Reflexive (knee-jerk)

Greetings good citizen,

It seems like only yesterday the ‘great communicator’ (who was hard pressed to stay awake during cabinet meetings) was telling us, after 220 years, that we had finally arrived at ‘Morning in America’ (we should dig the bastard up and hang him, just on general principles!)

Do you know what the last election proved? The people who bought the ‘Morning in America’ horseshit (the so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’) are all DEAD!

And by today’s conservo-whacko standards, St. Ronnie would be a flaming liberal!

Which brings us to the shortest day ever and where we are now, something akin to ‘Midnight in the garden of supreme evil…’

Our utter lawlessness at the top has reached crisis proportions, thus do the ‘fiscally responsible’ (read self-interested thieves) propose we:

1. “Fix” means cut: When they say “fix” Social Security, they mean cut Social Security. Fixers want to convince the public that a well-managed, hugely popular program that does not add to the deficit (it’s self-funded) is somehow in crisis and requires intervention in the form of various cutting schemes.

2. “Reform” means rob. When the say “reform” the tax code, they mean “make taxes even lower for the rich.” The wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes in the United States, which is a major reason there is a large deficit in the first place.

3.“Bipartisan” means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens. But the group is really just a coalition for the greedy, unpatriotic rich.

4. “Concern” means covet. There was a time, a couple of generations ago, when business leaders would not dare to go public with their desire to increase income inequality and stick it to hard-working Americans

5. “Fiscal conservative” means economically confused. Longtime Wall Street executive Steve Rattner, one of Obama’s auto bailout czars, has been using his influence to attract tycoons from the financial industry to the Fix the Debt movement.

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that’s a tough sell when you’re advocating policies that mainly benefit…yourself.

No irony should be lost on the fact that our failure to prosecute the criminals responsible for the first global depression 80 years ago has led to the criminal looting of our civilization today, unfortunately labeled as ‘bank bailouts’.

Well good citizen, we’ve been 'bailing out the banks' for the past five years (while basically gutting the global economy) and we’re still not done.

When do you suppose it will be time to shut down the banking industry and institute a more responsible system?

Will that be never (because nobody is ‘smart enough’ to figure out a different way? Or so the criminally rich would have you believe.)

Step one, before we shut down the banks is we have to lock all of the criminals up, starting with the ones in charge of our so called ‘justice system’.

In a bizarre juxtaposition, possessing a law degree will bar you from ‘practicing law’, actually ‘practicing’ what you have been taught will become an ‘exile offense.’ (Because the law is the people’s domain and NO ONE shall claim to speak for all of the people! Which is a direct violation of the human anti-exploitation law.

Understand that ‘lawyering’ is something most politicians do and as a profession is almost universally loathed.

Again, while some make a good living for themselves, most rue the day they decided studying law was a good idea.

All they have to show for that decision is a mountain of student debt.

(Which collides ‘face first’ with the notion that ‘more education’ is the solution to our massive unemployment problem and desperately unbalanced economy.)

Just because you study to become something doesn’t mean there will be a (good paying) job available after you graduate (and wasn’t that the whole point of going to college in the first place?)

Your ‘hard won’ degree will likely get you a job…as a barrista at Starbucks…where the tips (like the coffee) suck.

So it will be a doubly bitter pill to slave your life away, scraping and saving to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach (forget marriage, neither of you can afford it) only to reach retirement age to find that the cupboard is empty.

Yup, after they ‘reduce the deficit’ (not by raising taxes or cutting the trillions they are spending on drone warfare…no!) by shredding social security and pauperizing those who have spent their whole lives paying into the system.

What do you suppose they will do with the ‘savings’?

They’ll pocket them of course!

And they’ll flip you the bird if you say anything about it!

(Are we testing these motherfuckers yet?)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Crisis

Greetings good citizen,

Sick to death of riding the media see-saw that tells you the ‘recovery’ is chugging along with one breath while reporting there are no jobs with the next?

As much as they’d love to have it both ways we all know it is one or the other…

Here are two headlines from today’s Business section:

Jobs Few, Grads Flock to Unpaid Internships
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

In a weak job market, many college graduates are taking unpaid internships that fail to deliver on their promises of experience by offering little more than menial work.

A Gateway to a Career Through Volunteering
By EILENE ZIMMERMAN

Public service work can be a gateway to careers and gives new graduates time to consider options and learn about themselves.

Geez Louise, what’s wrong with this picture?

Working for no pay sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

I completely understand the ‘paying it forward’ concept and getting a leg up on the competition by making yourself the best candidate for a position that may or may not materialize sometime in the fairly murky future…maybe.

Which assumes Mom and Dad can afford to put you up indefinitely (even putting off their own retirement) until YOU get ‘situated’.

Works for Bill and Linda…probably works for Warren as well (heck didn’t he already gift HIS kids with a billion a piece?)

Naturally the part that sticks in one’s craw here is the idea of making oneself ‘valuable’ to an employer (despite having gone hundreds of thousands of dollars into hock to learn a skill that numbnuts is unwilling to pay you full measure for!)

I mean. What’s the point? Why not just go out there and start your own venture?

But wait a minute…can’t do that can you…because there’s no such thing as ‘capitalist utopia’.

There isn’t enough ‘market share’ to go around…

Which presents us with another damning problem…the extreme ‘mismanagement’ of the income distribution.

How many workers does it take to make a single billionaire?

Because, believe it or not, there is a ‘co-relation’…dependent on what you’re selling.

Certain endeavors are incapable of creating even a single billionaire, which is why most billionaires have their fingers a many pies.

And without exception, ALL Billionaires are only billionaires ‘on paper’, it’s their stock holdings that make they, er, ‘rich’…and we know what a sham the stock market is.

Forgive the ‘tangent’ good citizen but very subject of the ‘uber wealthy’ makes my blood boil…in ‘a just society’ they wouldn’t exist at all!

They truly are ‘slavers’.

It is easy to see that very existence of the ‘privileged few’ is fostered by a corrupt justice system!

In this respect, the US has been a fraud from the outset! (Although it could be argued that the founders truly didn’t know better and it was a major victory that they resisted the traditional route of naming a new king.)

Yes, conditions were ‘different’ two and a half centuries ago and we can’t be too hard on the comparatively ignorants who established what has since devolved into a cluster-fuck.

Methinks the fact that the US is the OLDEST established government on the planet is a damning indictment in itself.

And the ‘status quo’ really doesn’t like the idea of changing horses with such an ‘enlightened’ public to ‘win over’.

Nope, won’t do at all.

It used to take days to learn what we now get instantly.

The old ‘too bad we didn’t know that last month’ worked out quite handily for the founders way back when.

Today they have to ‘buy’ silence and it has become quite expensive.

Most ‘information workers’ are kept in check with their paychecks. The editors play hardball with them and dictate, quite specifically, what they are looking for.

If a reporter want to keep their paycheck coming they will do what the guy who has the power to squash them tells them to do.

But sometimes the story ‘gets away’ from how the spin-doctors want it handled…and now we have a game of blackmail on our hands.

Not that there is a chance in hell of a story getting past the copy editors…but (and largely despite ‘syndication’) there are still other outlets who would be glad to ‘scoop’ the major players.

The problem is even those ‘fringe’ players have to be careful of what they run with.

Most of what you hear is ‘speculation’, but it is ‘sanctioned speculation’. It’s what the players WANT YOU TO KNOW (actually ‘think’.) It doesn’t have to be true, it only needs to be ‘credible’.

Thus are you always the ‘dupe’, lied to at every turn with no possibility of escape…or so they would have you think!

Rewind with me back to the beginning, good citizen.

Unpaid internships and volunteering WILL NOT solve the ‘employment crisis’ our entire civilization is faced with!

Our civilization is based on cheap and abundant energy, the problem we have now is the cheap and abundant energy of the future doesn’t have a reliable point of sale (meaning the status quo can’t go forward!)

How do you ‘extend’ the reign of the existing order?

By eliminating as much of the ‘surplus population’ as possible…

Don’t ask chuckle-head how he will sort out the surplus from the valuable, he will likely answer something as simplistic as how many commas they have next to their ‘net worth’ estimate…or whether or not they even have a Dunn & Bradstreet rating.

Stupid is as stupid does…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner