Class War

Greetings good citizen,

As the great ‘Ponzi Scheme’ we call ‘the American Dream’ continues to unravel, one theme keeps repeating over and over again…

Are you worthy?

This is a bit of an odd question which most of us (rightly) don’t feel qualified to answer. It is assumed that you are indeed worthy until your actions prove otherwise. Think all of the bad things you like, thoughts are not deeds. Thoughts that go unvoiced are impossible to prove, none of us are able to see/hear what goes on in the mind of another, much less prove that another is ‘guilty’ of thinking…er, ‘harmful’ thoughts.

So we might wonder what being ‘worthy’ has to do with the current turmoil coursing through our rapidly decaying social framework.

Who would be trying so vigorously to sort the ‘worthy’ for those who are not? It is perhaps a more interesting question to ask what yardstick the ‘sorters’ are using?

But we already know, don’t we? It is the same measurement that has always been used when measuring ‘social status’…$

Either you ‘have it’ or you don’t, there is no ‘in-between’.

Which begs the perplexing issue of why everyone who isn’t ‘demonstrably’ wealthy thinks they are at still ‘middle class’? (Is this because nobody wants to admit to being ‘working class’?)

Could this be because the fastest growing ‘class’ happens to be ‘the working poor’?

Um, we still haven’t nailed down what ‘worthiness’ has to do with anything but make no mistake about it good citizen, this is Class war

[Hat tip: Jesse’s Crossroads Café]

Class Warfare: American Style

Matt Taibbi's reaction to the ZeroHedge story with regard to Turbo Tim's lifting of the government support on Christmas Eve for the GSE's was exactly my own.

What he does not overtly say is that this is class warfare, and it is becoming worse in the US than at any time since the 1930's. And the outcome of this will be a fundamental test of the US commitment to its republic.

The media stokes the viewing public with emotion-based and virulently distracting arguments about liberal versus conservative, while the gentrified class skins them all alive.

One only has to watch the 'news shows' on American television to see the lack of real content and discussion, with diametrically opposed 'strategists' hurling sound bytes at each other with all the depth of a schoolyard standoff.

It is comfortable to retreat into an 'us versus them' view of the world, and the noble class in the States is all too ready to facilitate that appeal to the darker emotions. People know deep down that it is a scam, and believe that it is easier to go along and get yours while you can, than actually attempting to change a system grown corrupt in an aging empire.

This explains more than one might imagine. Why do the economists continually excuse outrageously unsustainable economic behavior and financial systems that are as productive as games of chance? Why do some media outlets obviously take sides and pander to the worst biases in their viewers, supplying them with easy reflexive answers to any suggestion that something might actually be wrong? Why do adult people fall for this and regress to childish name calling so readily?

It is because they are afraid. They know the system is broken, that the country is in for hard times, and that the work of reform is going to be difficult and painful. [This will only be true if the ‘pain’ isn’t shared equally.] It is so easy to adopt whatever red or blue meme, whomever you think is going to deliver undeserved wealth to you, or at least safety and position. As always look for a fall guy, some identifiable and out of favor group. The search for scapegoats may be violent. [You can substitute ‘will’ for the word ‘may’ in the prior sentence.]

At turning points such as these, when the time is right, a 'great man' will stand up and many will follow. Who will it be, and what principals and principles will they represent?

Obama was such a one, but he is obviously like the character of Robert the Bruce in the movie ‘Braveheart’, or perhaps the Bruce's father, who chooses practically and cynically to support the nobles. He is finished; no one will follow him as his betrayal becomes too painfully obvious.

Will it be the banal fascist with the easy answers, the vile leftist with retribution to offer, or a 'Braveheart' who has nothing to offer but hardship, and freedom? [Does anyone fit the last prescription? There is no one beside myself who has a workable vision of the future that doesn’t involve a reversion to slavery and feudalism and the subsequent restoration of Monarchy.]

America is not alone in this. The UK is further along the path. We may see the first expression of the future of the West in London than in Washington. Only the future will tell.

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Warren Buffett, New York Times, November 26, 2006.

"The class warfare is over -- we lost. I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost." Dennis Kucinich, 18 December 2009

In the short term there will be quite a bit of jostling at the middle of the ladder, by those who fancy themselves, or their children, suited for the new nobility and so seek to perpetuate the status quo, with a lot of kicking and dog eat dog going on at the lower levels as the ladder shortens, trying to knock the immigrant, the less connected, off into the abyss, to feed the beast.

Out of all of this will come something different and most likely something unexpected. It’s an old story, one that replays over and over. The remedy is sound reason and the Constitution, but these forces have been in retreat for the past ten years at least. Reform and justice have few friends while the looting of a generation is in progress.

"For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system. In which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instantly-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory. In the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.

The essentially complicit nature of the two ruling political parties was in this way covered up for decades, as the crimes of the Democrats were greedily consumed as entertainment by the Limbaugh crowd while the crimes of the Bushies became hot-selling t-shirts and bumper stickers for the Air America listeners. The abiding mutual hatred the red/blue groups shared consistently prevented any kind of collective realization about the structure of the overall scheme...

Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel, to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means. [And the stunning silence surrounding this issue is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole affair!]

My own personal feeling is that our recent bubbles weren’t much different than pyramid scams and lotteries; they’re the handiwork of an essentially regressive and deeply cynical political organization that systematically hoovers up taxes and investment money mainly from middle-class suckers, where it eventually gets eaten in short-term cashouts and mostly blown on sports cars and tropical vacations and eye jobs for the trophy wives of Wall Street executives. Crackonomics: take literally all the spare money from four square city blocks and turn it into one tricked-out Escalade.

For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up. Of course my seeing it that way might have a lot to do with my own personal psychological prejudices, and I get that some other person with different hangups might choose to focus on Barney Frank deciding to “roll the dice on home ownership” with the GSEs... [I’m not going to go into that here…]

This GSE story is a big one, but if it gets used as a path back to a “The Market Reacted Rationally” version of history, we’re screwed. It has to be looked at as an important part of a diabolical whole, a symbiotic scheme in which the banks and the state were irreversibly intertwined in an enterprise that on both sides was never about market economics, but crime. Because otherwise… the diversionary notion that one side or the other is wholly to blame is part of what makes the whole scam possible..."


Why would you care? Why be concerned about the other? Because when the time comes, there may be no place to hide. Madness makes few rational distinctions between what is and is not worth preserving. Time to listen to the survivors, and not imagine that this time it will be different.

"First they came for the intellectuals, and I did not speak out—because I was not a intellectual;
Then they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a working man;
Then they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out—because I was not disabled;
Then they came for the gypies, and I did not speak out—because I was not a gypsy;
Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out—because I was a Protestant;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me —
and there was no one left to speak out for me."

Sort of an interesting choice of closing statements, don’t you think? The above verse is most commonly told as a cautionary tale about fascism, although the basic question: ’when is it time to speak up?’ rings loud and clear.

You’ve already been blamed in hundred of news articles and opinion pieces for not ‘standing up’ for what you believe…but that’s because it has been proven that standing up and speaking out only gets you branded as a subversive, as someone who bears watching.

Ironically, in for a penny, in for a pound…if you’re going to accept that level of risk, you’re going to wait until ‘the message’ you send is certain not to be ignored.

When the time is right, you’ll know…because you won’t be alone…and it’s unlikely you or your companions will be unarmed adding a extra level of commitment to the message.

Is it really ‘protest’ if you must bow to ‘authority’ and be herded by police every step of the way? Is it still a demonstration if you are ordered to stay miles away from the object/group you are protesting? Is it still protest if the very speeches containing your grievances first need to be vetted by the minions of those you are protesting against?

Is it time to speak up, good citizen?

Interestingly enough, we already have…and the infamous they have continued to ignore us.

What do you suppose comes next?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Who's got the power?

Greetings good citizen,

Weekends are tough because even the papers take refuge in the banal (see last nights post, which made today’s headlines.) The blogs often review the past week, usually focused on their favorite ‘crime of the week.’

Bizarrely, this week has exposed enough crime to keep a consensus from forming in the blogosphere.

There has been so much dissection of the minutiae in the blogosphere that it is easy to lose focus on the bigger picture.

Thankfully, Frank Rich helps us to focus on what’s important.

Yes, good citizen, this week we learned the ‘green shoots’ are nothing more than weeds, that unemployment is still in ‘free fall’ and retail sales are plummeting with no bottom in sight.

Naturally, we are looking for (and debating) the right combination of ‘policies’ to put our economy back on track

When the real debate belongs a few steps before this stage.

Is it sensible to look for change when nothing has materially changed from the policies of last hopeless administration?

Worse is the fact that our president is already back-peddling on earlier promises. It’s bad enough that his mandate to end the conflict in the Middle East ‘Now’ has morphed into the identical 18-month window the last administration negotiated before it departed.

Perhaps more disturbing is the total disregard this administration has displayed when it comes to prosecuting their predecessors for what can only be described as ‘criminal behavior’.

They are perfectly willing to ‘ignore’ the criminal acts of the previous administration, which, by itself, turns the new administration into criminals.

What is the point of electing a new chief executive, the principal law enforcement officer of the land if his first act is to ignore his primary function?

We didn’t elect Barrack Obama to restore the financial system; we elected him to restore justice this nation!

If he can’t handle the justice part of the job, how can we expect him to handle the financial crisis properly? If he is unwilling to prosecute criminal acts, it will ultimately result in more criminality.

In case you haven’t noticed good citizen, not only are we not seeing the necessary investigations into criminal wrongdoing but the new administration has squandered trillions without materially altering our financial morass at all!

We will soon arrive at the ‘finger pointing’ stage where the president, who has already expressed his ‘total confidence’ in his financial team, will find himself in a position where he will have to eat those words to avoid being crucified for their blunders.

The pending collapse of the auto industry will send the stock market below the 5,000 mark along with sending unemployment well over the 10% level. (A figure that is already well over 10% if you look at the U-6.)

Are you gonna run out and buy a new car good citizen? No you’re not, and neither are a vast majority of us. If your household income is below six figures, you have likely already purchased the last ‘new car’ you’ll ever own.

Again, if your household income is under six figures, it’s unlikely you will even ‘lease’ a new car as most folks have ‘wised up’ to the downside of leasing. (Exhaust your ‘mileage allotment’ before your lease expires and you’re screwed. You’re making a ‘new car’ payment on a set of wheels you can’t use without paying a horrendous penalty.) It’s a risk most of us are unwilling to take.

And if nobody (actually ‘too few’) can afford new cars, what do you suppose the chances are that the auto industry will ‘recover’?

Simply put, it won’t…and that’s a pretty harrowing indictment of our commerce system when an economic factor as basic as transportation becomes a ‘luxury’ for those performing society’s ‘heavy lifting’.

Here in the shadow of ‘peak oil’ this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s bound to play hell with getting what you need where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

Flipping that rock over, globalization is likely to become unworkable because people that live in ‘economic deserts’ are unable to travel to where the work is.

Worse, commerce located in ‘financially challenged’ areas are likely to shut down their operations when there isn’t sufficient business to support those locations.

Even these dire outcomes are a reflection of a government that has failed to protect the interests of society over the interests of the ‘self-interested’.

Simply put, a government that fails to deliver justice has itself, failed.

Why can’t you afford a new car? Because your employer isn’t compelled to pay you a living wage, if you can’t live on what they pay you, it’s not their problem; it’s yours!

Should the government tell employers how much workers should be paid? If the government doesn’t, who will? Understand the reason you make what you make is because the government publishes the ‘prevailing wage’ for your specialty in your area…so much for ‘invisible hands’ and ‘market forces’!

Which is to say there is very little danger of an employer overpaying you. They have the scoop on what other employers in the area are paying, courtesy of the US government.

Conversely, your ignorance can cost you dearly. If you don’t know what the prevailing wage for your specialty is and your last employer underpaid you, it is unlikely the person interviewing you is going to offer you what you should be getting.

Worse, the ‘prevailing wage’ information has no relationship to the cost of living, it is IRS data that is shared with employers.

No irony should be lost on the fact that prevailing wage data is often used when a company decides to relocate…for reasons that should be obvious.

Um, logically, poverty doesn’t ‘help’ the government…unless you want to factor in the government agencies that ‘fight’ poverty. As you can see, the government has the power to wipe out poverty but heading up one of these agencies is a rather lucrative position.

If the ‘war on drugs’ ever succeeds, there are going to be a ton of government employees hitting the streets. Ditto for ‘abandoning’ this lost cause…

So I ask you again good citizen, is our government broken?

You know what I think but what I think doesn’t matter, it’s what you think that counts!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'Smart money'

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you come across a ‘human interest story’ like the one below.

Naturally, what follows is a ‘cautionary tale’ that emphasizes the age-old axiom of ‘know your limits’, but, bizarrely enough, the focus of this article is not ‘know your limits’ it’s ‘hire a pro’ before it costs you twice as much…

If you know what you’re doing, there is no reason you can’t ‘do it yourself’…the common thread behind all of the stories below is that the, um, victim obviously had no clue.

Even if You Want to Save Cash, Don’t Try This Stuff at Home

By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: May 16, 2009

CHICAGO — Saving money never cost quite so much.

When the toilet in Carol Taddei’s master bathroom began to break down a few months ago, she decided it would be cheaper to buy a new one than pay for repairs. Ever frugal in this dismal economy, Ms. Taddei, a retired paralegal, then took her economizing a step further, figuring she could save even more by installing the new toilet herself. [Um, does anyone see an obvious problem right at the get go? It is the ‘conceit’ of the ‘college educated’. They went to college so they (erroneously) think they are capable of figuring ‘anything’ out…since these people aren’t paid nearly as much as she is, it must be ‘easy’!]

Initially, things looked good with the flushing and the swishing. That is, until the ceiling collapsed in the room below the new (leaky) toilet. Rushing to get supplies for a repair, Ms. Taddei clipped a pole in her garage. It ripped the bumper off her car, and later, several shelves that had been holding flower pots and garden tools collapsed over her head. [IQ test here good citizen…do YOU know where she screwed up? ( put your answer in the comments.)]

“It just kept getting worse,” Ms. Taddei said, ruefully describing what came out to be a $3,000, three-day renovation at her suburban Minneapolis home, finished by a professional from Mr. Handyman, a home repair service that takes emergency calls.

With the sour economy has come a class of ambitious do-it-yourselfers who are tackling things that, before the days of rampant penny-pinching, might have been left to paid professionals. An unlucky few like Ms. Taddei have learned that being thrifty sometimes comes at a high price and can bring along with it a new scourge of the times: saver’s remorse.

“Oh, tell me about it,” Ms. Taddei said. “Sometimes it’s better just to bite the bullet.”

Certain things are almost always true when times are tough, experts say, and they are not all bad. People drive less to save on gas, so there are fewer car crashes. People smoke less because cigarettes are expensive. Diets simplify and, sometimes as a result, become more healthful. Stress levels, on the other hand, tend to increase.

And while there is no national database that tracks do-it-yourself home injuries in recessions, experts say that there does seem to be an increase in the kind of accidents and mishaps that come with spending more time at home, based mostly on anecdotal evidence. [What’s most amusing is the victims are most often ‘well-compensated, highly educated’ people. These kind of incidents almost never happen to people that don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of…these are people that KNOW how to ‘do it themselves’ because they can’t afford to pay someone to do ‘basic repairs’.]

“We are seeing an increase in minor injuries, sprains and contusions,” said Dr. Peter Lamelas, who operates four urgent care centers around Palm Beach County, Fla.

The centers are seeing an increase in-patients in general, perhaps because urgent care centers are a less expensive alternative to hospital emergency rooms. Based on figures for this year so far, Dr. Lamelas is expecting to have 20,000 more visits from patients than last year.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of musculoskeletal problems from people lifting heavy things, maybe moving or doing things they’re not accustomed to,” Dr. Lamelas said. “A lot of back injuries, shoulder injuries. Lacerations all the time.”

Ramon Estrada has saver’s remorse, foodie-style. Hoping to save on groceries and avoid costly restaurant meals about three months ago, he accepted almost two dozen steak and fish filets from someone who offered his family their uncooked party leftovers. Being a culinary student, Mr. Estrada jumped at the chance to spend an evening chopping and seasoning and grilling, then cooling and repackaging the bounty of free food for dinners and lunches during the week.

The family ate some of the surf-and-turf on the spot. It tasted delicious, but about four hours later, “I’m completely feeling horrible,” said Mr. Estrada, 27. “Cramping stomach, the most horrible thing ever.”

Mr. Estrada’s brother had to be rushed to the emergency room. Mr. Estrada became so dehydrated that he also had to see a doctor a few days later, at the cost of at least $400 for drugs and treatment and four days of missed work.

“We learned something,” he said. “Saving money wasn’t worth all of that.” [We can only wonder if ‘stupid’ learned the basics of food handling safety?]

Hair stylists and auto mechanics are often among those called to the rescue when things go wrong for money-savers.

“One of my clients decided to bleach her hair all over instead of coming in to get a full head of highlights,” said Sunny Brewer, a stylist in St. Clair, Mich. “She put bleach on her scalp and pulled it through to the ends and left it on for an hour. She had hair down past the middle of her back and now she’s sporting a chin-length bob because her hair broke off.” [Millions of women ‘do’ their own hair and this woman has probably do it in the past…the screw up here was leaving the bleach in too long. This same incident could have just as easily in any busy salon.]

The client, somewhat mortified, did not want to be mentioned by name in this article. But she did allow Ms. Brewer to tell her story as a cautionary measure.

“We had to go in and do corrective color,” Ms. Brewer continued. “I charge by the hour, and I worked on her for four hours. So by the time it was over, she ended up spending close to $1,000 to have her hair corrected when it could have been $175.” [Left unsaid is how Ms. Brewer could just as well have done the job for free if one of her stylists ‘screwed up’.]

Don Tommasone, the owner of Village Automotive, a car care center in a Chicago suburb, says he spends a lot of his time these days doing corrections, too.

“We open the hood and can tell the guy tried to do it himself with cheap parts,” Mr. Tommasone said. “We see at least one a day like that. At least. The No. 1 part replaced: the battery.” [Sadly, we once again see the ‘ignorance’ of the well-compensated on display. Only a hyper educated moron could screw up installing a battery…and they have a fifty-fifty chance of getting right…it’s only two stinkin’ wires!]

Sasha Bernstein is among those who decided to skip out on the salon. About six months ago, Ms. Bernstein, 26, decided she would save $60 a month by buying an at-home kit and waxing her own bikini line. All she can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Often, though, the wounds are only to one’s pride.

Tony Contreras, who works at a nonprofit legal service clinic in San Francisco, saves money on his daughter’s haircut by trimming it himself. His wife, Sierra Filucci, called the latest style “a horribly uneven mess.” [Hair grows back, this is hardly the ‘end of the world’.]

But both parents keep telling Lola, 4, how cute she looks, even though they said they cringe anytime people mention their daughter’s creative hairdo.

In suburban Baltimore, Lynne Sherman was the temporary fix when her husband’s attempt to hang molding ended up puncturing a pipe, which sent water spouting into their daughter’s bedroom. Ms. Sherman plugged the hole with her finger until a carpenter arrived. [Hmmn…this is bizarre by itself, you don’t call carpenters when you crack a pipe, you call a plumber…although the carpenter would know how to repair such a, um, stroke of misfortune’…which is not to say that most carpenters wouldn’t have committed the same ‘faux pas’.]

“My husband said, ‘I took woodworking and shop in high school, so when we’re ready to do it, I’ll do it,’ ” Ms. Sherman, 50, said of the project gone awry, which cost $250 to fix, and about which her husband swore her to secrecy. “You can’t print what his reaction was, and I started that nervous laughter, ‘Oh, god what do we do?’ Now I have to say, we don’t do things ourselves anymore.”

This last ‘example’ looks like a typical case of a fellow that hasn’t swung a hammer much recently…like ‘since High school’.

Without a blue print of your house it is easy to drive a nail into either your wiring or your plumbing. Worse, ‘as drawn’ is no guarantee that it is how the work was performed. Often the plumbers and electricians are in a house simultaneously and sometimes obstructions caused by one or the other causes pipes or wires to be ‘re-routed’ for expediency’s sake.

But that’s not the underlying topic this article raises. Besides being a shallowly disguised advertisement to hire your local craftsman, it says something else about supposedly ‘smart’ people.

A genuinely smart individual knows when they’re ‘out of their depth’ and research how to do the job right…people that think they’re smart assume it must be easy because the ‘pros’ are paid less than they are.

This, naturally, is the ‘fallacy’ of believing ‘brains equal money’ and vice versa.

I personally witnessed a GE plant manager walk up to a Bridgeport and remark ‘fine looking drill press you’ve got there’. No one dared to correct him just as we all knew he was incapable of turning the machine on (or off) even if his life depended on it.

Naturally, he didn’t need to know; it wasn’t his job. Ironically, if we were to flip that rock over, there would be few of us that could turn the Bridgeport off and on that couldn’t do his job.

We all make decisions; we all do it day in and day out…so we are left to contemplate what’s so special about a decision-maker that they deserve their often prodigious salaries?

Do you know what I’m going to say?
Yes you do! I’m going to assert that there is nothing special about these ignorant, over-educated morons! Why do they get the big bucks instead of you? Because they are part of the ‘chain of command’ and you are not, end of story.

Given the identical body of information, you are just as capable of making a decision as they are, no ’magic’ necessary.

Let’s take this a step further because that failure of these individuals to recognize they were out of their depth is what has led our economy off a cliff.

These decision-makers didn’t realize the consequences of their actions, thus they made poor decisions. Since none of them admit to seeing the crisis coming, it’s safe to say they also didn’t realize (weren’t smart enough to know) they were out of their depth.

Understand good citizen, the intellectually vacuous ‘money equals brains’ phenomenon escalates the higher up the pay scale you go.

Theory has it that the highest paid individuals are naturally the ‘smartest’, despite strong evidence to the contrary.

No longer able to blind people with their brilliance, they are attempting to baffle them with bullshit instead.

Since neither Mr. Bernanke nor Mr. Giethner can explain what they are doing or why they’re doing it, it only stands to reason that they are following orders rather than formulating policy.

Perhaps more disturbing is Mr. Obama’s failure to rein in these two appointees, which leads us to the same conclusion…that instead of being in charge, he is merely carrying water for whoever is.

If the people we elect to public office can’t be held accountable then the nation is lost to us. It no longer serves the people who founded the nation, it only responds to the people that bought the highest offices in the land.

As the above article points out, money doesn’t make anyone a genius…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner