Twisted...seriously.

Greetings good citizen,

Being an ‘apologist for the very rich’ takes a pretty special individual, in fact it takes a pretty clueless one as well; who else would come up with this ‘Limbaughesque’ line: “To revile the rich is to revile the American dream,”

I believe the late George Carlin provided us with most accurate description of that cherished conservative value… “They call it ‘The Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it!”

Perhaps more interesting is the twisted way they project their own values onto others…and revile them for it!

You can’t help but read this piece and come away stunned at the sentiments revealed not by the wealthy themselves…but by those who…er, feed off of them, their ‘advisers’.

Without further adieu we commence tonight’s offering

Wealth Matters

All This Anger Against the Rich May Be Unhealthy

By PAUL SULLIVAN
Published: October 16, 2009

BEATING up on the wealthy seems to be the order of day. I suspected that. But a recent Wealth Matters column touched a particularly raw nerve. It looked at how even people with sizable fortunes were concerned about money in this recession and the impact that could have on the rest of us.

Robert Clarfeld, a financial adviser, bought a Jaguar XKR before the financial collapse, a point he makes on its vanity plate.

Readers rejected the attempt to understand the concerns of the rich. [This isn’t nearly as amazing as how he ends up sneering at this total ‘lack of empathy’…]

“That’s so stupid that you ought to be slapped for it,” one woman wrote. My favorite began: “Bowties and Reaganomics are for losers. You can cry for the rich all you want, the rest of us will be happy to see them get taxed.” [What do you suppose happens next? What else…he turns around and accuses these people of harboring a ‘double standard’…like there’s even a remote possibility any of us will ever find ourselves ‘swapping places’ with the ‘well born’ and ‘politically connected’.]

The vehemence in these e-mail messages made me wonder why so many people were furious at those who had more than they did. And why are the rich shouldering the blame for a collective run of bad decision-making? [Um, since the rich get to make those decisions, who the hell else should take the heat? Those of us who had no say?] After all, many of the rich got there through hard work. [Ha! If you have to work for your money, you ain’t even remotely ‘rich’]And plenty of not-so-rich people bought homes, cars and electronics they could not afford and then defaulted on the debt, contributing to the crash last year. [And who loaned those ‘not so rich’ people the money to buy all of that stuff they couldn’t afford? The same assholes that were making 30% interest on the loan!]

But in this recession, anger flows one way. Eric Dammann, a Manhattan psychoanalyst, theorizes that a lot of people are angry that the rules of the game seem to have changed. [These people are right to be angry, the rules have changed and the law has been suborned!]

“There’s always been envy and hatred toward the rich, but there was also a strong undercurrent of admiration that was holding these people up as a goal,” Mr. Dammann said. “This time it’s different because it feels like it’s a closed club and the rich have an unfair advantage.” [There’s nothing ‘different’ about this time and the way things went a thousand years ago; it IS a ‘closed club’ and they DO have an unfair advantage. But you don’t suppose the guy who is careful NOT to include the prefix ‘Dr’ in front of his name shrinks the heads of ‘normal’ people…do you?]

What is troubling is that the anger has hardened for some into a suspicion that all wealthy people are motivated purely by self-interest, said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist in Hawaii and a co-author of the forthcoming book, “Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health” (Random House). [Some phrases are just too rich…like the term ‘financial psychologist’ accompanied a place name synonymous with wealth…Hawaii. Simply put, if you weren’t born there and you have a residence there, it only stands to reason you are, by default, rich! Do you suppose Bradley denies the wealthy are motivated by their own self-interest in his ‘forthcoming’ book?]

“The script goes like this: Money is bad, rich people are shallow and greedy, and people become rich by taking advantage of others,” Mr. Klontz said. “But the same people who say money is bad say money is connected to their self-worth — they wished they had it and you didn’t.” [It’s hard to find a cleaner case of ‘projection’. They’re out there all right but this bad boy is pretty damn clean cut…]

In boom or bust, envy is natural, and the desire for a level playing field is understandable. But so too is the desire to do better financially, to the point where it seems at times to be hardwired into our national psyche. “To revile the rich is to revile the American dream,” said Robert Clarfeld, president of the wealth management firm Clarfeld Financial Advisors. [Now you know where our ‘opening quote’ came from and um, isn’t Mr. Sullivan starting to ‘foam at the mouth?’]

This resentment was so palpable, I started to wonder if it was having any effect — were the wealthy aware of it, and if they were, did they care?

TAX AND GIVE A big concern among the wealthy right now, their advisers say, is not populist anger but how it might translate into tax-the-rich legislation on the federal and state levels. Their concern is twofold. [Naturally, Mr. Clueless displays zero concern for what will happen if we don’t succeed at ‘leveling the playing field’…of course, it may be too late to avoid that outcome already.]

The first is that any tax increase has a direct impact on the income they withdraw from their portfolios. More money going to the government means less to live on. “They’re very concerned about taxes going up,” said William Woodson, managing director at the Family Wealth Management group at Credit Suisse. “The percent that goes to taxes is significant if it’s a 15 percent capital gains vs. 25 percent capital gains. It makes a big difference.” [Um, did I mention ‘clueless’? What percentage of US citizens are affected by the capital gains tax rate? Maybe the top 5%, but it’s actually a lot closer to the top 1%…and far more applicable to the top 1% of that 1%! The problem is boys like ‘Slick Willy’ here think we’re stupid…while we don’t pay ‘capital gains’ they ‘infer’ we might someday. Like any of us are going to make a profit on a house we’re madly overpaying for…which would be a capital gain and, for most of us, a ‘one time’ event.]

The second concern may be disheartening for those who are angry at the rich but like the museum exhibitions or scholarships they pay for: increased taxes could cut into donations. While there is not a direct correlation between tax deductibility and personal donations, there is a correlation between increased taxes in a continued weak economy and charitable giving. [Um, sorry good citizen but stealing from your employees and your customers to make tax deductible ‘donations’ for shit that should be publicly funded anyway is one of the things that make me crazy…but nobody looks at this reprehensible practice in the ‘proper context’.]

“I’ve not heard anything from anybody about the economy impacting the desire to do it,” said Lyle LaMothe, head of wealth management in the United States at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. “It’s the ability to do it.” [And that ‘ability’ it directly tied to just how ‘larcenous’ these miserable weasels believe they can get away with.]

Mr. Woodson noted that in the last year foundations reduced their giving in line with the economic downturn, yet individuals tended to give the same or more, if they could.

THE ANGRY RICH For the wealthy, their public image is a secondary concern since so many of them seek to live anonymously.

“They feel mis-characterized,” Mr. LaMothe said. “They know the time and effort they contribute. They fund scholarships and all the things they do routinely, and then to be characterized as not doing their fair share begins to wear on them.” [Understand, no actual rich people were inconvenienced by providing their point of view for this article, so far all we’ve read are the ‘opinions’ of their advisers (who may erroneously consider themselves rich…)]

From the outside, the wealthy seem to be one big money-minting group. But how they came upon their wealth differs greatly. And those who did not make their fortunes in finance seem just as angry as everyone else about what Wall Street has wrought. [I’m not sure you are up for another ‘intellectual exercise’ good citizen but I’ll hazard it just the same…what makes rich people rich? Or more succinctly, what makes up the ‘bulk’ of most personal fortunes?
Well hot damn…it’s stocks! Sure, there are some people with vast holdings of ‘hard assets’ but those hard assets are usually ‘represented’ as stocks. Mr. Buffet’s ‘preferred’ shares of Berkshire Hathaway’ are a prime example of this.]

“They want the problem to be fixed for their own personal benefit but also for the broader benefit of the community,” Mr. Woodson said. “They tie their wealth interests to the broader health of the economy.”

Mr. Clarfeld, who manages $3 billion largely for financial services executives, takes exception to lumping all of Wall Street together. He said his clients felt that they had worked hard and honestly for their money and were now being unjustly judged alongside those who did not.

He is counseling clients to live their lives largely as they’ve done in the past, though in a slightly toned-down form. Mr. Clarfeld said he had taken his own advice to heart. He bought his dream car, a Jaguar XKR, before the market crash but then felt uncomfortable about it. “I didn’t like the way it made me feel but not enough that I was going to get rid of the car,” he said. So he made light of it with a vanity plate to recall better times: “PRE LEHM.” [Nobody DARED display ‘conspicuous wealth’ in the ‘egalitarian’ period right after WWII, those who made millions supplying the war effort knew returning GI’s who actually fought in the war wouldn’t like that wealth flaunted in their faces. The war was over and it would hurt business to antagonize your peacetime customers…so these guys hide their wealth…for a while. Usually until their kids inherited it, then ‘humility and pretense’ went out the window. With the return of ‘Great Depression’ like conditions, the rich are going to go into hiding once more.]

WIDER IMPACT: The line from my last column that prompted the most responses was about how the wealthy weren’t sleeping well either. The vitriol in the e-mail showed just how deep the anger against the rich is.

Yet put simply, this is not healthy. After all, if you’re wealthy and no one likes you, you still have lots of money. But if you spend your free time obsessing about the rich, you could end up in worse shape emotionally, personally and financially.

“People who get caught up in this paranoia spend all night reading these blogs, and six months later they haven’t done anything to better themselves,” Dr. Dammann said. “Even if they’re right, there is a lot of wasted energy put into this. They need to look at the mistakes they’ve made in their life.” [Um, does anyone else see the ‘party line’ being toed here? If you’re not rich it’s your fault! Or better, ‘The reason you aren’t rich is you spend too much time criticizing them and not enough time being like them!’ As if we could all be rich! What a dumbass!]

Mr. Klontz is even more concerned that this obsession with money and blame will affect children. He said the risk is creating a generation that distrusts investing and associates wealth with greed. [Would that it were! None of the idiots of this generation are even interested in investing in the USA, in fact, these imbeciles would discourage them if any did!]

“People in their 20s have watched their parents lose their money and now they think, ‘You can’t trust banks, you can’t trust anyone,’ ” he said. “We need to do work around that. That association between money and being bad can be extremely intense.” [Considering money is an extremely flimsy legal construct, how does Bobo propose we ‘work around’ this issue?]

The trouble, Mr. Klontz said, is the people we surround ourselves with often reinforce our beliefs, even when they are unhealthy. “What we don’t see are the wealthy families with modest lifestyles who are raising responsible kids,” he said.

Uh, good luck trying to sell that one Mr. Klontz!

It never ceases to amaze me that these idiots are so fixated on the idea of ‘wealth for a few’ that they fail to see the reality that we’re all in this together.

Civilization has ‘crashed’ countless times in the past due to the failure to learn this one simple lesson. Oddly, it is the same concept used to establish civilizations but for some strange reason the shit weasels keep clubbing the honest people into submission.

Which sucks…

There is a better way but that better way isn’t going to wish itself into existence, you gotta want it.

Until next time good citizen, thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Maintaining a 'sense of entitlement'.

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we need not scrutinize the graphs of the market indexes to note yet another near vertical climb occur right at the end of the trading day. It makes you wonder what these boneheads are thinking, that most people will only ‘hear’ the numbers and not look up the charts?

Those big spikes at the end of the day aren’t ‘normal’ although this time only the Nasdaq made it into ‘positive’ territory. Yet today, like yesterday, there was an ‘identical’ spike across all three indexes.

In fact, these last minute rallies are all characterized by near identical spikes across all indexes on the end of the day’s tape…which makes it appear that much more suspicious.

Not that this has much to do with anything; it is merely a ‘curiosity’.

That said, tonight’s offering touches upon an even more disturbing phenomenon, that known as the ‘imprecision of speech’.

From the ‘top down’ there are only three ‘classes’, the rich, the middle class and the poor. From the bottom up another class squeezes its way into the mix.

In the opposite direction we have the ‘poor, the working class, the middle class and the rich.

Tonight’s offering introduces a term seldom used by the average pundit nor is it particularly well-defined.

Understand good citizen that most of us use the fact that our mail finds us regularly as ‘proof’ that we’re ‘middle class’. Where do you suppose the line is drawn between the ‘merely wealthy’ and those with ‘ultra high net worth’?

I mean there are zeroes good citizen and there are zeroes with ‘lineage’, as it is often the ‘age’ of your fortune that is far more impressive than its actual size.

But enough of this nonsense, let us proceed to tonight’s offering with its curious choice of title…

Teaching the Entitled Young the Financial Facts of Life

By PAUL SULLIVAN
Published: July 24, 2009

This is the summer of reviling the rich. The financiers at Goldman Sachs got a populist drubbing after the bank reported record quarterly earnings and analysts began predicting average bonuses of $700,000 an employee at the firm this year. Now, Congress is debating whether high earners should be hit with a surtax to pay for health care reform. In states like New York and California, that could mean that top earners are paying more than 50 percent of their income in taxes. [Cry me a river, they used to pay 90%]

But the rich and the not-so-rich do have something in common this summer: worrying about their children’s financial future. This may come as a shock to those middle-class Americans who imagine wealthy parents sunning themselves by their infinity pools, confident that their children, having been given every opportunity, are on their way to productive lives. [Surely, he is using the term ‘productive’ in its loosest possible sense!]

In truth, the image is fairly rare at this point. What is more common among the wealthy is their fear that the lives their children have known, and the futures they expected, may be gone.

“The notion that you’re entitled to goodies has to be dispelled,” said Fredda Herz Brown, a partner at Relative Solutions, a consultant who works with family businesses. “They really do think life is going to continue as it has. But most of them are not getting jobs, no matter what their parents do.”

While the wealthy are in a better position to help their children financially, having money doesn’t guarantee that their child will be responsible and productive.

So that leads to the question: How can parents help children with a healthy sense of entitlement adjust to the new economic reality?

EMOTIONAL REASSURANCE The first thought that pops into many parents’ heads when they worry about their children is bailing them out. But the best thing many parents can do, particularly those with children who are not asking for money,[Apparently ‘alien children’] is to set the right example.

While children may be idle this summer, many parents are out of work, too, and casting about for ways to pay the bills. If they mope around, their children are going to pick that up. If, on the other hand, they discussed what has happened over the last year, their children will be better equipped to make their own financial decisions. [Wait a minute Slim…aren’t these people the possessors of ‘ultra high net worth’? What kind of BLOCKHEAD works for a living and even entertains the idea they possess ‘ultra high net worth’? Let’s get this straight, if you work for somebody else, there’s no way in hell you have anything even remotely resembling ‘ultra high net worth’.]

“The patriarch can say, ‘This is the risk I took, this is how I felt, these are the lessons here,’ ” said Evan Roth, founding partner of BBR Partners, an adviser to ultra-high-net-worth clients. “It’s, ‘Look at how I’m handling this; I’m teaching you a valuable a lesson here.’ ”

That lesson is often the need to work hard. Ms. Herz Brown tells the story of a financial services client who traveled a lot on business. When his role at work was reduced, he started spending less time on jets and more time at home with his teenagers.

“He had a sense that too much came to them,” she said. “It came from a basic belief that what he had created for his kids was this sense that everything comes to you.” [What a ‘shock’ eh? Kids ‘know what they live’, if they have to look up the definition of the word ‘no’ then who’s to blame?]

So he made them look for summer jobs. And when they couldn’t find any, he made them take odd jobs to earn money. He also gave them a budget for school clothes and other incidentals and made it clear that if they budgeted poorly, they were not getting more money.

The point was that he recognized he was enabling his children’s sense of entitlement, she said. While his children will probably never want for money, he realized his actions had been just as indulgent as a parent who gives in to his child’s every request for fast food. [There’s that ‘disconnect’ again…his kids ‘will probably’ never want for money coupled with the notion that ‘dad’ worked for someone else! At the very minimum here our ‘hypothetical overachiever’ is an officer/principal in a big time concern. We’re talking not the Fortune 500 but one of the top five people in a Fortune 100 company.]

FINANCIAL PLANNING There are, of course, many reasons to give money to your children. A popular one during the bull market was estate planning — the more you could pass on while you were alive, the less subject to estate tax later.

One of the most popular structures during the bull market was a grantor retained annuity trust. This arcane-sounding trust was predicated on assets going up. The idea was that parents could put an asset they thought would appreciate into the trust for a set period of time, usually two to 10 years. At the end of that period, their child would get the appreciated value tax-free, less a small interest payment paid to their parents.

Now that most asset values have gone down, these trusts look as if they have failed. But there is a chance to salvage them. The grantor can swap out the original asset for one of equal value without penalty and start another trust with the original asset, if he believes it unfairly lost value.

Rich Kohan, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Company Services practice, said people who set up the trusts should take advantage of the opportunity. “If the asset has dropped in value, it’s likely not to leave anything for the benefit of children,” he said.

Then there are trusts set up for reasons other than tax savings. Joan Crain, senior director of wealth management strategies at Bank of New York Mellon, said she had seen an increase in clients setting up trusts for their adult children.

“Their children are in their late 30s to 50s, and they’re not good stewards with money,” she said. “Parents want to protect them from creditors but also ex-spouses, even if the children are happily married or not married.”

Money in trust is doled out to the beneficiaries and kept from creditors, but it is not shielded from estate taxes. That people are employing this strategy, though, should be a stark lesson to parents: teach money management skills to your children when they are young.

PRACTICAL SUPPORT In tough times, parents may need to set aside their estate plan and bail out their child.

One way parents or grandparents can help without seeming intrusive is to cover all medical and education costs for their children and grandchildren. If they pay the hospital or school directly, they will not incur gift tax.

Separately, if a husband and wife pool their annual gift exclusions, they can give up to $52,000 a year to a child and his spouse to help make up for a lost job.

“Parents worry it’s humiliating,” Mr. Roth said. “But paying their mortgage is not a direct handout. It’s the same thing, but if you don’t see it, it doesn’t affect them as much.”

On the positive side, this may be the right time to finance a child’s entrepreneurial idea.

“The consensus is the fortunes of tomorrow are going to be made today in this downturn,” said Mary Duke, head of private wealth solutions for the Americas at HSBC Private Bank. [And it will all go to Goldman Sachs, so the rest can just forget about it!]

The key is not to give your child a handout. Ms. Duke suggests setting up a board of advisers to look over the plan and provide assistance with framing and carrying out the idea. This takes the child’s request out of the realm of asking Mom and Dad for money and into the arena of an actual business plan.

“It’s important kids understand budgeting,” she said. “Everyone is more focused on living within their reduced means.”

If a parent can instill that discipline in a child, the rest may just fall into place.

One can only wonder if this piece was ‘dumbed down’ for general consumption or if the rich really are morons?

I have stated repeatedly that wealth is totally unrelated to intelligence. Rich by no stretch of the imagination even implies ‘smart’.

Conversely, it appears you can’t go wrong being a financial advisor to the ‘ultra high net worth’ crowd.

As we ‘clarified’ at the beginning of this piece, there is indeed a ‘Brahmin’ class over these lesser ‘ultra high net worth’ types that doesn’t work at all and lives (quite nicely) off of their dividend checks.

Amongst these Brahmin the definition of ‘hard work’ is cuddling up to granny to insure you and yours aren’t the ones cut out of the will to preserve the family ‘nest egg’ for future generations.

While Bill Gates’ kids (and their kids) will probably ‘never want for money’, not every ‘storefront’ is Microsoft.

Worse, this entire article addresses a rather rarified stratum of society, only the top five officers at Fortune 100 companies and maybe not all of them. We could be down to the Fortune 50 at this stage of the game.

This is not to infer that there’s not an equal number of people in the public sector with ‘access’ to this kind of compensation.

But we’re still only talking a relative handful out of a global population numbering in the billions.

Um, I think it’s worth pointing out that the stock market is what keeps this sort of shit humming through the generations.

This sort of redefines the term ‘do the work once and get paid forever’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Show Me the Money!

Greetings good citizen,

The banks (after having been injected with 700 Billion dollars worth of government funds) are now being required to raise nearly 70 Billion more on their own.

And so far, the banks that have offered billions of dollars worth of new debt (shares, bonds or whatever) have had no problem finding subscribers.

Naturally, what has me scratching my head is ‘where is this money coming from?’

After being soaked big time in the derivatives scam, do pension funds and the money markets still have enough ‘liquidity’ to make such risky bets?

Interestingly enough, pensions and other ‘institutional investors’ are prohibited by law from investing in anything less than AAA rated securities (not that this means much anymore.) Understand good citizen there ‘were’ only seven US companies that had AAA ratings and I’m guessing we’re down to five since GE and Berkshire Hathaway both lost theirs…

So, Show Me the Money!

To get an idea of how many folks have what in their bank accounts, we have this article from Michael Panzer’s site, Financial Armageddon.

He begins this piece with a rather curious choice of titles:

Not So Different


Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The current crisis has proven many apparent truisms wrong.

Among other things, we've learned that there are few, if any, industries, including health care and consumer staples, that are truly recession-proof.

We've seen how closely tied the rest of the world is -- up until now, at least -- to economic circumstances in the United States, despite the assertions of the decoupling-ists.

We've also discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the rich are not immune to the pressures of a broad-based economic downturn.

Indeed, in "How the Wealthy are Spending Their Money This Year," the Luxist blog reveals just how much the attitudes of those who still have the cash and those who don't have converged.

[Original article begins:]

Last week, I sat down with representatives from American Express Publishing and Harrison Group to see a presentation and discuss a question which is on many of our minds: How are the wealthy reacting to the recession?

Well, to start with, more than half (53%) are worried they could run out of money. Dr. Jim Taylor, vice chairman of Harrison Group, and Cara David, senior vice president of corporate marketing and integrated media of American Express Publishing spent approximately an hour display charts that showed the results of countless hours spent crunching the first-quarter responses of 1,300 Americans with discretionary incomes over $100,000 (that means income after tax, mortgage, home maintenance, and child education costs are subtracted.)

This year there are 120,000 fewer households that fit in that range. The number of households with a discretionary income over $500,000 went from approximately 118,000 to 92,000 -- the first drop since 1997. [You will note that the number of $100k households is missing the ‘total’ number so we have no clue what the 120,000 household drop is subtracted from. The $500k ‘discretionary’ figure is complete at 92,000.]

Of these 1,300 moderately-to-very wealthy Americans, 70% believe that the recession will last longer than a year, and 35% think this could be a long term depression. 78% report that the crisis has affected their sense of financial security.

So how does their spending look? "Luxury is not dead, there's simply a filter on risk," says Taylor. 77% said they are buying fewer "big ticket items" this year -- so it's a safe bet that they're buying brands they trust. There seems to be a trend among the wealthy of pride in their willingness to not buy things. This goes beyond the usual chatter of talking about great bargains you got; people are actually feeling an increase in their self-esteem related to their ability to take control of their own lives. Believe it or not, spending less is making people happier. People checking the "Very Happy" box went from 58% last year to 66% this year -- women up 10%, men up 4%.[snip]

All right, I cut off the last couple of paragraphs because the rest isn’t germane to the topic at hand, Show Me the Money.

While we remain ignorant of how many households currently enjoy ‘excess income’ of $100,000 per year, we do know that 92,000 of them enjoy $500,000 a year worth of ‘mad money’.

So, less than a hundred thousand households and we will also assume that this number considers only US residents.

You know that a handful of this 92,000 has $500,000 a MONTH in ‘discretionary income’ but at that point we’re really in ‘rarified air’.

I believe the statistics shake down like this, one percent of US households control 55% of all the wealth in the US, and one percent of those people control 80% of that figure!

Working with the one-percent and the hundredth of a percent figures, our 92,000 is only a third of the ‘top’ income households. The top third, but still only a third.

For more ‘math fun’ our 92,000 that had in excess of $500,000 in ‘free cash’ only totals $46 billion. At last look, total US ‘payroll’ was $17 trillion…which is a pretty neat trick considering GDP only weighed in at $13 trillion (no wonder we’re in hock!)

I believe the $17 trillion figure was from 2006, so it probably doesn’t apply today.

Worse, the damn BLS keeps ‘updating’ its charts as well as its metrics so it has become impossible to track down old data. Any link more than a month old is likely to produce a ‘page not found’ message.

But this is an entirely different issue.

I read somewhere recently that (slightly) more than a million households filed returns on income in excess of $5 million dollars. This contrasts rather curiously with a tidbit from a couple of years ago where it was reported that 7 million households filed returns in excess of a single million dollars.

Considering this latest incarnation of the (ongoing) global financial crisis has left no nation and no sector unscathed, it really is a mystery where this money is going to come from.

But not to worry, Timmy has promised that no ‘major’ financial institution will be allowed to fail.

So it looks like when all else fails, we’re going to see some more ‘hocus pocus’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rules, like promises, are for chumps

Greetings good citizen,

Up Date: Every time I get an early start on one of these something happens. This time the WHO upgraded the Swine flu outbreak to ‘level five’ -eminent global pandemic. It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ there will be more deaths, the question now is ‘how many?’

Back to the original post.

The new GDP numbers came out today and the markets are rallying like mad…apparently the idiots think we have ‘hit bottom’ at (negative) 6.1%

I’ve been puzzling over this and have reached the conclusion that the stock markets are ‘eyewash’ with no basis in reality. Like the money in your pocket, it’s all just numbers on paper.

Perhaps more disturbing is the end result of this brand of ‘fakery’; we are ‘mesmerized’ into inaction. Swindled into believing things are on the mend when our plight deepens by the minute.

What am I babbling about? It is not possible to make rational decisions without accurate information.

Let’s have a little ‘reality check’. The economy has lost half of its value over 2008 and yet our GDP (whatever the hell that’s supposed to tell us) has only dropped 6.1% in the past two quarters.

Unemployment continues to rise yet and for some bizarre reason the same people that have lost half of their (and your) money think we have hit bottom?

What ‘rational decision’ do you think you should be making in light of these facts?

How does this irrational behavior reflect upon the ‘competence’ of the people running the so-called ‘private sector’?

Given their gross incompetence, should there even be a ‘private sector’ (considering our continued survival depends on it?)

Lets take a look at the employment situation and use it to weigh the fact that your continued survival is NOT the top priority of the so-called ‘private sector.’

They most certainly can do without you but the reverse is not true.

Now ask yourself if you are as stupid as they obviously think you are?


Don’t beat yourself up good citizen, we have been carefully taught not to think along these lines or to even consider these terms.

The rich are rich because they deserve it, you are not because you don’t (deserve it) and it would be the end of the world if we shared the fruits of the planet equitably.

There’s your ‘gold standard’ good citizen, if our society were properly managed, rich and poor would be meaningless terms.

We have arrived at a point in time where this brand of ‘mismanagement’ is no longer tolerable (because we’re gonna be rich too someday!)

Extract your head from your buttocks and wake up!

The game is rigged, it’s not about you getting rich; it’s about them remaining rich.

We have become a human ‘feedlot’ where so many human ‘cattle’ drone their lives away keeping their ‘owners’ in the lap of luxury.

Is this what you want for your children?

Without equality there can be no justice; without justice there can be no peace; without peace there can be no prosperity.

It’s a pretty simple equation and until we embrace it and make it reality, our species is doomed to be nothing more than a curiosity, an oddity in the larger scheme of the universe.

We’ll become one more extinct life form that couldn’t figure out how to stop preying upon itself, tragic for us but of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos.

The dust of our civilization will leave no evidence as to why so few had to have so much while so many had so little.

It is Darwinian in the extreme to consider an entire species wiped out by something as preventable as ‘mismanagement’.

Addendum: Above is where I stopped writing this afternoon to prepare to go to work, I have now returned and it’s several hours later…why mention this? Because we’re about to jump a few tracks…

Shift mental gears as we shift from eminent extinction through mismanagement to a system that only benefits a few, a tiny minority in fact.

While I recognize that capitalism is held in high esteem by a large number of people, a vast majority of capitalism’s supporters do not personally enjoy the benefits of capitalism.

Their support is due to the ‘possibility’ that they too may someday become ‘capitalists’…and if they don’t, it’s their own fault for not playing their cards right…

As I point out above, the game is not about you getting rich, it’s about them staying rich (at your expense.)

You have as much chance of becoming rich as you do of becoming king!

Let’s look at some real life examples, a vast majority of lottery winners go bankrupt. There have been thousands of winners and a few have hit for more than a hundred million dollars, so where is the Bill Gates ‘lottery winner’?

Strangely, this same fact is used to justify why people like Angelo Mozillo and Sandy Weill deserved their multimillion dollars parachutes. An ‘average’ person with a large windfall has yet to ‘succeed’ in business.

What does this tell you good citizen? It tells you that it takes more than money to succeed in business.

Like most things, it’s not what you know but who.

Disturbingly, it is the same ‘who’ that are guilty of mismanaging our society to the edge of extinction. (No, it’s not too late to stop them, but time is running out.)

So why do some many fairly bright people delude themselves into thinking they’ve ‘got what it takes’ when the only way to gain access to the club is to be born there?

You can become one of these guy’s ‘friends’ and they will ‘take care of you’ but membership in the club? Out of the question!

Why is membership important? For the same reason someone with fifty or a hundred million dollars can’t buy their way in, all of the ‘slots’ are taken.

Pick any venture you can think of and there’s already somebody that ‘controls’ that slot/market niche. You may be able to hold your own for a while against the incumbent but eventually they’ll bleed you white.

You were ‘late to the party’ good citizen, the sooner you wake up to that fact the better off we’ll all be.

It looks like I’m talking about the mob here…well, guess what ‘entrenched power’ is?

Can you think of a better explanation as to why taxpayer funds are being used to bailout the banking sector from a mess they themselves created?

It goes against everything we were taught about how capitalism works…but there it is!

The ‘rules’ like ‘promises’ are for chumps.

Think about it…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner