Party of Ideas?

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘Party of Ideas’, those bizarrely tone deaf, one trick ponies who are champions of both monarchy and top-down management just don’t stop.

I read the headline of this particular editorial and ‘jumped to the conclusion’ that the authors were conservatives. Who else would posit such a counter-intuitive solution? It is almost as insane as the ‘one size fits all’ solution consistently trotted out by the ‘Party of Ideas’…tax cuts.

I wasn’t at all surprised when I found this in the footer of the article:

Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and the co-author of “Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity,” is the dean of the Columbia Business School, where Chris Mayer is a senior vice dean.

Is it just me or have the ideas put forth by the ‘Party of No’ gotten more bizarre since it became apparent that conservatism is actually a mental disorder?

I skimmed the article and (as usual) was unable to find any ‘concrete’ solutions. This is just one more conservative ‘giveaway’ that proposes making private (investor’s) debts the public’s problem under the guise of putting a ‘floor’ under the housing market.

Logically, if there aren’t any buyers who can afford to pay those prices, you don’t have a market.

Stupid is as Stupid does…

Did I mention that conservatism is now recognized as a mental disorder, treatable with mega-doses of Prozac? (While this may not alter your twisted worldview, you certainly won’t care!)

Anyway, How Underwater Mortgages Can Float the Economy represents the latest and the greatest the ‘Party of Ideas’ has to offer…

Which once again brings us full circle with the fact that the very definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome.

The mantra of ‘tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts’ has resulted in the largest ‘economic desert’ on the planet, you’d think they’d wake up at some point!

Remember good citizen, the Dow ‘Industrials’ standing at 10,600 has no relationship with reality. Like money itself, the number is ‘meaningless’.

Does it strike anyone as odd that the Dow stood at under 1,000 until the (whacko and decidedly ‘ethics challenged’) conservatives regained control of our government?

Worse good citizen is the stock markets were provided as ‘proof’ (often the ONLY proof because all the other outcomes of ‘conservative ideology’ were negative) that conservative values ‘worked’.

Which is to point out the stock market rose robustly while the job market (and payscales) stagnated. Consistently high corporate profits merely proved how ‘captive’ we were to imported goods.

It was (for the conservatives) the best of both worlds, the got to build market share while shedding production costs.

Well Bubba, there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’. We are now suffering the inevitable consequences that come when you ‘fire’ your customer base. (Not that the treasonous bastards responsible will suffer, the third world workers that replaced you can still afford their products!)

This is the ‘beauty’ of Mother Nature not having a cash register. A ‘million dollars’ is the exact equivalent of two cents when the bottom line is ‘it’s free to you! If you get anything at all for it, it’s a win.’

Which, naturally, leads us to the gross ‘mis-management’ of our, er, ‘shared resources’.

But you wouldn’t know anything about that…because you’ve been ‘taught’ (from a very early age) to believe that you ‘own’ nothing you can’t produce a sales slip for.

Understand good citizen, none of the motherfuckers that claim to ‘own’ what we all need to live can produce a ‘valid’ sales slip…not one of them!

We are, for the umpteenth time, approaching a nexus where we can finally correct this glaring deficiency in the management of our species.

But every ‘revolution’ suffers a counter-revolution shortly afterwards and those are the, er, ‘assholes’ who write history.

We have to be more ‘careful’…we don’t have a lot of ‘do-overs’ remaining.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Where's the Beef?

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while I encounter a piece that saves me a ton of writing. What follows isn’t precisely how I’d put it but it is mighty damn close.

Long time readers should be able to pick out the ‘quibbles’ (which are few.)

I tend to just start typing, which makes a lot of my works difficult to follow. The ‘stream of consciousness’ is less than constant, causing the reader to draw upon their ability to ‘filter’ rather frequently.

Sorry, it is a personal weakness that I could correct if I wanted to ‘re-write’ everything I post.

You might want to call this ‘blogger disease’ as I am not the only one who suffers from this, er, ‘tendency to ramble’.

While writing IS re-writing, blogging seldom affords you the luxury of unlimited time.

You just dash these bad boys off and hope the reader can sort most of it out…

Um, anyway…let’s get things back on track here by taking a quick peak at the stock markets, which are, it appears, taking the dive they should have taken yesterday…for the exact same reason as yesterday no less!

The ‘red ink’ is global; although the ‘Thieves Republic’ (USA) is bleeding far less than the exchanges of its, er, ‘vassals’…

Dunno what to make of this but it strikes me that we would be in far worse shape if the ‘head thieves’ didn’t consider these shores home.

You don’t shit in your own backyard. (For very obvious reasons.)

Stock markets aside, where is this ‘crippled economy’ leading us?

If we ask ‘question one’ it leads us to some rather grim assessments:

Where Are The Jobs?

Most Americans don't really care about the economic minutiae that many of us who study the U.S. economy love to pour over. When it comes to the economy, the typical American citizen just wants to be able to get a good job, make a decent living and put bread on the table for the family. For generations, this arrangement has worked out quite well. The U.S. economy has provided large numbers of middle class jobs and the American people have worked hard and have helped this nation prosper like no other.
But now people are starting to notice that something has shifted. Millions of people are looking around and are realizing that the jobs that are supposed to be there are not there anymore. [I would never use this ‘POV’; there is nothing ‘abrupt’ about our current circumstances! This shit has been going on for decades.] The American people are still working hard (and in many cases harder than ever [for less pay!]) but all of that hard work is producing fewer and fewer rewards.

Often politicians will placate voters by telling them that they are working harder and harder for less and less. [Must be a ‘local phenomenon’. I have yet to see a politician cop to ‘me too’ while campaigning.] That tends to ring true with voters because that is a very accurate description of what so many of them are actually experiencing, but what the politicians don't tell us is that they are the ones to blame for the situation that we are in. As millions of jobs become obsolete because of technology and millions of other jobs are shipped overseas, our politicians tell us over and over that we can "compete" with anyone and that if we will just go out and get some more education we can make it happen. But those of us who are extremely over-educated know what a fraud that line is. The truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs for all of us no matter how "educated" we are. This is creating a lot of anger and frustration, and now even the IMF is warning that we will could see "an explosion of social unrest" if high unemployment persists.

But what can be done? You can't force large [private] corporations to hire people. The reality is that there are a couple of huge factors that have brought us to this point. First of all, advanced technology means that big corporations need fewer people to do the same amount of work now. Secondly, the globalization of our economy means that U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool where they are in direct competition with workers who are more than happy to make less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

This all means that the labor of American workers is less valuable to global corporations than it ever has been before. [Funny how the solution to the problem lies in problem itself…eliminate global corporations and you eliminate the problem!] Advanced technology and computers have enabled corporations to operate leaner and meaner. If they do need some old-fashioned muscle for certain tasks they can always run out and set up a facility in some third world nation where they can pay people close to slave labor wages and where they don't have to worry much about taxes, regulations, unions, health benefits or pension plans. [This, ‘indifference’ to the health of society at large is a crime against humanity and it should be prosecuted as such! This is commerce to enrich the owner at the expense of society. These ‘destroyers’ shall be themselves, destroyed.]

What did you think was going to happen when the United States entered into all of these "free trade" agreements with nations around the world that did not have minimum wage laws? [This is where (very misguided) Libertarians defended globalization for lowering prices to the consumer, ignoring the fact that the bulk of consumers double as ‘producers’. The ONLY winners in the global race to the bottom has been the employer/importer, everybody else loses and our civilization is falling apart because of it!]

U.S. corporations are not in existence to provide the American people with jobs. They are in existence to make money. If they can make more money by shipping jobs overseas, then that is exactly what they are going to do. [This is essentially ‘fucked up’ because all ‘corporations’ are ‘chartered’ by the guardians of the public (the government) to serve ‘the public’. If a company ‘harms’ the society that founded it, it faces the revocation of its charter. How many corporations can you think of that are in violation of their charters? Would it be simpler to throw the blanket over the whole mess because all NYSE listed corporations are ‘guilty’?]

According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies skyrocketed 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

Are you starting to see the picture?

Global corporations based in the U.S. have been creating lots of jobs - just not in the United States.

In fact, things only seem to be accelerating.

In 2008 alone, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations fell by 445,500.

In the old days, you could give tax breaks to U.S. firms and that would spur them to do more business and to hire more workers. But today, if U.S. multinationals decide they wish to expand they will just go hire more third world workers and pocket the rest of the profits for themselves. [And who is behind handing out tax cuts to the already rich?]

The reality is that we are facing a very disturbing long-term trend in the United States. Today, over half of all unemployed workers in the United States have been out of work for over six months. In fact, the duration of unemployment in the United States has spiked up to the highest level it has been at since World War II....[It’s even worse than that good citizen, it is worse than its ever been!]

This has created a growing subclass of people in the United States who feel that the system has failed them. The anger and the frustration in the country is rising every day. You can almost feel it. [It’s a ‘tinderbox’ just waiting for a match.]

In fact, the IMF is warning that we are at risk of "an explosion of social unrest" due to this unemployment crisis. [Unemployment is bad enough, it will be when ‘heat or eat’ becomes an issue for tens of millions that haven’t faced this choice yet.]

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently made the following statement at an Oslo jobs summit with the International Labour Federation....

"The labour market is in dire straits. The Great Recession has left behind a waste land of unemployment." [Geez, you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the local media now would you? Are things really worse than they are letting on? You bet they are!]

So exactly what is going to turn that around?

Are millions of jobs going to suddenly hop up and return home from overseas? [No, the answer lies in a shorter workweek/day and a severely reduced level of expenses across the board…all while letting the useless banks go hang!]

Is the U.S. government going to suddenly eliminate a whole raft of taxes and regulations and are U.S. workers going to suddenly become much cheaper?

Is the U.S. trade deficit crisis suddenly going to reverse and turn into huge trade surpluses for the United States?

Of course none of those things is going to happen.

America is going to continue to bleed jobs, wages inside the United States are going to continue to be forced down and the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to deteriorate. [Just understand that this isn’t ‘infinite freefall’ people won’t obliging starve to death without retaliating…then watch out!]

Plus, if the American people don't have good jobs, they can't buy homes. In fact, a growing number of Americans are finding out that they can't even afford the homes they are in right now. CNBC is reporting that the nation's banks repossessed a record number of homes in August.

But for many Americans, a foreclosure is just the beginning of their problems. People are falling out of the middle class at an alarming rate. Approximately 45 million Americans [households, the number of affected individuals is considerably higher!] were living in poverty during 2009. That is an absolutely astounding figure.

The American people are getting mad and faith in the economy is plummeting. According to Gallup, confidence in the economy is way down compared to the same period last year. [Wait until ‘lack of faith’ in the economy becomes lack of faith in the currency!]

So what is going to happen when (not if) things get even worse?

Well, some investors are already anticipating rough times ahead and are flocking to commodities. The price of gold soared to a record intra-day high of $1,276.50 an ounce on Tuesday, and the price of gold and other commodities will probably continue to climb as economies around the world continue to destabilize. [Some are predicting gold to exceed $5,000 an ounce. Personally, human stupidity being what it is, I expect to see gold hit a million dollars an ounce before the gold market collapses into worthlessness.]

These are very, very difficult times that we are moving into. There are not going to be nearly enough jobs for everyone. People you know are going to be unemployed. People you know are going to lose their homes. People you know might even end up living on the streets. [Already there Amigo…we’re already there.]

Just hope that you don't end up being one of them.

Squatting will temporarily ‘ease’ the homeless situation. What’s going to throw the torch onto the bonfire is when people ‘living free’ are unable to scrape up enough to keep their ‘squat’ heated AND keep bread on the table.

These people are already living ‘illegally’ so they don’t want to attract unwanted attention to themselves by stealing fuel oil too (although some will.)

You can see the two edged sword already starting to drop. ‘Cheated’ fuel oil dealers will be on the police to evict squatters from, er, ‘abandoned’ properties.

The police have no place to house these, er, criminals so they will ask the state for assistance. The state can’t house them either…so ‘fuel assistance’ funds will be tapped.

[Although some families with small children will be ‘made an example of’ (arrested and taken into custody)…and this will turn out VERY BADLY for the law enforcement officials involved.]

But (damn it!) I digress…

I will refrain from making any ‘predictions’ regarding this coming winter, if things go to hell it is unlikely the MSM will draw your attention to it.

(Unless it’s ‘unavoidable’…which is bound to happen. Although, some ‘civil actions’ could be disguised as, er, ‘natural disasters’. I suspect this has already happened on more than a few occasions.)

More digressing…sorry.

Just as it is not possible to spend one’s way out of debt, you can’t solve a labor surplus by increasing imports…yet these are the ‘solutions’ our corporate overlords are giving their pet politicians.

What happens when we ‘lose faith’ in charade we call politics?

Stay tuned.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Madhouse!

Greetings good citizen,

It’s always distressing as well as disturbing to see the threat of war looming on the horizon.

Between Cryptogon on one side and Jesse on the other the ‘rumblings’ (of the ground) are becoming increasingly worrisome.

(And I’m sure by now some of you are of the impression that I love to write like this, I don’t. It is not my intention to give you ulcers. I am trying to prepare you for what is coming.)

Anyway, left on the back burner for quite some time has been the US dollar and behind that, the future of ‘fiat currency’ in general.

So far, nothing has happened; the status quo is still in force. On the other side of the table some players are taking a real soaking because nothing has changed.

No irony should be lost on the fact that these players (like the US civilian workforce) have no ‘leverage’. They have to accept the pounding in silence.

You’d think these victims would take their case to court…but the court is in the pocket of the tyrants, so nobody seeks justice from that quarter because they already know the outcome.

Weird, really, to keep bumping into the same problems every time one casts about for a solution…

Although it is only fair to point out there is more ‘design’ here than ‘accident’ going on.

Things are as they were ‘intended’ to be.

Thus does the ‘what are you gonna do about it crowd’ invite war.

Those who block the pathways towards the peaceful resolution of conflict leave the aggrieved no choice.

Let us proceed with the the evidence Jesse provides for our consideration.

Will Europe Join in Promoting the SDR as the Global Reserve Currency?

[I cut the quote from the play bearing the same name: Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224 to reduce wear and tear on your poor, abused eyeballs. Not to mention the unnecessary bruising of your already tired mind…]

China and Russia and some of the other developing nations have been proposing a reformulated SDR, with less US dollar content, a broader representation of currencies, and the inclusion of gold and silver, as a suitable replacement for the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

The US and UK are opposing the SDR as replacement to the US dollar as the new global reserve currency. They prefer to delay and postpone the discussions, and to maintain the status quo for as long as is possible to support their primacy in the financial markets. Control of the money supply is a huge hand on the levers of financial and political power. [ Here we see the ‘creators’ of the mythical ‘cheaper there’, the real ‘currency manipulators’ trying to keep their ‘Ponzi Scheme’ floating. The really disturbing question here is how far the manipulators will go to maintain ‘dollar hegemony’? Will they go to war?]

It will be most interesting to see where the European Union comes out on this issue, especially in light of the recent drubbing that their banks have taken via dodgy dollar assets and a vicious dollar short squeeze, alleviated by a rescue from the Federal Reserve. It could have gone otherwise, and that provides things to think about. No one wishes to be at the mercy of a small group of unelected financial engineers who are closely aligned with an equally small set of Anglo-American banks operating with a somewhat opaque discretion.

One hears things. A deal being offered to Germany by the financial interests, for example, as a counterbalance to sentiment for greater latitude and independence in the EU. The lines of discussion move, and sometimes blur. Currency wars are the continuation of diplomacy, and possibly a revival of the cold war, by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz. And a chilling fog is rolling over the landscape. [There’s that damn ‘cloak of national security’ again! We really should SHOOT anyone who invokes ‘national security’ to keep their underhandedness secret from a trusting public…]

This is just the latest event in an unfolding macro change I have been calling Currency Wars after the Chinese best seller authored by Song Hongbing in 2007. I viewed it as the definitive spike in the theory of the end of history by Fukuyama. [Original article has links to both references…]

It will continue to proceed slowly, at least for now, but such events tend to accelerate and sometimes dramatically as they progress. However, the longer-term implications for a change to the de facto Bretton Woods arrangement, in place since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, are enormous and yet little remarked by conventional economists. It has all the hallmarks of a classic conflict yet unfolding. [Left unknown here is whether or not the peaceful resolution to this issue will act to ‘correct’ the imbalances in the global economy or if will it make matters worse? There is still a huge ‘surplus population’ out there with no place to go. A Simple Plan puts these people to work, these assholes want to kill them!]

Rather than standing fast on an unsustainable status quo that serves the special interests of a wealthy few, the US might be well served to reform its banks, and balance its economy once again between service and industry, and stand once again for independent freedom and the common good, rather than narrow power and greed of the monied interests and their assistants.

Well, wouldn’t it be ‘nice’ if our corporate overlords wanted to protect and preserve civilization as we have come to know it…as opposed to throwing it into its own cesspool, which has been ‘the plan’ for a number of decades now.

Perhaps Jesse feels honor bound to give the government of the United States the benefit of the doubt…and maybe he just wanted to give us all something to laugh about!

Yes good citizen, if we shift our attention back to the MSM (keeping in mind that they are a pack of, er, paid schills) we see that the ‘has nothing to do with nothing’ stock market is once again defying gravity.

You’d think a, er, device that measures the wealth of society’s richest would have something to do with reality but these days it seems all money is ‘funny’.

The markets opened in negative territory only surge right up to positive ground on damn disappointing reports from the manufacturing sector.

Like I said, it doesn’t have to make sense…all you need to know is the junk in your pocket is being diluted, big time.

It won’t be long before you’ll spend your paycheck as fast as you can, the value of your money will be dropping so quickly.

This, good citizen, is the ‘hyper-inflation’ you’ve been warned about…what libertarian assholes keep telling you is ‘impossible’, they’re wrong!

ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

Being anchored to ‘nothing’ doesn’t help matters…(and if you anchored it to gold it would still be ‘worthless’!)

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was trying to start a stampede and scare the crap out of the peasants!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Freedom is the state of being free...

Greetings good citizen,

One of the quickest ways to get branded a whacko is to start pointing to a conspiracy…and, doubtless, there are a lot of ‘whackos’ out there who see a conspiracy behind pretty much anything and everything.

Society itself is a collection of organizations and what is a conspiracy but an organization that isn’t particularly ‘forthcoming’ about its agenda?

Which is not to say that all conspiracies hide what they are up to…

So what is it that makes a conspiracy a nefarious, underhanded collection of ‘likeminded individuals’?

At the end of the day we could call political parties conspiracies…(even if they merely conspire to defraud their members into believing ‘they’ are being ‘represented’.)

You get my point, life, as well as society, is full of conspiracies.

Everybody has an agenda and not everybody is forthcoming about what that agenda is.

The dividing line between ‘personal wish list’ and a conspiracy is collusion.

Once birds of a feather get together to work toward a mutually beneficial goal you have a full-blown conspiracy on your hands.

Again, not all conspiracies are ‘bad’.

But our experience tells us that most conspiracies don’t bode well for those not in on the, er, ‘secret’…

Yes, it’s the ‘underhanded’ part of a conspiracy, that hooray for me, fuck you aspect that makes us all uneasy when we suspect that others are ‘conspiring against us.’

If you let this sort of shit bother you, you will quickly become neurotic…but just because you’re paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you…

This is why it is astonishing that so many ‘serious minded’ people choose to ignore our obvious ‘social interdependence’ (most of us won’t take a piss alone) and quickly ‘pooh-pooh’ conspiracies.

Which lead us to an arena that is just bursting with mutually beneficial situations (that have long required legislative action to keep ‘in check’…until recently.)


The Marriage of Mercantilism and Corporatism: When Free Trade Is Not 'Free'

Something not commonly acknowledged by history teachers is the constant, er, struggle to prevent society crippling monopolies from strangling the world’s (alleged) democracies in their sleep.

What your teacher didn’t tell you (because nobody told them) is that this battle, democracy almost always loses.

There is only so much ‘market share’ and ‘competition’ is…er, counterproductive.

Repeatedly throughout history, competition has been ‘faked’. Avis may have ‘tried harder’ than Hertz but it didn’t matter because they were both owned by ITT.

Naturally, this is tangential to our current situation, a ‘conspiracy’ to, what’s the PC term for it…‘right size’ the ‘surplus population’ and to shrink the economy down to a ‘more sustainable’ size.

The single largest problem facing society since its inception is the ‘status quo’ who quite literally want to ‘freeze’ both time and progress at some imagined ‘ideal’ level.

Which is to point out that ‘leadership’ is a very misunderstood concept…

It is not leadership if your sole desire is to stay right where you are.

Yet this is ‘conservatism’, leadership that takes you to where you already are.

What these conservative morons don’t tell you is that you are marked for death.

To preserve their ‘perfect world’, you must die.

They don’t see the point in ‘wasting’ perfectly good resources on, er, expendable people.

But if you are part of the ‘reality based’ community, you don’t see this.

Nor will you see it…until it is too late to do anything about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bowling for Columbine

Greetings good citizen,

I finally got to watch ‘Bowling for Columbine’ last night…naturally, didn’t see the whole thing but I saw enough to get the gist of what Michael Moore was trying to say.

And in the end I was somewhat puzzled why he didn’t arrive at the ‘obvious conclusion’…

Naturally, that conclusion may only be ‘obvious’ to my humble self.

What did you take away from the end of that documentary?

Were you disappointed that Charlton Heston didn’t have any answers as to why our culture is so violent?

Why do you suppose it is that the citizens of the US are so much more likely than the people of other nations to blow your ass away than to look at you?

What makes us Murikans sooo ‘edgy’?

Could it be the ‘fuck you, pay me’ culture?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, 99% of all homicide revolves around money.

A man shoots his cheatin’ spouse, he ain’t even concerned about her ‘giving it up for someone else…he shoots her because he’s the one that’s been paying for it and there she is, giving it away!

It’s all about money and there ain’t a damn thing funny…except the money itself!

Still, this doesn’t explain why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to pick up a gun and go on a rampage against a world they have no use for because that world has no use for them…

More than a little disturbing was ‘commentary’ offered on NPR today about how our ‘educational system’ is failing…I’ll paraphrase since focus of the show was on ‘minorities’ but essentially this is so far off the mark as to be laughable.

The ‘linkage’ between education and employment is so spurious as to be beyond comical.

The only thing you need a college degree for is to prove that you can afford one.

Which is to point out what is already obvious to most of us (and you can ask virtually anyone in the ‘real world’ (who isn’t employed in the ‘Sciences’) just how often they actually ‘use’ what they learned in college.


Most people will answer ‘never’.

Yes good citizen, even engineers will tell you they didn’t learn anything ‘practical’ in college…it is impossible to actually produce parts the way they teach you to design them!

Yet our ‘salvation’ (under capitalism) is for 80% of the population to obtain a college degree.

To do what? God only knows…

Do you ‘need’ a college degree to pick up trash? No, but if you don’t have one in the future it is unlikely you will get the job (because the asshole who ‘screens’ the applicants will toss your resume/application the moment they see you left that part of your history blank.)

Worse good citizen, we don’t have to wait until some highly competitive future to see this kind of idiot behavior, they do it today!

Yeah good citizen, if you want to work in the future (at all) you need that sheepskin (if only to prove you’re ‘motivated enough’.)

In case any of you haven’t noticed, this is just one more aspect of our ‘fuck you, pay me!’ economic system that totally pisses me off.

It is useless bullshit and a ‘convenient excuse’ for clueless politicians and insecure educators.

It would be suicidal to admit that capitalism is incapable of providing jobs for even a fraction of the working aged population.

But that’s the truth.

Retracing our steps back to the question of why are citizens of the US so ‘prone to violence’?

If everything you were taught to believe turned out to be a lie, you’d be pretty pissed off too!

The anger we see manifested in the streets (and occasionally in the nation’s workplaces) is the direct result of the lie that is capitalism.

You will NEVER prosper working for somebody else.

Worse, there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ for everyone to have one (never mind a couple or three of ‘em!)
The ‘New Deal’ was based on the concept that you would do your part and the employer would in turn ‘take care’ of you.

Well good citizen, I think it is fair to say the ‘owners’ have ‘reneged’ on their part of the bargain.

So we, in turn, should renege on ours…we need to ‘do away’ with private property. The greedy can’t be trusted to act in the public interest.

We have hundreds of years of experience that proves this is true.

We don’t have another planet to divvy up so we have to ‘share’ this one.

If you don’t want to share, get the hell off!

There’s no ‘I’ in either ‘us’ or ‘we’ and together is the only way our species will survive…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

This land's not your land...

Greetings good citizen,

I used to relish Sundays. Sunday was the day I could read my favorite editorials written by folks who held surprisingly similar worldviews to my own…

We all admire people who agree with us, it’s only natural.

So what can be said when you no longer see ‘eye to eye’ with your favorite commentators?

Even this is not a ‘fair’ indictment. I agree wholeheartedly with today’s piece , it’s just that I think he’s ‘wasting his breath’, ‘flogging a dead horse’ if you will.

This does not diminish my respect for this individual’s talent, it merely perturbs me that he is forced to (by his ‘terms of employment’), er, ‘pretend’ that our political system functions ‘as advertised’.

Ironically, this same issue was the topic of today’s ‘On the Media’ broadcast on NPR, how Hurricane Katrina ushered in the ‘sympatico’ talking head.

I tend to think the RWNM has more to do with this unseemly turn of events because they were the ones who began to openly demonize those who didn’t see things ‘their way’.

Seems to me ‘journalism’ lost its ‘objectivity’ shortly after the Reagan Revolution…pointing to Katrina is just more smoke to obscure an unsettling bit of piracy.

For once again we encounter stories like this which are told in a way that ‘masks’ the seriousness of the problem.

Sure the ‘individual narrative’ lets us ‘feel the victims pain’ but it hides the fact that this particular victim is NOT Alone! There are millions more out there and huge percentages can’t find help period.

The resources available were already operating at maximum capacity BEFORE the crisis. To say they are ‘overwhelmed’ now is to severely understate the problem!

Worse, the article itself seriously understates the scope of the crisis. We once again have the same variety of ‘inference’ at play when the media tells us that 40 million Americans are on ‘food assistance’…people get the impression the media is talking about individuals! 40 million is not individuals; it’s families/households!

There are 117 million households in the US (and nearly 15 million have been foreclosed upon…but I digress) so the number of people receiving foodstamps is much larger than 40 million!

Out of our population of 300 million, we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million. (Not everyone on food assistance is also unemployed/homeless.)

Which is a much larger number than the 40 million the media, er, admits to.

Not to put too fine a point on it good citizen but how much do you ‘love’ the land of the free and the home of the brave now?

And we owe it all (in more ways than one) to the ‘Stupid Capitalists’.

I know I sound like a broken record but sometimes you just can’t repeat your main point often enough.

We live in a ‘broken nation’ that we desperately need to fix.

An monumental task made that much more daunting by the fact that we don’t agree on what needs to be fixed…

Sadly, this is due largely to ‘perception management’ spewed by the fucktards who keep you focused on illegal immigrants and tax cuts for the already rich!

How fucked up is that good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The price of loyalty...

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘double dip’(recession) , like the Koran burning party down in Fla on 9/11, is off, at least for now. (Although preacher Terry is now saying that he’s been duped!)

Talk about your cluster fucks, even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act by trying the uniquely capitalist method of ‘buying’ a peaceful outcome.

What most of us should find, er, amusing is that the Muslims have not threatened to ‘retaliate’ by burning bibles (or maybe they have and nobody cares…)

Would this turn into a competition of sorts? If you burn 20 Korans, we’ll burn forty Bibles!

(Or vice versa, so far the ‘whackjob’ in this overblown media circus appears to be the Florida pastor.)

You all know that somebody, somewhere, probably burns a Koran/Bible EVERY FUCKING DAY just to make themselves feel better. The difference being it isn’t something the media latches on to (although the fucktards would if somebody were stupid enough to admit it, just for the ‘tingle’ it would give their readers! That’s how low we/they have sunk!)

Which belabors the obvious, that three quarters of the asshats sitting at the editors desk across the country should (at the very least) be fired on the spot.

This is probably ‘unfair’ because chances are good that most of these poor slobs are only guilty of being ‘spineless’, which is punishment enough…push come to shove.

Their superiors, on the other hand, should be drawn and quartered!

But exile is fundamentally the same thing, without the mess, so I’d settle for that.

But naturally, I digress…

We were on the subject of ‘double dips’ and how this most recent one has been (for the fourth or fifth time) ‘narrowly avoided’.

I’d tend to agree but for a different rationale entirely.

You have to have a ‘recovery’ BEFORE you can ‘slip back in’ to recession.

Since the current downturn is going into its third year, we aren’t really ‘double dipping’, this is just a continuation of what started three years ago.

Alas, it is time once more to shift mental gears as we join Jesse of Crossroads Café fame for a look at what passes for economic recovery in the ‘war between the classes’.

Soaring Corporate Profits As US Worker Pay for Productivity Hits Record Lows

Two sets of charts tell the story.

The problem is that when workers are pressed to the wall on pay they lose the ability to consume without taking on debt [as has happened repeatedly over the past twenty years.] And at some point the debt leverage mechanism for consumption breaks down.

Perhaps the problem is related to the one Wall Street is now confronting. How do you continue on in business after having impoverished, alienated, or driven away most of your clientele in the heat of a short term greed enabled by a corrupted political and regulatory system? [Honestly good citizen, we are up to our ears in criminals! Worse, most of them are ‘appointed’!]

Those who were around in the late 1970's will recall the absolute disrepute in which equities were held by the public after the grinding bear market of 1973-74. Pit traders spent the better part of the day practicing their origami skills, for lack of serious 'outside participation.' Skinning each other when you have run out of greater fools is truly a zero sum game.

Sadly good citizen, there are more than ‘tricks’ laying in wait for us on the road ahead.

There will be blood, and lots of it. The name of the game will be minimizing the amount you are forced to contribute…

No one skates, we will all ‘pay the piper’…the wicked right alongside the righteous.

What I find truly disturbing is how the treacherous are playing the ‘what you gonna do about it’ card right to the hilt.

The ‘cops’ are just as ‘dirty’ as the crooks so we will be forced to, er, ‘punish’ them both.

When civilization breaks down and the boys in blue can no longer rely on backup ‘ever’ showing up there is going to be some vicious ‘retribution’ for the ‘just following orders’ crowd.

These folks are never going to set eyes on a judge, they’re gonna have to tell it to the executioner.

Treason is probably the worst crime any human can commit, ‘just following orders’ is no excuse.

Sadly this is yet another failing that can be laid at the feet of ‘fuck you, pay me’ capitalism. [Don’t get the wrong idea, all ‘versions’ of capitalism operate on the ‘fuck you, pay me’ basis so there is no ‘good kind’ of capitalism. Like ‘Capitalist Utopia’, it doesn’t exist!]

The ‘failing’ being the fact that it is quite amazing what you can get somebody to agree to do if you have the power to dangle their paycheck from the chopping block…

This is just plain wrong…and our patriot forefathers knew it…but they weren’t smart enough to solve the problem, although some might say they weren’t ‘strong’ enough. Their greed overcame them.

Many, many things, er, ‘irk’ me to no end, those who ‘idolize’ the founders are just one of them. [Partly because most of them are conservatives!]

I’d like to prattle on longer but other matters press…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner