Bondage

Greetings good citizen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you going to do when that day comes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress…

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

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

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

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

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

Snap to it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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

Focus

Greetings good citizen,

In honor of the holiday, today’s treat will be a ‘free-form’ piece from yours truly, essentially starting with what I’m NOT going to write about and ending with the usual rant somewhere deep off of the reservation.

Which is to admit I deleted yesterday’s Alternet article outlining yet another version of wishful thinking of how we could ‘resurrect’ bankrupt capitalism.

Like we all wouldn’t know what to do if we suddenly found ourselves free of indebtedness…

Just an opinion here good citizen but I think the ‘closet Libertarians’ over at Alternet believe the rest of us are ‘one trick ponies’.

Since capitalism is all we know, capitalism is all we can handle.

And these are the self-proclaimed ‘successors’ to the Democratic movement…

No wonder conservatism is looking more attractive to the average citizen, at least they stand for something…something weird and unidentifiable but at least it’s more than a shrug and a sigh!

Which is the main reason why I’m NOT parsing the latest proposal by the closet Libertarians, hell bent on retaining a government centered on private ownership.

Um, while most of you DIDN’T learn this from your history teacher (and you had history every year once you got into middle school) they never once mentioned that the central focus of our ‘constitutional government’ was not HUMAN RIGHTS but PROPERTY RIGHTS!

12 years of school, six years of specific history ‘indoctrination’ and not once do they mention what the ‘primary focus’ of our government is!

You, oddly enough, are led to believe our government was founded on the principles of justice and liberty for all. It is only after you leave school that you learn, if you learn at all, what the ‘central founding principle’ of this nation really is.

And once you know, you sort of understand why they don’t go advertising it, yet another reason why a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean really is ‘a good start’.

Because you learn right up front what this country is all about the minute you enter Law School.

In fact, if you’re headed for law school, chances are that somebody has taken you aside and told you this bit of trivia…along with them telling you in various ways that ‘the rabble’ don’t ‘appreciate the truth’.

Because seriously good citizen, the general public is largely ignorant of the, er, ‘focus’ of our justice system…(although the fact that the post constitution United States still permitted human slavery should have been a big tip-off.)

And literal slavery only ended with the advent of a new kind of slavery, wage slavery.

Part of the reason our civilization is collapsing upon itself is wage slavery. We no longer produce our own food and must sell ourselves in order to obtain sustenance.

This barely worked in a less populous time…now that there are more of us we are left with the question of what do you do when there are no buyers?

And the answer is whatever it takes…with YOU usually ending up in prison for a crime committed out of ‘desperation’.

But try to get the capitalist to admit they created this situation…you’ll have better luck fitting a camel through the eye of a needle!

Which brings us to the second part of this little, er, ‘exercise in education’…that we have a justice system that isn’t centered on justice at all, all they give a shit about is ‘ownership’!

How can we share this world of our if our courts are only concerned about ownership rights?

This is another little conundrum the criminals don’t want you thinking about…

And he’s your old pal Gegner, polluting your mind with this ‘there’s no need to go there’ stuff!

IF YOU CAN’T DON’T ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS HOW WILL YOU ARRIVE AT THE RIGHT SOLUTION?

And that, good citizen, is the essence of the ‘capitalist trap’. By preventing you from asking the right questions, they totally avoid the issues they don’t want to address!

That’s why our politics are rife with non-issues like Gay rights and compulsory healthcare (and just because its compulsory by no means makes it ‘universal’…although there will, like here in Massachusetts, be a ‘free’ version that NO DOCTOR is required to accept. How’s that for You’re On Your Own. (Remember ‘yo-yo’?)

Did I mention this was going to end in a rant that takes us way off the reservation? I think I did.

Gay rights are important to gay people but we can only wonder why they have to petition the government to get them, nobody (except conservative politicians) really gives a fuck.

Which is to say under a ‘just’ government, sexual orientation wouldn’t even enter the equation.

And what would constitute a ‘just’ government to you, good citizen?

Would it be one that focused on who owned what they had NO RIGHT TO CLAIM FOR THEMSELVES or one that was focused on liberty and justice for ALL, with a focus on HUMAN RIGHTS, not OWNERSHIP RIGHTS!

So as you settle down to celebrate 236 years of, er, ‘Independence’, take a moment to consider how well that’s working out for the > One Percent…(since the rest of us are ‘non-persons’.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bad Joke

Greetings good citizen,

A quick check of the stock markets shows us another day of bleeding from the eyesockets for markets worldwide.

And what would one expect, the global economic desert isn’t restricted to just the labor markets!

The ‘source’ of our current worldwide financial collapse started twenty years after the end of the second world war, when the completion of rebuilding a bombed out Europe caused investment opportunities to ‘dry-up’.

This is the same source that created what became known as Happy Days for the sole survivor of that European war, the USA.

During the post war period, jobs went begging. There literally weren’t enough workers to keep things going.

This led to better benefits and the steady rise in living standards we all take for granted today.

But was this just a historic fluke? The short answer is no. We could have enjoyed lifestyle improvements introduced in the fifties long before then, but the same fucking greed heads who want to push us back to living in mud huts kept them from us.

They were ‘afraid they’d spoil us.’

With that thought firmly in mind we move on with today’s offering :

The title of Ferguson’s book certainly gets the reader’s attention, and he powerfully delivers the goods, with a scathing, detailed history of what led to the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Ferguson takes the reader on a revealing journey -- a sordid and corrupt trail that leads from the Pandora’s box of deregulation from 1980 through 2000, through the two major economic bubbles. The first was the dot.com stock market bubble of 2000, exacerbated by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Then came the much larger housing/mortgage bubble, fueled by sub-prime lending and the emergence of a host of new esoteric financial tools, meant to protect investments -- in fact, they did the opposite, provoking the financial crash.

The economic disaster was driven, Ferguson writes, by a combination of “very low interest rates, pervasive dishonesty through the financial system, massive lending fraud, speculation, demand for high yield securities, and not insignificantly, a squeezed American consumer desperate to maintain living standards, and told by everyone – including George Bush and Alan Greenspan, the brokers and the banks, that home borrowing was the way to do it.”

Along the way, Ferguson debunks the right-wing meme that Freddie and Fannie Mae caused the bubble; he holds the pure private sector responsible, especially its least regulated shadow banking parts.

As we can see, Reaganomics failed. All of the liberal hatred and gay bashing are intended to distract the rest of us from the failure of conservative ideology.

A conservative ideology so ingrained in the power structure that the media blindly protects it.

But wait a moment…what’s that you say? Reganomics WORKS?

It’s just that the outcome of Reganomics is so ‘anti-social’ that it would never sell if it weren’t camouflaged as something else!

Thus do we have the world’s greatest scam ever perpetrated upon a civilization.

And now that civilization is collapsing.

Which is neither here nor there good citizen because in the end the question remains; will YOU survive the collapse of civilization?

Yeah good citizen, at the end of the day the very same self-styled ‘pranksters’ are going to accuse you and I of failing to protect ourselves from being ‘scammed’.

Yup, this was all 'our fault'!

And somehow making it illegal to scam on such a scale would never occur our once fine legal minds…would it?

Free Speech is sacrosanct, you can’t muzzle Liberty (like you regularly muzzle the truth)…you despicable fuckers!

Which is to point out what you already know, we are dealing with unadulterated evil here, good citizen.

There is nothing to ‘redeem’ (although they would all offer us wealth beyond our wildest dreams if only we would spare their children…)

And it ain’t gonna happen because that wealth already belongs to ‘us’. It isn’t theirs to give.

Yet another thing they must laugh themselves breathless over.

Well, the day is rapidly approaching when they won’t be laughing much longer.

And they will learn the true meaning of the term 'being hunted to the ends of the earth’.

We have arrived at a ‘make or break’ point for our species. If we don’t turn our current situation around it will be ‘game over’.

And I, for one, actually like ‘us’ and think we have the potential to be great, someday.

But first we have to remove the few who think this whole thing is a joke from power.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Chutzpah!

Greetings good citizen,

Time to spend one of my ten NY Times ‘freebies’ for the month, if only because the story itself makes my blood boil.

Um, let me digress for a moment as we take a quick look at the decidedly disturbing phenomenon I’ve pointed to several times before and that is the Opening bell at the NYSE and the ‘miraculous’ recovery of global stock markets…

Fucking criminals!

You’d have to be blind not to see it. Opening bell in New York and stock markets around the globe go straight up…and this is AFTER J.P. Morgan announces a $2 BILLION dollar trading ‘loss’.

WTF!

Remember good citizen, the only thing the stock markets tells us today is how rich the already wealthy have decided to make themselves AT OUR EXPENSE!

Higher stock prices for them mean higher prices for us! (Worse, the nearly wiped out ‘real economy’ can’t take much more of this!)

Let us proceed with that which should shame us all

The evidence is easy to spot. An American company, Element Electronics, for example, has made flat-screen televisions for years at a factory in China but is now expanding in America. It recently opened a factory near Detroit that is producing the first televisions made in the United States by any company in years.

At General Electric, local tax breaks and a concessionary union contract contributed to G.E.’s decision to manufacture its latest electric water heater in Louisville, Ky. — instead of in China. Similarly, the Otis Elevator Company is moving production to a new factory in Florence, S.C., from a plant in Nogales, Mexico, and Master Lock has switched the manufacture of combination locks back to Milwaukee from China.

At P.A.M.A. Furniture, in Jamestown, N.C., the owning Pennisi family has begun to manufacture upholstered chairs and sofas “from scratch,” according to Anthony Pennisi, a vice president.

Until recently, the Pennisis imported chair frames from Italy and Indonesia, and finished them at the family’s Jamestown factory. Manufacturing everything here is more expensive, Mr. Pennisi said, and he has asked for government help. “I think we are a prime example of a small manufacturer producing a Made-in-America product and trying to survive,” he said.

This nation has become a HUGE economic desert…but it wasn’t always so.

Worse, a whole generation has grown up thinking Japanese cars are the best and imported anything was superior to domestic everything…

NOW, the very same fuckers responsible for putting the United States productive capacity on a barge for points unknown are back, crying for MORE government subsidies!

And guess where our witless politicians will carve these ‘lifelines’ from?

From our fucking social security!

Burn them! Burn them to the fucking ground!

Our civilization cannot tolerate this ceaseless onslaught from those already so rich they CAN’T spend it productively anymore!

Burn their factories and HANG their politicians!

OR we could just slap their little wrists and tell them to cut the shit…but you know what they’ll do then, don’t you?

They’ll declare WAR on us (and hijack our own military to fight it for them!)

So we’re back to burn their factories and hang their politicians…and anyone else stupid enough to stick their heads above ground!

Enough is enough, good citizen!

These people need ‘subsidies’ like the rest of us need an extra hole in our heads…something THEIR bought and paid for politicians would gladly provide for us, free of charge!

Somehow ‘dead constituents’ are so much easier to answer to…

(And it’s not like the fuckers haven’t killed off a bunch of us without really trying!)

Look a little closer at ‘stop loss’ and the ‘left-handed draft’ created by the economic desert these fuckers are responsible for!

Now they have the chutzpah to return to the US and, er, ‘ask’ for ‘subsidies’?

You know what the definition of chutzpah is, don’t you?

It is when somebody murders their own parents them petitions the court for mercy because they are suddenly ‘orphaned’…

Same thing!

And, as I point out above, where do you suppose our ‘out of control’ politicians are going to fund these ‘subsidies’ from?

They will continue to ‘cannibalize’ what’s left of the social safety net…never once being asked to explain why a Chinese dollar will buy four times what an American dollar will yet one American dollar will still buy SIX Chinese dollars!

WTF!

In the meantime, good citizen, all (except the mom & pop furniture maker at the bottom of the list) are all fortune one hundred companies that pay virtually zero taxes!

Um, dunno about the electronic company but you can bet their ‘parent company’ is globally ranked.

Which is to point out (AGAIN) that the individuals who run these companies ALREADY HAVE more than they can rationally spend…so we’re subsidizing them, why?

Oh how sad is it good citizen that I find myself ‘bitching’ when our overlords (having read the handwriting on the ‘energy wall’) are trying to sneak back into a market they cruelly abandoned decades ago?

Yeah that’s me…a crank who is never satisfied!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Currency Wars

Greetings good citizen,

Asshole central (better known as the ‘corporate media’) expects you to believe the next downward leg in the completely fabricated ‘financial crisis’ (which is pushing what passes for our economy into the abyss) is that we are on the verge of a ‘currency war’. (Read 'class war.')

Left to our imaginations is whether or not the powers that be are prepared to admit that there is no such place as ‘the cheaper there’.

BUT, to admit such a thing is to admit to ‘currency manipulation’, the only vehicle capable of creating such a place.

IF they admit to currency manipulation, they are admitting that they screwed tens of millions of workers out of their jobs and their pensions.

We don’t live in the middle of a huge ‘economic desert’ for nothing…

Cui bono? [Who benefited?] The fuckers who ‘own’ commerce [and to a lesser degree their ‘subordinates’ along with their bought and paid for politicians, who negotiated their ‘trade agreements’ for them] the rest of us took a sharp stick in the eye!

I can’t ‘paint the target’ any clearer than that…while the bought and paid for media still feigns ignorance as to ‘who’ is responsible for the collapse of…

It’s a two-edged sword. On one side we have the financial system and on the other is civilization itself.

Because of the way the current (predatory) system is set up, you can’t have one without the other.

Whereas, EVERY (viable) replacement system has finance as an internal function of commerce (If we are to correct the imbalances created by the debt driven system.)

There’s your ‘acid test’ good citizen, if a proposed alternative operating system is based on credit at all, it is NOT viable.

Credit is how the ‘fuckers’ get something for nothing. It’s also how YOU get fucked. THEY buy on credit and NEVER pay it back but YOU can’t pull off the same deal!

Isn’t it nice to have ‘friends’ [read: lackeys] who not only interpret the law but also get to decide when the law has been broken?

Welcome to hell good citizen! (Well, hell for YOU anyway! The ‘do as I say and not as I do’ crowd readily acknowledges that this is {for them, for now} ‘Heaven’)

Since there is nothing we can do about the FED HEAD turning our currency into confetti in a brazen plan to enrich the already wealthy at our expense. What should we be watching for?

[If you’ve been paying attention you will have noticed that the principle effect of QE2 is to elevate ‘stock prices’.]

Understand, the problem with the global economy is that most of the money is, er, ‘trapped’ in the upper reaches of the income distribution, leaving the debt enslaved working class without enough money to purchase necessities.

So why does ‘Bonehead Ben’ think making the rich richer is going to ‘cure’ this ‘problem’?

Since YOU aren’t going to get ‘fat, stupid and happy’ from your stock portfolio, the ‘heads up’ implied here is to prepare for a massive surge in the price of EVERYTHING.

Imagine having to chase your next meal down with a stick and killing it…

AND if you’re lucky enough to already have matches, you can probably scrounge up enough wood to build a cook fire…for now. (Because you won’t be the ONLY ONE who will be ‘economizing’.

Given that it is now late fall across much of the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll need wood for more than just cooking…but so will a lot of other people!

You’d better plan on hooking up with a few of your more violent neighbors so you can get a piece of the truck hijacking action (while it lasts.)

There’s nothing like a sudden increase in the probability of getting killed to reduce the number of bastards crazy enough to drive a rig over the largely unprotected roads.

The last loads to be driven over the roads will be driven by cops, escorted by dozens of their ‘peers’…not that this will save them.

Starving people are VERY resourceful! (Even more so when their families are starving too.)

(It’s always sooo ‘cheery’ to read my constant grim predictions. Understand, once the killing starts, there won’t be a ‘lot’ of supply convoys. The ‘shortages’ in the destination communities will keep what remains of the police force busy until they stop reporting for duty…which will be sooner than anyone thinks.

Naturally, once supplies stop coming to you, your need for them doesn’t cease…So, you’ll be forced to go after ‘what you need’ from wherever it can be found!

Funny how the ‘marauder’ game is also a two edged sword, some days you are the marauder and other days you are the marauder’s victim!

Thus do we once again see the significance of ‘strength through numbers’.

Naturally you must be wondering if there is any situation that DOESN’T lead to the collapse of civilization and I’d say ‘yes’, BUT, the path that leads to salvation is ‘narrow’ indeed.

And, as I pointed out yesterday, it is usually ‘sabotaged’ before it gets off the ground.

Why do the ‘self-interested’ make such good leaders? Because they KNOW what they want and they are RELENTLESS in their pursuit of it!

You could even point out that they are more than a little ‘reckless’ (considering where we are today and WHO is responsible for it…)

Finding a leader who can see beyond the end of their own nose is a difficult challenge indeed, but it can be done.

The problem is the ones who can’t have a habit of killing anyone who stands in the way of what they want…and that is usually the one who can see the consequences of their actions.

Thus do most revolutions fail.

But not to worry good citizen because in this case we are going to have no choice but to revolt!

I mention the ‘doomed’ aspect of most revolutions to make you aware that there are wolves among you, don’t trust them.

Um, and by the way, this QE thing isn’t going to end well.

Hyper-inflation, here we come!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Insult to injury...

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The Rule of Man

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to ‘Bizarro world’ where the relentless search for ‘income streams’ has suddenly made all manners of previously prohibited activity, er, ‘desirable’.

Congress is looking into ‘legalizing’ both Pot and Gambling so they can tax the both of them!

Isn’t this the ‘Disaster Capitalism’ Naomi Klein warned us about?

Which is to ask the more pertinent question of how legalizing socially questionable behavior is supposed to ‘stabilize’ our society?

Back-up…

I got no quarrel with pot (even if I don’t prefer it myself) nor do I ‘disapprove’ of gambling, as a pass time, for fun, where nobody gets hurt. I would strongly support legislation that made gambling losses uncollectable.

If you are dissatisfied with the gratification gained by ‘winning’, money isn’t going to make you any ‘happier’. Nor is ignorance or stupidity ‘justification’ for forcing poverty upon anyone!

Yet our, er, ‘mentally challenged’ legislators are having their feet held to the fire to pass legislation that will make a bad situation even worse!

Um, how many of you think it is a good idea to ‘legalize’ another way to operate under the influence? Yeah, people do it anyway but unlike booze, pot doesn’t stink. You can be stoned to the bone and not, except for bloodshot eyes, show any, er, evidence.

And blood-shot eyes could just as easily be hay fever or one of a million other ‘irritants’.

Worse, you can pick up pot in a blood test…if you smoked it anytime in the past month. How much difficulty will this create when it comes to proving the operator was incapacitated ‘at the time’?

Then there is the other side of the coin…doesn’t taxing more income streams just hand more ammunition to the ‘anti-tax’ Republicans?

You can just see it now, they will be ‘howling’ that pot farmers can’t expand their business because of the onerous taxes being levied on them!

Worse, the chiseling fucks will use the tax issue to ‘justify’ importing weed from cheaper labor pools, putting us right back to square one, job wise!

AND, don’t for a minute confuse ‘legalized possession’ with legalized sourcing. If you aren’t a ‘licensed’ pot farmer it will still be ‘illegal’ for YOU to grow your own weed!

You can screw with people’s lives, even throw them in a cesspool if you can turn a profit at it, but you can’t screw with a capitalist’s ‘income stream’. That is what ‘The Law’ exists to protect!

And if you don’t find that deeply disturbing you are fucked up in the head!

We keep bumping up against the same disturbing proposition repeatedly good citizen and that is the one about whether commerce exists to serve society or if it exists to serve those who have laid claim to it?

Ironically, those who ‘volunteered’ (by petitioning the people’s ‘guardian’ (government)) to ‘serve society’ have (unsurprisingly) ended up serving themselves instead (at the expense of those they claim to serve!)

Just because our elected officials have ‘turned a blind eye’ to this social responsibility doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

Here’s an amazing concept for you, ‘the will of the people IS the law!’

We are ‘denied’ our will when it comes down to determining precisely ‘who’ speaks for the people. The fools we elect CAN’T speak for ‘the people’ because they refuse to even talk to us! (They speak with campaign contributors only…and that is hardly ‘representative’.)

No good citizen, there is but one ‘solution’ to this conundrum, we must remove the law beyond the reach of the self-interested and we can only do that via direct democracy!

As long as the powerful have the power to manipulate the justice system, the rule of law will remain superceded by the rule of man…and I shall suffer no individual as my master!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner