Tinman 2

Greetings good citizen,

I feel good today (despite the gods having gone mad!) Which seems to be today’s theme. Yesterday I complained about society losing its values, today we will take in the leading headlines and scratch our heads, wondering what ‘our betters’ were thinking…because it is obvious they weren’t!

Robot Makers Spread Global Gospel of Automation
By JOHN MARKOFF

Manufacturers of robots and similar machines gathered in Chicago, casting automation as an indispensable engine of economic growth.

Read the last line and marvel over the twit who stated it! Employers LOVE robots, they will work around the clock without taking a break, doing whatever it is they were designed to do, until they break.

The fly in this ointment is a society filled with robots needs nothing but the energy to power them, there is no ‘economy’ for robots.

Do we really need to ask HOW STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE to not understand that?

And yeah, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy kicking the capitalists in the shins every chance I get!

Because it is capitalist stupidity that gives us stories like this:

BUSINESS
Boeing's Battery Problems Cast Doubt on Appraisal of New Technologies
By JAD MOUAWAD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

The 787's difficulties have raised questions about how regulators certify new technology and how they balance advances in design and engineering with safety.

Hold everything! I thing we found the twit who think robots are the answer to the automation problem [idiots!]

Was it an accident or by design that the corporate owned media runs the ‘perfect’ follow up story next?

Share of the Work Force in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low, 11.3%
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the percentage of American workers in labor unions fell to 11.3 percent last year, the lowest since 11.2 percent in 1916.

That’s the other thing employers LOVE about robots! They don’t join unions! So the union isn’t in their face demanding more humane working conditions and that demand they really hate, more wages!

Although it has become the hallmark of capitalist stupidity that people who can’t afford your products won’t buy them, so cutting heads when sales drop is not an ‘effective strategy’.

Oh, and since robots don’t get paychecks (or benefit packages) they also don’t buy your products!

Bottom line. The same people who can no longer afford to pay for your products will eventually STEAL them…but you’re insured, right?

And when the heads you’ve cut burn your plant down, same answer, right? (Naturally, you re-open in China!) But your new employee/customers won’t be able to afford our products either so what will you do?

Same thing as these guys?

Nokia Shows a Profit, but Shares Drop
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN 50 minutes ago

Investor hopes were raised when the Finnish cellphone maker said it would turn a profit, but sales of its flagship Lumia were less than expected.

The homeless don’t need a phone, nobody they want to talk to that isn’t within arm’s reach…which is the fertile soil revolutions are sown in.

How sad is it good citizen that we lack a unifying ideology? [Like A Simple Plan?]

Like a ticking time bomb, how long do you think we have before this bad boy blows?

Euro Watch
Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone
By REUTERS

While the euro zone economy moved a step closer to recovery this month, Spain’s unemployment rate surged to 26 percent.

Sure looks to me like that headline is missing an ‘s’, should read ’points’ but hey, I just cut and paste, ya know?

What’s up with the mixed message? On one hand they are, er, ‘asserting’ that conditions in the euro-zone are ‘improving’ then they point to sky-high unemployment and shrug…

Did I mention our civilization is SEVERELY ‘mismanaged’?

These people shouldn’t just be fired, they should be made to walk the plank into shark infested water (but that would constitute cruelty towards sharks!)

No living organism can eat that many ‘empty calories’ without being adversely effected.

I am no Luddite good citizen. In many cases automation is a larger boon to the employee than it is to the employer.

What I am pointing to is SOME things can tolerate automation and others CAN’T. Wisdom needs to be exercised rather than idiotic profit/loss ratios.

Our civilization is collapsing because society has become unbalanced due to the reckless/relentless pursuit of profits.

When profits supercede people without mitigating factors it is beyond destructive, it is catastrophic!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Immigrant's Song

Greetings good citizen,

As predicted, the Dow has handed back the irrational 175 point gain it made a little more than a week ago and is currently plumbing new depths as the emptiness that is US productive capacity remains hollow.

But fear not good citizen as we see from this ‘fluff piece’ written to demonstrate to the rest of us ungrateful slobs how foreign nationals still have the ‘drive’ to make lemonade with the lemon that is ‘The American Dream’.

PHOENIX — Hussein Al Hamka is going to farm his famous cucumbers on a 15-acre vacant lot in the heart of this city, where nearly half of all lots sit empty and unused.

If his piece of fertilized dirt had a price tag, it would cost much more than he could ever dream of affording; the lot is valued at $25 million, or at least it was before the housing market collapsed and it was left undeveloped. To survive, Mr. Hamka, 50, an Iraqi refugee three years into his life in the United States, grows and sells cucumbers just like the ones he ate in his home country.

On Friday, Fidele Komezusenge, 25, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, picked rocks from the loose soil in the raised beds next to Mr. Hamka’s. Mr. Komezusenge was planning to plant carrot and cabbage seeds, his first farming foray since arriving in the United States in June. Nearby, Safala Chhetri, 50, a refugee from Bhutan who arrived in 2009, wavered between planting spinach or kale, but then decided to give onions a second chance.

Left unstated is where the time to tend these garden patches is coming from (are they all unemployed, like half of all working aged US citizens) or do they work the night shift at the local convenience store?

Then there is the other issue, only briefly touched upon by the vegetable garden writer…what was the lot BEFORE it was abandoned?

(Did they house the shops that Wal-Mart drove out of business?)

Can’t say as I’ve never been to Phoenix.

But it’s the same old story, everywhere you go.

What (like so many things) ‘disturbs’ me about this story is the clear evidence it provides regarding the ‘pauperization’ of our civilization.

There was an article that I should have jumped on yesterday, an article explaining (actually debunking) the conservative position that we don’t possess enough trained manufacturing personnel to fill the open jobs.

I am living proof that the problem is NOT the lack of personnel but the unwillingness of the employer to pay for that talent!

Just yesterday I was passed over for a job I low-balled! It can’t be the ‘experience’, I’m a twenty year man and 3 times a foreman! (not only can I do the job, I can run it as well!)

They just didn’t want to pay…

Which reflects on our current situation.

Do you KNOW why our economy is ‘stalled’?

Too many of us only earn enough to keep us alive. This excludes us from being able to participate in and thereby 'expand' the economy...our other needs go 'unfulfilled'. (This is what happens when (idiot) ‘entrepreneurs’ decide they are going to become billionaires too!)

They screw their employees until they are forced to close because NOBODY can afford to work for them anymore.

Worse, good citizen, the well-trodden path has a name. Do you know what that name is, when the vast majority of the population lives in abject poverty while a, er, ‘fortunate few’ live in the ‘lap of luxury’?

When this happens they call that place a Banana Republic.

Well don’t look now. Worse, the people responsible for this phenomenon honestly believe it is not their fault…(they just played the game better than everyone else!)

And THAT’S part of the problem too…considering the very real business of life ‘a game’ where winning is accomplished by pauperizing all of the other players…

I’m going to stop right here so you can ponder the wisdom laid down for you to absorb…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Scuttled

Greetings good citizen,

The unemployment numbers are out and it looks like both sides are claiming victory.

Now the same photo Alternet used to crow about the drop was used by USA Today to advertise that the drop is mainly due to people dropping out of the workforce (combined with exhausting their UE benefits.)

Um, personally speaking it’s been a year and a half now and I’m still unemployed…but I chalk that up to ‘over fifty disease’.

Sadly I cannot pass for forty anything anymore (despite having a full head of hair!)

That said, it could be worse

I’m not exactly punching the panic button and we all know that thanks to strict environmental laws, Californians pay a premium for their gasoline.

But if you follow that sort of thing the price per barrel has been falling but the price at the pump has remained stubbornly high…a bit unusual for and election year, wouldn’t you think?

Which brings us to today’s top story, the unemployment rate

Since Obama took office, Republicans have sought to game the unemployment numbers at the state and local levels by forcing layoffs of public employees through anti-union austerity measures. According to an analysis by Moody's Analytics (reported by the New York Times in June), unemployment figures would be a percentage point lower were it not for all the public-sector layoffs.

Understand good citizen, the unemployment rate fell two tenths of a percent. As most experts would point out, the data is within the ‘margin of error’ where there might not be ANY drop when the figures are revised next month.

But still we have this ‘over-reaction’ when the rest of our civilization is crumbling all around us.

Let’s take a closer look at how our civilization is collapsing.

And this is something you’ll NEVER see in a ‘presidential debate’.
Now, the cost of living keeps increasing while the average worker’s purchasing power keeps decreasing…meaning kids are getting started on building their lives later than they used to.

To the point of do you know ANYBODY who IS NOT in a ‘fertility program?’

Short answer, no. because they’re all waiting until their forty to have their first kid…which has produced a bumper crop of kids with food allergies!

But you don’t hear about these ‘tragedies’ in the corporate owned media because people are ‘choosing’ to start families later.

And then we come to the sky-high cost of healthcare…and them fucking fertility treatments ain’t cheap!

But wait, aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? Why are people choosing to wait to start their families?

Well, partially because they are staying in college until they’re thirty getting an advanced degree so they can get a ‘good job’ that will keep them ‘financially secure’.

Something that a lot of kids today are discovering has become an exercise in futility.

These days you can stay in school until you’re fifty and still not have enough ‘qualifications’ to land a secure job!

Because those jobs are going to the ‘cheaper there’, especially if they can be done ‘over a wire’.

So, good citizen and future refugee from the economic desert…what are you going to do knowing that the deck is stacked against you?

Start your own country out in the middle of the ocean?

Let’s flip back a second to those fertility treatments and the, er, ‘stress’ it puts on a woman’s reproductive system.

Again you don’t see it discussed but the facts are that many woman who undergo fertility treatments also happen to contract cancer at a much higher rate.

But your insurance company turns a blind eye to that, hell, there’s good money in the for profit treatment of cancer.

Which is another reason why medical professionals doubt there will EVER be a cure for cancer…and it’s the same you WON’T see a cure for the common cold, there’s more money to be made treating the symptoms!

Did I mention that capitalism was PREDATORY?

The bastards would rather get paid a hundred thousand dollars treating you than collect ten thousand for curing you!

Um, I’d like to think you see where I’m going with this.

If we keep on pricing decent people out of the gene pool the only ones left will be the defective ‘hot house plants’ born to the thieves and criminals!

Yessir, those who get theirs by sealing yours.

I will once again put in my usual pitch for the human anti-exploitation law and all that it entails…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Disclosure: Both of Gegner’s children were conceived naturally but more than half of his nieces and nephews got their start in a test tube…just saying.

Economics or Law?

Greetings good citizen,

Watched Doomsday Preppers on National Geographic last night, contemplating the whole time how much of this (nonsense) was due to the channel being owned by Newscorp?

More interestingly, the preppers themselves were revealed to be conservo-whackos (by dint of their bumperstickers, never mind being STUPID enough to go on national TV with their so-called ‘secret stashes’ of weapons, food and cash.)

And these people did the term ‘conservo-loonie’ proud! They were doing it all wrong and were being praised for their efforts by the show’s ‘independent judges’.

Actually, I am personally thankful for the preppers efforts, they will become the supermarkets that will provide temporary relief from eating whatever you can chase down with a stick and beat to death after the collapse.

For people obsessed with cop shows they appear to be completely ignorant of just how easy it is to get ‘the drop’ on somebody.

And after they tear that gun out of your surprised hands you only have moments left to live…and those will be the moments it takes for you to give up the location and how to disable the booby traps protecting your stash.

And you WILL tell them because YOU want to live.

Heck, comply quickly enough and they just might decide to spare your life…if only to have you take some of the risk out of hunting down future supplies.

Not all ‘hoarders’ will be ‘pushovers’ and as time goes on the job will only get more difficult.

But that is not the topic of today’s post.

Like the headline says, it’s still about the economy…

“This is one of the reasons wages haven’t been growing,” he said. “People are taking jobs they didn’t take in the past, moving from sectors like construction into jobs at lower-paying, big-box retailers.”

There were a few slivers of encouragement in Friday’s report. Using the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes part-time workers who want to work full time as well as individuals who are not looking for jobs but indicate they want to work, the unemployment rate fell to 14.7 percent from 15 percent.

The pace of government layoffs seems to be slowing, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School and director of the school’s Center for Human Resources. As the private sector added 103,000 jobs in August, governments cut just 7,000. That is down from 21,000 in July, and well below the average of 16,000 reductions a month since March. Federal employment actually increased by 3,000 in August, to 2.8 million, the first monthly increase since February 2011.

There was only slight relief for the long-term unemployed, defined as workers out of a job for at least 27 weeks. Their ranks fell by 152,000 to just over five million in August, and they account for 40 percent of all unemployed people. Among workers with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate fell to 12 percent from 12.7 percent, but that remains far above the 4.1 percent unemployment level for workers with a college degree or more.

Still, there were plenty of other signs the economy was still treading water. Average hourly earnings paid by private employers ticked downward by 1 cent in August, to $23.52, while the length of the typical private sector workweek remained flat at 34.4 hours. Both measures have barely budged from where they were six months ago.

This slightly longer than generally permissible snippet was taken from the tail end of the article.

Funny to see all of the ‘hands in motion' here as they examine the public sector side by side with the private.

The Feds can ‘shazaam’ money and hire as many people as they want…below this and government is totally dependent on tax revenue and ‘grants’ for specific purposes.

City and states are laying off because their tax base has been gutted by the global race to the bottom.

No employers means no employees living in their once prosperous communities.

You’d think politicians would want to avoid that sort of thing but apparently we have a new breed running for office…

A breed that knows there is a lot to be had for those willing to do as their told without asking any questions.

Sadly, this new breed thinks their new masters will protect them from having their necks stretched for treason…and this is totally untrue!

If it suits these masters purposes, they will have them strung up themselves! (if only to buy themselves a few more precious minutes of ‘run time’.)

But I digress…it’s not about being ‘sold out’ (although in the end it is ALL about that!) It is about the badly broken economy the massive unemployment problem the idiot capitalists have created!

Here’s a simple proposition I’m sure everybody can understand. When your commerce system excludes ‘too many’ people, your civilization collapses.

For all of this 8%, 12%, hell, 5% unemployment, the REAL rate is closer to 50%!

Worse, you can’t tolerate a 50% unemployment rate and expect your society to remain cohesive.

For too long the working have been taught to despise the unemployed as lazy freeloaders despite being the victims of predatory capitalism.

So when non-workers achieve parity with workers a conflict erupts.

And guess what else has been bubbling right under the surface of this cauldron? The ‘I can get any one of those people out there to do YOUR job!’ threat.

Coupled with the other famous taunt: Be happy YOU even HAVE a job!

Now the unthinking conservo-whacko worker doesn’t realize the guy in the street doesn’t want HIS job…well, I think you can see where this whole thing is headed.

[He wants something that doesn’t exist, a job of his own!]

They don’t say ‘blood in the streets’ for nothing…although, supposedly, we have a robust ‘justice system’ to prevent things like this from ‘getting out of hand’.

Boy, are they gonna be surprised!

As I have stated repeatedly, we don’t have a ‘money problem’ (because money is fiction, albeit a very dangerous one) we have one pisser of a legal problem! (with criminals in charge of the justice system.)

Thanks for letting me inside our head,

Gegner

CHUMP

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow opened down 150 points, supposedly on, er, ‘tepid’ job numbers. Talk about hell, the economy needs to add almost 200,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth so what, precisely, is ‘tepid’ about falling 120,000 short?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the civilian labor force continues to grow every day whether there are jobs for those workers or not.

So what are we to make of headlines like this:

Job Growth Remains Tepid; No Dent in Rate of Unemployed
By CATHERINE RAMPELL 2 minutes ago

The economy added 80,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, which is not enough to significantly reduce the backlog of unemployed workers. The jobless rate remained at 8.2 percent.

Economix Blog: Reaction to June Jobs Report, in Tweets 8:54 AM ET
Economix Blog: Another (Seasonally Adjusted) Slowdown 10:40 AM ET

Ms. Rampell is no ‘rookie’, she’s been around long enough to know these figures suck BUT the people who cut her paycheck don’t want to upset the people they work for/with so we, er, ‘put lipstick on the pig’ and pretend it’s a poodle.

Which, in her defense, she KNOWS the economy has been ‘falling behind’ for the past four years. However, the people who cut the paychecks want YOU to believe things are getting better so the ‘shortfall’ that 80,000 jobs represents for a labor force already in excess of 230 MILLION; over a 30 day period really is a farce!
Thus do we end up with reports like the one below:

Wall Street Lower After Jobs Report
By REUTERS 52 minutes ago

The main stock indexes were down about 1 percent after the Labor Department said employers hired at a weaker-than-anticipated pace in June.

Is it fair at this point in the game to parse ‘weaker than anticipated’ to ‘weaker than hoped for’ after so many missed expectations by so-called experts?

Once again we are cautioned that monkeys throwing darts would be correct more often than these apparently clueless experts are!

Which brings us to my favorite ‘hobby horse’ (that I continue to flay relentlessly) the labor force continues to rise while the labor force ‘participation rate’ continues to fall.

What do you suppose we should make of these circumstances, good citizen?

Who do you suppose is doing the cha-cha on this particular batch of the Grapes of Wrath?

Some of you would opine that it is me and you wouldn’t be completely wrong. I didn’t grow the grapes nor did I nurture them, I am merely pointing to what has always been there.

And, ironically, that is exactly how those who do ‘nurture’ these gross inequities in our society defend the practice, they’ve always been there!

Like the question of ridding ourselves of them is somehow pointless.

But they pooh, pooh that, preferring to imply that darker and more evil inequities are waiting behind these so called minor injustices to fill any possible gap created by eliminating them.

It’s the old ‘devil you know’ ploy.

Well good citizen, the fuse on this ticking time bomb resides in the ‘participation rate’. The greater the number of people left with zero prospects for the future, the higher the likelihood of a catastrophic failure of the system.

The system isn’t designed to ‘warehouse’. It is designed to ‘exploit and dispose’.

The hyper-extension of unemployment benefits coupled with the dramatic increase in federal food assistance is, quite naturally ‘unsustainable’.

But they can do it because all ‘money’ is ‘funny’ (literally meaningless.)

And while it disturbs some of you to read me repeating this message, it doesn’t dilute the interpretation you fear.

What interpretation is that, good citizen?

That ‘work’ is an exercise in futility…you don’t work for YOU, you work for THEM, making YOU the CHUMP!

Do the ones at the top ‘work’?

NO, they don’t need to because fools like you do everything for them!

But wait good citizen! The icing on this true ‘shit sundae’ is when our betters exclaim (proudly in fact) that this is THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS!

THEIR ‘God’ put YOU here to SERVE THEM!

Is it any wonder an increasing number of us have no use for ‘spirit in the sky’?

Worse, it goes a long way towards explaining why these people consistently treat ‘The Help’ like shit…because THEIR GOD made YOU to be ‘disposable/replaceable’.

Now, after reading this, let me ask you.

Don’t you feel like walking right up to one of these smug bastards and straightening them out with a slap upside the head (with a brick in your hand)?

(And it goes without saying that you’d be foolish not to finish the job by crushing their skull with the brick on the down swing…)

Just a little smirk for you as we ease on into the weekend,

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

A Fire Bell in the Night...

Greetings good citizen,

After yesterday’s, er, ‘delays’ I will endeavor to be more timely with today’s post.

I’d like to begin today’s offering by being abundantly clear that there is NO VERSION, however benign, (which is, naturally, an oxymoron) of capitalism that is capable of repairing our badly broken social model.

As I have stated before (repeatedly), the ‘unemployment problem’ is a mechanical one that can be fixed, partly by adjusting the workweek and partly by restructuring the payroll process.

In fact the biggest ‘fix’ to overall ‘social inequity’ lies in the Human Anti-exploitation Law.

How many of you believe we successfully ended slavery in 1863, here in the US?

You would be dead wrong.

Outlawing the ‘bill of sale’ merely made ‘Massa’ no longer responsible for the welfare of the, er, ‘named property.’

It is now up to the property to maintain itself…and if he/she is incapable of doing that on what Massa pays that is NOT Massa’s problem, it is and remains to this day the PROPERTY’S PROBLEM!

Some of you will object to the ‘broad brush’ being used here and you’d be correct, not ALL employers are penny-pinching skinflints. I’ll even take that one step further and ‘opine’ that most employers would relish the idea of being able to brag about how well they treat their people…but Wall Street won’t let them!

Most of you are unaware of this, er, ‘historic event’ but nearly thirty years ago there was a Supreme Court decision handed down on that controversial subject of ‘the purpose of commerce’.

Worse, most of you remain ignorant of what the Supreme Court decided.

Ironically, this goes back to the days (presidency) of Ronnie Reagan and a supposedly ‘liberal leaning’ Supreme Court…although I believe Ronnie had just succeeded in putting an end to that liberal bias due to the death of a noted liberal jurist that King Ronnie got to replace.

But enough suspense…in fact you SHOULD KNOW this.

For reasons unknown the issue of the ‘purpose of commerce’ had again been dragged before the Supreme Court…and this time the court found for the plaintiff!

By declaring unequivocally that the ‘sole responsibility’ of a corporation was to earn ‘profits for the shareowners’.

So a CEO who, er, ‘lavished’ pay and benefits upon their employees could be SUED (by, er, ‘activist shareowners’) for fiscal irresponsibility!

Keep that in mind as we delve into the subtext of this article that was written by a man smart enough to know better but apparently not interested enough in finding a solution to care…

We begin with the first paragraph of ‘tripe’:

The American Jobs Act proposed by President Obama in September includes subsidies in the form of re-employment services, wage insurance, work-sharing benefits and self-employment assistance. Stephen A. Wandner of the Urban Institute and the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research testified before the Senate Finance Committee this month and offered a number of other ideas that have been successful on an experimental basis. Among them are comprehensive job search assistance and re-employment bonuses.

IF the above named programs comprise the ’central platform’ of the Obama jobs program then I, for one, am pleased that they have been blocked!

‘Re-employment services’ do not and CAN NOT ‘create’ jobs that don’t exist…so what are these services being ‘paid’ to do? They are being paid to fit square pegs into round holes.

How will they accomplish this ‘temporary at best’ measure? With ‘Wage Insurance, of course! Naturally nobody is asking what happens when the ‘wage insurance’ fund runs dry. If the worker would have starved to death on the wages the job paid before wage insurance, how is he/she supposed to survive on it once ‘wage insurance’ is no longer available?

Next on the list is an aspect of one of my own proposed solutions…but with a key ingredient missing!

Work Sharing is the only way the unemployment crisis will be solved…but I may be speaking too soon as there are plans in the works to significantly reduce the, er, ‘surplus population’ (via famine.)

It is an ancient curse but effective…and it plays directly to the huge inequity that currently exists…and YOU thought it was all ‘accidental’!

But I digress, back to ‘work-sharing’.

You can, er, ‘subsidize’ workers who ‘share’ a job…the job may pay ‘good money’ but no so good that you could live on half a week’s pay…and therein is the main difference between my proposal and the idea of, er, ‘subsidizing’ people who will ultimately be forced to ‘share’ work.

Work sharing doesn’t float if there isn’t a proportionate reduction in the expense picture!

If you intend to ‘halve’ someone’s pay you had best halve their expenses as well!

Mr. Schiller continues:

The stakes are very high here, and they are not just economic. As anger rises in today’s economy, I’m reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s words about the danger of “angry passions” arising between the North and South over the question of extending slavery to the Missouri territory. In an 1820 letter, he wrote that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” He went on to predict, from his observations of such rancor, the secession of the South that was to come 40 years later.

Our country is a much more stable and just society now than it was in 1820. Still, we should regard the current economic dispute as another fire bell in the night. It is important to recreate the sense of a just society, without anger — and an important step in that direction is to ensure that there are enough jobs.

What proof does Mr. Schiller offer that this nation is either ‘more just or more stable’? Just his own opinion, which he is perfectly entitled to.

But I quibble, let us move on.

How many of you have already discerned the reason I chose these two particular paragraphs to close with?

Pretty bright crowd around here! Most of you got it.

Naturally, the ‘tie-in’ comes from my earlier query regarding the ‘alleged abolition’ of slavery.

Just because nobody has a bill of sale with your name on it is insufficient proof that you aren’t a slave.

How fortuitous is it that we currently have the potential to end once and for all vast social inequity (a certain degree is unavoidable but those differences should always be restricted to qualitative rather than quantitative ones.)

The human anti-exploitation law facilitates work sharing by greatly reducing the worker’s expense picture, thereby guaranteeing them a ‘living wage’.

Simply put, the anti-exploitation law prohibits anyone from making their living off of someone else’s labor.

Free a last good citizen! No more landlords, no more utility bills, hell, if it’s a service, it’s free to you (just like it used to be free to the owner!)

And prices will finally ‘stabilize’ because commerce IS NOT AND NEVER SHOULD BE a ‘for profit’ venture.

See good citizen, there IS a sustainable/workable social model available…and we still get to ram it up the 1%’s ass too!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Another WTF moment...

Greetings good citizen,

Have you ever noticed that every day the world’s stock markets tank until the sun rises over the NYSE? Then, as if by miracle, stocks all over the world start ‘rallying’…FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON!

What is it good citizen, what could it be? Is the answer as simple as we have lunatics in charge of our money supply? UNDERSTAND, the ONLY thing the stock market tells you is how wealthy the criminal class says they are (considering stock ‘values’ have absolutely ZERO foundation in REALITY!

Go ahead, prove me wrong!

But that isn’t the half of it good citizen, the global economy is teetering on the edge of a meltdown and what do our so-called ‘leaders’ do? They EXPORT more of our jobs!

In a recent post I asked the question that has plagued most of us and that question was: Who are these idiots PRETENDING to be Democrats/Progressives?

Observe

The Obama administration moved Monday to complete free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, submitting the deals for Congressional approval after resolving a standoff of months with Republicans over the details of a package both sides said they favored.

By one estimate, a pact with South Korea could increase the annual sales of American goods by as much as $10.9 billion.

Under special rules that govern the consideration of trade deals, Congress has 90 days to approve or reject the agreements, but it cannot amend the terms. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, said Monday that the deals were a “top priority” and promised to move quickly.

“Today we have overcome a crucial hurdle to helping put Americans back to work,” Mr. Boehner said. Then he took a swipe at the White House. “While the delay was unacceptably long and likely cost jobs, I am pleased the Obama administration has finally done its part.”

Talk about clueless and out of touch! Is the first, er, requirement for a politician of either stripe be being brain dead/solid concrete from the shoulders up?

Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear, we are INCAPABLE of electing competent leadership as long as the corporate owned media retains its lock on official information.

Once again I level the charge of treason against those charged with providing the public with accurate information.

Just how clueless do you have to be to miss the connection between these two events?

A loose-knit populist campaign that started on Wall Street three weeks ago has spread to dozens of cities across the country, with protesters camped out in Los Angeles near City Hall, assembled before the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and marching through downtown Boston to rally against corporate greed, unemployment and the role of financial institutions in the economic crisis.

With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, as the prototype in New York is called, has clearly tapped into a deep vein of anger, experts in social movements said, bringing longtime crusaders against globalization and professional anarchists together with younger people frustrated by poor job prospects.

Welcome to ‘The New Normal’ good citizen where the ‘Fuck you, pay me’ system of commerce refuses to employ more than half of working age citizens…because it cuts into THEIR profits!

You don’t need me to tell you that this is a social model that doesn’t hunt!

So why do our politicians keep voting us out of our jobs?

Worse good citizen, how do we stop our politicians from voting us out of a job (and turning the nation into a Banana Republic in the process?)

Because that’s precisely what the ‘less government regulation crowd’ wants. They WANT you to reject the government so they can import EVERYTHING and if you can’t afford it, tough!

Once you’re thirty they’ll send you to the farm…once you pass forty the mother fuckers will turn you into compost! (Not them, mind you, their minds are too valuable, it is YOUR now aged and ‘weak’ back that can’t keep up…society shouldn’t be ‘forced’ to carry YOU!)

Our species will not survive if the predators among us are given free rein.

We either get this right (via A Simple Plan) or we can just hang it up because we are NOT going to evolve beyond what we’ve become…a species that is perfectly content to cannibalize its own kind.

The choice, as they say, is yours.

Do nothing and suffer the consequences.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Critical Thinking Skills...

Greetings good citizen,

I sometimes despair that there are so few ‘viable’ alternatives to the failed system we are currently saddled with.

It is only in retrospect that we have learned that capitalism has NEVER worked and only thrived due to the collusion of the few it benefited.

(As we are witnessing, the only thing holding it together was avoidance of the massive train wreck switching to another system would cause.)

Perhaps the most distressing of all of these proposed ‘alternatives’ is the plethora of ‘half measures’ that don’t take into account the true nature of the problem.

Take this tripe for example.

Rushkoff also raises points worth considering, particularly for those of us trying to articulate, in the wake of massive failures of the economic system we've lived our whole lives with, some sort of alternative to the cycle of boom, bust, bailout.

He argues that perhaps we're going about it backward when we call for jobs, that maybe it's not a bad thing that technology is replacing workers, and points out that actually, we do produce enough food and “stuff” to support the country and even the world—that, in fact, we produce too much “stuff.”

He alternately harkens back to a past before jobs, when many people worked for themselves on a subsistence level, and forward to a future where we are all busy making games and books and communicating with one another from behind computer screens, with the hours we have to work dwindling.

Like most ‘half-measures’ Bobo leaves the details to ‘take care of themselves’. Worse, this half-wit doesn’t possess the presence of mind to focus on the crux of the problem, which is where a solution can be found.

Constant Reader knows where I place that crux (we don’t have a money problem, we have a legal problem, big time!)

It is the laws that need to be changed…and until they do, nothing will change!

Your kids starving to death? Sorry, nothing we can do, helping you (or you helping yourself to what you need) is against the law!

Yes good citizen, fuck you, pay me capitalism is ‘centered’ on property rights NOT the ‘common good’ (which empty -headed Libertarians routinely dismiss as being exploitive.)

So what the fuck is the thinking behind a future where only some people contribute?

Where’s the justice in that?

Which is to ask ’who the fuck thinks THAT is a ’good idea’?’

While A Simple Plan mandates 100% employment as ‘the price of citizenship’, detractors would question the sanity behind essentially quadrupling the commute.

Well, as we build a more sustainable future, working where you live will become the rule rather than the exception it has become today.

If you commute at all you will use your feet as the preferred mode of transportation.

Going anywhere else you’ll probably take the choo-choo (or a dirigible.) If your travel plans take you across one of the world’s oceans it is more likely safer to take a sailing ship.

Yes, we will ‘sacrifice’ supersonic speed for ‘fuel efficiency’.

Hopefully, slowing things down a couple of notches will give us all more time to think things over.

Everybody (even the ‘handicapped’) will be provided with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in society…and that means ‘jobs for everyone!’.

You WILL do your part, even if it is only for a couple of hours a day or a couple of days per week.

Which is to point out there’s no lack of things that need doing, it is capitalism which prevents them from being done!

People are already aware that they can no longer ‘breed like minks’ and that is the true danger of building ‘utopia’.

Which is to say that there are still ‘hard choices’ to be faced, that part doesn’t go away.

I strongly suspect only a ’hooray for me and fuck everyone else Libertarian’ is capable of conceiving of a future where not working (and thereby not participating in society) is an option.

It is uncertain which disturbs me more, the lack of critical think on display here or the fact that THIS ASSHOLE gets a national forum to air his nonsense in!

Oh fucking well…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Deviant Behavior

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘stupidity markets’ are diving for the bottom as the unemployment report made its first negative showing in over eleven months.

Understand that many of the ‘positive’ numbers posted over this dubious interim have been nothing more than slight of hand. many have been adjusted downward later.

Add this to the insoluble ‘living free’ mess and you’ve got a true ‘crisis of faith’ on your hands.

Why bother to make ‘timely payments’ if there are no consequences?

The number of long-term unemployed — people out of work for 27 weeks or more — remained about the same as in July, at 6 million, as did the median duration of unemployment, at 19.6 weeks compared with 19.7 weeks in July.

The general unemployment rate, which counts only people who looked for work in the previous four weeks, held steady at 9.1 percent. But a broader measure that includes people who have looked for work in the last year and people who were involuntarily working part-time instead of full-time, fell to 16.1 percent from 16.3 percent. The percent of working-age adults who were employed, already at its lowest rate since 1983, ticked down from 58.6 percent to 58.5 percent.

While there is still a chance that the United States can slip into a double-dip recession, many economists believe that the economy will stay in growth mode, albeit at levels barely perceptible, much less comforting, to Americans without jobs.

“We’ve got at least another 12 months of difficulty to go through,” said Steven Ricchiuto, United States economist for Mizuho Securities USA. “I know that doesn’t help politicians who are worried about the elections.”

Double dip my ass! The whole ‘recovery’ only existed on paper! How sad is it good citizen that flashing your economist ‘creds’ has become an excuse for being both ignorant and out of touch?

I just exhausted my unemployment claim while my ‘99’er’ friend just got handed his walking papers (again!) I think he got two quarters in, enough to ‘recharge’ his unemployment account for another six months.

But what does it say about our ‘social model’ if ‘a majority’ of working aged citizens CAN’T hold onto a job for more than 6 months at a time?

It is through ‘churn’ that wages are driven down. How long do we let them continue to ‘pauperize’ the nation’s customer base?

Our elected representatives, FOR THE PAST FORTY YEARS, are all GUILTY of TREASON, they have placed their personal interests ahead of the interests of society and for that they must pay the ultimate price.

There is no difference between ‘failing to prosecute’ and aiding and abetting criminal activity.

Our ‘justice system’ sucks!

We will not enjoy peace OR prosperity as long as there is no Justice!

We won’t have Justice until there is Equality, yet another piece of the puzzle the truly arrogant choose to ignore.

Although it is more correct to point out that they ignore this ‘at their own peril’…

Want to save the future for your children and theirs? We’ve got to start rounding' em up followed by stringing 'em up!

It all starts with ‘justice’, real justice not the bullshit selective kind the too powerful regularly ‘buy’!

Live on your knees or die on your feet?

The real question, good citizen, is ‘aren’t your knees getting sore?’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Belaboring the obvious

Greetings good citizen,

The markets tanked yesterday after the employment situation took a foreseeable ‘turn for the worse’.If you don’t STOP off-shoring you won’t have ANY jobs to worry about!

Which makes you think this is what our bought and paid for politicians must be thinking, once the unemployment rate is absolute, unemployment becomes a ‘non-factor’.

(When EVERYBODY is unemployed, the unemployment rate will [ironically] be ‘zero’.)

As I stated three years ago our civilization could not tolerate another ‘jobless’ recovery…yet the corporate owned media has handed us exactly that.

It is damning enough that nothing has been done to correct the causes of the ‘employment crisis’ (they are actually, actively making it worse!) But the media’s perpetual ‘blind eye’ to the truth of the situation renders them worthless as a social service.

(And they wonder why nobody reads the paper anymore!)

why pay to be lied to?

Naturally, you can only lie for so long until the truth makes itself known:

All levels of government shed workers, and hiring by companies continued to slow, resulting in a meager 18,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The government also revised downward the small gain for the previous month to 25,000 new jobs, less than half the original estimate. [Be mindful that the most recent numbers are also only an 'estimate']

Although the government’s survey of employers showed a slight expansion in jobs, a separate survey of households found that more people were searching for work than in the previous month, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent in May.

Economists were stunned. They had been expecting job growth to strengthen in June as oil prices eased and supply disruptions caused by the Japanese tsunami and earthquake receded. Instead, the government’s monthly snapshot of the labor market showed that several industries, including construction, finance and temporary services, shrank. At the same time, leading indicators like wages and the length of the average workweek, which tend to grow before employers begin adding more jobs, actually contracted.

Um, not to be mean but aren’t economists perpetually ‘stunned’ by what we all recognize as ‘reality’?

Is it not apparent that economists are, once again, not looking at the correct factors?

Isn’t that how they ‘missed’ the ‘free house swindle’, by looking at the interest rates rather than the ability to pay?

But that’s besides the point, the focus of this article is on what ‘Dear Leader’ had to say on the subject through his current puppet president Obama:

In remarks in the Rose Garden at the White House on Friday, Mr. Obama went beyond counseling patience on the economy’s long return to health and urged Congress to extend the payroll tax cut passed last December. He also said that legislators should sign pending trade agreements and pass bills that would establish an infrastructure bank and reform the patent process, all measures that he said would help create jobs.

How does this ‘stump speech’ differ from what your typical Republican would offer?

Tax cuts and free trade agreements will only make matters WORSE!

How much worse, good citizen?

Collapse worse!

Continually ignored in conservative doctrine is the cycle of activity that supports civic funtion.

No taxes = no government (under monarchy/capitalism) the ‘rulers’ don’t make their own way, they take it from the ‘governed’ whether they like it or not.

Bizarrely, taxes are just a mechanism with which to repress the owners of commerce from becoming too powerful. (How unfortunate for the rest of us that St. Ronnie broke that particular ‘safeguard’?)

Which is to point out that governments have the, er, ‘authority’ to print all the money they want. The government doesn’t ‘need’ to tax YOU.

How frightening is it that we are currently, er, ‘surviving’ on the government’s ability to ‘whip up’ debt on demand? (Pure socialism.)

Without this mechanism we would be in a state of civil war right now! (And it would be that ugliest of all conflicts, the ‘haves’ vs. the ‘have nots’.)

The ‘Tea Partiers’ see this but they do not understand it. They are so locked into the ‘pay-go’ mindset that they can’t comprehend the consequences of their soon to be met demands to end this ‘wasteful spending’.

Capitalism is a bad idea on a whole range of levels.

The ‘fuck you, pay me’ mindset blinds people to the destructive consequences of these actions.

But if you want to live in a war zone, then by all means…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Escalation (of the class war)

Greetings good citizen,

Power corrupts and you know the rest. Every day we deal with the decisions of people with too much authority and not enough brains.

Which is to ask who thought THIS was a ‘good idea’?

Um, we can only speculate that it is a good thing for the rest of us that the prohibition against videotaping cops was just recently overturned or the mere act of posting this on the web would be a crime!

Clearly, these kids we doing no harm (and you can bet your backside there’s a job opening at the Jefferson Memorial for the position of ‘head of security’…which, disturbingly enough, was probably a political ‘plum’ handed out by some politician’s chief of staff!)

What do you suppose the new Park Service police officers uniforms should look like? Which is to ask how you ‘offset’ the big bulls-eye the asshole in charge just painted on his people?

Understand good citizen, wars are fought over this kind of ‘oppression’, better known as tyranny.

Bizarrely, it wouldn’t be the first time a minor political appointment has gone horribily and disastrously wrong.

But if we consider the powder keg the conservative movement has become, this sort of outcome starts to look inevitable.

How many of you DON’T think the conservatives are just spoiling for a fight?

In the beginning of the video we see the ‘nice’ police officer come and ‘warn’ the kids they will be arrested if they ‘protest’ at this National monument. They aren’t doing anything, none of them has a sign or a placard denouncing anything!

If anything they are guilty of being the correct age to engage in a political protest.

AFTER the cop ‘warns’ them they do exactly what any kid would do, they start doing what the cop told them not to do!

You see, their parents made the common parrental mistake of telling these kids they had rights and one of those rights was due process, that they couldn’t be arrested for nothing.

As we can see in the video, these kids got a reality check.

Guess what, you CAN be arrested for ‘disobeying’ a cop! (A cop who KNOWS he’s perilously close to trampling YOUR rights just to make his boss happy!)

So what did WE learn here today good citizen?

Either you roll over and play dead or you go ‘all in’.

These, er, ‘officers’ have just set a very dangerous precident. The next time people start ‘dancing’ at a public monument, some of them will be armed and ready…and it will turn into a firefight.

Just think good citizen, the revolution will begin when we start dancing in public!

Which is to ask just how far off the deep end have our overlords gone?

Up ‘til now we’ve pretty much let them get away with murder…and that is the very next line to be crossed, murder: personal.

The question good citizen is whether or not (now that you know it is coming) you will stand there and take it or whether or not you are willing to give it right back?

We do have numbers on our side.

They, unfortunately, ARE the law, which is what needs changing.

Speaking of laws and escalation the foolish GOP in Utah has decided to make the already murky issue of money even murkier.

Now, however, Utah has passed a law intended to encourage residents to use gold or silver coins made by the Mint as cash, but with their value based on the weight of the precious metals in them, not the face value — if, that is, they can find a merchant willing to accept the coins on that basis.

You think $2 bills were a flop, watch what happens here, it will be a fiasco!

This is a situation ready and waiting for the greater fool to come along.

Doesn’t this bring us directly to the point I often use, where the merchant first checks the ‘spot price’ before proceeding with the transaction?

How much ‘time and energy’ will be wasted verifying the unknowable? If the quote is off you could be out thousands if the transaction is large enough.


Worse, it is a ‘two-edged’ sword.

Let’s suppose for a moment our merchant uses two quoting services just to be, er, ‘safe’ and he gets two wildly divergent numbers…what does he do? Proceed, hoping the number that benefits him the most is accurate or does he decline the transaction and demand a more ‘stable’ form of payment?

What would the customer do? Go next door to see if that merchant is willing to be more ‘reasonable’?

Talk about a pickle!

Anyway, we arrive at today’s dose of ‘happy talk’ where reality is twisted beyond recognition…

After years of being outgunned by Japanese rivals, the American auto industry has made small cars a central part of its strategy, seeking to capitalize on a fundamental shift in the preferences of consumers in an era of fast-rising gas prices.

By refocusing on small cars and de-emphasizing the gas-guzzlers that had long sustained the industry, General Motors and Ford in particular are preserving jobs and positioning themselves to prosper. Their efforts are already paying off in the marketplace. Ford’s tiny Fiesta is the best-selling subcompact in the United States this year, and G.M.’s Chevrolet Cruze outsold every other compact car in America last month except the segment-leading Honda Civic.

They are selling fewer cars than ever (because ‘working American’ is still an endangered species AND they ARE NOT ‘giving’ the fucking vehicles away!)

Do you suppose the ‘buying public’ (as few of them as there are) is taking comfort from the fact that the ‘New Chevrolet’ has ‘hencho in China’ stamped all over it?

Which is to ask how much of this is being driven by sky-high gas prices combined with the growing danger presented by ‘conspicuous consumption’?

Which is to point out that the people buying these over-priced econo-boxes COULD afford to buy new Hummers but that wouldn’t be ‘prudent’ for reasons that have little to do with ‘frugality’.

Lastly, we arrive at a topic that has been so overshadowed by other horrendous global events as to have ‘disappeared’ from the news cycle now that the campaign season is getting underway.

In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.

As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.

I’d defend Mr. Krugman by pointing to the ‘muzzle’ he wears as a nationally syndicated columnist. He has to be exceptionally careful of what he writes or it won’t get published at all.

The truth be damned, you can only push the advertisers so far!

Which is to once again ask how unfortunate it is for our society to have the dissemination of information rely on a ‘for profit’ business model?

This would not be the case under A Simple Plan and ‘unemployment’ under ASP would be non-existent…because ‘profit’ is calculated differently than it is today.

Yes good citizen, Mr. Krugman is correct in observing that ‘solving’ the capitalist created ‘employment crisis’ has been a ‘low priority’ for the people responsible.

Now that they are arresting people for assembling in groups larger than three, we are all ‘on notice’.

Happy Memorial day good citizen, how ironic is it that the evidence we have been seeking just happens to turn up today?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Doin' Mom proud!

Greetings good citizen,

I’m the wrong gender to be contemplating the ‘meaning’ behind Mother’s Day, although if the ‘statistic’ I read yesterday is correct, the $1.9 BILLION spent on ‘flowers for mom’ is all the ‘meaning’ commerce needs to flog this Sunday ‘non-holiday’.

You can bet psychologists and socioligists have a field day batting around the ‘value’ of holding forth a ‘day of celebration’ for this institution or that cherished ideal.

Understand, commerce has dug through the dung heap of human emotion and exploited (or at least attempted to exploit) every one they could find.

But we digress (as usual.)

Back to the ‘Destruction of our civilization!’

In keeping with ‘tradition’ (this blog has been around for a while) we will visit one of our favorite sources for economic input.

No. 367: April Labor Numbers, Money Supply, Dollar and Precious Metals
Subscription required May 6th, 2011

• Increasingly Misleading Seasonal-Factors Continued to Pummel Accuracy of Jobs Data • April Household Survey Showed 190,000 Employment Drop
• April Unemployment Rates: 9.0% (U.3), 15.9% (U.6), 22.3% (SGS)
• Broad Money Supply Gains in April
• Underlying Inflation, Dollar and Precious Metals Fundamentals Unchanged [More; but you need to subscribe to see it.]

Um, if we start ‘from the top’ we encounter the wildly inaccurate unemployment data the government uses to determine whether or not they need to ‘extend’ benefits beyond the ‘standard’ 26 weeks.

This summer will mark the 4th year since the crisis began…and we are supposedly going into our 2nd year of ‘recovery’.

But my point would be that the only two numbers that matter are the two you never see published. One is the current size of the, er, ‘working age population’. This number stands, as of last month, at 239 million. Then we look at the official size of the ‘civilian workforce’, which currently stands at 139 million, we see a ‘gap’ of 100 million workers.

Understand that the 139 million ‘includes’ the 13.8 million people currently drawing unemployment benefits! So if we look at how many ‘jobs’ there are in the economy we arrive at 126 million (roughly.)

Hard to say what’s more disturbing, the fact that the size of the civilian workforce has grown by almost 20 million since the last time I looked or the fact that our system of commercce basically tells half of us to go suck our thumbs?

Now we need to come back to another significant ‘datapoint’; the one where there are six applicants for EVERY open job.

Now, remind me, where, precisely, is that ‘recovery’ they keep babbling about?

Not for nothing good citizen but where do any of you think this is headed? What do YOU suppose the ‘logical outcome’ of this sort of…well, economic collapse (for the lack of a better description) will be?

And we’re not talking ten years from now and we’re also not talking ‘maybe’ here.

We’re talking this summer and that, my friends, is just WEEKS away!

Can they keep things ‘limping along’?

We’ll see.

Um, the second bullet point is a shocker because it is mentioned nowhere else in the corporate owned media…and sometimes the ‘difference’ between the household survey and the ‘birth/death’ model is debated for our benefit...

For some reason they chose to remain silent on the topic this month…probably too many other ‘contrary indicators’ to put up a spirited defense of the flagging economy.

So, the ‘wildly optimistic’ birth/death model says the economy added 244,000 jobs while the household survey says the economy lost 190,000. Is the ‘real answer’ somewhere in the middle?

How long do you think they can keep the ‘deception’ up?

It has been going on for years now, maybe decades.

And by this point in the game only the dumbest among us believe these so-called ‘statistics’.

The third bullet point is unsurprising considering April marks the (official) ‘end’ of ‘quantative easing’.

The final bullet point is a bit disconcerting because the erosion of our purchasing power will soon become a major factor in the coming economic meltdown.

Again, the ‘equation’ is pretty simple: when your income doesn’t meet your outgo working for somebody else becomes pretty pointless…worse, it is a waste of YOUR valuable time!

You can only afford to make someone else rich if the effort provides you with what you need to ‘get by’.

The ‘Kabuki Dance’ (of capitalism) is going to stop someday and when it does all hell is going to break loose! Many will die in the scramble that follows…your primary objective is not to be one of them.

I’m in the camp that says the dance will stop sooner rather than later. You have to decide for yourself whether or not the situation is, er, ‘salvagable’.

Under the it all ties in depending on how you look at it category, we have this piece from Ilargi to provide you with a ‘contrasting’ perspective.

Ilargi: There are two main stories going into the weekend: first, the US BLS employment report, and second, the Greek situation - German magazine Der Spiegel suggested Athens might want out of the Eurozone, and issue its own currency again.

First things first: when, as happened on Friday, stock markets rise while the official U3 unemployment rate goes up (to 9% in this case, U6 reached 15.9%), it's obvious that there's a huge disconnect between those same markets on the one hand, and Joe and Jane Main Street on the other. As usual, to know what really goes on, you have to look below the surface of the numbers. I thought I’d leave it at this, quoted from Mike Shedlock’s take:

In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,817,000. Yet the labor force dropped by 1,099,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 2,916,000. In January alone, a whopping 319,000 people dropped out of the workforce. In February another 87,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In March 11,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In April, 131,000 dropped out of the labor force. The 4-month total for 2011 is 548,000 people dropped out of the labor force.

Many of those millions who dropped out of the workforce would start looking if they thought jobs were available. Indeed, in a 2-year old recovery, the labor force should be rising sharply as those who stopped looking for jobs, once again started looking. Instead, an additional 548,000 people dropped out of the labor force in the first four months of the year. Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the [U3] unemployment rate would be well over 11%.


Ilargi: Indeed, I’d venture that if you add in all those who’ve left the work force since 2008, you’d end up way above 11%. All in all, the total number of people in the working age population who are not in the labor force hit a new all time high of 86.248 million in April. And Wall Street likes that.

Um, I personally think it is unfortunate that Ilargi chose to quote that ‘rabid Libertarian’ ‘Mish’ as there is no ‘Libertarian solution’ to the current crisis.

Worse, the datapoints quoted are without reference points, rendering them meaningless.

You would have to go to the BLS report in question to make sense of the information.

But I’d opine the piddling monthly fluctuations don’t tell us much, the two ‘gross’ numbers I point to (the overall working aged population and the number of employed) tell you all you need to know.

And what do you ‘need to know’?

That our current system of commerce doesn’t ‘work’, nor can this be ‘fixed’ by re-arranging the pieces. Nothing short of a complete overhaul will rectify the situation and that complete overhaul starts with the government/legal system itself!

You have more ‘rights’ than our chiseling founders granted good citizen and its high time we stood up and claimed them!

Down with ‘wage slavery!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shazam!

Greetings good citizen,

Seeems a bit odd to engage in a discussion/debate over ‘money’ when we have so many other legal issues demanding our attention.

I’ll offer this item from the very astute Jesse as an illustration of ‘mainstream thinking’ on the matter.

I, as most of you are well aware, disagree with most mainstream arguments/rationales surrounding that failed attempt to ‘simplify’ barter commonly known as ‘money’.

What you SHOULD glean from Jesse’s article is the (in my opinion) ‘mistaken’ notion that the value of gold is somehow immutable and that all ‘value’ stems from this singular relationship.

So, good citizen, how much IS an ounce of gold ‘worth’?

Before being abandoned the ‘universal standard’ was $35 per ounce. Now that ‘standard is hovering around $1,400 an ounce (and it was stuck at $200 an ounce for years after ‘freak event’ that pushed gold to $800 an ounce in the late Seventies…)

So the relationship between gold and dollars isn’t nearly as ‘solid’ as its followers would have you believe.

for a different ‘twist’ on the same problem we have this article by Mr. Krugman which nicely illustrates the dangers of chasing chimera.

Which brings me back to the destructive effect of focusing on invisible monsters. For the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t what some people imagine might happen one of these days, it’s what is actually happening now.

Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future. The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job. It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.

There are real problems and imaginary ones. How unfortunate is it that those responsible for making the decisions around here are unable to distinguish the difference between the two?

To put it more bluntly, capitalism ‘failed’ (repeatedly) in its initial attempts to institute it for precisely this reason over two hundred years ago.

Given the ‘global race to the bottom’, where does the ‘incentive’ to create jobs in the more expensive here come from?

Short answer, ‘nowhere’.

Capitalism couldn’t get a solid ‘foothold’ until the ‘basement’ was established (and ultimately closed to outsiders.) Commercial ventures were constantly being scuttled by products produced in ever-cheaper labor pools.

This provides all the ‘proof’ anyone needs that money failed miserably in its original goal.

But capitalism ultimately DID take root…with a little ‘help’ from its backers…and to this day none dare call it ‘collusion’.

So, where are your ‘free markets’ now?

The same place your individual ‘freedom’ hides, in your ‘imagination’!

If you don’t feel like a chump good citizen, you should!

You’ve been taught to chase a lie your entire life and now you’re about to have the rug pulled out from under you…which might be funny…if you weren’t about to fall into a pit lined with sharpened stakes.

Worse, the ‘history’ of revolution within our species isn’t particularly promising. The axiom ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ keeps being verified over and over again.

There are revolts followed by bloodless ‘counter-revolts’ that open the door to the same forces that sparked the revolution so they can seize power once more…worse, it happens EVERY time!

To guard against this constant threat the system itself HAS TO prevent the self-interested from ever being in the position to turn the tables in their favor.

That is why A Simple Plan was designed to put the laws we all must live under BEYOND THE REACH of the self-interested.

A leader’s job (under ASP) is to ‘solve problems’. It is their problem solving capabilities that win them the ‘top spot’ in their respective division.

They are NOT ‘legislators’, they are expressly forbidden to draft (never mind implement) laws ‘on a whim’, to do so is an exile offense.

As I have mentioned before, we need to ‘re-think’ the entire legal process from top to bottom.

Even lawyers will tell you that the law and justice are only, er, ‘tenuously’ related. This is the primary reason for abolishing the ‘practice’ of law as a paid profession…because you ‘get what you pay for…’ which tends to defeat the whole purpose of justice.

Toward that end the ‘deep pocketed’ will cease to exist. Everybody works for a paycheck, no exceptions!

The ‘plus side’ of this change in method is, EVERYBODY works!

Life is a pretty simple equation that the HOPELESSLY STUPID keep ignoring.

You WORK which provides you with MONEY so you can obtain the things you need/want!

Nothing too complicated there, it there?

Why am I ‘ignoring’ the elephant in the room?

With nearly half of the world’s workforce unemployed, where are all of these jobs going to come from?

Easy, we just ‘adjust’ the workday/week so everybody can ‘participate’.

That, good citizen, is every individual’s most basic RIGHT! Each of us has the RIGHT to participate in human society.

Being denied that right justifies criminal behavior, just as it does today.

So we had best make damn sure that everyone is allowed to participate in our society because ‘exile’ (the ultimate punishment for criminal behavior) is a ‘one way trip’.

Which is to say you can’t play the ‘I was denied my rights’ card with the ‘I didn’t like the job I was qualified for’ excuse.

A vast majority of jobs will only be for a couple of hours at a time, a couple of days a week. Surely you can ‘suck it up’ for a couple of hours! It all the more incentive to ‘win’ come test time. If you get promoted, you change jobs!

Yeah, I’ve received some complaints that A Simple Plan isn’t that simple, and they’re correct. Paving a new road without cracks is a painstaking task and I only provide the ‘foundation’, the finished product is up to you and future generations to craft as you like.

A Simple Plan is a ‘finished product’ but the ‘execution’ of it remains ‘flexible’. I propose some ‘variants’ to provide space for humanity’s diverse ‘appetites’.

Sadly the word ‘harm’ encompasses different things for different individuals. It is entirely possible for one man to love what another loathes.

I am of the, er, ‘opinion’ that ‘tolerance’ should reign in as much as no one is ‘harmed’ by the practice in question.

It is neither practical nor reasonable to attempt to ‘legislate’ behavior.

Murder is a rather interesting case study in precisely this sort of verbiage because it only forbids killing between individuals, leaving killing by committee both intact and acceptable.

The recent ‘execution’ of a well-known ‘global criminal’ is proof of this. Bin Laden COULD HAVE BEEN captured…but he wasn’t…because ‘the committee’ had already passed judgement on him.

Talk about your ‘slippery slopes’, we had best stop in our tracks else we set off another land mine!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tweaked!

Greetings good citizen,

Did I mention that the jungle drums are still pounding out the message that the world’s financial markets are on the verge of collapsing?

Hard to imagine where I got that idea considering the corporate owned media appears to be hellbent on keeping you focussed on the fact that they (finally) got OBL!

Yesterday was ‘the big reveal’; today we’re getting the ‘juicy, intimate details!’

You’d never know we have larger, more immediate problems to be dealt with.

How sad is it that ‘mismanagement’ is baked right into the political pie?

Could we find (let alone name) even one ‘competent’ politician?

It is more important to keep You focussed on ‘going along to get along’ than to let your thoughts wander into contemplating the endless bumbling of our superiors.

If YOU fucked up as badly and as regularly as these assholes do, YOU’D be history!

But (and our politicians are no exception) YOU aren’t in a position to fire THEM!

The boss doesn’t want to hear about his fuck-ups (and you’re in no position to do anything but testify against him in court, if push comes to shove!) His fuck-ups are not YOUR problem, it is your perceived fuck ups the boss can’t seem to forget.

And when do YOU fuck up? Usually when you get bad information from ‘guess who’…

Worse, 99% of all fuck-ups are the direct the result of the underling failing to READ THE BOSSES FUCKING TWISTED MIND!

Geez, that sounds bitter, doesn’t it?

Well, we tend to ‘write what we know.’

How lucky is it for me that 99% of my resume is ‘phantom’ (largely due to the bosses ‘too big to fix’ fuck-ups?)

Now it is ‘quiz time’ good citizen. I am going to ask you what the last 9 sentences ‘point to’?

Does it look like, in your opinion, that our system of management is, to put it bluntly, FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair) ?

Understand, it is regularly acknowledged that our system is, er, ‘less than perfect’ and that ‘mistakes happen’ and that a certain amount of shit ‘slips through the cracks’. BUT ANY attempt to alter the current system is met with rigid resistance (mostly from ‘vested interests’ who worked long and hard to get their foothold in the system.)

So we return to the ‘it’s fucked up and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it’ situation.

How sad will it be when it is precisely this ‘rigidity’ that pushes the system over the cliff?

While that will be a relatively happy event, the bad news is, where the system goes, we will follow!

Speaking of irrational memes we arrive at this story about how the stock market is tanking because ‘estimates’ about April employment figures failed to meet ‘expectations’.

Shares on Wall Street declined on Wednesday after a weaker-than-expected report on jobs from a private payroll firm.

In a precursor to Friday’s unemployment report from the Department of Labor, the ADP payroll firm reported that private employers in the United States added 179,000 jobs in April. The figure was lower than the 195,000 analysts had expected. The ADP report is closely watched because it can provide insights into the government’s monthly jobs report.

In early trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 69.85 points or 0.55 percent. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost 7.77 points or 0.57 percent. The technology heavy Nasdaq gained 4.99 points, or 0.18 percent.

Naturally, economic recovery is wholly reliant on a recovery of the job market. No jobs = no recovery.

Only accountants/economists can achieve a jobless ‘economic recovery’ and then they can ONLY do it on paper.

So in the ‘real world’, no jobs = no recovery.

Now we have to consider just how many of the ‘gained’ jobs are ‘imaginary’?

When we get the unemployment numbers Friday they are likely to be ‘better than expected, not because there is more hiring but because more people will have exhausted their claims and be dropped from the unemployment roles.

Time has a funny way of doing that.

For a closer look, I purloined this article from Some Assembly Required:

While they mentioned job losses due to offshoring as one important factor, they emphasized that displacement effects have been difficult to measure. The possible trade-offs between job creation in the United States and in other countries are even more difficult to quantify.

But a recent article by David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal provided startling evidence of the impact of globalization. His analysis of data from the Commerce Department indicates that major multinational corporations cut their employment in the United States by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.

This is a big change from the 1990s, when those corporations added 4.4 million jobs in the United States and 2.7 million abroad.

Mr. Wessel pointed out: “The growth of their overseas work forces is a sensitive point for U.S. companies. Many of them don’t disclose how many of their workers are abroad. And some who do won’t talk about it.”

Yes, good citizen, the ‘enemy’ seldom desires to admit their guilt. It is time to wake up to the fact that corporate America is NOT your ‘friend’.

So how, er, ‘unfortunate’ is it that this, er, ‘unfriendly force’ HAS YOU BY THE SHORT HAIRS!

Please allow me to (once again) bring the single most important issue facing our species to the fore: What is the purpose of commerce?

Understand, if we fail to get this right, it will remain ‘impossible’ to fix the other issues facing civilization as a whole.

If you REALLY want to tweak it, we haven’t got a ‘systemic problem’ on our hands, we’ve got a big time legal problem!

This is what it looks like when the criminals take over.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Not for nothing...

Greetings good citizen,

I have long ‘bemoaned’ (whined, vetched, you get the picture…) the base ‘dishonesty’ resorted to by the government when it comes to economic reporting.

As I, er, ‘predicted’ when this whole shit-storm started, the infamous ‘they’ (I have a brother-in-law this vague term drives insane…and you guessed it, he’s a conservative.)

Little exercise in logic here, do any of you REALLY not know precisely who ‘THEY’ are?

Anyway, if we take the ‘plutocracy’ and our ‘captive government’ as ‘givens’, it is THAT ‘they’ we’re referring to, the ones who have gained great fame by putting a ‘positive spin’ on every reported news item. Them fuckers there…yeah, those ones!

It is ‘those fuckers’ who, as predicted, have (via blatant looting of the Treasury through the Federal Reserve.) er, ‘engineered’ a THIRD CONSECUTIVE ‘JOBLESS RECOVERY’.

Not to belabor the obvious but what, precisely, is a ‘jobless recovery’?

We’re told the stock markets continue to climb because of economic activity ‘elsewhere’.

The problem with that LIE is THE WHOLE FUCKIN’ PLANET IS ON ITS ASS!

There isn’t a single ‘economic indicator’ that explains the otherwise irrational rise in stock prices, it’s all been ‘quantative easing’!

This brings us full circle to the issue of who, precisely, ‘owns’ 99% of all available stock and what is it, precisely, the stock markets tells us besides how rich the already wealthy are?

‘Stock valuations’ have NO BASIS IN REALITY, but you knew that, right?

Let’s shift perspectives here for a moment and ask another simple question, given what passes for ‘wealth’ in our fucked up system, why are YOU busting your ass (basically for nothing)?

The only thing you ‘get’ for your efforts is the, er, ‘opportunity’ to return the next day for even more abuse.

And you do/put up with it BECAUSE the alternative is even worse.

Now how much does that SUCK?

But I ‘preach to the chior’ as far as the wretchedness of our circumstances is concerned.

You all know intimately the degradation we must all endure for the, ‘luxury’ of living indoors and eating regularly.

Which is precisely what a psychopathic Libertarian considers such basic human rights, they are a luxury (that you don’t deserve!)

But we shouldn’t be too surprised, many ‘famous’ scholars ‘couldn’t concieve’ of society without slavery.

How ironic is it that they also ‘couldn’t concieve’ themselves as slaves?

They, like their Libertarian/Conservative counterparts were much ‘too valuable’.

If these ‘worthys’ were made slaves, who would concoct bullshit like this?

It would be useless to rage over such trivia. We are into the THIRD YEAR of the fucking (but they don’t dare admit) ‘New Normal’, so naturally the ‘unemployment rate’ is falling.

They don’t pay benefits ‘forever’…which is going to cause some deadly serious problems in the not too distant future.

The ‘sand in the ointment’ here is the, er, ‘inference’ that hiring is actually ‘up’ (again, somewhere…likely over the damn rainbow!)

Again, it’s the ‘new normal’, I remember there being pages and pages of help wanted ads, now ALL of the help wanted doesn’t fill a half a page!

Understand, that was ‘prior’ to the Internet. For all of the strides we’ve made, there still isn’t a computer in EVERY household, so telling us that there are thousands of jobs ‘online’ (which nobody keeps up to date) is worthless.

Of course, if you WANT TO WORK ‘bad enough’ you can find a computer that you can use to search for work.

Naturally, there is no correlation between ‘wanting to work and the availability of work’.

Yet another ‘sticking point’ that has deadly potential for the not too distant future.

Speaking of which, the US media is sticking with its story that the ‘revolts’ sweeping the Arab world are an expression of the strong desire for ‘democracy’ (as opposed to ‘freedom from oppression’ which is definitely NOT the same thing.)

Worse, it is the ‘tipping point’ where the global economy will first come unraveled. It’s more than a bit ironic that the greatest source of wealth in our modern world is located in such an economically repressed region.

Which is not to say there isn’t a reason for this, albeit a feeble and racist one…but the ones with the guns makes the rules!

Which is to once again point out that war IS NEVER ‘the answer’.

Not for nothing good citizen but I can’t help but notice that our own house is in a serious state of, er, ‘disarray’.

The collective ‘we’ need to get our shit together and put the brakes on the idiots who are driving our civilization over a cliff (largely to escape prosecution!)

Hard to say what’s sadder, the fact that it is this obvious or that we aren’t doing anything about it?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

How Fucked up is This?

Seriously good citizen, How fucked up is this?

DETROIT — General Motors said Thursday that it would temporarily shut a truck plant in Louisiana because it could not get enough Japanese-made parts, the first in what analysts say could be widespread disruptions at auto plants in North America because of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis half a world away.

A Toyota plant in northern Japan. Toyota and Honda have shut their plants in Japan until next week.

Mark Fields of Ford said the company was assessing production on a day-to-day basis.
That it was G.M. — rather than one of the Japanese automakers, which depend on many parts from their home country — that succumbed first to the shortage shows how much the industry depends on far-flung suppliers. But Toyota and Honda have shut their plants in Japan until next week as they try to repair damaged facilities, assess the state of their suppliers and determine how to restart production safely.

Do any of you wonder why our workforce has shrunk by 2 million over the past decade?

What should you do the next time you see a ‘tax slashing tea partier’?

It is their opinion that you’re being unemployed is YOUR FAULT.

Did you notice WHOSE taxes keep getting cut? (Hint: they sure as shit aren’t YOURS!)

As you were…sorry for the interruption but I read this and my head exploded!

Gegner

The Road to Recovery

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while the stars align and the hive mind kicks in to inspire the blogosphere into producing the following trio of articles.

If we were to use their conservative ‘labels’ we would start off with The Shrill One followed by Mr. Tinfoil Hat with the The Perma bear wrapping things up nicely.

Yesterday I pointed to the greatly diminished labor force figure. (Our current labor force is two million workers smaller than it was 10 years ago.) But I didn’t mention that we currently have nearly TWICE THAT NUMBER of ’working aged’ individuals, putting a considerable damper on the prospects of achieving anything approaching economic prosperity here in the rapidly expanding economic desert.

Okay, that aside, we arrive at the second article which tells us in no uncertain terms that the COST OF LIVING HIT AN ALL TIME HIGH!

Which is to say there is no ‘escape’ from the collapse of our badly corrupted commerce system. It’s going down and all of the ‘bailouts’ in the world won’t save it!

Article one and article two have a common thread…do you know what it is?

Both are ‘symptoms’ of mismanagement/government failure. Until the labor laws are changed the unemployment problem will persist, ditto for the ‘deterioration’ of our currency (which is causing the ‘inflation‘ they claim is insignificant.)

The final article tells us what our ‘elected representatives’ intend to ‘do’ about the mess their collective inaction has created.

Instead of raising taxes they would rather slash benefits. This is decidedly ‘anti-social’ behavior.

This also defines the longstanding ‘divide’ between conservatives and ‘liberals’.

Worse, guess which ‘segment’ created this ‘division’ in the first place?

Liberals would be better described as ‘normal’ people but that doesn’t provide a solid platform for debate…

‘Normal people’ strive for social harmony while we conservatives say to hell with that!

See, not nearly as effective as calling their opponents ‘liberal’.

I’ll end this little digression with Liberal = normal and Conservative = anti-social.

Sadly, I’ll pick up the original thread by pointing out that we are on a decidedly conservative path going forward…if we can call it that. The reality is it’s simply more of the same (bullshit) we‘ve been getting from the so-called ‘compassionate conservatives‘.

As this post is titled ‘the road to recovery’ we would do well to at least point to what has to happen to put this nation and the world on a sustainable path.

You see, good citizen, the conservative corporatocracy isn’t concerned with sustainability. The ones with the most funny money will get their pick of what’s left er, remains and the rest can go hang!

You see good citizen sustainability SHOULD HAVE BEEN the ‘target’ all along BUT we have allowed ‘pirates’ to manage our affairs since the beginning, thus have we always suffered under their decidedly poor management skills.

Now the wheels are coming off of our social construct and we are faced with yet another ‘civil war’.

This time its the pirates vs. the ‘rabble’ (formerly known as the ‘useful idiots‘)

Have I ‘sidetracked’ again good citizen?

Sadly no, step one is the war we are having rammed down our throats, whether we want it or not.

I would be remiss if I didn’t use this as the ‘starting point’ because whatever comes next is predicated on sweeping the ‘old’ away.

Yes good citizen, your ‘rights’ are once again going to be stripped from you and you will be forced to ‘fight’ for them all over again!

This, as Vonnegut classically described it, is ‘idiot’s delight’ writ large!

If you fail to stand up for your selves, your ‘rights’ will be determined for you, just as they were in the secret, invitation only, armed guard enforced meeting held after the original ‘revolution’.

A pox on the ‘founders’ who conspired to but chickened out of making themselves ‘Royalty’.

The principle reason these ‘royal wannabes’ DIDN’T make themselves royalty is the lack of legitimacy’ of their claims. Prior Kings and Queens could point to religious decrees that God had ’blessed’ their elevation over the common man.

After a while there were a bunch of people who could claim ‘divine lineage’, being the offspring of royal parents and this formed (still does) the basis for their, er, ’legal/legitimate’ claim.

How unfortunate was it that the wannabes couldn’t convince the religious separatists to cave on their demands for a secular State…all it would have taken was an ’official religion’ and the royalists would have been in!

Do you see where we’re going here?

This simple exercise illustrates the problem with letting the ‘self-interested’ make up the laws as they go along.

We came within a push and a shove from perpetuating a nasty system ourselves. A couple more royalists and it wouldn’t have mattered what Washington wanted or was willing to go along with.

The ‘answer’ good citizen lies within the law. If we come out of the other side of this conflict as the victors then our goal must be to level the playing field and to institute a new social contract that provides citizenship/membership for ALL (and not just the useful idiots who suck up to the corrupt and the unjust!)

If we win…if we don’t…well, slaves are property, to be disposed of as their master sees fit.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner