Handwriting

Greetings good citizen,

While you’re busy making sure nobody grabs your gun out of its holster (thereby distracting you from other things happening right under your nose.)

A barrel of oil has crept back up to $96 a barrel while the price at the pump hovers around $3.50 a gallon locally (funny how those two numbers, the price per barrel and the price per gallon keep becoming ‘disconnected’, yet another ‘distraction’ considering ALL MONEY IS FUNNY! The price is whatever they want it to be because THEY certainly don’t need the money! And for the pinheads out there, the ‘they’, in this instance, refers to the >One Percent.)

But wait, there’s more! How many of you noticed that the Dow is within spitting distance of setting a new record?

Which really makes you wonder why they (same they) bother because we all know the number is total fiction?

Tomorrow they could claim the Dow hit 44,000 and nothing would change (besides the fact that the rest of us would all become poorer relative to the nation’s shareowners.

Well, how unfortunate for the rest of us that articles like this feed the notion that the One Percent is planning to kill most of us off.

That same month, the online publication Market Oracle reported that “ [t]he new ‘water barons’—the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires—are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace.” The report reveals two phenomena that have been gathering speed, and that could potentially lead to profit accumulation at the cost of communities and commons —the expansion of market instruments beyond the water supply and sanitation to other areas of water governance, and the increasingly prominent role of financial institutions.

In several instances this has meant that the government itself has set up public corporations that run like a business, contracting out water supply and sanitation operations to those with expertise, or entering into public–private–partnerships, often with water multinationals. This happened recently in Nagpur and New Delhi, India. In most rural areas, ensuring a clean drinking water supply and sanitation continues to be a challenge. For-profit companies such as Sarvajal have begun setting up pre-paid water kiosks (or water ATMs) that would dispense units of water upon the insertion of a pre-paid card. It is no surprise that these are popular among people who otherwise have no access to clean drinking water.

With climate change, however, the water crisis is no longer perceived as confined to developing countries or even primarily a concern related to water supply and sanitation. Fresh water commons are becoming degraded and depleted in both developed and developing countries. In the United States, diversion of water for expanded commodity crop production, biofuels and gas hydro-fracking is compounding the crisis in rural areas. In areas ranging from the Ogallala aquifer to the Great Lakes in North America, water has been referred to as liquid gold. Billionaires such as T. Boone Pickens have been buying up land overlying the Ogallala aquifer, acquiring water rights; companies such as Dow Chemicals, with a long history of water pollution, are investing in the business of water purification, making pollution itself a cash-cow.

Understand good citizen this story would be about air if they thought they could get away with it.

Under Manslow’s hierarchy of needs, you will only survive a couple of minutes without air, a couple of days without water and roughly a month without food. Shelter is a slider depending on the hostility of the environment. In a mild climate it comes last but in a harsh one it can supercede water!

You’d think history would have taught mankind the ‘futility’ of hoarding anything, water in particular.

It also provides us with a definitive example of one of the things that shouldn’t have a ‘price tag’ attached to it.

Yet the capitalist thinks everything has a price…and they think nothing of exploiting a situation.

Worse, they are the first ones to cry, “it’s not personal, it’s business!”

Let’s take a step back and look at this for a moment…the ‘businessman’ says he’d love to help you out BUT there’s MONEY involved here. (Keep in mind that ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!)

Stick a gun in his face and all of a sudden HE’S THE ‘VICTIM’!

Did I mention the need to redefine the term ‘criminal’?

The water is no more ‘his’ than it is yours but who is the (criminal) court going to believe?

Which brings us to another ‘marvel’, the fact that you will find humans living in even the most inhospitable environments this planet has to offer.

And despite capitalist insistence that this is due to ‘rugged individualism’ it is in fact due to the overwhelming desire to escape the rabid capitalists!

How can you be ‘free’ when those who run our society do their worst to nickel and dime you for everything they can?

YOU know Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register (and so do the creeps, that’s why EVERYTHING requires a ‘permit’ under capitalism and guess what? Those permits aren’t FREE! Worse, they can be arbitrarily ‘denied’.)

But I digress, the ‘real bad news’ here is it is only a matter of time before the combination of water and energy scarcity erupts in civilization ending ‘class war’.

Under the ‘judge for yourself’ category, real estate ads have started touting a location’s remoteness as a ‘selling point’ and some even use the term ‘bug out’.

What does that tell you?

Think handwriting on the wall…(especially when they try to play the ‘who knew’ card…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Uncertainty...

Greetings good citizen,

As we slog forward into an uncertain future those who would drive our civilization over a cliff to mask their crimes against humanity care not what happens after that.

My advice, as always, is to prepare. (And NOT like the idiots on ‘doomsday preppers’ who obviously have a screw loose…besides being decidedly homicidal! If you need further convincing that the world after the collapse is going to be uncommonly hazardous, watch the show!) Hint: it’s the trigger happy preppers you have to watch out for! Stumble upon their ‘hide’ and they will open fire first and ask questions afterwards!

In a flicker of insight on an otherwise direction-less horizon we have this article that belabors the obvious in a couple of directions…

Our Economic Pickle
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The debt-ceiling debate is unlikely to alter one major factor contributing to income inequality: stagnant wages.

Now that it is ‘on the table’, who (and how) will the issue of ‘stagnant wages’ be addressed?

‘Employers’ have no problems raising their prices in pace with inflation (driving inflation ever upwards) but are ‘strangely reluctant’ to raise their ‘employee/customers’ purchasing power.

The ‘strategy’ could be called ‘out-waiting the competition’, the longer they wait to raise their employees pay, the more they keep for themselves.

Ultimately, your NOT being paid a living wage is being driven by the ‘owners desire’ to wax rich (at, ultimately, ALL of our expense.)

It’s lower prices we don’t pay and fair wages you don’t get, because the idiots who sign your paycheck follow their mother’s advice and PAY THEMSELVES FIRST!

Funny how this advice isn’t so sound when you put it into this context, is it? It creates a ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ situation that is crumbling all around us as we sit here contemplating how we got ourselves into such a, as the article calls it, ‘Pickle’?

We will see in the article after this next one who WON’T be working to save us from employer greed

But the other article first:

News Analysis
The Low Politics of Low Growth
By ANNIE LOWREY

What if it is the weak economy that is driving the fiscal failures in Washington?

How odd is it that the question answers itself? (But this can be attributed to the ‘muzzle’ the ‘write for hire’ crowd is forced to wear.)

I find it astounding that our, and let’s face it, none of them has a grip on reality, ‘politicians’ continue to flog the concept of ‘perpetual growth’ as the key to future prosperity.

How can you ‘grow’ when there has been NOTHING ‘new’ since Pong? Every other technological marvel is merely the ‘fleshing out’ of potential that was already there.

So ‘exporting jobs’ (to make it more profitable for the ‘owner’) also doesn’t encourage (local) economic growth. It really only serves to make the owner richer than he/she deserves to be.

But are our politicians focused on their ‘primary job’ of managing our civilization for the benefit of our species?

Let’s have a look:

TOP NEWS
Obama Will Seek Citizenship Path in One Fast Push
By JULIA PRESTON

President Obama and lawmakers from the two parties believe that their best chances for passing substantial legislation on immigration will come early in his second term.

Like healthcare, NOBODY is looking for a ‘solution’ to an already over-populated, far too competitive job market!

It’s been opined that this (European satellite) was built by ‘immigrants’. (It was even somewhat true when most of the immigrants hailed from Europe…)

Not that providing EMPLOYERS with a ‘cheaper labor pool’ to exploit is ever a justification to ‘streamline’ the immigration process, especially when you get a load of how they intend to go about it.

You’ll get your ‘citizenship’ all right but first you’ll have to do your military service. You will be sent to foreign lands, meet new, interesting people and kill them.

What used to be scabs to keep the factories humming (cheaply) will become fodder for the endless wars the capitalists wage, merely to keep the population (and by extension, the unemployment rate down.)

There won’t be any ‘resource wars’. Resources are all sold openly on the (alleged) ‘free markets’ so what’s to ‘fight’ over?

Even the current conflict in the Middle East is over a police problem that should have been handled ‘internally’ by local law enforcement.

BUT NO! Our (block-headed) government had to use military force instead of foreign aid and providing foreign governments the tools to handle the problems itself.

Worse, our (rogue) government supports criminal regimes like the Israelis who openly subjugate the former inhabitants of the nation they now ‘occupy’ and use military force to maintain the upper hand, in open defiance of international law…not that ‘respect for the law’ is real strong here either.

But that’s another issue altogether as the ‘over fifty crowd' prepares to fight for its survival!

BUSINESS
Over 50, and Under No Illusions
By CAITLIN KELLY

Many people aged 55 to 64, who had been dreaming of easy retirement, have had to remake their lives to find work during the recession and its aftermath.

As many of us close in on the ‘finish line’ of our professional careers (most of them in tatters…the careers and our humble selves.) We are encountering the above mentioned ‘lawlessness’ that offers us no recourse to what is likely to turn into a very deadly confrontation.

While we have long lamented the ‘rudderless’ condition of our crumbling society, this was no accident. It didn’t ‘wear out’, it was snapped off by those who could (through manipulation) afford to ‘buy’ the justice system…(something many will pay dearly for because so many already have!)

Note how the capitalist credo is parroted here in the headline. How the ‘over fifty crowd’ are (unsuccessfully) ‘making themselves useful’ as they ‘sprint’ (more like limp/drag) themselves toward a finish line that (mysteriously) keeps backing away! (So a wretched few can be rich…)

Yes, good citizen, we’re all going to be each other’s ‘financial advisors’ and manage each other’s money and sell each other houses neither of us can afford.

With those ‘encouraging words’ I thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

First Person Shooter...

Greetings good citizen…

I’m sure many of you are ‘anticipating’ how I will address the most recent wave of violence erupting across our crumbling civilization...

And I’ll repeat what I’ve been screaming about all along…although you’ll now see certain ‘between the lines’ and ‘assumed’ universals (things everybody knows but few acknowledge) brought to the fore.

First let’s look at the ‘culture of violence’ we are expected to shrug off like it doesn’t effect us.

How many of you are connecting yesterday’s gunning down of Connecticut school children with drones killing civilians halfway around the planet (who are ‘posthumously’ labeled ‘terrorists’ by the corporate owned media to justify this ‘murder’?)

But a little closer to home we need look no further than the prevalence of ‘first person shooter’ video games that kids like Mr. Lanza grew up playing.

What doe this do to a child’s Id?

Sure as hell ‘desensitizes’ them to the idea of shooting someone to death…doesn’t it.

And what was one of the headlines on my homepage news feed this morning? How violent video games are the ‘top seller’ at retailers this Christmas.

How much of this is caused by Halo, Call of Duty or Assassin’s creed?

More succinctly, what drove this anti-social loner to first KILL HIS OWN MOTHER and THEN take up arms and drive down to the local elementary school (as opposed to a shopping mall) and open fire?

Do you think we should start mandatory testing (for psychopathy) now or should we wait until a few more thousand are murdered?

Will the next psycho cut to the chase and blow the whole school up?

Hell, we’ve already let the ‘high functioning’ psychopaths destroy the global economy so what’s the senseless murder of a few dozen innocents matter?

When there’s a ‘free for all’ out in the streets it will be too late. The bonds that prevent us from killing one another on sight are wearing perilously thin.

How many times do I need to repeat this before SOMETHING (like TESTING) is done?

Or would we discover that drawing our children from the bottom of a test tube (another crisis that the media purposefully ignores) is adding to what Mother Nature might naturally screen out? (Like the sudden surge in nut allergies and the insane jump in asthma rates?)

But no, we couldn’t possible be talking about the same thing…except we are now coming into the ‘maturation’ of the first generation of ‘test tube’ babies.

And with it nobody wants to connect the alarming rise in the rates of ADD and other ‘socialization’ problems that have been ignored…because the source of every one of these afflictions is…rabid capitalism (profits before people!)

Why are females ‘waiting’ so long to start families? Because they want to establish their careers first…so they go to school and work during their prime childbearing years, leaving most of them barren by the time they make their heap (or say yes to the guy who has been chasing them since they were in High School.)

No money, no family!

What do you suppose our young shooter saw that the fucking asshole corporate owned media is doing its damnedest to ignore?

He saw a system that didn’t have a place for him and determined that no matter how he sliced it, he had nothing to lose!

He killed his mother for bringing him here in the first place and he killed those kids as a ‘favor’ to them. While he’s not here to ask I would bet he believed he was doing them a ‘kindness’ (albeit a left-handed one.)

Which also shines a spotlight on just what kind of monsters we’re dealing with here (and I mean that figuratively because we are factually doing nothing about this.)

So, I have pissed off my female readers and all of the parents in my audience…but like I have said repeatedly, I’m not here to be ‘popular’, nor is it my purpose to tell you what to think.

My ‘mission’ is to provide you with things to think about by offering up a different perspective than the corporate owned media serves up.

Yes, they lie to you religiously and you don’t hate them…(you may catch yourself muttering ‘bullshit’ under your breath a lot but you don’t begrudge them doing you the disservice of lying to you in order to protect the oligarchs.)

Yup, nobody questions that the stacked deck has become obvious just as nobody questions the futility of living from lottery to lottery, hoping you can set yourself free from the debt trap you were born into.

I’ll ask (rhetorically) if our shooter was ‘wrong’ in his assessment of the future that led him to act so…

Rationality is a very fragile thing, what seems senseless to you may appear perfectly logical to someone else.

If we back up a few steps, the society that bred this killer is NOT blameless…

I say the ‘root’ of this disease lies in a predatory social structure that leaves the individual on their own to deal with problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

We would be very lucky indeed if the Mayans were right and this predatory mess we are snared in ‘died’ on 12/21/12…

So what do you say good citizen, are you feeling lucky?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bad to the Bone

Greetings good citizen,

As I approach my second (full) year of unemployment (this most recent odyssey started in 2011.) it occurs to me that it might be easier for me to see the unraveling of our civilization more clearly than the rest of you because I’m caught in the center of the storm.

It is important to point out that I am not alone on my perch that provides me a ‘birds-eye view’ of the situation, there are millions of us (if not billions…depending on how far you cast your net and there is a disturbing tendency to ‘stop’ when one reaches the number of people in YOUR country, like the rest don’t matter.

Part of the problem with the ‘banking crisis’ is people don’t understand these trillions of dollars…are owed by nations with populations the size of a small US state!

Adding to this ‘cognitive dissonance’ is the purposeful ignorance on how these systems ‘interact’ (because of the need to fudge the fuck out of certain factors most people never consider.)

today’s offering attempts to provide us with a glimpse of that larger, more than somewhat fuzzy, picture:

Any reforms which seek to address growth in the context of private sector debt deleveraging and demographics ought to be made with a focus on increasing the economy’s capacity to produce real goods and services today and in the future, rather than on ensuring positive actuarial balances through eternity. Unlike the case with individuals, social policy can provision for the future in real terms—by increasing productive capacity in the intervening years. For example, policies that might encourage long-lived public and private infrastructure investment could ease the future burden of providing for growing numbers of retirees by putting into place the infrastructure that will be needed in an aging society: nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, independent living communities, aged-friendly public transportation systems, and senior citizen centers.

(Screeching, ear-splittingly loud, halt!)
Read the above again, slowly and let it sink in.

Makes sense doesn’t it? EXCEPT for the ‘how do we pay for it?’ part, it’s all too beautiful!

Did you notice the blinders on the topic of ‘over-capacity’? Our economy is at FULL STOP because the consumer can’t afford any more debt…why don’t these boneheads devise a solution that deals with this problem first?

It is articles like this one that basically prove that tired old ideas are not the path we can follow into the future…(but you can’t tell the One Percent that, they don’t want to hear it.)

Education and training could increase future productivity. Policies that maintain high employment and minimize unemployment (both officially measured unemployment, as well as those counted as out of the labor force) are critical to maintain a higher worker-to retiree ratio. Policy can also encourage seniors of today and tomorrow to continue to participate in the labor force. The private sector will play a role in all of this, but there is also an important role to be played by government.

Um, back to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ problem (which is not limited to us mere peasants.)

The creators and issuers of ‘funny money’ are the ONLY ONES capable of fixing this problem…that the PRIVATE SECTOR CREATED!

If you read between the lines here you will see that ‘Libertarians ‘R’ Us’ sees the private sector filling it’s usual role of collecting rents and oppressing the general welfare for its own safety.

But I digress…

On balance, if we were to focus on only one policy arena today that would best enhance our ability to deal with a higher aged dependency ratio tomorrow it would be to ensure full employment with rising skill levels. Such a policy would have immediate benefits, in addition to those to be realized in the future. This is a clear “win-win” policy, unlike the ugly trade-off promoted by both parties, who only differ in the degree to which today’s workers and future seniors are to pay for the mistakes of the banksters through misguided proposals to “reform” entitlements and put our future on a “fiscally sustainable” path.

Do you see the ‘win’ good citizen or has the gloss worn off that old banner promoting ‘unlimited, perpetual growth’?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, it is precisely this belief in ‘voodoo economics’ (also known as ‘wishful thinking’) that has led us to where we are today.

A sustainable future does not consist of turning our former manufacturing facilities into (fake) ‘state of the art’ assisted living facilities (and training ALL of our kids to be candy stripers and orderlies…)

You can’t pay for extended care if you earn minimum wage and your taxes don’t cover the nut either.

All economies are LOCAL.

That’s were it starts and that’s the key feature behind A Simple Plan, creating robust local economies that nurture a healthy, well educated public.

But you have to read and understand it before you can successfully advocate for it!

You not only will be doing yourself a favor but your kids will thank you for freeing them from the cycle of exploitation YOUR PARENTS condemned YOU to!

Thanks for letting me inside 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

Predators

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Monday and what a Monday it’s starting off to be with stock markets around the globe in unanimous agreement that the global economy is FUBAR.

WHY is the global economy FUBAR?

Could it be due to predatory capitalism at its finest?

Which is to belabor the obvious, the private sector wants control of the nation’s prison population (for less than altruistic reasons…)

Observe:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Can’t find a job Bucko? Get busted for minor possession (or something equally as trivial) and you’ll get a job all right with the State picking up the tab for your meals, health care (sometimes) and lodging while you work for ‘pocket money’ to spend at the prison PX!

And when I say ‘predatory capitalism at its finest' I naturally mean its most vile.

You know why YOU (or your kids) can’t find a job? It’s because the self-centered assholes that run private prisons are playing both ends against the middle!

And it ain’t just the ‘private prisons’ that play this game.

Have a good look at our badly broken economy where tens of millions work but don’t earn enough to put food on the table…and just imagine what’s wrong with this picture?

You don’t suppose greedy employers aren’t jumping on the opportunity to have the ‘price advantage’ of having their low skill labor requirements met by people they pay a few dollars a day for?

And where does that leave the ‘law abiding citizens’ of this nation?

On the outside looking in!

Imagine for a moment how $5 a gallon gasoline is going to affect this segment of the population?

You don’t suppose places like Aaron’s or Rent-a-Center will be seeing a ton of returns, do you?

Priorities…you can sit on your ass (without the fancy sectional you’re paying $99 a month for 99 months) but you’ve still gotta eat (and you can’t eat the fucking couch!)

Stop right here for a moment and look at how fucked up this situation is becoming!

Why is capitalism ‘predatory’? Because it inevitably turns on its own employees as a ‘profit center’.

And if it can be done ‘cheaper’ on the outside then the permanent employees get axed!

Fuck the family and fuck you, that is what the predator capitalists say!

How are YOU supposed to survive when profits trump the family unit?

Don’t look now but THAT’S WHERE WE ARE!

Um, sorry…I get carried away.

Worse, you knew that because this is not ‘new’ by any stretch of the imagination.

What might be new-ish is the notion that we can fix this situation with some good ‘old-fashioned Yankee know-how’…not.

Which is to point out the ‘futility’ of attempting to ‘cannibalize’ that which has already been laid to waste and made barren.

Turning our ‘trash into treasure’…ain’t happening.

Some things are ‘salvageable’ and some things aren’t.

Civilization is definitely ‘salvageable’ but the capitalist ‘monkey-boy’ has to go.

Especially the one clinging to tangible currency. It’s his ticket to a ‘free ride’. Yet those morons in Washington have turned a blind eye to the criminal act of ‘helping yourself’ to ‘legal tender’.

Well, as we have known for quite a while, good citizen, the ‘end result’ of rampant tampering with the money supply is to render it worthless.

Which is to point out, like this morning’s global red ink that has totally escaped, er, ‘comment’ by the lying corporate owned media. It is only a matter of time before you start getting asked whether or not you have something else to trade at the check-out counter…

And shortly after that your (fill in the blank) will be no good, you’ll be forced to trade ‘in-kind’.

Don’t get ‘blind-sided’, good citizen; prepare!

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

Until the Fat Lady sings...

Greetings good citizen,

My hopes for our civilization grow dimmer with each passing day. It has become apparent that the quicksand of greed has consumed what little bedrock there was holding up the foundation of our society.

We are in ‘uncharted waters’ here, good citizen. By the ‘hard and fast’ rules of commerce, our civilization has already passed the ‘point of no return’.

Tonight’s offering is only true if ‘the rules’ are followed. (Our current financial system is ‘fried’, there’s no way to repair it without writing off huge amounts of debt.)

What should be obvious to us all is ‘the rules’ no longer apply. We’re currently skating along in a ‘nobody’s doing anything about anything’ mode where we all pretend there’s nothing wrong (mostly because we can’t fix the problem on our own!)

As the wiser heads among us opine, the banking sector is still strangling to death with the public sector close behind.

As he points out, the housing sector will not ‘recover’ in the former industrialized West, EVER! (Um, neither Mr. Whalen nor Mr. Panzer actually says this but it is ‘implied’.)

Since the banking system is supported by ‘perpetual’ mortgage payments on properties that are hundreds of years old…wages need to keep ‘pace’ or the whole artifice collapses, as we have so recently witnessed.

No buyers means no price support…lower prices equals less ‘income’ all the way down the line.

So, to paraphrase the title of the article: And You Thought Last Time Was Bad...

Like death itself, there is no way to avoid collapse---we have merely sidestepped the inevitable for the moment.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this whole fiasco is the ‘too little too late’ part where absolutely NOTHING has been done to stop the ‘race to the bottom’.

Sadly, when the ‘cause’ of this fiasco is finally addressed, it will indeed be ‘too little, too late!

Naturally, I marvel over the fact that ‘Neutron Jack’ is still alive! (Perhaps we should be more amazed that he’s still ‘at large’…)

‘Turn the earth to glass and still commit no crime…’

Unfortunately, the print media isn’t the only source of global insanity. I apparently don’t have many readers in the UK or the BBC would have debunked (instead of reporting) how British schools are teaching pre-schoolers to be more ‘entrepreneurial’.

They are teaching these youngsters the mechanics of commerce in hopes that they will grow up to be more ‘self-reliant’.

Naturally, what these FUCKTARDS are missing is the principle reason why we don’t already live in ‘capitalist utopia’…

FUCKING MARKET SHARE!

What part of ‘there isn’t enough market share to go around’ don’t these idiots get?

Oh well, stupid is what stupid does…

Worse, ignorance can be fixed…stupid is permanent!

Again, we have to believe that the real problem here is the perpetuation of ignorance by those too stupid to know they are doing anything wrong.

Most of you have no idea how frightening it is to realize your entire world is held together by little more than ‘myth and superstition’ (enforced at the point of a gun.)

You’re actually supposed to buy into these little ‘fantasies’ (without the benefit of the fucking ‘ruby slippers’!)

It is important to understand good citizen that most of what you’ve been taught to believe is a self-serving LIE!

The other part that is paramount for you to understand is that the liars are in charge!

Nothing changes until you recognize this truth!

The mis-management that is bag and baggage with capitalism is not nor will it ever be sustainable. No system based on infinite resources is!

Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that if resources were indeed ‘infinite’ there would be no need to ‘buy’ them from anybody, would there?

We have to put an end to this vicious exploitation of our fellow humans if we are ever to advance beyond being our own worst enemy…

The reasons we DON’T kill one another on sight are getting fewer all the time…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bowling for Columbine

Greetings good citizen,

I finally got to watch ‘Bowling for Columbine’ last night…naturally, didn’t see the whole thing but I saw enough to get the gist of what Michael Moore was trying to say.

And in the end I was somewhat puzzled why he didn’t arrive at the ‘obvious conclusion’…

Naturally, that conclusion may only be ‘obvious’ to my humble self.

What did you take away from the end of that documentary?

Were you disappointed that Charlton Heston didn’t have any answers as to why our culture is so violent?

Why do you suppose it is that the citizens of the US are so much more likely than the people of other nations to blow your ass away than to look at you?

What makes us Murikans sooo ‘edgy’?

Could it be the ‘fuck you, pay me’ culture?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, 99% of all homicide revolves around money.

A man shoots his cheatin’ spouse, he ain’t even concerned about her ‘giving it up for someone else…he shoots her because he’s the one that’s been paying for it and there she is, giving it away!

It’s all about money and there ain’t a damn thing funny…except the money itself!

Still, this doesn’t explain why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to pick up a gun and go on a rampage against a world they have no use for because that world has no use for them…

More than a little disturbing was ‘commentary’ offered on NPR today about how our ‘educational system’ is failing…I’ll paraphrase since focus of the show was on ‘minorities’ but essentially this is so far off the mark as to be laughable.

The ‘linkage’ between education and employment is so spurious as to be beyond comical.

The only thing you need a college degree for is to prove that you can afford one.

Which is to point out what is already obvious to most of us (and you can ask virtually anyone in the ‘real world’ (who isn’t employed in the ‘Sciences’) just how often they actually ‘use’ what they learned in college.


Most people will answer ‘never’.

Yes good citizen, even engineers will tell you they didn’t learn anything ‘practical’ in college…it is impossible to actually produce parts the way they teach you to design them!

Yet our ‘salvation’ (under capitalism) is for 80% of the population to obtain a college degree.

To do what? God only knows…

Do you ‘need’ a college degree to pick up trash? No, but if you don’t have one in the future it is unlikely you will get the job (because the asshole who ‘screens’ the applicants will toss your resume/application the moment they see you left that part of your history blank.)

Worse good citizen, we don’t have to wait until some highly competitive future to see this kind of idiot behavior, they do it today!

Yeah good citizen, if you want to work in the future (at all) you need that sheepskin (if only to prove you’re ‘motivated enough’.)

In case any of you haven’t noticed, this is just one more aspect of our ‘fuck you, pay me!’ economic system that totally pisses me off.

It is useless bullshit and a ‘convenient excuse’ for clueless politicians and insecure educators.

It would be suicidal to admit that capitalism is incapable of providing jobs for even a fraction of the working aged population.

But that’s the truth.

Retracing our steps back to the question of why are citizens of the US so ‘prone to violence’?

If everything you were taught to believe turned out to be a lie, you’d be pretty pissed off too!

The anger we see manifested in the streets (and occasionally in the nation’s workplaces) is the direct result of the lie that is capitalism.

You will NEVER prosper working for somebody else.

Worse, there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ for everyone to have one (never mind a couple or three of ‘em!)
The ‘New Deal’ was based on the concept that you would do your part and the employer would in turn ‘take care’ of you.

Well good citizen, I think it is fair to say the ‘owners’ have ‘reneged’ on their part of the bargain.

So we, in turn, should renege on ours…we need to ‘do away’ with private property. The greedy can’t be trusted to act in the public interest.

We have hundreds of years of experience that proves this is true.

We don’t have another planet to divvy up so we have to ‘share’ this one.

If you don’t want to share, get the hell off!

There’s no ‘I’ in either ‘us’ or ‘we’ and together is the only way our species will survive…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Buckle up!

Greetings good citizen,

There were very few ‘buyers’ (among the ranks of non-investors) regarding yesterday’s inexplicable ‘rally’.

I’m willing to bet the ‘surge’ in the Dow was driven by the same financial entities that comprise the majority of the Dow ‘industrials’ (my ass) index.

What does your ‘economy’ look like when the bulk of your ‘leading index’ is made up of, er, ‘institutions’ that buy and sell, ahem, STOCKS?

How ‘accurate’ a picture do you think we are receiving?

What prevents these lying weasels from pumping up each other’s stock?

Nuthin, (most of ‘em can’t spell ‘ethics’ much less have any!)

In case you aren’t getting my meaning here, RED ALERT!!!

In tonight’s first offering we see the stage is set for an explosive start to the onset of cold weather.

Intended to ‘put you to sleep’ is there is nothing in either story that hasn’t been going on for years, hell decades.

What you need to recognize is we have finally hit the ‘breaking point’.

Jobs/prosperity isn’t coming back. This latest ‘economic downturn’ marks the beginning of our slide into becoming a (bonafide) Banana Republic.

Ironically, ‘going quietly’ isn’t an option.

What you need to decide right here and now is what you intend to do when the National Guard guns down your sibling in cold blood.

I’m betting a majority will choose to ‘return fire’.

Understand good citizen, these people have been ‘trapped/betrayed’ and the puppets that pass for our government haven’t lifted a single finger to correct the problem.

Because the people who caused the problem don’t want the problem ‘solved’.

Your choices here good citizen are really quite simple…either we have ‘majority rule’ or we have rule by the elite minority.

We can’t have both, something’s got to give and when it does, the ‘retaliatory attacks’ (on both sides) will be hellacious.

Buckle up good citizen, it’s going to be one hell of a ride!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

May victory go to the righteous!

Long live the King!

Greetings good citizen,

Three sites focused on the conservative ‘attack’ on Social Security today while a forth warned of the ‘Hive Mind’ in an entirely separate issue.

Is social security ‘in peril’, good citizen?

The government benefits program has, as we all know, been severely mismanaged but it isn’t anything a couple of tweaks couldn’t put right…

However, the ‘genuine’ security of society hasn’t been more perilous since the Dark Ages.

(There is very good reason to turn the social clock backward a thousand years for our comparison. Government, without our consent, has already re-established monarchy. The new ‘Royals’ are just itching to reveal themselves to us good citizen but they know this would be suicide. The deeply disappointing Obama administration is obviously a ‘puppet government’ taking its orders from a master other than the one that elected it.)

Which brings us back to the issue of the government program and the ‘political will’ to fix it…

Obviously Social Security would be ‘scrapped’ out of hand if it weren’t for the massive social upheaval such an, er, ‘edict’ would create.

Which is the ‘good news’…the fuckers still fear us, as well they should.

Since the ‘political will’ to fix social security DOESN’T exist we are left with the only remaining alternative…it won’t be fixed.

Sidebar: Please make a mental note to think in terms of ‘us vs. them’ because that’s what we’re up against.

If you have a problem with why the, er, ‘owner’ class would resent/fear the laboring classes, you need to study history, especially the ‘revolutionary’ parts, more closely…

The ONLY difference between a modern ‘wage slave’ and the traditional ‘bill of sale’ type is the property owner was obliged to care for you…the wage slaver only captures the ‘useful’ part of your life, the rest is all yours!

However, it does provide us with interesting window as to how ‘justifiable homicide’ came to disappear from common law.

If you were going to treat people the way they treat us, you’d want to make sure that all murder was illegal.

There’s probably be a lot of criminal cases that would have been decided differently if the jury were allowed to consider whether or not the victim ‘had it coming’.

Mind numbing to think that revolution and murder are (relatively) rare events…

Just saying, ya know?

Of more immediate concern is whether or not anything even remotely resembling civilization will survive the return of monarchy.

Understand that the return of the king automatically ‘extinguishes’ your property rights. In fact it pretty much throws the entire Constitution right out the window…including the All men were created ‘equal’ clause originally used to defeat monarchy.

You may not feel any different but you had better believe you’ve been knocked down several pegs as far as your legal standing is concerned.

It will be amusing to watch the shit weasels scrambling as they try to figure out who they need to bow to…(kings never work alone.)

It is probably equally as ‘amusing’ to most of you reading this, thinking to yourself, “This guy is cracked, if somebody had named themselves King we’d all know it by now!”

But would we?

Put yourself in His Majesty’s position, how anxious would you be to paint a bull’s eye on your back, especially in light of all of the ‘unpopular’ changes you have planned for the peasants?

Heavy is the head that wears the crown! The king ‘may’ make himself known AFTER he has restored ‘proper proportion’ to the kingdom…

That’s code for killed off most of the ‘surplus’ peasants.

Poor men want to be rich and rich men want to be king…

So it was, so it shall ever be!

Until we adopt a system that prevents ANYONE from seizing power…

A Simple Plan is just such a system.

It always struck me as peculiar that our education system has consistently failed to point out the disturbing similarities between monarchy and capitalism.

The ‘head’ of a company is called the ‘president’ but s/he isn’t elected to the post. The ‘junior’ officers are also appointed to their posts and have zero say regarding any final decision…

Weird how they use ‘democratic’ job titles but there is nothing ‘democratic’ about how an enterprise is run.

In fact, none of the ‘rank and file’ employees are consulted on any aspect of how the company is run.

Sure, there is a semblance of inter-play but mostly it is ‘token’; just as our form of government lends itself to ‘the illusion of participation’. It ‘looks like’ we’re running things but the truth is another matter entirely.

Two hundred and thirty years of uninterrupted tyranny should be proof enough for anyone.

While ‘perfect liberty’ may not be achievable; we sure as shit can do a lot better than what we suffer now!

The (deliberate) mismanagement of our society has gone on far too long. It’s time to chart a new course, to light anew the beacon of hope we once represented to the world.

Because is sure as fuck ain’t coming out of China!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Road to Serfdom...

Greetings good citizen,

A quick poll of my ‘peers’ produced a disturbing consensus that our collective situation, despite the spin, is far worse than it appears.

The always fragile at best, ‘gossamer threads of trust’ have been strained beyond the snapping point a few times too many. The ‘culture of fear’ has done its job a little too well.

To the point where most agree; conservatism is now a legitimate ‘mental disorder’. If you’re a ‘librul-hating wingnut’ the emphasis is now on the ‘nut’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that only one in five admit to being ‘conservative’, a definite (but apparently critical) minority. The ‘problem’ stems from the fact that these certifiable sociopaths control 99% of the, er, ‘financial conduits’ in our shitty little system.

Yep, it is those ‘troughs’ that keep channeling the pittance they pay YOU back into THEIR pockets that makes the Crazy Train run.

Why do you put up with this bullshit?

Sadly, the answer is quite simple, you don’t have a choice…and they intend to keep it that way.

Ironically, if you are EVER going to have a choice, it is up to you to decide that you aren’t going to just accept a situation that amounts to being robbed…forever.

It’s the ultimate game of ‘idiots delight’. Bozo convinces you that you are being ‘justly compensated’ with one hand while he robs every cent back from you with the other.

This is a ‘good deal for you’ How?

It is, conversely, a great deal for him.

He gets all of the benefit and does none of the work.

Bozo lives large while you scrape by…and the ‘economy’ shrinks down to where it can be blotted up with a paper towel (and guess who’s pocket that towel will end up in?)

Back in the day, before anyone figured out another/alternate way of doing things, what we have now WAS ‘as good as it gets’, seriously flawed but still…you had a ‘chance’.

Those days are over good citizen. Not only are there ‘too many’ of us but there are way too many of them as well.

If it takes a million of us to support one of them, they should number around 300…but that’s not the case. There are a hundred times that many and there aren’t enough ‘resources’ to buy them off with.

So we end up where we are today "Giving sophisticated models and fast computers to traders is like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys. Only complete mayhem can result (and as we saw recently, complete mayhem did result)."


The title of tonight’s piece is The Road to Serfdom Is Lawlessness: Inside Goldman Sachs.

It is the ‘lawlessness’ part that speaks to me good citizen because we found ourselves ‘suffering’ under the ‘rule of man’ without the benefit of the rule of law.

Criminals run our society for their own benefit and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.

Task one of restoring anything that even resembles ‘order’ is to restore the rule of law, unequivocally. We can’t let the bastards that have put the screws to society wriggle off the hook by claiming ‘it wasn’t illegal at the time’…it was and they knew it was.

We will actually see people ‘prosecuted’ for violating the ‘social contract’, even if they don’t subscribe to it.

Just something else to think about in these times when things are going so incredibly wrong.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Reform - Revisited

Greetings good citizen,

Lack of permanence is one of the hallmarks of my generation, those who have, er, managed to remain stationary have done so by swallowing an enormous load of…er, negativity.

After being chased off of the decidedly Libertarian leaning Daily Kos over three years ago, I have once again been required to ‘pull up stakes’ as Conceptual Guerilla heads in a ‘new’ (purer) direction.

So, in this latest ‘incarnation’ or rebirth, I am faced with the task of re-focusing upon what is important.

First things first, I’ve decided I need to get rid of the opt in screen, this will necessitate ‘cleaning up my act’ as well as requiring me to bite my tongue more than I prefer.

Dunno if you can lift that bad boy (filter) off of an existing blog; I may be forced to create a new one. (If you start seeing links here you’ll know what happened.)

Another ‘change’ will be a heavier reliance of ‘original content’, You already know the media lies, my repeating that over and over again changes/adds nothing. Worse, the MSM seldom reports on issues that directly effect you on a day to day basis, so we don’t get to reflect on what matters, we are distracted with ‘pie in the sky/emergency of the moment’.

No links in today’s post (and probably a lot fewer of them in future posts as well.)

So what is ‘important’? Failure to plan ahead on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part…what is important to me may not be a ‘front burner’ issue to you but believe me, it IS important.

And what could be more important than a workable solution to the predatory mess that is collapsing around our ears?

If we don’t know what to do, nothing will be done…or worse, those who have their own agenda to advance will implement it unopposed (and un-discussed.)

‘A Simple Plan’ is soup to nuts and, as one critic pointed out, it’s not very simple. (I’d be very leery of any concept that attempted to re-arrange the foundations of society that was too simplistic, there’s a lot to address!)

On a ‘step by step’ basis there is nothing ‘complex’ about A Simple Plan, each ‘block’ is simple to understand and dovetails smoothly with the other blocks. (So smooth is this dovetailing that even the uninitiated should be able to spot ‘additions/subtractions’ to the plan.)

If your mind isn’t locked into a box you can’t understand (how bizarre is it that understanding isn’t ‘necessary’, only your blind acceptance is required/demanded.) Follow me into the realm of what ‘could be’. A world that actually ‘makes sense’…how’s that for a ‘novel concept?’

Here the math works out to the same simple result, if enough of us desire change, change will happen. The only reason change has not come already is because all ‘improvements’ upon the existing system have been suppressed/ignored.

Those who benefit the most from the way things are have actively prevented discussion of the system as it exists or how it could be improved upon, while simultaneously claiming that what we have ‘can’t’ be improved upon…it’s already as good as it gets!

This is ‘conservatism’ my friends and lately anyone who challenges the status quo is marked as an ‘enemy of the State’ (same as it ever was.)

Well good citizen, the ‘status quo’ has ceased to have your best interests in mind for quite some time now, leaving open the question ‘what are you going to do about it?’

So far the answer to that question has been ‘nothing’, but push has finally come to shove my friend and at stake is your place at the table. Lose that place and you lose your children’s ability to survive.

Think it’s time for a change? Damn straight it is!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Fullness of Time

Greetings good citizen,

If we look at this from the perspective of my ‘teeny-tiny audience’ we are well and truly, not that there was any real prospect of salvaging the situation before it crashed and burned.

Record high numbers of people receiving food assistance, records being set in the length of unemployment benefits and let’s not forget the record number of foreclosures/number of homeless people!

Is this really due to ‘laziness’ good citizen? Is there really work out there that the TENS OF MILLIONS OF UNEMPLOYED are supposedly TURNING THEIR NOSES UP AT?

Because that’s what the fucking Conservatives say the problem is…you can find work if you really want it (too bad if you can’t live on what it pays!)

Naturally, if you don’t acknowledge (the real cause of) the problem, you can’t fix it. (Or worse, you waste time and resources trying to fix the wrong things!)

What is causing hundreds of millions of people to draw from rather then contribute to society?

You don’t suppose the heart of the problem that is tearing civilization apart rests in predatory capitalism? (and there is no ‘non-predatory’ variety, capitalism’s ‘central premise’ is predatory! If you were to remove the predatory aspects, it wouldn’t be capitalism or anything remotely resembling capitalism!)

Well, we’re about to witness what happens when commerce prevents government from protecting the public good…and the extremely violent public backlash this should create!

Not only will there be violence but there already is violence, the MSM just isn’t reporting it. Think that’s impossible--think again. Your ‘news’ is far more ‘filtered’ than you know.

And bizarrely, you see proof of this everyday in the financial section! 1984 was over twenty-five years ago and many of Orwell’s ‘warnings’ have come true.


Left to our imaginations good citizen is precisely where the so-called tipping point is and whether or not we’ll recognize it when we pass it?

This same writer says

I have some news that will shock some progressives. Are you ready for it? Here goes: by historical standards things really aren’t that bad right now, nor were they really all that bad during the Bush presidency.

“But that can’t be true!” some progressives in the crowd are surely going to respond. “What about the torture? What about the wars? What about the economic crisis and the warrantless wiretapping and the erosion of all our democratic rights?”

The years of 2001-2009 in which George W. Bush was in power were certainly a low point for our country in many respects, and I firmly believe that future historians will judge him to be the worst of the first forty-four American presidents, if not possibly the worst American president of all time. But the reality is that, despite his terrible incompetence, the average American did not suffer terribly under Bush’s watch. Because there is no longer a draft the average young American did not need to worry about being forced to fight against his will in Iraq and Afghanistan and the average middle class parent did not need to worry about their precious offspring being sent overseas to be killed. There was no terrorist blowback in the United States from those wars and because they were financed by deficit spending there were no tax increases to burden the average citizen. Practically the only inconvenience faced by the ordinary American was a dramatic rise in the cost of gas and heating oil caused by the resulting Middle Eastern instability. The years of 2001-2009 in which George W. Bush was in power were certainly a low point for our country in many respects, and I firmly believe that future historians will judge him to be the worst of the first forty-four American presidents, if not possibly the worst American president of all time. But the reality is that, despite his terrible incompetence, the average American did not suffer terribly under Bush’s watch. Because there is no longer a draft the average young American did not need to worry about being forced to fight against his will in Iraq and Afghanistan and the average middle class parent did not need to worry about their precious offspring being sent overseas to be killed. There was no terrorist blowback in the United States from those wars and because they were financed by deficit spending there were no tax increases to burden the average citizen. Practically the only inconvenience faced by the ordinary American was a dramatic rise in the cost of gas and heating oil caused by the resulting Middle Eastern instability.

Sadly, this writer is correct, things haven’t been ‘that bad’ (so far) but it is the direction things are headed that has us doomers making our dire predictions.

Worse, and history is on our side with this one, things can get a lot worse faster than you might imagine!

Bizarrely, the trigger is a little too close to the ‘panic button’ and the ‘straw that breaks the camels hump’ will most likely be, er, ‘intended’ to ‘preserve civil order’ in a most barbaric if not Draconian way.

The ‘Patriot Act part II’ will read like anything but as it grants the status quo with the unprecedented use of force to maintain ‘peace’…

Then we will see the many make their choice to die on their feet rather than live on their knees!

We can only hope that we don’t lose too many of these brave souls during purely ‘symbolic’ clashes, their lives wasted without any ground being won.

The Status quo will battle us for every inch, hell, this is their ‘birthright’ they’re fighting for (while the rest of us are fighting for our lives!)

Truth be told good citizen it’s even worse than that, we who oppose the status quo are not just fighting for our lives, we are fighting for the right to exist in a predatory world that no longer needs us.

To survive, we MUST vanquish the predators who have no more ‘right to live’ than we do! Not only do they have theirs but they have ‘ours’ too (and have taken it upon themselves to sell to us what is ours by right! At a price of their choosing.)

Those who do not live as we live and suffer as we suffer have no right to benefit from our misery! They are the authors of our collective destitution and for that they must perish, having already demonstrated their desire and ability to wipe us from the face of the planet.

It’s us or them…if we don’t prevail, at least we will no longer be exploited…which is to point out that it is not a ‘lost cause’, as long as we fight, we ‘win’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Greetings good citizen,

There is a disturbing tendency by the MSM to treat very widespread cases of social dislocation (meaning it is happening to millions of people) as ‘isolated incidents’.

Naturally, the reverse is true when they are cheerleading the thus far ‘invisible economic recovery’. Any tiny increase over last year’s abysmal numbers is heralded as the next ‘proof positive’ that the glorious recovery hasn’t been ‘derailed’…

What is totally missing from this equation is proof that the recovery ever really started!

There’s something particularly frightening about ‘perception management’, especially when the facts don’t line up with what is being reported.

When these little ‘differences of opinion’ lead to bloodshed, it is treated as an ‘isolated incident’…until its not.

Left to our collective imagination is how far away are we from the veil being torn away from the disaster that is being hidden from the public?

Tonight’s offering may provide as good a gage as any if we keep in mind that the stories laid out here ARE NOT ‘isolated incidents’…

Pay Garnishments Rise as Debtors Fall Behind
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
Published: April 1, 2010

PHOENIX — When the bank sued Leann Weaver for not paying her credit card balance, her reaction was typical for someone in that situation. Personal and financial setbacks weighed her down, and she knew she owed the $2,470. So she never went to court to defend herself.

She was startled by what happened next. When she swiped her debit card at the grocery store, it was declined. It turned out Capital One Bank had taken $224.25 from her paycheck, a quarter of her wages for two weeks of work at a retail chain, and her bank account was overdrawn.

“They’re kicking somebody who’s already in the dirt,” she said.

One of the worst economic downturns of modern history has produced a big increase in the number of delinquent borrowers, and creditors are suing them by the millions. Concern is mounting in government and among consumer advocates that the debtors are not always getting a fair shake in these cases.

Most consumers never offer a defense, and creditors win their lawsuits without having to offer proof of the debts, much less justify to a judge the huge interest charges and penalties they often tack on. [I’m no ‘legal eagle’ but I don’t think creditors can ‘write off’ bad debt without first exhausting all ‘reasonable efforts’ to collect. (Pretty sure the definition of ‘reasonable’ varies from state to state and sometimes credit instrument to credit instrument.)]

After winning, creditors can secure a court order to seize part of the debtor’s paycheck or the funds in a bank account, a procedure called garnishment. No national statistics are kept, but the pay seizures are rising fast in some areas — up 121 percent in the Phoenix area since 2005, and 55 percent in the Atlanta area since 2004. In Cleveland, garnishments jumped 30 percent between 2008 and 2009 alone.

Debt collectors say they are being forced into the action by combative debtors who dodge attempts to settle. “I think there’s a lack of accountability among debtors, and a lack of interest in reaching out to their creditors to resolve things amicably,” said Fred N. Blitt, president of the National Association of Retail Collection Attorneys. [Do you suspect, given the current economic situation, that this latest development in the war to bankrupt the ‘surplus population’ and drive them into destitution is unlikely to have a ‘peaceful outcome’?]

Bankruptcy can clear away most debts. Yet sweeping changes to federal law in 2005 — pushed by the banking lobby — complicated that process and more than doubled the average cost of filing, to more than $2,000. Many low-income debtors must save for months before they can afford to go broke. [The icing on this ‘shit sundae’ is the bankruptcy attorney won’t accept your case if you don’t pay ‘up front’!]

In some states, courts allow creditors to charge high interest rates for years after a lawsuit is decided in their favor. In others, creditors can win lawsuits by default and seize wages and bank accounts without a case ever appearing before a judge. [Which is a total failure of ‘due process’ but hey, it is what it is and you weren’t going to ‘win’ anyway!]

Lack of participation is the most fundamental problem. Some consumers do not even know they are being sued; the people who are supposed to serve them with formal notice have sometimes been caught skipping that step and doctoring the paperwork. [Which, naturally, redefines the term ‘Nasty Surprise’.]

In far more cases, consumers are served but still do not offer a defense. Few can afford lawyers; [Why do you suppose that is?] others are intimidated or confused. In their absence, judges can offer little relief.

In the rare event that a consumer battles back, creditors frequently lack the documentation to prove their claim, and cases are dropped. That is because many past-due debts are owned not by the banks that issued them, but by debt collectors who bought, for cents on the dollar, a list of names and amounts due. [This is an interesting bit of information…but it is doubtful debtors will go to court over ‘trivial amounts’. (That is a rather broad window with the word trivial being defined by the ‘beholder’…)]

“If the consumers were armed with more education about how to defend against these debts, they’d be successful,” said Jeffrey Lipman, a civil magistrate in Des Moines.

The case of Sidney Jones shows how punishing the system can be. In January 2001, Mr. Jones, 45, a maintenance worker from California Crossroads, Va., took out a $4,097 personal loan from Beneficial Virginia, a subprime lender now owned by HSBC, the big bank.

He fell behind, and Beneficial sued. Mr. Jones did not appear in court. “I just thought they were going to take what I owed,” he said.

By default, Beneficial won a judgment of $4,750, plus $900 in lawyers’ fees, with the debt accruing interest at 27.55 percent until paid in full. The bank started garnishing his wages in March 2003.

Over the next six years, the bank deducted more than $10,000 from Mr. Jones’s paychecks, but he made little headway on his debt. According to a court order secured by Beneficial’s lawyers last spring, he still owed the company $3,965, a sum nearly equal to the original loan amount.

Mr. Jones, who did not graduate from high school, was baffled. “Where did all this money go that I paid them?” he said. [Understand good citizen, the fact that Mr. Jones didn’t graduate from High School is ‘irrelevant’; look at the financial carnage caused by people who were PAID to know better! They include this seemingly ‘innocent’ fact to make him appear less ‘responsible’.]

Dale Pittman, a consumer law lawyer in Petersburg, Va. , took Mr. Jones’s case without charge, and found that all but $134 of his payments had gone toward interest, fees and court costs. “It’s a perfectly legal result under Virginia law,” Mr. Pittman said.

HSBC said it ceased collection shortly after Mr. Pittman took the case, but declined further comment. “We are confident we are treating our customers fairly and with integrity,” Kate Durham, a spokeswoman for HSBC North America, said in an e-mail message. [Um, once again we encounter the relative terms of ‘Fairness and integrity’ and you can bet your boots that Beneficial firmly believes they have behaved in compliance with THEIR DEFINITION of both terms…they just aren’t sharing their definition with us. Which is to point out the obvious, if Mr. Jones had not found an attorney willing to do some ‘pro bono’ work, HBSC would still be milking his ass for all they could get…and there isn’t a fucking thing he could do about it.]


The rare debtors who press their claims, and catch a sympathetic judge, have a shot at a result more to their liking. [Um, notice the ‘qualifiers’ thrown in there? Most judges don’t look kindly on ‘deadbeats’ nor do they have much sympathy for ‘sob stories’… they’ve heard them all.]

Ruth M. Owens, a disabled Cleveland woman, was sued by Discover Bank in 2004 for an unpaid credit card. Ms. Owens offered a defense, sending a handwritten note to the court.

“After paying my monthly utilities, there is no money left except a little food money and sometimes it isn’t enough,” she wrote.

Robert Triozzi, a judge at the time, heard the case. He found that over a period of several years, Ms. Owens had paid nearly $3,500 on an original balance of $1,900. But Discover was suing her for $5,564, mostly for late fees, compound interest, penalties and other charges. He called Discover’s actions “unconscionable” and threw the case out. [Are you wondering the same thing I am? What happened to ‘Judge at the time’…he’s not a judge anymore? Do you wonder why?]

Discover defended its actions. “This account was placed with an attorney only after all other efforts to reach the card member were exhausted,” Matthew Towson, a bank spokesman, said in an e-mail message. [Are you detecting a pattern? It seems as though the debtors aren’t the only ones who are ‘difficult to contact’! Opps, how many of you KNEW this was coming?]

Going to court is no guarantee of victory, of course. Consumers who do go are sometimes intercepted by collection lawyers, who press them to sign papers settling without a trial. These settlements may be against the interests of debtors, but they sign anyway.

“We’re signing off on a lot of settlement agreements where we shake our heads and ask, ‘Why is this person settling to this?’ ” Judge Lipman said. [Again, savvy attorneys know they can get ‘something’ out of these people because there is no dispute that they owe (and they feel guilty.) In the end it comes down to how much they can wring out of these people (in addition to what they’ve already paid.)]

For the working poor, losing a lawsuit can mean disaster. A 1968 federal law exempts 75 percent of a worker’s wages, or 30 times the minimum wage per week, from being taken in garnishment — whichever is less. But increases in the minimum wage have failed to keep up with inflation. As federal law stands now, just $217.50 a week is exempt from seizure. (A few states set higher cutoffs.)

The working poor “have difficulties maintaining payments on life’s necessities with their full paycheck,” said Angela Riccetti, a lawyer with Atlanta Legal Aid who represents indigent clients whose wages are being garnished. “You lose 25 percent of it and everything folds.” [It is no ‘accident’ that regional ‘prevailing wages’ are close (and often below) regional prices/living expenses.]

For Leann Weaver, the woman at the grocery store, Capital One’s lawsuit made a bad situation worse. After being evicted from her apartment, she moved in with her grandparents. Without them, she might have ended up on the street or in a shelter, she said.

Capital One declined to comment on Ms. Weaver’s case. “We encourage anyone facing difficulties meeting their financial obligations to contact us right away,” Tatiana Stead, a bank spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message.

Ms. Weaver said she repeatedly asked Capital One for more time to pay her $2,470 debt, but last year the bank filed suit. She failed to show up in court, and a judgment was entered against her, swollen by $1,800 in interest and lawyers’ fees. Then the garnishment began, almost $500 a month, or a quarter of her pay.

“I can’t even look at my paychecks any more,” she said.

If you want to add insult to injury you can bet Ms. Weaver is wondering why she agreed to be interviewed for this article. While she wasn’t portrayed badly, neither were the ‘predators’.

I guess it is up to the public to draw their own conclusions.

How do you interpret this piece good citizen? Do you see it as just another disturbing ‘sign of the times’ or do you detect the ‘warning shot’ from our corporate overlords lurking just beneath the ‘bring it on’ challenge to take ‘em to court?

Truth be told, you chances of going before a ‘sympathetic’ (to you) judge are pretty much ‘slim to nil’ and if, as we see here, you haven’t already paid the vulture twice what they gave you, you don’t have a prayer of the judge finding in your favor!

The ‘rule of thumb’ here good citizen is the creditor needs to be ‘made whole’, then there is a shot at ‘settling’…but if you haven’t paid back AT LEAST as much as you borrowed…you don’t have a prayer.

BUT WAIT, I don’t know any of the details but I just heard an advertisement yesterday that claimed if you owe MORE THAN $10,000 on a credit card, you COULD BE eligible for ‘NEW FEDERAL PROGRAM’ that would cut your debt in HALF!

You can only imagine what ‘qualifiers’ are bundled in behind THAT bad boy!

Starting with the debt has to be of a certain age…(preferably ‘pre-dating’ the ‘amnesty’ offer) and there is likely another regarding ‘singularities’…meaning the $10 k plus in credit card debt isn’t all due to a new pair of Jet Ski’s (with trailer and optional ‘color coordinated’ cap.)

And you may also have to show that you can ill afford to pay this debt.

Bizarrely, the $10,000 ‘minimum’ kind of raises a ‘red flag’ all by itself. None of our examples…in fact, all of them combined, would put us barely in range of this offer!

Cards with more than $10,000 limits aren’t all that uncommon…it’s the credit card companies approving you for that much credit (without freaking out) that makes you ‘suspicious’.

You gotta be pulling down some pretty good money for credit card companies to let your balance get that high. But wait, like ‘sub-prime’ mortgages, credit card debt was, up until recently, bundled up and sold off to investors! So maybe the banks weren’t as ‘stringent’ as they ‘should have been’…leading to this most perplexing ‘2 for 1’ offer.

Mine is not to reason why, good citizen…I can only sit here and ponder why I have a bad feeling about this…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Overkill

Greetings good citizen,

Seems as though I’ve turned into quite the ‘contrarian’ as things go flying off the rails during this slow motion train wreck. It seems as though there is nothing the status quo can do that isn’t related to preserving their own interests, while being paraded for us in the media as ‘government benevolence’.

Which is to ask if this isn’t an ‘agenda within an agenda’? The people are already hopping mad and ready to march on Washington (but won’t…yet) because they don’t want to be perceived/portrayed by the media as (Whacko) ‘Tea Partiers’.

(And you KNOW that is precisely who will be ‘credited’ with the next massive protest, especially if it turns violent!)

The latest ‘assault’ on our battered and bruised consciousness is the most recent plan in the government’s ceaseless efforts (not to ‘save’ homeowners) but to save the (banking industry’s cash cow) ‘housing market’.

Understand good citizen, buying houses and furnishing them with the latest toys IS what passes for the US economy. Without this ‘business model’ our banking sector will collapse.

How ‘bizarre’ is this? The $23 trillion dollars spent by the government ALREADY in bank bailouts and guarantees is almost entirely centered on the domestic Real Estate market, which is valued at roughly $7 trillion.

Are these numbers disturbing? They should be.

Somebody is getting it stuffed up their backside…and I think we all know who ‘somebody’ is. Don’t have a mirror handy by any chance, do ya?

U.S. Plans Big Expansion in Effort to Aid Homeowners
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: March 25, 2010

The Obama administration on Friday will announce broad new initiatives to help troubled bankers homeowners, potentially refinancing several million of them into fresh government-backed mortgages with lower payments.

Another element of the new program is meant to temporarily reduce the payments of borrowers who are unemployed and seeking a job. Additionally, the government will encourage lenders [with oodles of cash] to write down the value of loans held by borrowers in modification programs. [The only ones getting soaked here will be…where’s that mirror again?]

The escalation in aid comes as the administration is under rising pressure from banker owned Congress to resolve the foreclosure crisis, which is straining the economy and putting millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes. [Which would ‘sink’ the economy] But the new initiatives could well spur protests among those who have kept up their payments and are not in trouble. [Protest all you want, it doesn’t change a thing!]

The administration’s earlier efforts to stem foreclosures have largely been directed at borrowers who were experiencing financial hardship. But the biggest new initiative, which is also likely to be the most controversial, will involve the government, through the Federal Housing Administration, refinancing loans for borrowers who simply owe more than their houses are worth. [Wait a minute Slim! Hasn’t the taxpayer had more than their share of this debt dropped into their lap? We’re already ‘on the hook’ for many times the full value of the nation’s entire housing stock! How many more times do we have to buy every house in the nation?]

About 11 million households, or a fifth of those with mortgages, are in this position, known as being underwater. Some of these borrowers refinanced their houses during the boom and took cash out, leaving them vulnerable when prices declined. Others simply had the misfortune to buy at the peak. [Understand good citizen, it’s not that people re-financed ‘irresponsibly’, for time out of mind (and even today) the ‘bankers’ controlled this game. These ‘reckless’ loans are not the ‘borrower’s fault’.]

Many of these loans have been bundled together and sold to investors. Under the new program, the investors would have to swallow losses, but would probably be assured of getting more in the long run than if the borrowers went into foreclosure. The F.H.A. would insure the new loans against the risk of default. The borrower would once again have a reason to make payments instead of walking away from a property. [Read this paragraph again…it doesn’t make any sense. Sadly, re-reading it doesn’t make it any more comprehensible. The ‘more in the long run’ statement assumes (and there’s that word again) that housing prices would recover BEFORE all existing structures rot and return to nature! WTF!]

Many details of the administration’s plan remained unclear Thursday night, including the precise scope of the new program and the number of homeowners who might be likely to qualify.

One administration official cautioned that the investors might not be willing to volunteer any loans from borrowers that seemed solvent. That could set up a battle between borrowers and investors. [This ‘battle’ could be coming anyway, people are tired of getting ‘ripped off’ for ‘money pits’ that are never paid for (because of the constant need for repairs/updates.)]

This much was clear, however: the plan, if successful, could put taxpayers at increased risk. If many additional borrowers move into F.H.A. loans, a renewed downturn in the housing market could send that government agency into the red. [How did this, er, ‘consumer alert bulletin’ slip in here? You don’t suppose this was the whole point behind publishing this article, do you?]

The F.H.A. has already expanded its mortgage-guarantee program substantially in the last three years as the housing crisis deepened. [And the MBS market vaporized] It now insures more than six million borrowers, many of whom made minimal down payments and are now underwater.

Sources said the agency would use $14 billion in funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, some of which it could dangle in front of financial institutions as incentives to participate. [Um, excuse me but didn’t we just spend $23 Trillion (with a ‘T’) dollars bailing these criminal fuckers out? (Of their bad Real Estate bets) Why do our politicians think their ‘bankster overlords’ need to be ‘enticed’? Which is to ask, good citizen, just how ‘far gone’ is our political system? Put a fork in it?]

Another major element of the program, according to several people who described it, will be to encourage lenders to write down the value of loans for borrowers in modification programs. Until now, the government’s modification efforts have focused on lowering interest rates. [Um, if you make a bad business decision, you ‘eat’ the end result. You make a bad life decision, same thing. Which begs the question that has been busting everybody’s balls since this bullshit began, why aren’t these fuckers being FORCED to accept their losses? (Rather than being made whole at the taxpayer’s expense?) Hold on to that question mark, we’ll return to it later.]

Lenders began offering principal forgiveness last year on loans they held in their own portfolios. In the fourth quarter, however, this process abruptly reversed itself, for reasons that are unclear. The number of modifications that included principal reduction fell by half.

Bank of America, the country’s biggest bank, announced this week that it would forgive principal balances over a period of years on an initial 45,000 troubled loans. [45k out of 11 million? Um, this is like a hundredth of a freaking percent! Is the comeback here “Hey, it’s better than nuthin’? How about it’s as good as (nuthin)]

Another element of the White House’s housing program will require lenders to offer unemployed borrowers a reduction in their payments for a minimum of three months. [Whose hat do you suppose they picked THAT ridiculous time period out of given how many of the long term unemployed are going into their SECOND YEAR of benefits?]

An administration official declined to speak on the record about the new programs but said they would “better assist responsible homeowners who have been affected by the economic crisis through no fault of their own.” [Are you wondering what I’m wondering, just who gets to make THAT judgement call?]

The new initiatives would expand the government’s current mortgage modification plan, announced a year ago with great fanfare. It has resulted in fewer than 200,000 people getting permanent new loans. As many as seven million borrowers are seriously delinquent on their loans and at risk of foreclosure.

While fewer people are beginning default, the number of borrowers who are seriously distressed is rising. [They made a similar ‘idiotic statement’ like this last month!] In the fourth quarter, the number of households at least 90 days past due on their mortgages swelled by 270,000, according to a report issued Thursday by the comptroller of the currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision.

“The government is seeking to persuade people to stay in their homes by aligning the mortgage debt with the asset value, which is the only viable path to real housing stability,” said one person who was briefed on the government’s plans. [Um, there’s a term for this and it’s called ‘putting a floor’ under the market…the bad news is nobody knows where that floor actually is. Worse, it is not a function of what the property is worth, it is what a buyer can afford to pay…and in this job market, that ain’t much!]

The number of foreclosures in the fourth quarter rose 9 percent, to 128,859. An additional 38,000 owners disposed of their homes in short sales, where the lender agreed to accept less than it was owed. [Freaking ‘lenders’ have been made whole on ALL of the properties they hold mortgages on several times over. So a ‘short sale’ isn’t an accurate term to describe this transaction, is it?]

A person briefed on the new plan said the number of underwater borrowers who qualified for the plan could be in the millions. The government is not planning to solicit loans for the program, stressing that it is voluntary. [Which tells us what? That the banks, using our money, reserve the right to dangle the ‘debtor’ out the window, shaking them down for every cent they can squeeze out of them, before agreeing to accept terms only somewhat more favorable to the borrower. Isn’t the current ‘re-default rate’ still over the 70% mark?]

The administration recognizes that some people’s finances have deteriorated so far that they are beyond help, the person said. People in that situation simply cannot afford the houses they are living in, the person said, even if the mortgages were reduced. [Which tells us what good citizen? It tells us how predatory these mortgages really were! It wasn’t about matching homeowners with homes, but about bundling mortgages for bonuses! Friggin’ thieves!]

“All these programs are geared toward people for whom it makes sense, for whom it’s workable when all is said and done,” the person said. “Some people are too far gone.”

And not all of those people who have ‘gone too far’ were borrowers! Lenders sure as hell have ‘crossed the line’ too but we don’t see any prosecutions pending, two years after the fact.

And perhaps this is the most disturbing part as far as this article is concerned. Here we are, two years later and people are still losing their homes (because lenders stiffed them!)

Um, like I said, why is this happening is a question that needs to be revisited. How many times does the public need to pay the banksters for the nation’s housing stock? Did this massive public debt that was handed over to ‘private investors’ bring about the current crisis in Social Security?

It is highly unlikely that ‘A’ is not directly related to ‘B’. Not that ‘privatizing’ Social Security would have altered this outcome.

Is it the ‘social Darwinist’s’ plan to insure that Social Security fails? (If only to justify their own ideology?) Which poses an even more frightening proposition…just how much control DO these ‘Social Darwinist’s’ have?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner