moment, is it becoming clear to you just who is buying all of those new cars?

(Because, ironically, defaulting on their mortgage HAS NOT ruined these people’s credit rating!)

Or the Auto builders are too desperate to care (meaning they are extending credit to ‘poor risks‘ regardless)…chew that one over for a few minutes and see what you come up with…it will redefine the term ‘depression’.

Which is why I get such a big charge out of the show 'Doomsday Preppers' and how their so-called ‘experts’ keep giving these people really bad advice!

Rule number one of true preppers is DON’T HOARD! There’s no way you can keep visiting the site of your hoard without drawing attention to it!

Only ‘moles’ (people who plan to stay out of sight until it’s safe to come out…which may be never) can ‘hoard’.

But even that ‘strategy’ comes with the commitment requirement, you can NEVER leave the shelter or you risk revealing its existence, and revelation is both damnation and doom.

If people know there’s a hoard, they’ll be on it like stink on excrement…

Just the sight of you walking around looking healthy and well fed (long after you have no reason to be either) will be enough to betray you.

Which gives the wrong impression…roughly 60 days after the supply lines collapse there won’t be much of anything around population wise, the chaos and lack of modern conveniences will ‘kill-off’ most of the, er, ‘surplus population’.

How sad is it that this will make the ‘true’ survivors no less adamant in seeking to ‘refresh’ their dwindling stores of ammo or (what will become) luxury items like toilet paper, tissues and candy/liquor.

Gold? Gold will be a ‘find’ (when these hoarders are eventually overrun) and some (morons) will still try to hoard it although most of the time it won’t do the hoarder any good.

Worse, the wrong word in the right ear and it will probably get you dead, there’s no accounting for morons.

But I digress, we have gone form one herd of elephants to another, entirely different herd and how the corporate owned media is spreading ‘dis-information’ on both.

How pathetic is it good citizen that we have an economy supported largely by people who are ‘living free’?

Worse, good citizen, given the defunct ‘real estate market’ how long will it be before there won’t be ANYBODY paying their mortgage?

What will become of our crumbling ‘financial system’ them?

I’d posit that our civilization doesn’t have that long so the question becomes a rhetorical one at best.

Um, under A Simple Plan the real estate market (along with the parasitic banking system) both ‘vanish’…a place to live (equipped with all of the modern conveniences of the time) are your RIGHT! Not a ‘roll of the dice’ investment that you may or may not recover…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner