Lying liars (and what it means to you.)

Greetings good citizen,

When you’ve been doing this as long as I have you end up ‘re-visiting’ topics you’ve already addressed (some topics it seems like a bazillion times!)

So it is that we revisit one of my ‘core’ topics, something I have ranted about at length, albeit not recently.

To ‘refresh’ your memory I’ll begin with the primary assertion:

It is impossible to arrive at the ‘correct’ conclusion without accurate information.

One need look no further than the bombed out wreck of our civilization for proof of that postulate.

It seems, when the study of law was ‘new’ and the scholars were endeavoring to ‘get it right’ they recognized the, er, ‘power’ of ‘manufactured consent’ and the danger it presents to civil society.

Yet today, here in the wreckage of the failed ‘rule of law’ experiment we have a reckless disregard for the truth as the One Percent rams their fairy tales down the throats of the terminally stupid:

The Romney campaign recently accused Obama of directing his administration to relax the welfare-to-work provisions of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill. That accusation is directly refuted by the facts. What Obama did was to permit waivers for states that could affirm their progress in moving people from welfare to work, and allowing them flexibility to enhance their programs. It’s a modification that Romney himself had requested when he was governor of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, Fox News picked up the accusation and ran with it. In every segment on the subject it portrayed the issue precisely as Romney had framed it despite every factchecking operation concluding that Romney’s charges were entirely false.

Speaking of factchecking, Romney has been rated untruthful 67 times by PolitiFact, and 14 of those were “Pants-on-Fire” lies (including the welfare lie). In fact, 43% of PolitiFact’s findings on statements by Romney are rated as untruthful. He’s downright pathological, but Fox has not yet reported that fact.

Understand good citizen, a society that is ‘intolerant’ of the truth is on the edge of collapse.

If I were to be worried about anything right now it is about how few are sounding this alarm!

That said, there is the possibility that those warning the rest of us about our being manipulated are also, like my humble self, being ‘surpressed’.

Only those who feed (or ignore) the ‘bullshit machine’ are granted a national forum to share their opinion.

Which does YOU zero good!

So thank your lucky stars that you have found this oasis where you are provided with questions with which to test what you’re being sold.

Although it is much more comfortable to just lie down and let them tell you what to think…then you can be like your co-workers, little Fox News wind-up toys who regurgitate the day’s headlines with malice in their hearts.

And that has to be ‘damaging’ to the individual psyche all by itself.

To be given a (false) target and not being granted a way to ‘relieve’ that torment.

Liberals are tax and spend mental cases but every problem in your life is the direct result of conservative legislative action…

How the fuck do you deal with that?

And as our latest crop of shooters reveals, you don’t!

It is no secret that the mainstream (corporate owned…which translates directly to ‘owned by the >One Percent) is out of control and in complete disregard for the law as well as the general wellbeing of our society.

Which is why I have opined repeatedly that the first target would be rebels should tackle is the ‘dis-information networks’.

Weirdly, once again we circle back to concepts that haven’t been revisited for hundreds of years.

Back when the US was founded, the ‘learned men’ who met to build this nation apparently didn’t completely understand what a ‘free press’ really meant.

Worse, most people don’t understand it today.

How can you have a ‘free press’ under a totally ‘for profit’ enterprise system?

Short answer is you can’t.

Worse, good citizen, free ‘unbiased’ information is essential to a ‘free society’.

As evidenced by the battle for the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy.

Elizabeth Warren appears in her commercials questioning Republican heavy handedness regarding female reproductive rights while Scott Brown appears right after her talking up his efforts to restrain the bureau of wildlife management so that ‘hardworking fishermen’ can do their damnedest to drive commercial fishing stocks into extinction.

WTF!

Is HE a moron or does he just think the rest of us are?

And you already know the answer to that one…which is sadly BOTH! (Because morons think everybody is as dumb as they are.)

Well, I ‘try’ not to repeat myself too much but as my audience grows I find it important to keep returning to core topics.

Our future depends on you being on board with ‘the whole program’.

Looks like a big promise but believe me, there’s a lot at stake!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Price

Greetings good citizen,

Um, the markets are ‘up’ a tiny bit although that tells us nothing. Markets around the globe are a ‘mixed bag’ all up or down, but not significantly in either direction.

As one might expect in an election year, our first headline announces:

Second-Quarter Growth Revised Up to 1.7 Percent Rate
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 52 minutes ago

The American economy fared slightly better than initially estimated in the second quarter, the government reported in its first revision of gross domestic product.

Like a lot of things ‘statistical’ the variation on display here isn’t ‘significant’. The only reason you’re hearing about it is because it’s ‘up’, if it were down it would remain obscure if not unknown.

This is one of those ‘it should piss you off’ sort of things! Here’s our economy, sucking pond water due largely to ‘gross mismanagement’ and who has to brave streets filled with starvation crazed rioters?

YOU WILL!

Yet here are the Twinkies crowing about abysmal economic growth like you were ‘saved’.

Hallelujah, the rapture came after all!

Fucking twits!

It’s ‘the other shoe’, always.

Speaking of ‘pipe dreams’:

Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank says there can be no return to the many currencies that preceded the euro.

Central Banker Facing a Test
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, will be under pressure to provide details of his plan to shore up the euro zone’s weaker member nations by buying their bonds.

Dunno how it will play in Peoria but it seems asshole’s mouth cut a check his ass is unable to cover.

Like two wrongs don’t make a right, two lies don’t suddenly make it true!

But politicians have a, er, ‘difficult time’ comprehending that concept…

Especially when ‘the truth’ jumps up and takes a big bite out of your backside, like we see here:

Shut Out of the Debt Markets, Catalonia Asks Madrid for Emergency Aid
By RAPHAEL MINDER

The request from the most economically important region of Spain underscores a growing regional debt burden as the country struggles to pull out of its economic tailspin.

As many observers have pointed out, where are the Euros supposed to come from to bail out all of these mismanaged economies?

Looks to me like they’re going to borrow them from Bob Mugabee! (What the hell, he has trillions!)

It’s what Zimbabwe Ben is doing…and it might be a good time to remind everyone that our ‘apolitical’ Fed Chief, like his predecessor, is A FUCKING REPUBLICAN!

But THAT doesn’t matter, and coincidentally, neither does this:

Germany and Italy to Meet on Euro Crisis
By MELISSA EDDY and RACHEL DONADIO

Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy is hoping to persuade his European partners to let the European Central Bank buy more government debt to help keep borrowing costs lower.

We can appreciate that the ‘Prime Minister’ of Italy really NEEDS to pull a rabbit out of his hat (and not just any rabbit, a ‘credible rabbit’!)

Funny thing about ‘funny money’, it requires a lot of faith that its worth something…a difficult task indeed when the thieves in the stock markets keep jumping their price, thereby ‘devaluing’ the purchasing power of money (regardless of whose it is!)

Naturally, when there’s only ‘one source’ for everything we will all be compelled to pay whatever they demand…or their private army will shoot us.

Again I ‘project’ but I suspect we are closer to that day rather than farther:

E.U. Widens Probe of Ryanair Bid for Aer Lingus
By REUTERS 30 minutes ago

Regulators began an in-depth review of Ryanair’s latest bid for its Irish rival, signaling the budget airline may have to make big concessions to ease competition concerns or face failure.

Don’t be deceived good citizen, this airline thing is but one of many often hidden ‘mergers’ that have been providing the economic data with a false ‘positive spin’.

Company ‘A’ gobbles up company ‘B’ cementing a near monopoly in a given market sector, the price goes up to pay the cost of the take-over (as well as to line the pockets of the out-going executives being made ‘redundant’.)

And viola! We now have profits were we once had ‘stagnation’!

(It’s Magic, fuck you!)

Speaking of ‘magic’, it appears not everybody is gullible enough to take the ads for electric cars seriously: Sure you don’t have to buy gas that often but the last time I checked, nobody was giving away ‘free electricity!’:

A Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle, front. Consumers so far have been slow to buy electric cars.
U.S. Sets Higher Fuel Efficiency Standards
By BILL VLASIC

The rules, first proposed last year, would require new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving by 2025.

The real question being put to you here good citizen is ‘will you be driving anything ‘inorganic’ come 2025?’

You will be considered ‘crazy well-to-do’ if you have a horse or some other form of ‘drayage’ (like oxen.)

Only the extremely wealthy will have ‘motor vehicles’ (and they will expect us to keep up the road network for them!)

The job title ‘mechanic’ will be preceded by the word ‘personal’ because if you can afford a car, you can afford a mechanic and you probably won’t want to risk going to a garage (that regularly has its tools stolen.) So you’ll keep the tools and the mechanic safe behind your gated walls, guarded by your security team of private merc’s.

But again, I project.

Just as this somewhat disturbing ‘sign of the times’ bodes poorly for the, er, ‘less than affluent’.

The Patriot-News, which won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Penn State sex scandal, intends to print three days a week.

Newspapers in Syracuse and Harrisburg, Pa., to End Daily Distribution
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The decision by Newhouse Newspapers follows its similar move in New Orleans and is set to take effect in January.

Many have given up the physical delivery of newspapers because the Internet tells them what they need to know.

Naturally, there’s a downside to this as well. Under capitalism, information is a commodity and thus for sale.

If you can’t afford the asking price then it gets added to the ever growing list of things you ‘do without’.

You might have noticed that I limit myself to the ‘headlines’ of the NY Times stories because the ‘free’ edition limits me to actually clicking through to read a mere ten articles a month.

That’s not even one a day. (But you knew that!)

The headlines, on the other hand, remain ‘free.’

And with a little luck, so will we.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

They KNOW!

Greetings good citizen,

Seems those who recklessly mismanage our very survival are in line for another stiff slap upside the head.

Who though it was a good idea locate the BULK of our animal feed production on the DESERT SIDE of the fucking continent?

They (oddly) don’t teach this in school but the dynamic holds true around the globe. WEST = Desert and EAST = Rainforest

So why do you suppose this is happening?

Food Prices to Rise in Wake of Severe Drought
By RON NIXON 1 minute ago

The Agriculture Department said the cost of beef would increase the most, up to 5 percent, because of the weather and rising costs for animal feed.

This is going to turn into one hell of a ‘How do you do?’ as it will hit during ‘Heat or eat’ season!

And poverty is on the rise across the nation, never mind the rest of the, er, ‘Western World’.

Those ‘wildfires’ the corporate owned media portrays as accidents or ‘natural events’ are in fact a by-product of a long running ‘war in the West’ and most of what is grown west of the Mississippi is ‘feed’ for livestock (and the grains for our daily bread.)

The bulk of food production is actually located in the southeast…because of this dynamic I mention above.

Chalk up one for the Vegans while the People Eating Tasty Animals crowd gets socked in the wallet again!

In yet another sign that the financial markets are more fucked up than we have been led to believe, we have this headline:

Ford Profit Falls Despite North American Growth
By BILL VLASIC 8:16 AM ET

While the North American business performed well, the automaker reported a loss in Europe and now expects to lose more than $1 billion there this year.

Unfamiliar Problem in China: Unsold Cars 9:23 AM ET

Sales grow but your profits fall…what do you suppose causes that? It looks like somebody is ‘giving the product away’ because otherwise their customers would let them rot on the lot.

Yet one more by-product of the Global Race to the Bottom!

The cash register don’t tell no lies…as we see in our next headline:

Euro Watch
Signs of Deepening Downturn Multiply in Europe
By LIZ ALDERMAN 7:23 AM ET

As Spanish borrowing costs continued to rise, Britain reported that its second recession in three years was growing worse and the outlook for the German economy deteriorated.
Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, testified last week before a House financial services panel.

Geez, you don’t suppose the ‘worsening condition’ they are experiencing over in the Eurozone have anything to do with customers being too cash strapped to support the economy, do you?

And what do you suppose is behind this headline?

Fed Leaning Closer to New Stimulus if No Growth Is Seen
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

A growing number of officials have concluded that the Federal Reserve needs to expand its stimulus campaign unless the economy soon shows signs of improvement.

Thus far the Fed’s ‘stimulus program has consisted of various ‘cash for trash’ programs aimed exclusively at the banking sector.

More alarmingly is the government program to extend unemployment benefits for two years.

Tell me they don’t know what their ‘masters’ are up to?

Imagine the pickle we’d be in if they DIDN’T take such an extreme measure? The economy would have flat-lined months ago and food riots would be a regular occurrence.

So don’t delude yourself into thinking they don’t know what’s going on, they know!

Take a gander at the, er, ‘disclaimer’ before our last headline:

DealBook
William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In the wake of the crisis years, the New York Fed has beefed up oversight.

New York Fed Faces Questions Over Policing Wall Street
By BEN PROTESS and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

While the regulator has revamped its approach to overseeing the nation’s biggest banks since the crisis, recent black eyes suggest that fundamental problems persist.

Naturally, our modern ‘lawmakers’ are not interested in ‘correcting’ our badly broken economy because the ‘peasants’ (read you and me) aren’t looking to put heads on pikestaffs outside the city gates.

Um, the down side comes from people who are, er, ‘dissatisfied’ with the current set-up quickly find themselves on the outside looking in.

We are rapidly approaching the hundred million mark of people classified as ‘unemployable’…and we aren’t dying nearly fast enough to let this become the ‘new status quo’.

Why aren’t our, er, ‘elected officials’ interested in, er, ‘rehabilitating’ our financial system?

Inaction is intolerable…how soon will we reach the ‘tipping point’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Disarm

Greetings good citizen,

What’s up with the stupid Batman thing? Like the High School shooters we are never given an explanation as to why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to ‘Hari Kari’ and take as many of their classmates with them as they can.

This, idiotically, feeds calls for ‘gun control’. Like ‘Jacko the Whacko’ wouldn’t have gotten his hands on the guns regardless of the law…

Right.

There are certain aspects of this crime that raise one’s eyebrows…like where does a kid get that much free cash? (Ammunition ‘averages’ fifty cents a round and Bobo bought and paid for six thousand of ‘em.)

That’s a ‘chunk of change’ no matter how you look at it. We have people preparing for Armageddon that don’t have that much ammo laid aside!

[When all hell breaks loose you won’t have to buy ammo; you ‘ll be able to pick it up for free from the dead.]

The corporate owned media is focused on the gun control issue, the, er, ‘other guys’ are all over the chart flailing like mad… but this particular article takes a fairly balanced point of view.

The US government considers “eco-terrorism” the greatest terrorist threat in our country. The evidence suggests this is not the case. Most people who struggle with mental illness do not act out in violence. Some convicted terrorists said to be “obviously” mentally ill do not have a diagnostic condition recognized by the medical community; while juries convict terrorists who display clear signs of mental distress. What if the few terrorists who are mentally ill are like the mine canaries, warning us of something toxic spreading the fumes of anxiety through our society?

Even the definition of the term terrorism is hotly disputed and politically-biased. Not all acts of violence—even political violence—are necessarily forms of terrorism. A broad generic definition of terrorism is using force or the threat of force to harm or intimidate civilians to advance a political or social objective. Using this definition, terrorism can be carried out by individuals, groups, or states. It can be a methodology used by the weak against the powerful, or the powerful against the weak. It can be aimed at persons or property. Using this definition, in the Middle East, suicide bombers targeting Jews and Israelis and the Israeli government shelling of Palestinian towns are both acts of terrorism.

The U.S. government rejects this definition in favor of one that assumes nation states cannot be engaged in terrorism. This is self-serving, since it excludes from “terrorism” US drone attacks that kill non-combatant citizens in foreign countries. It also excludes the World War II carpet bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945, and the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

You can tack the highest suicide rate ever for all of the servicemen and women trapped by ‘stop-loss’ in the never-ending conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You don’t suppose this is a factor weighing heavily on the minds of those dwelling in the economic desert formerly called the Mid-West?

We would be justified in assuming that this kid, like the kids in Columbine and Virginia Tech might have been ‘recruited’ by some covert organization to instigate calls for a weapons ban.

Otherwise this bullshit makes ZERO sense.

Um, just like the covert agency that has bought our electoral process, the same ‘criminals’ would be very interested indeed in ‘disarming the peasants’…preferably before same said peasants came after said criminals for crimes against society.

But that’s just ‘crazy talk’, right?

There aren’t any fringe groups out there looking to disarm the public, guns are just plain dangerous, right?

Unless you need one…then it’s a different story.

What do you suppose the victims of the holocaust would have done if they were armed?

Might not have been quite so easy to exterminate ‘em if they could shoot back.

Worse, good citizen, it is probably the only thing preventing them from rounding up the ‘dissidents’ right now.

Gun control is being able to hit your target…

When guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns.

Take a good look at our society and ask yourself if you believe for one second that the ‘One Percent’ aren’t all packing?

You know they are!

And they have already made it known that they think YOU are a waste of perfectly good butt-wipe.

Do you really want to deny yourself the ability to defend you life and the lives of those you love because some whacko got a gun and went berserk in public?

NO LAW can ‘protect you’ from that…but if just one of those moviegoers had a piece, the whole situation probably would have turned out quite differently…

Think about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Progressives

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets continue to rally for no apparent reason but considering the rampant fraud in the financial markets maybe this is a case of ‘getting while the getting is good’…

Because one need not be a genius to see that there will soon not be any financial markets, anywhere.

And yes Virginia, it will be ‘fallout’ from the collapse of the global banking network.

Um, it staggers the mind to consider what life will be like in the hours after they drop that particular WMD?

But wait! Our ‘saviors’ in the in the ‘progressive party’ want us to turn off our computers because they are making us ‘depressed’.

(Sadly, thinking has a way of doing that.)

To stay sane, Americans just might have to return to a 40-hr work week and ditch our screwed-up attachment to E-mail. According to a new study, spending too much time on the internet is disastrous for your mental health.

From CBS Charlotte:

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg recently studied more than 4,100 Swedish men and women between the ages of 20 and 24 for a year and found that a majority of them who constantly use a computer and mobile phones can develop stress, sleeping disorders and depression.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is about as ‘out of context’ as you can get but the headline for this article reads ‘Get off the computer, it may be making you depressed!’

Not study shows, not the pressure of being available 24/7, just ‘get off the computer!’

WTF!

Most people will never read that article but almost everyone will skim that headline…

How did CK phrase it the other day? Incompetence is not a diagnosis--it’s a verdict!

Let’s parse this one just a teeny-tiny bot more, shall we? They conduct a study during one of the worst economic downturns IN HISTORY and arrive at the conclusion that some of the people in this study were ‘depressed’…

How fucking remarkable is that?

More remarkable, perhaps is the number of people who buy into the conservative meme that social contracts are no longer valid!

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

The first scholarly edition of the Magna Carta was published in 1759 by the English jurist William Blackstone, whose work was a source for U.S. constitutional law. It was entitled “The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest,” following earlier practice. Both charters are highly significant today.

The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the cornerstone of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples – or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”

Let us parse Mr. Chomsky’s last comment because I have already told you about the affirmed conservative position on social contracts.

Both charters are indeed ‘highly significant’ if you want to live in a ‘civil society’.

Without a ‘social contract’ civil society is impossible…or at the very least disturbingly inconsistent.

The adhesive in a ‘non-contract society’ is fear. You live day by day doing your utmost to not be the one who pisses-off the nominal ‘head of the table’ of the day.

And I do indeed mean ‘of the day’.

Usually, the biggest and the meanest have SOME staying power (and contrary to popular belief, not everyone WANTS to be ‘king’.)

In fact the ‘head oaf’ is usually a bit of an enigma. He has a bigger and stronger rival who bosses him around behind everyone else’s back but the obvious leader let’s the Oaf wear the crown.

This is a way of protecting oneself against (stupid) rivals.

And mind you, this does absolutely nothing for the ‘average individual’. The Oaf is too stupid to care about the common man and his ersatz ‘handler’ can’t do more than suggest what the Oaf should do…and if things go poorly, he once again has the oaf for cover.

Understand what it means to live in a world without a ‘social contract’. It is Darwinism taken to the extreme.

You, right here and now in fact, would be wise to KILL everyone you see before they get an eyeball on YOU…because when they see you it is in their ‘best interests’ to kill you too.

That is life under the ‘no social contract’ mandate.

This is NOT the first time the human social contract has come under attack, nor will it be the last.

It is regularly shredded by governments of both sides during armed conflicts but it is not just governments who 'disavow' the basic human social contract, movements and whole ideologies have sprung up around the notion that there is ‘no such thing’ as a ‘human social contract’.

I also hope I don’t need to remind you that during the last global economic recession, the people who called themselves ‘progressives’ had another name…

A name that is now ‘infamous’…they called themselves Nazis.

How ironic to see the Nazi inspired Libertarians calling themselves ‘progressives’ again?

Oh, PS, by the way…guess who ISN’T defending the human social contract?

You got it! (The progressives!)

Any questions?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Last Call!

Greetings good citizen,

The day is hardly over and things could turn back around but it must be getting close to last call if the stock markets of the world are any indication.

And all of them ‘dogs’ have miraculously become ‘foxes’ again.

Go figure…

And while you’re pondering the imponderable we have yet another ‘book review’ serving as an editorial on the state of our civilization

The following snippet comes from just after the intro to this story which explains how it was spawned by the Twilight Saga:

Invisible Handcuffs

This has been coming for some time. Ever since the Reagan era, from the factory to the office tower, the American workplace has been morphing for many into a tightly-managed torture chamber of exploitation and domination. Bosses strut about making stupid commands. Employees trapped by ridiculous bureaucratic procedures censor themselves for fear of getting a pink slip. Inefficiencies are everywhere. Bad management and draconian policies prop up the system of command and control where the boss is God and the workers are so many expendable units in the great capitalist machine. The iron handmaidens of high unemployment and economic inequality keep the show going.

How did this happen? Economists known as “free-market fundamentalists” who claim Adam Smith as their forefather like to paint a picture of the economy as a voluntary system magically guided by an “invisible hand” toward outcomes that are good for most people. They tell us that our economy is a system of equal exchanges between workers and employers in which everybody who does her part is respected and comes out ahead.

Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with the contract. Thieving CEOs get mega-yachts while hard-working Americans get stagnant wages, crappy healthcare, climate change, and unrelenting insecurity. Human potential is wasted, initiative punished and creativity starved.

Again we find ourselves wondering (and if you aren’t you should be) just who these Democratic Replacements really are.

First they pick a lame, Ayn Rand inspired pseudo horror story as a ‘mirror’ of our society when the truth is far more horrific.

And I will again remind you that you won’t end up with the right outcome if you aren’t fighting the right battle.

We ain’t fighting vampires or zombies here. While the ‘enemy’ is indeed ‘soul-less’, it is not ‘supernatural’ nor is it ‘independent’…as the antagonist in the book is (or claims to be.)

(If I’m not totally goofy here, the girl is the ‘protagonist’, the ‘villain here is the ‘anti-hero’. But some twisted people would be inclined to reverse the two…)

But who is who is unimportant, it is the circumstances we need to pay attention to.

Let’s start with the ‘pauperization’ of the workforce.

Prices go up but your paycheck doesn’t…and there’s no place you can go to correct this situation.

(The age-old solution to stagnant income has been to get a ‘better’ job, but these days those jobs are being shipped overseas wholesale.)

In most cases, the shiftless boss knows he’s got you over a barrel.

Hell, he could fire half of you and force the survivors to pick up the slack (and if they couldn’t, he’d fire and replace them too!)

It’s the old ‘more with less’ situation…the sad part of this arrangement is it’s YOU who end up dealing with the ‘less’ part of this proposition.

YOU get ‘less’ pay for more work.

And again Mr. Boss-man is ready to show you the door if you don’t ‘like’ this situation.

Worse, the asshole honestly believes YOU’RE ‘overpaid’.

Now, he isn’t about to make you wear a ‘butt-plug’ to extract ‘more value’ from what he’s paying you…but he is equally disinclined to shower you with gifts even if you have agreed to be his private meat puppet on the side.

Because he has YOU over a barrel.

He holds what you ‘need’ hostage. (For this he should be hung…but we aren’t up to that part yet.)

In the future it will be a crime to hold anyone’s job hostage. In the future, your job (a.k.a. ‘the ability to support yourself’) will be one of your rights!

Yes, good citizen, we need a new definition of the word ‘criminal’.

Because many things that are (wrongly) ‘celebrated’ today should be crimes against humanity.

And if we succeed, they will be!

But I digress.

It all comes down to ‘choices’, good citizen.

The circumstances we live our lives under are of our own choosing…to a degree.

The criminals among us have, er, ‘tilted the playing field’ to their advantage, it is up to us to tilt it back…forcibly. (It is no longer a question of ‘necessity’, it must be done!)

Nobody can live in an economic desert (which our politicians did nothing to prevent!) and now it is up to us to correct this situation!

[Sidebar: the bulk of my readers are from outside the US and this advice applies to them as well…]

YOU must break the monopolist’s grip on the global economy and restore ‘local’ balance if you or your children are to ever experience ‘prosperity’ again!

2012 is as good a time as any…and what comes next promises to be more ‘draconian’ than anything we’ve seen thus far…which is more horrific than any horror novel!

The part you SHOULD BE marveling over is how our politicians flaunt our well-being with impunity!

Corruption is not a ‘game’, it’s a DISEASE and we must eradicate it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Preoccupied

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Saturday (to those of you who still have jobs.) Funny how the final symptoms of the death spiral have put the job situation front and center as our civilization dies.

More interesting is how the, er, Alternative Press has suddenly embraced (half) of the solution I have been promoting since this whole fiasco started back in 2008.

[The idea of a reduced workweek, and idea that needs to be coupled with ‘free’ housing in order to work. You can’t reduce hours without reducing expenses!]

Um, I confess to not even clicking on the link to the article so I don’t know if the practical side of this proposal was even addressed.

It can be done BUT it will deprive the renegade bankers of their reason for existing, which is why it WON’T be done!

Or, perhaps it will, but you already know YOU can’t survive forty hours of expenses on fifteen hours of pay.

Maybe that’s how they plan to corral us all into debtor’s prison when they re-introduce outright slavery…

Which brings us to another question that has likely evaded most people’s awareness; WTF happened to OWS?

It's unfair to blame Sage, who claims he was "born in a mental hospital". Virtually every occupation was beset by the same types, though New York seemed to have a surplus. Nonetheless, one seasoned Occupy organizer, by way of the Middle East, does blame the wayward behavior of a minority for "destroying Occupy as a functioning entity". He claims after the eviction of the Zuccotti Park occupation last November, there would be meetings of up to 300 people groping for a path going forward, but constant disruptions would "suck the energy out of the room".

The Middle East organizer mentioned that in Tahrir Square; Egyptians would surround provocateurs and disrupters (both of the voluntary and involuntary kind) chase them out of the square. If they came back, then a beating was in order. He said, "While it's a different political culture, the Egyptians and Syrians have had to deal with people shooting them from windows. Occupy Wall Street couldn't even deal with a few crazies."

That moment in Franklin Square encapsulated why Occupy Wall Street crumbled. It was not – and still is not – able to negotiate between conflicting rights. Occupy's child-like view of politics – how consensus and participatory democracy will free the angels within every one of us – was a big reason for its success because it offered a palpable alternative to our cynical, acquisitive society. Yet it apparently hasn't dawned on the hive mind that it is impossible to satisfy all rights, every time, everywhere.

One minute they were everywhere, the next the cops are dragging them away and the media is pretending like they never existed.

The last paragraph contains the stark truth, the movement that took the nation by storm last year lost the publics attention when it was discovered that it stood for ‘nothing’.

How sweetly innocent to protest unfairness without putting even the slightest effort into defining what specifically was ‘unfair’.

An executive pulling down 300 times what the lowest paid worker gets is deemed ‘unfair’…so how about 299 times? Are we all good now?

While OWS ‘nominally supported’ the general issues of the day, their failure to take a stand made them irrelevant.

They were reduced to being just so much ‘noise’ in an already noisy environment that most of us had tuned out of already anyway.

Do we really need a protest movement that stands for nothing?

Isn’t the major malfunction around here an over abundance of shaking heads and clueless shrugs?

We all KNOW ‘what’s wrong’. What we need is someone willing to DO SOMETHING about it!

[How disappointing is it that electing 'Mr. Change' netted us nothing either?]

And as you have seen, ‘protesting’ gets us absolutely no where.

Well, it gets you an arrest record and a place on a government watch list that’s going to come up and bite you on the ass when you least expect it…(like when you find out you need organ replacement surgery.)

More vexing is how we have an over abundance of people willing to do THE WRONG thing about our current pressing problems.

What should truly amaze you is how these people manage to land national media attention for themselves.

Whatever happened to ‘the public trust’?

You don’t need a lot of imagination to figure out that the powers that be are more interested in ‘covering their tracks’ in any way possible…so the public trust can go twist in the wind!

Yeah, so OWS was ‘conspicuous in its absence’ from any 4th of July ceremonies.

I am inclined to think that the ‘leaderless’ movement was a failed attempt at ‘manufacturing blind protest’.

It was set up as an avenue of protest where one could speak their mind, get it off their chest and then SHUT UP AND GO AWAY!

Ironically, OWS started to turn violent…right around the same time the cops started shutting them down wholesale (also violently.)

IF the police DIDN’T ‘get ahead’ of the violent protests they would have spread like wildfire.

Now the, er, ‘Authorities’ are afraid to let OWS ‘re-assemble’.

Because the situation has gotten worse since last fall and NOTHING has been done (outside the busting up of the OWS movement) to remedy the now out of control economic desert.

Since Occupy Wall Street didn’t, maybe it’s time somebody should…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: Occupying Wall Street was always a ‘bad’ idea. From a ‘tactical’ point of view, occupying anything is a bad idea because you end up making (yourself) an easy target.

We aren’t going to ‘win’ this thing by getting ourselves killed off, er, ‘stupidly’.

Think for a moment just who is ‘influencing the public’ with bad propaganda and figuring out a way to squelch the lie machine would be as good a place to start as any.

All Opposed

Greetings good citizen,

After a butt-kickin’ Friday the markets lack the confidence to advance even further…but, equally as interesting, they haven’t ‘cashed in’ on Friday’s irrational run up either.

Ironically, it’s all the same to the ‘paper rich’ but for the rest of us it is not so much

Across America, freaked-out employees are coping with sweat-drenched nights and heart-pounding days. They’re reaching for the Xanax and piling on the work of two or three people. They’re running the risk of short-term collapse and long-term disease.

The hell created by three grinding years of 8 percent-plus unemployment brings us plenty of stories of what people suffer when they lose their jobs. But what about the untold millions who live in chronic fear that tomorrow’s paycheck will be their last?

Research shows that the purgatory of job insecurity may be even worse for you than unemployment. And it's turning the American Dream into a sleepwalking nightmare. From young temporary workers to middle-aged career veterans, Americans are being pushed to their physical and psychological limits in what has the makings of a major national public health crisis.

Those of us who, er, ‘depend’ on what could kindly be termed as (in conservo-speak) ‘the kindness of strangers’ often find themselves deeply concerned about the stranger deciding they no longer need our services.

Just ask any of the TENS OF MILLIONS of ‘homeless’ out there what happens when the ‘stranger’ no longer requires your particular ‘expertise’…

And trust me good citizen, homelessness is just the beginning!

Let us, if you will, ‘marry’ the onus of being unable to support yourself (or your family) with the totally counter-intuitive meme that the conservatives keep on winning

Have you ever wondered why it is that Progressives repeatedly lose ground in American politics? We almost always have the facts on our side. The experts agree with us. Hell, a lot of us are the experts. And yet history clearly shows that Conservatives have the best political game in town. They dominate political discourse, establishing which frames shape the most important issues of the day. Their values associated with rugged individualism, mass consumption, and a contempt for civil society are blasted at the American public through massive media outlets that they have acquired and built up over the last several decades. And when the global economy melts down as a direct result of their economic and fiscal policies, who gets blamed? In a word, liberals.

What’s going on here? Why is it that Conservatives are so good at winning and Progressives produce a lackluster resistance at best? The answer comes from a fundamental insight from evolutionary biology. Stated simply, it goes like this:

When two groups compete, the one with the most social cohesion wins in the long run.

This insight arises from research on group selection that reveals how social animals capable of working as a team readily out compete those individuals who must struggle on their own. The astute observer will already note the profound irony here — a political group whose ideology elevates the individual over the group (Conservatives) has managed to cultivate more group cohesion than the political group whose ideology blends community well-being with that of the individual. I’ll come back to this irony in a moment.

Because the ‘minority’ party of the >One Percent happens to OWN the fucking media, it is the ONLY reason we are told (ceaselessly) that our nation is ‘divided’.

And it is ‘divided’…80-20.

Yes, good citizen, a full 19+ percent of the population ‘mis-identifies’ itself as being part of the > One Percent.

So where do these turkeys get off telling the rest of us that a full half of us support what amounts to economic suicide?

Because they can.

Impossible? You can bet the Germans thought so too.

Look at what the Nazis regularly got away with right under the average German citizen’s nose and compare it to what our current government is pulling now.

Extra-judicial murder, concentration camps, disappearances…under these circumstances, good citizen, no-one is ‘safe’.

But our second article makes a very succinct point, the, er, ‘alleged opposition’ can’t seem to actually oppose any of these things.

Which tells us what, good citizen?

That there is no genuine ‘opposition’ to the criminal regime that has taken over this nation’s (nuclear armed) government.

More disturbing is the fact that the US is the largest nuclear power in the world…(not that ‘overkill’ means much once the damn button is pushed.)

We can only wonder to what extent the US nuclear arsenal was used to ‘extort’ the governments of the rest of the world into ‘compliance’ with the capitalist agenda?

Sort of brings to mind the old saw about being careful of what one wishes for…because you just might get it.

The greed-heads wished for universal capitalism and destroyed the global economy in the process, now the myopic bastards have no clue how to fix the disaster they created.

Nor are they willing to surrender any of their ill-gotten gains…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Trained...

Greetings good citizen,

Having just browsed the Sunday paper I can’t help but wonder what the rest of the newspaper reading community thinks of the state of our society?

Understand good citizen, the ‘engine’ of the US economy seized solid after they ran out of suckers willing to buy synthetic credit derivatives for ridiculous terms.

US GDP now consists entirely of raw materials and food exports.

Looking for a bright spot on the economic horizon?

Have a gander:

Want to know what the job of the future looks like? Go to the gym. Phillip Hoskins did, but not to work out. He went to find clients, and to join the ranks of personal trainers, one of the fastest-growing American occupations.

“I knew I didn’t want a desk job,” said Mr. Hoskins, of Louisville, Ky., who became a personal trainer after being let go, after 17 years, from a middle-management position at a car repair shop in December. “I’m pretty fit for 51 years old, and I knew I could do something with that.”

Once stereotyped as the domain of bodybuilders and gym devotees, personal training is drawing the educated and uneducated; the young and old; men and women; the newly graduated, the recently laid-off and the long retired.

Cogitate on that for a moment while we ponder the other ‘clue’ accidentally dropped into this piece.

Mr. Hoskins worked as an ‘administrator at a garage’. I’m not sure what that comprises but you can pretty much bet it didn’t involve spinning wrenches and getting muddy from your knees to your eyeballs.

Worse, few and far between are the garages that can afford to have ‘paper shufflers’.

If we look further down the economic shit pipe we would see that the entire automotive service industry is, er, ‘endangered’…poor Mr. Hoskins was just one of the first to go.

Sooner than you think the term ‘mechanic’ will literally be preceded by the word ‘personal’ as ‘driving’ returns to its origins as being a ‘hobby’ of the rich and shameless.

YOU won’t drive, thus will you no longer need the services of a ‘mechanic’.

We aren't far away from a time when they’ll be giving cars away because nobody will be able to afford to fuel them.

BUT they will find the ‘extra energy’ to melt them all down! (Go figure, scrap metal is FOREVER!)

Now take a moment to parse Mr. Hoskins’ defiant, bootstrapping attitude.

He knew he ‘could do’ personal training.

Do you think Mr. Hoskins is ‘making a living’ off of his (count ‘em) TWO paying clients?

These aren’t ‘contracts for life’, let either one of his current employers lose HER job and the first thing to ‘go’ will be Mr. Hoskins.

Besides the ‘could do’ aspect of the job, what do you suppose really motivated a 50 plus year-old man to jump into the ‘self-employment’ arena?

Could it be because nobody else would hire him?

Um, again, you don’t need me to tell you that this whole situation has something nasty about it.

Let us return a moment to yesterday’s post where we examined the, er, ‘idea’ that our civilization is being run by criminals.

Why can’t fellows like Mr. Hoskins find suitable employment?

Could it be because all of the jobs people like Mr. Hoskins is qualified for have been exported to the cheaper there?

Because the problem is NO LONGER limited to people approaching retirement age!

Junior can’t find a summer job at ANY wages and the kids fresh out of college are lamenting their chosen majors due to the fierceness of the competition for even the most obscure job title.

Because there aren’t enough jobs.

And let’s not forget the ‘other shoe’, if there aren’t enough jobs then there isn’t enough ‘free cash’ circulating within this jobless panorama to support an ‘imported economy’.

Is this the result of criminals lining their own pockets or is it our self-professed betters stepping in to teach us a ‘lesson’ about being ‘properly grateful’ to our ‘job creators’?

Actually, does it matter? Not to anyone with half a brain.

The desert is the desert.

Oddly, Discovery channel has a new ‘reality’ show featuring our old friend Flipper (not the extremely intelligent dolphin of the Sixties television show, the ‘Flip this house’ idiots.)

Where, (besides TV Fantasyland) are they going to find buyers for these properties?

Is our memory that far gone that we have already forgotten how badly the most recent episode of buy cheap/sell dear played out?

I mean, maybe they can ‘get away with it’ because it’s ‘entertainment’ but it certainly ISN’T ‘reality’.

Did I mention there are criminals are in charge of our society?

I thought I brought that up recently…

Hello, is anybody out there?

Is this thing on?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Oopsie!

Greetings good citizen,

Well, one thousand plus one and it’s still the same old, same old…although today’s ‘main distraction’ is ‘all of a sudden’ JP Morgan may have lost not 2 billion dollars but 9 billion!

Little ‘oopsie’ there with the decimal point apparently.

Sadly, push come to shove, it’s a ‘thousand trillion’ (a.k.a. a quadrillion) they’re trying to fill in with an eye-dropper, a few billion at a time.

Er, more pathetically, the fucktards were betting on the ‘soundness of the banking system’ (and they LOST, how fucking sad is THAT?)

Anyway, here is today’s first snippet:

Wall Street Stocks Drop
By REUTERS 26 minutes ago

Financial shares were in focus, with JPMorgan losing ground on a report that recent trading losses could reach $9 billion and with Barclays down after a probe into interbank lending rates.

So what are we looking at here? Are investors ‘suddenly’ worried about the ‘soundness’ of JP Morgan? Or is it those screwy ‘credit derivatives’ that nobody understands?

JPMorgan Trading Loss May Reach $9 Billion
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and SUSANNE CRAIG

As JPMorgan has moved rapidly to unwind the position in credit derivatives, internal models at the bank have recently projected losses of as much as $9 billion.

Jeez, I don’t recall the corporate owned media mentioning that Sir Jamie told Congress last week they might be ‘a few BILLION off’ in their original projections when he testified before them last week… Maybe I missed it…(I’m going to bet that Congress did too!)

Again we are faced with the question of ‘what did they know and when did they know it?’

If you subscribe to my theory (and too few do) then NONE OF THIS is an ‘accident’.

Switch mental gears with me here as I explain yet another fundamental fact, every time you find yourself in 'Bizarro world' there is absolutely no guarantee that you’re going to find your way back.

And guess where you’re ‘stranded’ right now?

Let’s have a look at what’s going on ‘across the pond’:

European Summit to Test New Alliances Among Leaders
By STEPHEN CASTLE

As European Union leaders prepare for talks on Thursday, the traditional French-German power center is fraying, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, more isolated than ever.

Er, speaking strictly from the ‘rules of evidence’ point of view, the arrow of guilt tends to point to the party that ‘benefits’ from a catastrophe.

Um, Germany’s market niche is luxury goods and it should surprise no one that since the ‘beneficiaries’ of the global race to the bottom are rabid consumers of luxury goods that the German economy has emerged relatively unscathed, comparatively speaking.

Whether or not this is a massive coincidence or not is another issue entirely.

A German’s company’s attempt to buy the NYSE casts a suspicious shadow but thanks to near impenetrable secrecy statutes surrounding the banking, er, ‘community’ we have no concrete evidence.

Our last tidbit is either the economy’s greatest conundrum or the umpteenth bottom call for the housing market (this month…pick one.)

After Years of False Hopes, Signs of a Turn in Housing
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Roughly six years after the housing market began its longest and deepest slide since the Great Depression, home sales and an increase in sales prices indicate that the market is recovering.

Left to our confused minds is the contradiction of falling salaries and rising prices…it is ‘counter-intuitive’ to say the least.

But, if we look to our example (the Banana Republic model) we would see that they indeed have a ‘robust’ housing market (albeit it a tiny one, indicative of the size of the pool of ‘qualified buyers’.)

So is the ‘bottom’ in for a much-diminished US housing market?

I think we’re still a long way away from any ‘concrete’ settlement of the housing issue.

It is my feeling that the currency markets will have to collapse first, perhaps several times before it is determined how many Yuan you can get for your stack of lumber.

For those of you who are a little slow on the uptake, the center of Western Civilization has been moved to Beijing (where capitalism at the point of a gun reigns supreme.)

Not that we aren’t inches away from the same thing over here.

It only stands to reason since the first buds of an ‘economic renaissance’ are starting to blossom on the borders of the economic desert, in US factories staffed (with some) US workers.

Whether or not this will be enough to stave off a revolt is totally academic at this point, It is my personal opinion that they have let the economic desert grow too large.

Could we ‘rebuild’ our lost manufacturing capacity?

Of course we could…standing athwart that goal is the intrepid capitalist who wouldn’t tolerate the ‘competition’. Companies like Wal-Mart can’t ‘compete’ with a direct manufacturer, they have to pay a middle man to obtain their imported bullshit.

And there is NOTHING cheaper than buying direct!

This is why the cheaper there doesn’t exist…and why all of these capitalist wankers are guilty of treason for throwing tens of millions of US workers out of their jobs (and stuffing their pockets with their pension funds!)

But that’s like closing the barn door after the horse has run off…not that these cretins shouldn’t be tracked down and punished to the full extent of the law!

But naturally, I digress.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Neutron Bombing

Greetings good citizen,

Today we are treated to a disaster in the making masquerading as a success story

Let’s take a look at our ‘fair use’ snippet to see what kind of Republican hit piece the so-called ‘liberal media’ can get away with:

Mr. Porter, a retired AT&T engineer, was an advocate of the town when it was a hopeless cause, during the many years when Democrats blocked efforts to let a largely Republican and white suburb cleave itself from Fulton County. One Democratic legislator vowed that Sandy Springs would incorporate “when pigs fly,” a phrase that Mayor Galambos has since adopted as the name of her blog.

After an election in 2004, both houses of Georgia’s legislature were controlled by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.

“It was like a dog that’s been chasing a train for years and finally catches it,” Mr. Porter says. “The question was, What do I do with it now?”

As a fan of Ronald Reagan and the economist Friedrich Hayek, Mr. Porter came naturally to the notion that Sandy Springs could push “the model” to its nth degree. His philosophical inclinations were formed by a life spent in private enterprise, and cemented by a visit to Weston, Fla., a town that had begun as a series of gated communities.

Mr. Porter tells this and other stories in “Creating the New City of Sandy Springs,” a book that will leave readers with one indelible lesson: incorporating a city is dull. Superduper dull. The book is composed mostly of the codicils, requests for proposals and definitions of duties that were required to jolt Sandy Springs to life. Without a love of minutiae and a very long attention span, forget it. But this is intended as a blueprint, not a gripping narrative. Mr. Porter regards the success of Sandy Springs as a way out of the financial morass that has engulfed so many cities in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Left unmentioned here was something else St. Ronnie [Reagan] was a big fan of, the fucking neutron bomb! [Kills the people but leaves the buildings intact…see the connection?]

Naturally this Libertarian pinhead wouldn’t ‘justify’ his work, he'd just tell you how to copy it; then it’s your bad when the downside of this idiotic idea slams you upside the head!

Immutable fact number one, you can’t do ANYTHING cheaper ‘second-hand’, adding a ‘middle-man’ adds cost.

So where do the ‘cost savings’ of privatizing government come from?

It sure isn’t cheaper for the municipality, the chiseling capitalist pockets most of the ‘savings’ for themselves.

And what ‘savings’ are these? First is the considerable reduction in wages paid then there is the near total elimination of ‘benefits’.

As you gaze drifts across the economic desert, caused by a decimated consumer base, you have to question the wisdom of slashing salaries and benefits further.

Benefits the, er, company (in our privatized example) don’t pay for have to be made up out of the private sector worker’s considerably lower salary.

This wasn’t ‘the right thing to do’ when the private sector exported our manufacturing capacity and it certainly isn’t the ‘right thing to do’ now…

Unless you really WANT YOUR CHILDREN to squander the rest of their lives in a banana republic!

Again I will remind you that this is not only mismanagement in the highest degree, it is also ‘treason’ of the highest order!

(Before you object, saying this is ‘only business’, placing your own selfish interests ahead of the interests of society IS and FOREVER will be TREASON!)

And you KNOW what the penalty for treason is…

And this is how we know our justice system is broken beyond repair!

(Sorry good citizen, I haven’t gone off the reservation like this in quite some time but seeing this Libertarian BULLSHIT being pedaled in the corporate owned media as a ‘good thing’ makes my blood boil!)

True, the public sector now makes the kind of salaries you can only dream about in the private sector (although that was NOT the case forty years ago.)

Worse, that should give you pause to consider just how badly beaten down the private sector in this nation has become.

And the > One Percent aren’t complaining…hell, they’re laughing all the way to the bank, the very same bank that is about to foreclose on your home!

Um, I am well aware that the conservo-whackos have been accusing the imaginary ‘libruls’ of treason for the past decade…but that accusation was only to cover their own treachery!

Again, truth be told, the conservo-whackos don’t know what treason really is!

Bizarrely, when they accuse someone of treason what they are usually doing is calling them ‘unpatriotic’ FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW…

And Treason has NOTHING to do with PATRIOTISM!

Nope, the ‘traitors’ among us don’t believe in ‘Nation States’ and thereby are convinced they are ‘incapable’ of treason.

While they sell out the future of every man woman and child in this country to enrich their ugly, selfish selves.

They are the ones who exported our jobs while elimination tarrifs around the globe.

And you won’t hear one of them ask, who cares if we unbalance the world’s economy as long as WE get rich!

Not their fucking problem, man…

But it sure as shit is gonna be yours…and fucking soon!

I am predicting they WON’T get away with it…but stopping them is up to YOU!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Gravitas

Greetings good citizen,

By now it has been pointed out endlessly that ‘the media we pay for’ isn’t worth the price. Don’t you find it odd that there hasn’t been a poll lately indicating how little the public ‘trusts’ the media?

One would be tempted to rephrase that the other way around but only the ‘write whatever I’m paid to’ crowd would object to the original wording.

Worse, they actually have gone back and ‘erased’ (fudged past data) so the future can’t be accurately compared.

I’m sure that old data is lying around somewhere but nobody is threatening to bring it out into the light of day because the people who changed how the data was interpreted don’t want to look ‘stupid’.

The few people who were alive during the last Great Depression were small children and they don’t remember much about how things were through an adult’s eyes.

Ironically, they though what they were seeing was ‘normal’.

So the current ‘Great Recession’ is no big deal. They remember bread lines and tent cities…where today we have tens of millions of people on food stamps and living in homeless shelters.

Depression? The worthless media don’t see no depression!

SO we have not only a ‘positive’ performance out of yesterday’s stock markets but we also have stories like this:

“Definitely a bounce here, although it is simply a reaction to how sharp the sell-off was yesterday,” said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Asset Management in Bedford Hills, N.Y.

Bank shares rose after Moody’s Investors Service downgraded 15 of the world’s biggest banks on Thursday, lowering credit ratings by one to three notches to reflect their risk of losses from volatile capital market activities.

“The banking world is undergoing a major transformation and a lot of questions about the concept of ‘too big to fail’ and all of that,” Mr. Ghriskey said, “so I’m not surprised to see the new rating levels – ratings agencies are always backward-looking and that is what that reflects.”

Seriously, good citizen?

Don’t you find it curious that ‘insiders’ never question why the market is valued like it is?

My first observation to the press (you have my permission to use it too!) would be, “ Today’s Markets? These people are out of their minds by a good ten thousand points (and that’s being MIGHTY ‘charitable’! A less charitable individual would opine the markets are off the full twelve thousand.)

The question, quite literally, is one of ‘what’ are they measuring (and how many times is that same activity being measured (and attributed) globally?)

IF the public knew how the data was being manipulated, governments around the world would topple overnight.

Maybe you don’t have school aged children and maybe your school aged kids don’t talk about what goes on in school…but my kids tell me what their teachers tell them.

And this ‘rock’ was originally thrown by Fox media, the ‘posers’.

It turns out none of the broadcast media is truthful more than eighty percent of the print media is ‘unreliable’.

You’d fair best on the internet but that’s not ‘policed’ and mostly opinion.

So how sad is that?

And we circle back to something I haven’t brought up in a long time, the ‘impossibility’ of making critical decisions with incomplete/biased information.

Yet we do it all of the time.

What sucks is 99% of the time NOBODY admits the original information has been found invalid and the ‘crusaders’ march on with their mission of death needlessly.

Which brings us to an even more disturbing phenomenon.

The high suicide rate that has been the resulted from the oligarch’s latest ‘war of choice.’

The killing (murder) of the innocent usually comes at a high price.

Ten years and nobody knows why we’re there or what ‘victory’ looks like.

Actually that isn’t true…everybody knows we’re ‘there’ for the oil and victory will come once the pipelines are laid.

Regardless of how little oil there is or worse, how expensive it becomes.
The thing to remember good citizen is if you’re NOT one of them then you’re ‘expendable’.

The only way to (temporarily) make yourself valuable to them is to fight on their side (while the battle lasts, once it’s over, all bets are off.)

It’s Saturday, things to do and people to see…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

If this is a little ‘messy’ it is because it was not subjected to the normal ‘proofing’ scrutiny I normally do.

My apologies.

History

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘up’ on Wall Street despite disastrous news for the global banking system…but the ‘pocket stuffers’ don’t give a shit about reality. You can bet your boots the day the economy does a face-plant in the dust, the ‘traders’ will be busy bidding up the price of worthless stocks.

It’s what they do…how fucking pathetic is that?

Now, before you think I’m going schizo on you let me clarify the insidiousness of the Libertarian mind. They are more than willing to parrot popular memes if it helps to hide their true agenda from a very confused public.

I would also point out that Libby Central didn’t compose this particular article, they lifted it from the Booman Tribune:

What I Know About Our Corporate Overlords

To understand the last 40 years, and how we got to the place we are now is hard to understand on the macro level for many people. That's why a simplified lie - give more to the rich and all will benefit -- has worked so well, even though history has shown us again and again that this well worn myth is untrue. So why does it work on so many people? Well, Americans are peculiarly ignorant of history, their own and the history of other nations and cultures. Our own culture preaches self-reliance, independence and the rejection of charity. Follow these simple rules and you too can achieve your goals, you too can have the "American Dream" of wealth and comfort.

And that is why the lie is so appealing. We want to believe that in America there is this dream that anyone can make it rich. We feast on stories of hard working individuals who came out of poverty, who came literally from "nowhere" to become rich and famous. We live under the hazy mists of a cloud cuckoo land, one where the individual is all powerful and controls his or her own fate. A myth that has never been true for the vast majority of people. Yet even today, we here from the generations that benefited the most from government programs and subsidies that whatever they accomplished they did it all by their lonesome.

Yes, you will always find stories of individuals who made it up from the depths of poverty (though most of them these days seem to be sports stars), but more likely than not you, if you dig hard enough will find that those who allegedly "made it" on their own were actually the children of rich people who became even richer than their parents. And those who do become extremely rich typically do so with the support of governments and by exploiting the labor and health of others. In general, the rich as a class are more ruthless, less generous and more willing to act illegally and immorally than the poor. Just ask any one who works for a hedge fund manager or a major company's CEO and ask them how they got to the position they did. In general, most of them did it by stepping on other people (especially subordinates but also their peers), and by practicing the arts of lying, cheating, deceit, fraud and ruthlessness.

I recommend you click through and read the rest, it is seldom that you encounter such refreshing ‘directness’.

If the Libby’s didn’t throw you the occasional piece of ‘red meat’ like this, you would, as I have, begun to ask just who are these people?

And the answer would eventually come back as the ‘triangulating centrists’ that got us into this mess in the first place!

Because I have indeed come to the conclusion that the ‘thing’ that swallowed up the Democratic party and turned it spineless is in fact a branch of the Libertarian assault on humanity.

All of this ‘triangulating’ is intended to mis-direct you from the valid arguments you SHOULD BE MAKING by convincing you there is a ‘compromise’ in a situation where there really isn’t any acceptable ‘middle ground’.

They don’t need to be ‘right’; all they need to do is prevent YOU from acting!

Their whole goal is to get you out of action mode and into listening mode. If you ‘buy’ their bullshit, mission accomplished. If you don’t buy, then they start in on how ‘unreasonable’ YOU’RE being.

Again, they can be wronger than wrong but the problem is (as far as they’re concerned) YOU!

You’re not agreeing with them is ‘wrong’ and they simply won’t have it!

The second someone starts handing you the ‘let’s not be hasty’ line you have to shut ‘em down, immediately! (And in most cases forcefully.)

You may be forced to shoot them to get them to shut up!

I do NOT recommend you shoot anyone (if you can avoid it) but when push comes to shove, you do what you’ve gotta do.

In the end it all comes down to choices and anyone who interferes with your freedom to choose isn’t doing you any favors.

Which brings us full circle with the ‘free market’ assault on the workers of the world.

It comes down to the old split between producers and sellers.

The producer knows what it ‘cost’ him to produce a given thing in terms of time, inputs and sacrifice.

The seller doesn’t. He only knows he has to win the difference between what he pays and what his non-producing customer is willing to pay.

This ‘ignorance of cost’ produces some outlandish, er, ‘market fluctuations’.

Which in turn produces some pretty bizarre variances in the ‘value’ of money.

(It’s part of what makes ALL money ‘funny’.)

This ‘separation’ between producer and seller is decidedly ‘unhealthy’ for the rest of society.

You see, the (immensely) ‘ignorant’ seller concentrates his attention on the ‘ownership’ of the thing without regard of its true value (a matter of pure perspective even at the best of times!)

The producer is more mindful of the ‘demand’ for the item they produce as well as the overall benefit that item provides to society…(something the seller could care less about.)

What you should really ask yourself, good citizen is just how much do you buy ‘direct’ from the source?

You’ll be surprised at how little this actually is…and it should make you wonder why you are being subjected to the predations of the ‘middleman’.

The human anti-exploitation law, an idea whose time has come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Reprehensible

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

Not that there are any ‘real’ democrats anymore.

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

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

(And THAT’S pretty damn pathetic!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But again I digress!

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

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

Back-up, there is NO SUBSTITUTE!

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

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

So what ‘good’ came from JIT?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Leveled

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Friday (to those of you who still have a weekend to look forward to.) You poor slobs in retail know it’s only a matter of time until your ‘holidays’ are restricted to the time off you’re granted for meals during the coming ‘actual day’ sales events.

As other observers have noted, when ‘nothing’s sacred, anything goes!’

If you refuse to give up your family time during the holidays, they will ‘find’ (because they’re making them as we ponder this) somebody who WILL.

Because the poor bastard will, quite literally, be ‘hungrier’ than you are.

Does ‘desperation’ make ‘good’ employees?

Short answer is No, the extension is also true, the desperate also make lousy citizens (because they already have nothing left to lose!)

‘Compliance’ holds no benefit for them.

Sounds like common sense but take a good look at where we are today good citizens before you start discounting the morons among us.

Wall Street Starts Lower
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stocks fell early on Wall Street before the weekend release of what may be weaker-than-expected trade and industrial data from China.

But once again markets around the world are in ‘vertical take off’ mode corresponding with the opening of the NYSE…and no one finds that, er, ‘remarkable’. (in a ‘fraudulent’ sort of way…)

As Grain Piles Up, India’s Poor Still Go Hungry
By VIKAS BAJAJ

Despite surplus grain stockpiles, malnourishment is widespread in India, where politicians are facing pressure to deal with corruption and waste in distribution programs.

Video: A Problem of Distribution
India Ink: What Did You Eat?

Wait a minute Slim, isn’t this the SECOND crisis to slam the world’s second largest population center in as many months?

Remember (it may have been April) but they announced they didn’t have enough coal to keep their generators running?

Can YOU say ‘mismanagement’?

No power AND no food…

I don’t know about you good citizen but it looks like ‘the stage’ is being ‘set’ if you know what I mean.

They have a surplus of grain but hundreds of millions of starving people…

Geez, you don’t suppose it’s true do you? that the only one this capitalism bullshit works for is the capitalist? Hell, India is a microsm of the global labor market, let’s assume that their ‘working aged population’ is roughly in the half a billion region.

Are there a half a billion jobs in the entire world?

The answer is yeah, just barely. So what about the other six and a half billion people all trying to ‘make it’ under capitalism?

Perhaps it would help to look at this from the ‘other end’, the thousand or so people who own 99 percent of everything.

Is this a case of ‘Lucky them’ or ‘Stupid us?’

What do YOU think?

I’m thinking ‘I’m with Stupid!’

But only from the aspect that we ‘allow’ this sort of nonsense to continue…because, in reality, we aren’t given a ‘choice’ in the matter.

And yeah, there IS a degree of ‘maybe someday’ involved as well.

Most of us ‘wish’ it will be us someday although I’d like to think the majority of us are ‘practical enough’ to know it’s never gonna happen.

How ironic is it that knowing you have a snowballs chance in hell of ever becoming ‘more than you can spend’ wealthy and this prospect is STILL on an equal footing with your chances of ‘leveling the playing field’…something you actually have a much greater possibility of achieving.

It also boggles the imagination to consider how much better off we’d all be IF we adjusted the ‘stupid rich’ right out of the equation.

(Having more money than you can ‘rationally spend’ IS ‘stupid beyond belief.’)

Yet that is the ‘goal’ to which we all aspire.

The principal difference being putting yourself first (as the selfish Conservatives do) or putting ‘society’ (the world you are but a part of) first, something the now extinct ‘liberals’ strove for.

Which is to opine that the ‘liberal spirit’ lives, it just isn’t represented in our current ‘political landscape’.

How sad it must be to be a communist in today’s predatory capitalist world…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Nanny State

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the globe are bleeding from the eye-sockets for the second straight day but THIS is today’s top story:

TOP NEWS
New York Plans to Ban Sale of Big Sizes of Sugary Drinks
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A proposal that would take effect as soon as next March is the most ambitious effort yet by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration to combat rising obesity.

Isn’t it comforting to see that the > One Percent’s Mayor has his eye what’s important?

Could this latest incarnation of the Nanny State be any less intrusive? How long before ‘robo-conservatives’ start decrying this move as another ‘Liberal attack’ on liberty?

How much worse is it that this asshole is able to claim he’s an ‘Independent’?

By distancing himself from his decidedly conservative roots he is able to blame the much abused but no longer existent Liberals for his unpopular social decisions.

And the editor chose this story as what is ‘important’ to New Yorkers?

Looks like there ought to be a job opening at the NY Times…don’t you think?

Let’s see what got relegated to the ‘inner depths’ of today’s edition.

You don’t suppose THIS would have made a ‘more appropriate’ headline, do you?

Debt Crisis in Europe
Central Banker Sees Structure of Euro Zone as ‘Unsustainable’
By JACK EWING 10:37 AM ET

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, warned Thursday that the structure of the euro zone had become “unsustainable.”

Europe Fears Bailout of Spain Would Strain Its Resources

You don’t suppose the, er, ‘unfortunate choice of words' by the head of the European Central Bank has anything to do with shuffling this story off to the business section, do you?

I mean, calling the world’s fall back currency ‘unsustainable’ is a bit harsh, isn’t it?
Maybe they were reluctant to run a story not centered in the US but, the very next headline tells us what we all already know:

U.S. Steps Up Pressure on Europe to Resolve Euro Crisis
By DAVID JOLLY 36 minutes ago

President Obama has held conference calls with the leaders of France, Germany and Italy to help lay the groundwork for action before a G-20 summit in June.

It is also ‘understandable’ that they wouldn’t want to run with this story as today’s top headline.

The ‘Euro-crisis’ has been bubbling for four years now and nothing they have attempted (or proposed) has proven workable.

What does dummy think will change by adding his two cents?

If he has a solution don’t you think he should try it out on the US financial network first? It’s not like our banking system isn’t on life support.

And naturally good citizen, he doesn’t expect anything to change, he is doing this to provide the appearance of doing something.

If he actually did ‘do something’ it would likely, er, ‘upset’ some important campaign contributors…(who, PS, by the way, are still making sizable contributions to his re-election campaign despite their public dislike for the incumbent.)

He must be kicking back and grinning, ear to ear…just like ‘the great one’ (Jackie Gleason) with a hearty ‘How sweet it is!’

Getting paid tons of cash for NOT doing the right thing!

And NOBODY’S saying a word about it! (Talk about having a muzzle on the media!)

Skipping along we have this little tidbit:

Other Business News
First-Quarter G.D.P. Revised Down to 1.9% Rate
By REUTERS 9:05 AM ET

Economic growth in the United States was a bit slower than initially thought in the first quarter, the Commerce Department reported.

Again, not quite the story you want to run at the top of the paper…although the public would be interested in knowing this little factoid.

But how do you run a headline like that without opening the door for a discussion about why things are going so badly?

Since the ‘official line’ has been to ignore the symptoms leading up to the crash, you don’t want people to start asking questions now…

They might actually expect something to be done about it!

So the question turns back onto YOU…are YOU ‘happy’ with how things are being handled?

Or are you getting fed up with ‘more of the same’ from our deaf and blind political leaders?

Because, UNTIL YOU ‘show them’ you will no longer tolerate inaction, NOTHING is going to change, capeche?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Clean Sweep

Greetings good citizen,

Let’s begin today’s offering with the familiar refrain, ‘is this the best the (Fourth Estate) can do?

Because this post is about the ‘headlines’ in this nation’s ‘paper of record’, the NY Times…(despite conservative morons choking whenever someone else points this fact out.)

Yup, let’s take a look at what the ‘liberul media’ has on offer.

(And you know it was an idiot conservative who made up that nonsensical label…)

Um, in case you’re new here let me make it perfectly clear that I have zero love for ‘mindless conservatives’, the people who believe what they believe because they believe it.

How ironic is it that the so-called ‘liberul media’ has run yet another headline in TODAY’S PAPER about the all but forgotten Tea Party?

WTF!

But enough of that, let’s have a look at today’s headlines:

U.S. May Scrap Costly Efforts to Train Iraqi Police
By TIM ARANGO

The State Department could jettison a multibillion-dollar training effort by the end of 2012 that has emerged as the latest high-profile example of America's waning influence in the country.

Does something about this story strike you as ‘wrong’? Is it the ‘multi-billion dollar’ part or the ‘waning influence’ our, (er, military) has on this former (multiple) invasion victim?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, we ‘invaded’ Iraq in 1991 then we ‘officially withdrew’ (but continued to bomb the fuck out of them) until we ‘re-invaded’ in 2003.

And if you think we aren’t still bombing them, think again.

How disturbing is it good citizen that the Iraqi’s were the ‘lab rats’ for what they intend to do here?

Considering how the last almost thirty years have gone for the Iraqi’s, is it any wonder they are ‘resisting’ US style law enforcement training?

But our ‘corporate owned’ media makes no mention of this ‘background information’ and we can only wonder…why?

Well, actually we don’t wonder why…most of us are savvy enough to figure out for ourselves you write what ‘massa’ wants you to write if you want to keep getting your paycheck on Thursday.

What is even more disturbing is how the bylines are increasingly being attributed to foreign names. Like John and Jane, who lived recent US history, can’t be trusted to report it the way Rajneesh or Kim Sung (who only know the ‘whitewashed’ version that they learned in school would report it.)

Yeah, how frightening is THAT good citizen?

But I digress, let us move on:

Tea Party Focus Turns to Senate and Shake-Up
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JONATHAN WEISMAN

Tea Party-backed Republican candidates for the Senate are looking to infuse the upper chamber with the deep-seated conservatism that is coursing through the House.

How did we get a ‘Tea Party’ house, good citizen?

Remember the statistics, only one in five voters are ‘registered Republicans’ so how the fuck do ANY OF THEM win elected office?

You aren’t supposed to question this mathematical impossibility because it casts (SERIOUS) doubt on the ‘sanctity’ of our ‘free and fair’ elections…

Or hey, here’s and idea, you don’t suppose the patently corrupt bastards who OWN the fucking media may not be serving their own ‘business friendly’ agenda…do you?

Which is to ask, good citizen, how long are YOU going to let THEM fuck with you like this?

For our final ‘headline’ of Mother’s Day 2012 we have this story:

Degrees of Debt
A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College
By ANDREW MARTIN and ANDREW W. LEHREN

Nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor's degree is borrowing money, and as prices soar, a college degree often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

Geez bub, what the fuck do you suppose is up with this bullshit, eh?

Isn’t ‘more education’ supposed to be the singular cure to our long running and largely self-inflicted ‘unemployment crisis’?

But again the fucking worthless media has stuck to the official story that too many students have been chasing the ‘wrong’ degrees. Resulting in a mountain of (very lucrative) debt for the finance industry and lifetimes of economic woe for the hapless, succorless DUPES who get roped in by the lying politicians!

Um, understand that when the chips are down and the public looks to collect on the crimes of our ‘elected officials’, we’re going to be handed a ‘sob story’ about how everybody was doing it and they had no choice, they HAD TO go along (or they wouldn’t get re-elected!)

Tell it to the gibbet…

Because you (and those who recruited you) are going to ‘swing’ for your crimes.

But don’t fret, you won’t be alone. Most of the financial sector and ALL of the justice department will be swinging right beside you.

The new broom will, by necessity, ‘sweep clean’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Revolt (faux or real?)

Greetings good citizen,

The stock markets are tanking big time but we’re used to that by now, the only question in anybody’s mind these days is what they’re doing with all of those profits they keep skimming off from their pump and dump schemes.

(Followed closely by the question of just who is stupid enough to keep buying these worthless bank stocks…the crooked bastards who operate the mutual fund your retirement account is in?)

In the end the question is purely rhetorical, the financial sector is FUBAR and all of this up and down motion in the markets is nothing more than eyewash for the hopelessly stupid.

But that’s not YOU, good citizen. You know better than to be duped by the phony DOW ‘financials’ (which is more accurate than calling them ‘industrials’.)

Either way I’ll save the ‘hard questions’ for the end of the post.

Today we have a rare (you only get to look at 10 a month) offering from the New York Times and from our favorite commentator, Paul Krugman!

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

It must be very frustrating to be Mr. Krugman, able to point so precisely at the crux of the problem but he isn’t permitted to offer us/speak his mind on what we should do about it…

It would drive me crazy if it were me...thankfully, it’s not!

I’m crossing the ‘fair use’ line of three paragraphs but I don’t think Mr. K will mind because it is necessary if we are to include his, er, ‘conclusion’ (which isn’t actually a ‘solution’ per se.)

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority. And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.

A thorny problem indeed, how do we use the ballot box to fix the ballot box?

We have, thus far, proven incapable of getting our so-called representatives to pay attention to (never mind addressing) ANY of our ‘genuine concerns.’

So how are we going to get these assholes (who routinely ignore us) to act on our behalf?

Short answer, we don’t.

Now things get ‘hairy’ as we enter the realm of ‘speculation’ but the odds are, sometime between now and December 21 we are going to see the headline ‘Washington DC under seige’ followed shortly thereafter by one that reads ‘Washington surrenders!’

What we don’t know is ‘who’ the criminal government intends to surrender to…but you know it won’t be the rag-tag ‘99 percenters’!

Could it be the even more incredible Tea Partiers? (Be mindful that there are only 30,000 of them and the corporate owned media isn’t trustworthy!)

Although they might claim to be the OWS gang…but its doubtful because people would expect almost immediate action beyond the simple shutting down of an already tapped out Wall Street.

The public will ‘demand’ blood…and it is, er, ‘incredible’ that OWS wouldn't deliver, but a faux OWS wouldn’t.

A fake OWS would shut down Wall Street, declare ‘mission accomplished’ and urge the public to 'move on'...(somehow)

Letting the ‘perps’ just walk away.

You know as well as I do that this isn’t ‘justice’…nor is it what the 99% wants.

So you know what the ‘faux’ OWS’er will throw at us next? Single payer healthcare!

And for ‘propaganda purposes’, the Progressive Party will officially ‘replace’ the Democratic party as the new ‘Occupy Party’…(with an ideological opponent to be named later since the Elephant is dead also.)

How ironic is it that the Elephant died of ‘Mad Elephant disease?’

Naturally, in the end, it all comes down to you.

If you sit on your hands and salute whatever they run up the flagpole, do you deserve any better?

A Simple Plan is right here, ready to go and it offers a lot more than the greedheads will ever offer…and it’s spelled out in black and white so there’s no quibbling!

Yes good citizen, it is ‘safe to assume’ that the ‘overthrow’ of the current government has already been ‘choreographed’. The question is whether or not you are willing to let them get away with screwing you again?

The ‘in name only’ revolution will change nothing! (new names, same old shit.)

The ‘fight’ we’re all looking for comes after the current mess crashes into its own cesspool.

The battle will be to see what rises in its place…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner