Heads Up!

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we witness the ‘miracle of Wall Street’ in action. Overnight, exchanges around the world were bleeding red ink…and then the sun rose over Lower Manhattan and all of a sudden the Dow is in POSITIVE territory!

The ONLY place on the fucking planet, how about that?

The truly frightening part good citizen is we use this, er, information to plan how we are going to proceed with our lives.

Bad information only makes the situation exponentially worse!

First up is Bobby Reich with another rant about the nonsensical policies being pursued by the ‘government haters’ and their corporate media 'back-up singers…'

Paul’s newly-unveiled economic plan – promising to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget in year one (presumably that means 2013) – is only slightly more ambitious than what we’re hearing from other Republican candidates. They’re all calling for major spending cuts starting as soon as possible.
 
What are they smoking?

Can we just put ideology aside for a moment and be clear about the facts? Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don’t have the dough. And businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers.

Exactly correct sir! The business community (with global connections) is flush with cash. It’s their customer base that doesn’t (in increasingly larger numbers) have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of…

What is the number one killer of ‘private enterprise’?

Lack of customers!

Bizarrely, it isn’t just capitalists who are, er, ‘ignorant’ of this fact, it appears our new ‘one size fits all’ politicians are also, er, ‘clueless’ regarding this bit of capitalist trivia…

The only thing stupider than attempting to solve a debt crisis with more debt is attempting to cure a solvency crisis by drying up income sources, in effect, tightening the noose they have helped the greedy few to slip over our heads.

The ‘austerity’ will NOT be universal, it never is. Worse, those responsible for this train wreck will enjoy the protection of both the police and the courts while the victims languish in a world that no longer needs them.

Tortured for their ‘failure’ in a stratified world that has no use for them…or worse, regards them as parasites to be exterminated!

These one way, dead end social Darwinists have only one goal and that goal is to insure they aren’t on the ‘losing’ side.

So don’t take it personal if they throw you and yours under the bus, for all of their rhetoric, they subscribe to the philosophy of ‘better you than me!’

You are routinely being enlisted to help dig your own grave…if you’re ‘too smart’ for that old trick then you’re invited to sit on your hands while they slowly strangle you to death.

And the bad news is you’re doing it!

We are long past the time for talk, it’s blood in the streets time!

As evidenced by this lucid argument

What worries me is that we’re… starting to see fault lines develop, where one side blames the government while another side blames Wall Street for the messes of the last two decades…

Everyone was involved in the mortgage scam. At the lender level the deceptions were myriad; liar’s loans, fraudulent income documentation, negative amortization loans, HELOCs, etc. The rush to get as many loans written as possible and then get those hot potatoes moved to the next sucker in the line was furious and extended from coast to coast, sinking one lender after another in Ponzoid debt and indictments….

Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means.

Did our ‘friend’ Flipper fall for the bait hook, line and sinker? He sure did but who is responsible for that if not Tom Vu?

AND the dire lack of critical reasoning skills the ‘fuck you, pay me system’ prevents our children from being educated in.

Why did no one wonder if there was so much money to be made in Real Estate why was this asshole peddling ‘get rich quick’ schemes?

At $600 a clip?

For all of my ragging I have never forked over a single cent to a ‘snake oil’ salesman like Tom Vu but I have friends who did…

And other friends who bought into EST and a whole slew of other ‘fads and trends’ mostly famous for being a flash in the pan/ hit and run event…

I did get clipped for a hundred dollars in a ‘circle of gold’ letter once…

But I digress, it’s not the scam itself that is worrying, it is the flipside…where have the, er, ‘Good Guys’ been during all of this or more importantly, where are they now?

You STILL don’t see anybody getting prosecuted for their, er, ‘treachery’…

Which leads us to this ‘you’ll know it when you see it’ question.

Like children sitting anxiously in the back of the car on a long journey, many people -- especially those "experts" who failed to see financial Armageddon coming or how bad it would be -- keep asking if we are there yet -- with "there" being the long-awaited economic recovery.

Well, if history is any guide, they might want to get their blankies out, because odds are that we still have a long (and depressing) ride ahead of us. According to a new paper, summarized by Globe and Mail columnist Michael Babad in "Great Recession May Not Yet Be Even Half Over, Study Says," "the Great Recession may not even be half over yet."

"The preponderance of evidence for episodes comparable with the current U.S. slump is that, while potential GDP is eventually restored, the slumps last an average of nine years," they write. "If this historical pattern holds, the Great Recession that started in 2007:4 will not ultimately affect potential GDP, but the Great Slump is not yet half over."

I’d follow the first question with a second one (being one of the few blessed with ‘critical thinking skills‘) and that second question would be, “Does anyone think the economy/social model is capable of correcting itself?

That’s what the ‘anti-government’ crowd thinks.

Must make your head explode to see an ‘Anarchist’ preaching in favor of government but every right minded anarchist knows that without ‘enforceable rules’ civilization itself is not possible! (And I do LOVE civilization!)

And make no mistake about it good citizen, those who would abolish YOUR protection from the greedy and the selfish have no intention of being caught unprotected!

Sadly, this means exactly what you think it means…what it has ALWAYS meant.

It means, “do as I say and not as I do.”

Not that I’m convinced the majority has been hoodwinked into supporting their own assassins, that is the media’s fault for creating that, er, ‘impression’.

And when the gloves come (completely) off, the worthless media will be the first to feel the wrath of a mislead public…

But I, once again, digress…

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Crazy Train

Greetings good citizen,

Once again the global stock markets were bleeding from the eye-sockets UNTIL the sun rose on the NYSE, then, ‘magically’ stocks reversed direction.

I need remind no one that there is no ‘logical’ reason for this, nor do I need to point out that market performance has zero relationship with economic stability or the personal prosperity of those not on the ‘inside’ of a decidedly rigged game.

So how do you interpret this load of bull shit?

Isn’t this the exact same CRAP they pulled with the totally doctored retail sales figures last week?

Investors will be closely monitoring all commentary from key players in the summit, especially if anything emerges later from a telephone call between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A French government spokeswoman said Sarkozy emphasized to cabinet members earlier Wednesday that "Europe has a rendezvous with its history."

While stocks have advanced, the euro has perked up and appears headed back towards the $1.40 mark for the first time in six weeks — when investors are willing to take on more risk the euro usually rises.

By late morning, it was 0.9 percent higher at $1.3862.

Oil prices have also recovered ground on optimism of a comprehensive solution in Europe. The benchmark rate for November delivery was up another 10 cents at $88.44 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

A lie is only ‘useful’ if you know about it ahead of time…

Which is to point out that there is no ‘fix’ for the (poorly designed) Euro…so rumors of a ‘deal’ should have zero effect on share prices…unless the rumors are the ‘useful lie’ of the day!

While we’re on the subject, Mr. ‘Flat-Earth’ has sprung out of the closet to sound the alarm against ‘Trade Protectionism’!

After spending last week talking with Hong Kong entrepreneurs about a bill, just passed by the U.S. Senate, to clear the way for tariffs on Chinese exports to America if China doesn’t revalue its currency, there are three things I have to say. One, I really hope the people pushing this bill do not give up. Two, I really hope the people pushing this bill do not succeed. And, three, I really hope no one thinks this legislation will make any sustainable dent in our unemployment problem, which requires much more radical rethinking.

I support this legislation in theory because China needs a wake-up call. I know, China never responds to in-your-face pressure — not immediately. But it began revaluing its currency upward in 2005, the last time the Senate brandished a big stick. The fact is, China’s strategy of using low wages and a cheap currency to build up an enormous export-led growth engine — while using its huge market to lure and compel companies to transfer their next-generation technology to China as well — is now hurting both sides.

Geez, Chicken Little was singing a very different tune when China was eating our lunch!

The fact that automation and over production along with the financial ‘hyper-extention’ of the consumer base combined to destroy ‘competitive advantage’ around the world is the primary reason China is ‘all revved up with no place to go.’

A sadly ‘self-inflicted’ wound indeed!

Or was the wound caused by:

I am typing this column on a Dell laptop that says “Made in China” on the bottom. In fact, it was assembled in China — but the design, memory board, screen, casing and dozens of other parts were all made in other countries. And while the machine says “Made in China,” the lion’s share of its value and profit goes to the firm that conceived the idea and orchestrated that supply chain — Dell Inc. in Texas.

The very same crowd that ‘imagines’ all sorts of benefits but totally FAILED to think things through to their ‘logical conclusion’?

Because the collapsing world you see, the one the ‘imagineers’ keep re-imagining for us on a daily basis, was brought to us by people with a decidedly fatal case of ‘myopia’…more commonly known as ‘short-sightedness’.

Which is why there is ZERO truth behind the ‘genius’ of Steven Jobs, he did what EVERY OTHER pinheaded capitalist did. The movement to build a ‘legend’ around him sickens me.

Which is more so an extremely sad indictment of what our, er, ‘leaders’ supposedly ‘value’…

Mr. Friedman owes his position/popularity to his passion for ‘cheerleading’ the extremely destructive movement we now call ‘Globalization’.

He sort of lost some of his ‘cred’ when it became common knowledge he is ‘married to it’ (billionaires that is.)

It doesn’t quite come off the same way when others learn that you will NEVER suffer the ‘downside’ of the theory you so boldly champion.

Why do the super rich ‘love’ globalization?

Because their employees provide them with their largest ‘income stream!’ (the cheaper it is to produce, the more profitable it is for the ‘owner’…)

How sad is it that employees are also customers?

Which is to say capitalism SUCKS…but you don’t have any alternative…yet.

Sadly good citizen, things will get a lot worse before they get any better.

Next stop on this Crazy Train is Barterville. If you’ve got nothing to trade that’s your tough luck!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Do you 'Know it when you see it?'

Greetings good citizen,

As, er, ‘usual’, markets around the world are ‘tumbling’ as, er, ‘uncertainty’ grows over France’s ability to keep its economy from sinking…

Naturally, only the most paranoid of sycophants would actually ‘worry’ about the stability of the French economy as opposed to the rest of the globalized world that remains, er, ‘afloat’ solely by the graces of ‘creative accounting’.

But more disturbingly we have this insane situation residing at the heart of our legal system.

Which is to ask do ANY of these ASSHOLES know what CORRUPTION is?

Apparently not:

The parties' efforts to emulate Best Buy, in short, create true Legislative Leviathans. They turn Congress into a jungle where individual members compete frantically for donations. The system also produces top-heavy, cash-rich leadership structures within each party. It ensures that national party campaigns rest heavily on slogan-filled, fabulously expensive lowest-common-denominator appeals to collections of affluent special interests. The Congress of our New Gilded Age is far from the best Congress money can buy; it may well be the worst. It is a coin-operated stalemate machine that is now so dysfunctional that it threatens the good name of representative democracy itself.  [Ha!]

But democratic legitimacy is far from the only value at risk as the 2012 election approaches. Over the long run, the bonfire of inanities fueled by gridlock has encouraged more and more investors and interest groups on the right to keep raising the stakes. Groups like the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute have become ever bolder in challenging Republicans whose conservative credentials they deem suspect. Establishment Republican leaders in Congress, even with all their advantages, have a harder and harder time containing these groups. The leadership only just prevailed in the battle over the debt ceiling this summer. In a globalized world that is increasingly nervous, however irrationally, about budget deficits and sovereign debt repayments, it would be a mistake to underestimate how much havoc a small group of zealots could wreak in the next few months, as taxes and the budget promise to redefine American politics.

The land of ‘many kings’ (that IS capitalism) has proven no improvement over the ’one king’ system, especially after the ’one king’ loses control over the clamoring nobles…

It serves no purpose to launch into another rant about the ‘scam’ we call ‘representative democracy’.

You already know it serves the singular purpose of stripping you of your vote!

NOW, our alleged ‘elected representatives’ are ‘auctioning off’ governmental seats of power!

THIS is done in ‘the best interests of the people‘? WTF!

Let me try one more time (and maybe some of you will get it this time!)

Those elected to public office who then sell that trust for their own personal benefit are guilty of what good citizen? Do any of you know?

There was a while there I’m sure some of you thought I would never shut up about this, er, legal technicality but like pointing out stupidity, I have refrained from screaming it every time it rears its ugly head as of late.

That word I’m searching for (naturally) is TREASON!

Why EVERY elected/appointed official in this nation ISN’T swinging by their necks from the end of a slip knotted rope remains a mystery, good citizen?

I will, once again, add that NOTHING will change ANYWHERE in the world until JUSTICE is restored!

Without justice, ‘hopes’ for better days/times will remain precisely that, hopes.

We need to recognize that corruption is OMNIPRESENT!

And until we root it out, all else will be futile!

Sure. That might makes sense, except it's hard to see with the naked eye. It's even harder to prove. Few would argue unregulated Wall St. greed and excess aren't a problem. But when was the last time you got mugged by banker or came home to find a stockbroker stealing your stuff ? How do we know we're not making Wall St. a convenient scapegoat for our problems?

Here's how. It was laid out in the 2010 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job.
The film carefully revealed how the U.S. subprime-mortgage fiasco really was a criminal racket engineered by key players in the financial industry for which the regular people of the world paid, and paid dearly. Due to the abstract and confusing nature of the crime, the guilty were largely rewarded with bonuses and their institutions with bailouts. But eclipsed in the film was a more disturbing and perhaps profound fact. Only 60 years ago, the financial industry was a much smaller part of the North American economy. It has since exploded. While necessary for business, finance generally doesn't make anything except for bland glossy brochures. There's a revealing chart based on statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that suggests a stunning transformation. The corporate profits of the financial industry ballooned from eight per cent of the U.S. economy in 1948 to 45 per cent in 2002. In short, the financial industry is suddenly dominating the North American economy.

If you have eyes to see then you know the ruthless few have corrupted the government so that they may enrich themselves.

The evidence is right before your eyes!

What is 45% of the, er, ‘shadow economy’ doing working in Finance?

Someone has to play the role of ‘customer’, without customers all commerce is pointless!

The REALLY ‘bad news’ is the longer this charade goes on the more the ‘phantom economy’ shrinks…

Because fewer goods are produced and prices rise as a result…

This is ‘the new normal’.

The economy keeps shrinking and the ‘casualties’ keep piling up on the sidelines…until civilization collapses.

Tick, tock good citizen, how much more time do you think YOU have (because local conditions will vary wildly!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Circus

Greetings good citizen,

The corporate owned media is often, er, ‘forced’ into the realm of the surreal precisely because editors know they will get fired if they reveal the truth.

Take this morning’s headline for example : Romney Beating Obama in a Fight for Wall St. Cash

Are we, the voting public, supposed to be, what, ‘worried’ for Obama? They certainly aren’t doing Mitt any favors, considering the current ‘mood of the nation’…

It is no secret that the relationship between President Obama and Wall Street has chilled. A striking measure of that is the latest campaign finance reports.

Mitt Romney has raised far more money than Mr. Obama this year from the firms that have been among Wall Street’s top sources of donations for the two candidates.

That gap underscores the growing alienation from Mr. Obama among many rank-and-file financial professionals and Mr. Romney’s aggressive and successful efforts to woo them.

What is fucktard trying to say here, that Wall Street is PUNISHING the president for NOT DEFENDING them from the OWS crowd?

Should we ’sympathize’?

What part of ‘the 99%’ doesn’t the Corporate owned media get?

They have gotten so used to telling us what to think that they sometimes ’forget’ they are telling us two different things.

Oops! We ‘forgot’ the whole world is PISSED at Wall Street or that very few people these days think being ‘supported’ by Wall Street is a ‘good thing’.

I’m sure the handful of the 1% that actually reads sympathized…

Which leads us to today’s ’second act’, where we once again test the axiom, “It’s better to keep your mouth shut and have people THINK you’re an idiot than to open it and PROVE THEM RIGHT!

ON a traditional farm, when winter comes and there’s no need for planting, fertilizing or harvesting, it’s time for infrastructure projects. Farmers fix their barns, build fences or dig wells — important tasks that could be done in any season if there weren’t more pressing jobs to do.

If the winter is unusually long and cold, planting time is delayed and additional projects are undertaken. It’s all very simple and sensible: the idea is not to let people sit around idle, and to use down time to get important things done.

The farm needn’t go into debt to do this. All able-bodied people on the farm are expected to contribute their labor, an imposition we can view as an informal tax. Later, everyone on the farm enjoys the benefits of all that work, by participating in the various benefits — the economic growth — it helps to create.

Um, this is just WRONG on so many levels I have a tough time picking a starting point so let’s begin with the premise itself…‘ASSUME a Farm.’

Do you have any idea how far we’d have to roll back the social clock to arrive at a time when the majority of us were farmers?

Try the Civil War!

Um, sans ‘the farm’ Mr. Schiller’s advice is more than a little ‘bankrupt’, wouldn’t you say?

Let’s give the man some credit and back away from the ‘analogy’.

That done, a vast majority of the general public AREN’T QUALIFIED to be heavy equipment operators! (Just as the national ‘repaving project’ undertaken when Obama took office turned into nothing more than a ‘job security program’ for people ALREADY EMPLOYED in the road maintenance industry!)

Does our ‘infrastructure’ need replacing?

Desperately…but the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system doesn’t make this an ‘economical proposition’.

But let’s suppose that the 455 BILLION dollar ‘infrastructure replacement’ program DOES provide 1.9 million jobs, um…they aren’t paying ANY of these workers a million bucks a year to direct traffic…so WHO do you think is getting ‘the lion’s share’ of this public money?

It goes to the ‘contractors’ (and their consultants) for ‘intangibles’.

Did the ‘Big Dig’ REALLY cost 14 billion dollars? Not in materials and labor (although it took plenty long enough!)

It is, however, a perfect example of how ANY given project sees its cost ‘escalate’ when it is done on a ‘cost plus’ basis.

So, what of the ‘infrastructure projects’ that get started but don’t get completed before Obama’s term expires?

They will likely ‘stop in their tracks’.

(Worse, more than half of the money will ‘disappear’ without so much as a shovel full of dirt being moved on over half of the projects…the other half will be paid in ‘forfeiture fees’ for canceling the projects.)

And the projects themselves? Should the contractor leave a gaping hole in the ground, that’s the way it will stay. The contractor will claim they weren’t ‘paid’ to fill the hole back in or restore the worksite to its original condition…

And somehow THAT violates no laws!

Naturally, the ‘elephant in the room’ is the only 2 million jobs this huge public expenditure is expected to create…how does this help the other 6 MILLION PEOPLE (8 million total) that lost their jobs in the waning months of Bush‘s second term?

Why doesn’t bone-head pull the plug on the ‘free trade agreements’, nationalize the housing market (bum-blast the banks!) and cut the workweek in half?

Only the public should ‘profit’ from commerce, not the self-serving assholes that claim to own it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'Massaged' Reality

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow tacked on nearly 200 points yesterday on, er, ‘encouraging’ news from the retail sector.

Once again I’m uncertain which is worse, the lie itself or them believing (acting upon) their own lies?

Considering how upward moves in stock values only serve to make the rich, richer, this little ‘slight of hand’ should come as a shock to no one.

What SHOULD piss you off is the effect this underhandedness has on YOUR purchasing power!

These days you show up in the market place with a pop-gun while the thieves are toting a bazooka!

You have to bust your butt (never mind jump through hoops) to get your's but old smarmy there, his is a ‘gimme’! (As can easily be seen by the irrational rising of the stock market.)

Worse, like ‘milking a cow’ corporate insiders have been unloading their shares as fast as they can arrange to have them ‘bonus’d’ to themselves!

What really happened with the retail sector?

Fortunately for the rest of us, Mr Panzer knows where the bodies are buried:

Let's find our great increases!  Ok, motor vehicle sales were up, right?  Uh, no.

Electronics?  Nope.

Nobody expects building materials to be up (and they weren't) but food and beverages must have been, since we had an actual increase, right?  Nope.

Health?  Nope.

Gasoline!  I know, gasoline!  Uh, no.

Clothing!  Certainly kids needed new clothes going back to school!  That's where the increase was.  Oops.... that was down too.

Sporting goods?  Collapsed - down some 18% m/o/m.

General merchandise!  That's the ticket!  Well, no - it was down about 7%.

I know I know I got it!  The Internet saved us!

Actually, the Internet (non-store retailers) were down slightly too.

Oh, so we have one place left that must have been up - bars.  After all, with the economy sucking this badly we all went out and get drunk (and put it on our credit cards), right?

Actually, we didn't - September saw a ~2.5% decline there too.

The truth?  The entire gain was "seasonal adjustment." All of it.  In other words, in actual dollars there was not only no increase, there was a net decrease in sales of approximately five percent - not annualized either, month-over-month!

Put that in your economic pipe and smoke it.

Another possible reason for an ‘uptick’ in seasonal figures is that the Christmas time ordering season is upon us…but the (still) broke consumer has retailers reluctant to boost inventories as yet another gift giving season comes and goes with no ‘must have’ item to flog.

As I indicated a couple of posts ago, we are drifting dangerously towards a catastrophic systemic collapse. There will be massive shortages of things you need combined with an abundance of shit you don’t!

Which is to point out how marvelous your CORPSE will look all decked out with colored lights and tinsel!

You couldn’t buy food for love or money but they were practically GIVING Christmas Decorations away!

Mis-management that lead to mis-allocation which resulted in famine and culminated in massive riots, causing huge loss of life.

Not exactly the most ‘effective’ method of dealing with unemployment/overpopulation but the sick social Darwinist bastards wanted to see how it worked out…

And guess who gets to be the Guinea Pig?

That’s right…YOU!

Once the ‘pretense of order’ collapses you’re gonna be amazed at how many shoes start to drop, you’ll think it’s raining feet!

(Comedy, please…I’m exercising a little license here! I definitely don‘t mean literally!)

Left to our imaginations is the ‘trigger event’?

How are they going to push us over the edge now that they’ve gone through all of this trouble to drag us here?

Will it be a ‘surprise’ nuclear exchange, that GOP closet monster of a ‘dirty bomb’ successfully smuggled into a major US city making a large swath of downtown radioactive for an unknown period of time?

More intriguingly, will they spring this one on us during Obama’s watch?

He’s already proven he’s their boy. What better way to demolish the ‘weak on defense’ Democrats than to have a terrorist attack more deadly than 9/11 succeed during his presidency?

What better way to counter the ‘we are the 99%’ movement that threatens to destroy the carefully constructed media image of a neatly divided society?

These are ‘History’s actors’ good citizen. While you contemplate the meaning of what they have just done they are busy executing their next action, always one step ahead because it doesn’t have to make sense.

The goal is to keep you too confused to act.

Once you realize that you can begin to dismantle the disinformation system that makes it possible for them to pull this shit off!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Irrelavant

Greetings good citizen,

After closing mixed yesterday the markets finished with a flourish today to put a cap on a fairly positive week of unrelentingly negative economic data.

Perhaps more interestingly is the buzz surrounding the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Not only has it not impacted share prices (meaning ‘investors/thieves’ aren’t ‘worried’) but are in fact quite the opposite.

The banksters can barely conceal their contempt for the OWS demonstrators, on the other hand they seem unable to find the right word to describe the protestors although Irrelevant seems to be the word they’re searching for

Some on Wall Street viewed the protesters with disdain, and a degree of caution, as hundreds marched through the financial district on Friday. Others say they feel their pain, but are befuddled about what they are supposed to do to ease it. A few even feel personally attacked, and say the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks are just bitter about their own economic fate and looking for an easy target. If anything, they say, people should show some gratitude.

“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”

He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.

Later in the same article they go on to opine that the movement will soon be a ‘distant memory’ that the cold weather will drive the protesters away…

And you know what? They’re right!

To a degree.

Only the most desperate and destitute would persist in ‘symbolically’ occupying (a block from) Wall Street in the dead of winter.

Although we could draw parallels to Washington’s winter in Valley Forge.

Which would REALLY make the shallow and clueless Wall Street types, er, ‘nervous’.

I am stricken by how both the members of the media and the privileged few really don’t ‘get it’.

The protesters are there looking for the same thing the Egyptians were looking for, jobs!

And the fuckers who are preventing these kids from getting on with their lives seem unable to comprehend their part in why these kids have singled them out.

Which isn’t 100% true, they have a vague sense of why the kids are pissed at them…they read the papers, they know what’s going on.

Hell, some of the protesters are their kids (or their kids friends.)

They know these kids did everything ‘right’, took on a whole boatload of student debt and now a minimum wage job is as good as it gets, (IF they are patient!)

Many of them are in their second year of unemployment and the collectors are calling them daily looking for student loan payments.

Funny thing about unemployment, you have to have had a job before you can collect anything…which sort of makes it all suck that much more.

And these Wall Street types are the first ones to take the position of ‘if you don’t have a job it’s YOUR FAULT!’

Which is to point out that those fucking Libertarians are EVERYWHERE!

What you need to understand is who ISN’T a Libertarian. There aren’t any ‘poor’ Libertarians, Libbies are ‘boots strappers’ who make their own way! You will find the occasional fool who isn’t exactly ‘well off’ (but likes to pretend they are) that profess as well as spout Libertarian viewpoints but they’re pretty rare, although they do have one thing in common with the ‘real deal’, they’re just as stupid as real Libbies are!

It takes a mighty special kind of asshole to turn into someone who fails to appreciate the privileges they were born to.

These, unsurprisingly, are more common than you’d imagine…a ‘side effect’ of the post WWII prosperity brought on by the devastation of Europe.

If ‘American Exceptionalism’ flows from anywhere it comes from this twisted variety of superiority born out of NOT being bombed back to the stone age!

Did I mention the ‘stupid part’?

So what do you think good citizen?

Will the OWS movement, er, ‘unexpectedly’ morph into ‘class war’ or will the kids blow away with the autumn leaves?

One thing is for certain, their student debts aren’t going anywhere, just as nobody else’s is either…leaving us to wonder just how ‘massaged’ those retail numbers really are?

Are the top one percent spending their asses off just to maintain the ‘illusion’ that the economy is ‘recovering’?

Because that has, thus far, proven to be precisely the case good citizen. Almost ALL of the, er, ‘increase’ in retail sales has been coming from the ’top tier’ stores, the rest is inflation.

Seriously good citizen, it is a good thing they didn’t ’attribute’ any of the comments in this article because these guy’s houses would be a pile of cinders tomorrow morning.

What the fuck was he thinking, berating his state Senators for not coming to the rescue…because that’s PRECISELY the sort of shit the 99% are pissed off about!

In a related ‘road to hell’ article in AlterNet, a fellow tried to explain ‘why’ OWS was three years late to the party.

He, (I’m sure) was all ‘good intentions’ of sharing his reason why it took these kids so long to get organized…but it looks like he got lost in the ‘backstory’ of why the 99% is pissed at Wall Street.

He never gets around to explaining the 3 year delay.

Which means he probably didn’t have a firm grip on why the protestors have held back so long.

Oddly, my theory is it circles back to the student loans they can’t pay!

The kids want relief and they don’t know where to find it so…

Here we are.

The danger in this thing going global is that different regions have different levels of tolerance for, er, ‘civil disobedience’.

Some places have a reputation for downright ’heavy-handed’ policing, especially when it comes to ‘peaceful protesters’.

Normally a little bloodshed is both expected and tolerated on both sides…but this tinderbox is a lot hotter than your typical anti-war protest.

These people feel like they’re getting screwed and the people on the other side of the picket line are protecting the people that screwed them.

We literally have a ’just doing my job’ attitude isn’t going to cut it, good citizen.

There is already a general perception that the justice system is broken…meaning that the cops have lost their authority because they’re part of that broken system.

Can’t you just hear the cries of the angry mob?

What are you hassling US for? Where were YOU when these assholes were ripping the country off?

If you’re not going to do anything about it, stand aside or we’ll take you down too!

Like I said, it becomes one of those ‘fine line’ issues that puts the average officer in a bad place of having to decide WHO, precisely, they really work for, the public or the politicians?

Choose the politicians and you’d best hope the Chief lets you move your family into the Police Station because it won’t be safe for you among the general population…

Just saying, ya know?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Short and Sweet

Greetings good citizen,

Let us begin with the AM rally being enjoyed by the stock markets. The official cause of the rally is said to be due to the ‘superior performance’ of the retail sector.

Just look at this load of BS:

Analysts noted that the retail sales numbers had beaten expectations. Sales rose 1.1 percent in September from August, and 7.9 percent from the previous year — the fastest monthly growth since February. Total retail sales were $395.5 billion.

The report was another sign that the United States economy may be in better shape than many economists thought, said Dan Greenhaus, the chief global strategist at BTIG. The recent rise in stock prices reflects the change in the prevailing outlook, he added.

You know as well as I that the above figures were subjected to some rather serious massaging to produce the, er, ‘desired results’.

Unsurprisingly, data from the nation’s largest retailer casts this data in an entirely different light:

It seems that cash-strapped consumers are not only trading down to stores like Walmart. They are also trading down at stores like Walmart, choosing cheaper brands and smaller sizes.

Of course, the Wall Street crowd sees a silver lining in there somewhere. Otherwise, why else would they be so upbeat on the retailing sector?

How’s that for a ‘reality check’ good citizen? I’m thinking the second story runs a lot closer to actual experiences of the majority of us.

While the NY Times may be the nation’s ‘paper of record’ it is obviously written for a considerably, er, ‘smaller’ audience. (and I’d dare say a more ‘elite’ one than I write for, no disrespect intended, gentle reader.)

Which brings us to the ‘bear trap’ we find ourselves caught in.

We are roughly a year away from the next presidential elections and we find ourselves saddled with an, er, ‘ineffective’ incumbent that is running ‘unopposed’.

How fucking sad is it that we are powerless to do anything about this? (Which is to ask how the hell the ragtag 99% of us is going to cough up the nearly billion dollars it takes to mount a presidential run?

Worse, who the hell are we going to run against the (Libertarian) ‘stacked deck’ entrenched in Washington?

We can all pretty much surmise how we ended up with a Congress filled to the brim with ‘representatives’ who aren’t who they say they are…

Come election day you only have two choices. Half of the time, after you scrape away the paint job, you end up with none.

Of course, we got to this sad state of affairs through the ‘Party System’, where if you want to run as a candidate for either party you must first pass a ‘sniff test’.

The people who perform this process get to decide who gets to run (with Party funding) and who doesn’t.

Politicians are no longer free to respond to the public mood, in fact, so fearful are they of deviating from the ‘Party Line’ that one would suspect they have all been threatened with assassination!

Maybe they’ve been, er, ‘assured’ that straying from the script will result in an unfortunate and unforeseen ‘accident’.

But this crap isn’t pulled until AFTER they win the election…which is why most challengers can still talk a good game.

IF, as the evidence suggests, our political process has been ‘hijacked’ by the self-interested, what, pray tell, should we do about it?

(Here’s were we get our ‘in a nutshell’ version of A Simple Plan.)

As you can see, the problem of ‘captive government’ is a legal one and not a fiscal one. (Although seizing control of the government by default gives you ‘control’ of the monetary system since money is nothing but a ‘legal construct’.)

But I still haven’t answered the question, have I? What the hell are we gonna do about it?

We can’t ‘talk about it’, the captors own the ‘public square’.

The only viable option is to use the ‘power of numbers’…

It will take twenty or thirty MILLION of us ‘parking’ in Washington DC, demanding the elected government ‘stand down’…just like the Egyptians ousted Hosni Mumbarak.

Let’s indulge our fantasies for a moment and suppose like a dog chasing a car, we get what we’re after, the media arranged elected government indeed stands down…

What next?

We make a ‘Leap of Faith’, the ONLY way an equitable system will EVER be established is over the still kicking and screaming corpses of the privileged.

While it would be ‘nice’ to think A Simple Plan would enjoy near universal support, it doesn’t have a prayer of being ‘voted in’, the ‘entrenched interests are too powerful.

We have been played for dupes for so long that there is no reason in the world ANYONE should trust the ‘level playing field’ promised by A Simple Plan.

So, like EVERY OTHER ‘alternative’ out there, A Simple Plan would have to be enacted ‘by decree’.

Just like the founders of the deeply flawed system we are currently saddled with did to us.

Understand, the, er, ‘survivors’ of the Revolutionary War fully expected ‘somebody’ to declare themselves King.

But our founders had been thinking of the ‘bulls-eye’ royalty traditionally hung on the nobility and opted for a ‘different’ solution. A ‘half-measure’ if you will.

The fear being that a government truly run ‘by the people’ would vote itself ‘free food’ (a sentiment that persists to this very day) was avoided by allowing the public to elect ‘representatives’ that would vote for them…

Which was a sham from the start considering the total lack of accountability the current system has.

Worse, they dare to call it an ‘oversight’ (with nothing being done about it for more than two hundred years! That’s some ‘oversight’!)

No-no, you were distracted with the wonderful (although imaginary) Balance the new ‘trilateral’ system possessed!

How do you like that ‘balance’ now?

I could spend hours tearing the current system apart but it doesn’t answer the problem of replacing it so back to the matter at hand.

We ‘establish’ A Simple Plan by fiat/decree with MORE PROTECTION than our humble forefathers had when ‘mock democracy’ was sprung on them.

What protection is that you might ask?

It is the protection of large numbers knowing how things are supposed to work.

In the beginning there will be a minimal number of laws as laid out in A Simple Plan.

Once you familiarize yourself with the plan you will note that few activities are ‘illegal’, because Anarchy is one of the ‘freest’ forms of government possible.

Protection number one is the law itself is beyond the reach of the ‘self-interested’ Beyond the basic precepts that establish Division Society, no one has the authority to decide either what is or isn’t a law or when a law will be enforced and when a law will be ignored.

So we have this ‘blueprint’ that explains how our new civilization operates but we have no new ‘chiefs’…yet.

Life as we know it can be ‘divided’ into 12 broad ‘fields of endeavor’ All of the jobs necessary to maintain a happy, healthy human civilization come from these 12 fields.

Which is to explain that ‘rich people’ ARE NOT ‘job creators’ (given their preference they are in fact ‘job destroyers’!) Only Mother Nature can create a job, wealth has nothing to do with it!

In fact, wealth is EVER and ALWAYS the end result of CRIMINAL ACTIVITY!

In our, ‘reformed’ world EVERYBODY gets a paycheck and NOTHING more, the very act of ‘buying and selling’ [for personal profit] is prohibited/criminal!)

You don’t need to set aside funds for ‘retirement’ (that most of us won’t live to enjoy.) Our new society provides cradle to the grave security at zero ‘cost’ to you!

But that’s an extra.

What about our currently ‘saturated’ markets that are being choked off due to excess profit-taking by the financial sector?

Jubilee, Baby!

All personal debt ‘disappears’ along with ‘unemployment’.

Thanks to the highly predatory capitalist system, some people have NEVER had a job and probably CAN’T adapt to becoming a ‘worker’ at this late stage of the game.

HOWEVER, there is absolutely NO LACK OF THINGS THAT NEED DOING!

And EVERY job will pay ‘a living wage’! (Mostly because your expense picture will shrivel to almost nothing!)

So, everybody works with the work day/week being adjusted to accommodate ‘full employment’. You aren’t going to get ‘rich’ working for the common good but you will enjoy a better life than your parents did. (Unless you’re one of those twisted bastards who gets off on making everyone else miserable…then you’re out of luck!)

No credit and no property ownership so the two biggest drains on your income disappear.

Um, one of the final ‘wrinkles’ of the new system will be the responsibility to vote (directly) on the laws you will live under since ‘legislators’ no longer exist.

Yes, good citizen, we will have ‘leadership’ but they will NOT have the ability to create or alter the law. (Much less exempt themselves from them like they currently do!)

The law belongs to those who must live under it and all laws MUST pass ‘The Golden Rule’ to be a law to be enforceable.

Sounds ‘dumb’ doesn’t it? A rule we all learned as children governing our society but think, good citizen, would we be in the trouble we’re in today if we paid heed to this very basic premise?

I didn’t name it ‘A Simple Plan’ because I thought the phrase was catchy. It really is based on some very simple premises.

One is it is impossible to build a ‘sustainable’ social model if we permit even one person to claim they own ANYTHING we all must share!

(The first fucktard who insists on ‘sharing’ their dirty underwear will be strangled with them!)

(Learn to LOVE that Golden Rule Bucky or you’ll find yourself exiled before you know what hit you!)

Two, the purpose of civilization is to provide its MEMBERS with the bounty of nature, commerce DOES NOT exist to make a few rich!

IF we fail to adopt a system that levels the playing field, we WILL NOT survive as a species.

And if you doubt that just keep on doing what you’re doing.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner