Simplicity

Greetings good citizen,

I am ‘a simple man’, which is to say I believe nothing is complicated and the simplest solution/answer is ‘probably’ the correct one or the one that is ‘closest to the truth’.

Anyway, on Sunday’s I start my browsing with the editorials in the NY Times and this week Mr. Rich was discussing ‘no drama Obama’s’ too cool approach to catastrophe. Mr. Rich also criticized Obama’s reliance on his favorite scapegoat, ‘the best and the brightest’ that religiously screw up everything they’re tasked with. (Because they seek ‘crowd pleasing’ but impossible to execute solutions so they don’t ruffle campaign contributors feathers.)

As has become apparent over the past three years, you can get an ‘expert’ to endorse the craziest ideas if you pay them lavishly enough. If you can't find an expert willing to proclaim the world is ‘flat’, no problem, for a fee you can create your own fully credentialed ‘expert’ who, being your ‘employee’, will say whatever you pay him to say!

Um, if you don’t think this is a ‘serious’ problem understand that the foundation of the whole crisis rests on the ‘destruction of integrity’ caused by holding people hostage to their paychecks!

You’re not expected to ‘tell the truth’, you’re expected to ‘toe the damn line’ if you want to see your next paycheck!

Gee, have we uncovered yet another ‘serious flaw’ in the ‘best damn commercial system, ever’?

This whole damn thing is falling down around our ears because the ‘race to the top’ is only superceded by the ‘race to the bottom’!

If there’s a ‘silver lining’ here it is the fact that whatever rises from this burning trash heap it WON’T BE Capitalism because it has been proven you can’t TRUST individuals with what everybody needs!

The apologists will say ‘bad apples’ but the truth is good citizen, capitalism is a ‘bad system’. A ‘perfect example’ of free-markets exists in Somalia, where they stick a gun in your face and demand payment for ‘shade’.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time Mr. Panzer has evoked Julius Caesar’s famous ‘seizure’ of Roman government as allegory to our current predicament.

‘Crossing the Rubicon'

In "The Problem with Markets," I argued that the strong performance of one high profile market is less than it seems:

People may...believe, as a great many apparently do nowadays, that those currencies and foreign assets that are risky in their own right are nevertheless a better bet than any of the alternatives --- that is, they are the best of the worst.

That's one reason why the U.S. Treasury market has remained buoyant even though Washington is spending and borrowing money like a drunken sailor and wrecking the nation's long-term creditworthiness in the process. From the perspective, say, of a European who is worried about the burgeoning debt crisis in his own backyard, our market might appear to be a safe haven.

In "The Debt-Bomb Rubicon," Dow Jones Market Talk blog offers up some further thoughts on the threat posed by Washington's spendthrift ways, as well as a far more sobering explanation than mine for investors' seeming denial about the risks [italics mine]:


Real Times Economics picks up on the debt theme, noting that the $13 trillion in U.S. national debt equals 88% of projected 2010 GDP (in a post earlier this week, I compared it to 2009’s GDP and arrived at 90%, but little difference; at current growth rates for both it will soon be 100% of GDP.) That puts the U.S. in a dangerous situation. From the Journal’s Mark Whitehouse:

We’re borrowing to bail out consumers who took on too much credit and couldn’t pay, and to support social security and Medicare systems we can’t really afford. We’re able to do this because financial markets have maintained a surprising faith that we will eventually get our spending under control, and because the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency has kept our borrowing rates unusually low.

The travails of Greece demonstrate the hazard such easy borrowing terms can create. After Greece adopted the Euro, markets began to treat it more like any other European economy, allowing it to borrow at interest rates nearly the same as Germany or France. That, in turn, helped Greece get into much deeper debt trouble than it would have otherwise. As a result, it now has to implement austerity measures that will likely yield much deeper economic pain.

I’ll tell you, folks; we are crossing the Rubicon. We are going to be forced into some very hard choices, choices we have been putting off for years, no matter how the economy’s doing. That’s the real takeaway here, that soon no matter how fast the economy is growing, it won’t be able to keep up with our debts.

I disagree with Mark on one point, though. I don’t think our creditors and the markets are giving the U.S. a pass because they believe the government will eventually get spending under control. There simply is zero evidence that that’s going to happen. No, the markets are giving the U.S. a pass because the thought of a sovereign debt crisis in the world’s largest economy, which prints the world’s reserve currency, and which is in times of trouble the ultimate safe haven, is simply too terrifying to even contemplate.

But you’d be wise to do so.

I’d ‘disagree’ with both of them, first on the ‘Republican/conservative talking points’ of ‘too much borrowing by irresponsible consumers…it didn’t happen in the past because banks weren’t ‘stupid enough’ to lend to people who couldn’t pay! Whose foot is in it now?

Let’s ‘cut to the chase’ shall we and look at ‘economic growth’…(fuckin’ conservative fucks!)

Why isn’t our economy growing with our population? You know and I know what happens when you ‘export’ your productive capacity and import finished goods, you end up with sky-high unemployment! There aren’t any fucking jobs!

And who is this ‘good’ for? The fucking ‘retailers’ and no one else!

Which brings us full circle to a very disturbing situation, if commerce has government in a stranglehold, who is ‘protecting' the interests of society?

Short answer, nobody.

Social protections are ineffectual if commerce only serves those who ‘own’ it and not the population it was founded to serve! And isn’t this precisely what the conservative pukes are saying? We should cut social services (just as the taxes that supported those services were cut, radically!) and ‘pare back’ the government so it could no longer effectively enforce consumer protections.

The fucking ‘Teapartiers’ may not say that’s what they want and (worse) they’ll be the ones squawking the loudest when that’s what they end up with!

For some very bizarre reason, people are ignorant of the fact that government EXISTS to provide protection from the predations of the rich.

Understand good citizen, if not for government, we’d all be slaves and there wouldn’t be a fucking thing we could do about it…except kill every stinking, greedy one of them on sight.

Considering how ‘out of hand’ the situation has become it may well come to that as some point.

Thanks for letting me inside your head (link to mirror site)

Gegner

What are we doing?

Greetings good citizen,

In what might best be described ‘disturbing’ the markets are currently crashing (Down over 200 points) on the ‘news’ that the ‘big employment numbers’ posted for the month of May are less ‘promising’ than previously advertised.

Understand that just days ago the market ‘rallied’ over 200 points on ‘rumors’ of the, er, pretty fucking poor job market performance relative to the size of the labor force.

After a solid year of ‘down’ the job markets posted a relatively ‘tiny’ gain largely due to the once a decade ‘census’. These are jobs that will disappear next month (maybe the assholes will mange to spin that into a rally too…)

If it hasn’t been made abundantly clear, the performance of the ‘markets’ has absolutely nothing to do with conditions on Main Street. Why these assholes deserve billion dollar bonuses is totally beyond comprehension!

I think we all know exactly what they ‘deserve’ and they deserve it so richly that they should be given it on national TV!

My dear mother, may she rest in peace, always said, when what is passed off as the truth deviates too far from the average person’s reality, the seeds of revolution are sown!

Try not to get any on you…

Let us proceed with tonight’s first offering

SP Daily Chart: Looking Ugly

By now you will have heard about the shocking miss on the US Payrolls Number, made more shocking by the cheerleading that preceded it by the likes of Goldman Sachs and even by Barack Obama himself.

The administration had nothing constructive to say this morning except for mindless sloganeering by the likes of Christina Romer, Obama's chief on the Council of Economic Advisor, who is unlikely to inspire confidence when delivering even good news, much less a clear sign of a double dip in the making.

With Romer, Summers, and Geithner, the President has managed to put together the economic scream team. Even Volcker is looking tired and ineffective. His proposal of a VAT, the most regressive of taxes, sounded less like a democratic reform and more like something from the Bilderberg playbook.

And then there is Obama himself, who sounded this morning like Baghdad Barack when speaking about the economy. It was obvious he was going to try and talk himself out of yet another misstep in a remarkable bluff, something that may have worked for him in the past when he was not responsible for any quantifiable results. But now he is, and he looks short performance and long rhetoric.

It looks like the SP futures may be forming a bear flag, with another big step down to follow. That would be 'bad news' because below the support at 1040 is a disturbing possibility of a triple digit SP 500.

Um, Traders can be so ‘melodramatic’ sometimes…999 are still ‘triple digits’, just as 101 is.
The disturbing thing here is nobody the general public is largely ignorant as to what the S&P 500 standing at 1040 means.

Quad digits are obviously superior to triple digits but where ‘should’ the number be? What does it indicate? Admit it good citizen, 99% of us are absolutely clueless when it comes to ‘economic indicators’, which is why they can screw with them and nobody’s the wiser!

I’ll spare you the globalization diatribe and the lecture on the constantly shifting basket of items being measured (which, naturally, totally distorts/confounds the whole idea of economic measurements!)

Needless to say, the situation is far worse than it appears and it is, as always, incumbent upon YOU to sort out the ‘spin’ from the tiny nuggets of truth…such as they are.

Worse, what you THINK you know is ‘suspect’ at best too…

That said, let us proceed to tonight’s second offering , where the slippery MSM tries to ‘save face’.

U.S. Adds Jobs in May, but Private Hiring Disappoints

By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: June 4, 2010


Employers added 431,000 nonfarm jobs nationwide in May, the biggest increase in a single month in a decade, the Labor Department said Friday. But the bulk of the growth was in government jobs, driven by hiring for the 2010 census, and private-sector job growth was weak.

The unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent nationwide, from 9.9 percent in April, the department said.

The figures for May represented the fifth consecutive month that payrolls have risen, but fell below analysts’ expectations that 540,000 jobs would be added to the economy. Most of the private-sector gains were in manufacturing, but over all, the figures suggest that non-government hiring was weak. [Did overseas hiring plans fall short? Because you know domestic hiring is flat, at best. Talk about lying with statistics, the increased production of US Company’s foreign subsidiaries is counted as domestic productivity gains! It is akin to adding a step to put a label on imports that says ‘assembled in the USA’ when the only thing that was ‘assembled’ here was the fucking sticker! Worse, then the product is added to our GDP as ‘domestic production! Sound far-fetched? Remember, these are the same people who ‘permit’ the banking sector to ‘pretend’ the mortgages on their books are worth more than they really are so they don’t have to declare bankruptcy!]

Altogether, 411,000 of the jobs added were for census workers whose positions will disappear after the summer. [So, that means the ‘private sector’ added 20,000 jobs ‘nationwide’ for an entire fucking month! Color me very unimpressed! Did I mention capitalism has failed and these job numbers are proof? The real question here, good citizen, is how long can they keep this farce up? (Because when, not if, the wheels come flying off, you WILL be the first to know! You’ll know it’s gonzo long before the MSM even hints anything is amiss!)]

President Obama tried to put a positive spin on the jobs report, telling workers at a trucking company in Hyattsville, Md., that the addition of 431,000 new jobs in May demonstrated that the economy was “getting stronger by the day.”

Mr. Obama acknowledged that temporary workers for the Census Bureau accounted for many of the additional jobs, but he said that hiring in the private sector was also growing. He noted that there has been jobs growth for the last five months.

“These numbers do mean that we are moving in the right direction,” Mr. Obama said. But, he added: “There are going to be some ups and downs.”

In April, nonfarm payroll employment grew by 290,000, but the unemployment rate rose that month because of a surge in the labor force. [Um, it has since been ‘confirmed’ that a majority of these ‘alleged’ new jobs were created not by the economy but by the BLS’s ‘birth/death model…and they exist only as ‘projections’, they can’t be found in the ‘real economy’.]

“The U.S. employment data was disappointing,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, in a statement. Mr. Chandler noted that private-sector job creation, a crucial measure, reached only 41,000, compared with expectations for 180,000 and a three-month moving average of 155,600.

“The fact that the unemployment rate ticked down is not really good news,” he added, “as the decline in unemployment was not a function of more jobs but a reflection of people leaving the work force.”

The May figures suggest that the job market still has a long way to go. The economy has to add more than 100,000 jobs every month to absorb the new entrants to the market. And they are joining a labor pool that is already swollen with 15 million Americans looking for work. [What should baffle most of us is not that friggin long ago, the monthly number stood at 150,000, so what are the fucking lying weasels trying to pull? Or is this another instance of, ‘What are YOU going to DO about it?’]

More than eight million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007. [And a vast majority of those jobs are NEVER coming back!]

“These new data do not present a picture of a healthy private-sector growth, and nothing closely resembling the job growth needed to dig us out of our very deep hole,” Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement.

In addition, the quality of the jobs was important as well.

“You would need to be producing 150,000 to 200,000 jobs a month to be making a dent in this,” said Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist for Channel Capital Research.

“If you are getting people back to work but they are earning less, they are spending less,” Mr. Roberts said. “It does not affect the underlying condition.”

Economists are hoping that the recovery of the job market will lead to improved consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy. [Which is actually a bizarre statement, it ‘should be’ only 50% and that is at ‘full employment’. Understand that the 70% figure has 50% of the workforce unemployed!]

But there are issues of how sustainable the job growth is. The Labor Department report said that private-sector job growth was strongest in the temporary help and manufacturing sectors. There was a net gain of 31,000 temporary service jobs in May, meaning employers are not entirely convinced they want to commit to permanent hires. And the census positions are temporary.

Employment by all levels of government rose by 390,000 in May. Jobs with state and local governments, which are grappling with budget cuts and the prospect of job losses, decreased by 22,000 in May.

Analysts said that the figures for May showed how important government spending has been in supporting the domestic economy.

“Without the government, the total number of payrolls would have barely increased by enough to cover population growth,” said Guy LeBas, the chief fixed-income strategist for Janney Montgomery Scott, in a research note.

The new job figures suggest that there are still headwinds to face, some of them from abroad, as the [alleged] economic recovery progresses.

One area of potential growth is in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturers are slowly making gains in their businesses and that could lead to an uptick in future hiring. [What is not ‘clearly defined here is what is considered ‘manufacturing’ these days? Does ‘building sandwiches’ count as ‘manufacturing’, does building ‘microbes’ count?]

The Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a trade association, said this week that the sector was rebounding, based on low consumer inventories and strong gains in exports. Manufacturers are “bullish on job growth in a sector that is not known for job creation,” said Daniel J. Meckstroth, the group’s chief economist. “The supply-chain pipeline is filling with orders and manufacturing firms are reluctantly, but out of necessity, adding staff,” he said. [Having the title ‘economist’ attached to his name automatically makes anything he says a total fabrication…maybe this is where the alleged ‘uptick’ in manufacturing is coming from! Everybody’s broke, what ‘supply chain is nitwit babbling about? The top 20% of the income distribution does not the whole economy make!]

Investors have been watching the job figures for signs of health in the economic recovery. Corporate earnings for the first quarter have been generally stronger than expected, which raises hopes for more jobs. But there are still uncertainties from the European debt crisis hanging over the financial sector, and how that will affect credit availability. A further strengthening of the dollar could lead to export stagnation and hit the bottom line of companies that rely on sales abroad. [Not to mention what this will do to domestic hiring. It doesn’t matter if you’re starving to death, the people up top’s large paychecks continue to make you ‘un-competitive’.]

President Obama called for an extension of unemployment benefits, and Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis called on Congress to also extend health coverage. [How long can this go on before we end up like Zimbabwe? Naturally, ‘the alternative’ is far worse!]

“We continue to push for programs to help unemployed workers make it through this difficult time,” Ms. Solis said in a statement. “I call on Congress to extend the unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidy provisions in the Recovery Act through the end of the year.”

The Labor Department figures show that the number of those unemployed for a long time continued to grow. Almost 6.8 million had been out of work for more than six months in May, and the average length of time that people remained out of work grew to 34.4 weeks, up from 33 weeks in April. When that figure reached 31.2 weeks in March, it represented the longest period since 1948, when the government started to keep track of such records.

The so-called underemployment rate, however, fell to 16.6 percent in May from 17.1 percent in April. The rate includes people with jobs whose hours have been cut, and those who accepted part-time jobs because they could not full-time work. The rate was 16.9 percent in March.

That means 8.8 million people were working part-time in May who preferred full-time work, compared with 9.15 million in April. [Couple of hundred thousand here, a couple of hundred thousand there and pretty soon we’re talking serious numbers here!]

Anthony Watler of Rosedale, Queens, might find himself in that category. This week Mr. Watler, 58, put on a fresh shirt and suit and went to a Suffolk County job fair to look for work as an accountant, a job he lost when he was laid off in 2008, earning $80,000 a year.

After working in a temporary part-time job, Mr. Watler went on unemployment in January and uses the $425 a month in benefits while drawing down from his retirement account to make monthly mortgage payments of $2,000.

He has searched for work on the Internet and gone on job interviews.

“I always feel hopeful,” Mr. Watler said. “Until I get home and a couple of weeks pass and I don’t hear anything.”

On Wednesday he filled out an application and left his résumé at the job fair. He was told by one company that it did not need an accountant now, but he said he was willing to do whatever that business or any other had to offer.

“I would accept anything that is above unemployment,” he said.

Which is pretty fucking bizarre because $500 a week wouldn’t crack his nut!

But that’s besides the point good citizen. Which leads us to a different question, what the hell IS the point?

How long should we be, er, ‘satisfied’ with flopping around, ‘hoping’ things will (trust me, ‘miraculously’) get better?

There is no light at the end of the tunnel, maybe we should wonder what the hell we’re doing down here in the first place?

Our ‘imported, globalized economy’ does the vast majority of us zero good…although the number of billionaires continues to rise. There’s a ‘connection’ to be made here and it’s as close as the words ‘stick ‘em up!’

You are and always will be a ‘captive’ of the local economy. As we have all learned, lower costs for your supplier do not always translate to lower costs for you, especially when ‘time’ enters the picture.

You can’t afford to wait three weeks for food and you’d be dead if you had to wait that long for water…so, it’s a game of ‘gotcha!’ You’re gonna buy from whoever has what you need and you’re gonna pay what they ask…no negotiation.

So remind me again who wins from all of this low wage import stuff? Geez, wouldn’t that be the guy who imports the crap? He’s getting a ‘good price’…too bad you can’t get the same deal…not without a ‘license’ anyway! (Add in the necessity of buying ‘in bulk’ to make it worth the supplier’s while.)

As long as Bobo can import ‘cheaper’ than what it costs you to produce a given item, your ‘job’ will remain in the ‘cheaper there’ and if you can’t afford Bobo’s ‘bargain prices’, tough, it’s not his problem, it’s yours!

Naturally, you can’t beat ‘free’ and, as unimaginable as it might be, if you could make everything you need for yourself, you’d put Bobo out of business!

Sadly, time and inputs are against you…never mind the capital investment required to convert the raw materials into useable components.

What am I pointing to? If you are left outside the supply chain you can’t draw from it. Lower prices are indeed ‘relative’…some things, like ‘globalization’, cost much more than they’re worth!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Oh yeah, here is the link to the mirror website.

Presto Chango!

Greetings good citizen,

Today I have ‘good news’ and bad news, since I’m always giving you the bad news, we’ll lead off with the ‘good news’!

Effective July 1, Joe is back! I’d like to get you all pumped up with some enticing insider information but that’s all I know.

However there is a ‘flipside’ to this exciting news…effective July 1st you will no longer find my posts on this site. This is not being done ‘to me’ and I fully support Joe’s decision to have the site sending a clear, strong message.

Joe’s battle is centered on (but not limited to) conservatism while mine is somewhat more complicated.

That said, those interested in continuing to follow my often ‘madcap’ observations can find me here I will endeavor to include this link in all of my final posts but once they go, the link goes with them! [Make it a point to bookmark BEFORE July 1st, please!]

I was a bit surprised to note that the ‘mirror site’ had its first birthday in April! Which is to point out that this pending move isn’t by any means ‘abrupt’. It’s been ‘in the works’ for quite some time now.

Well, that does it on the ‘local’ front. On the larger screen it tickles me considerably to learn that yesterday’s two percent ‘rally’ of the stock market has been attributed to the subject of yesterday’s post, the ‘improvement’ in the employment picture…

Like ‘temp jobs with no benies’ is going to save our collective asses!

Is the nation being run by morons or is it simply populated with them? Let’s move on with tonight’s offering to see if we can spot the difference!

Obama Gives Us a Hint: Look for a Hot Jobs Number on Friday - Mission Accomplished

Since he is the commander-in-chief of the Washington bureaucracy that churns out government statistics, it is a good bet that the boss' expectations will be met by those who serve him. So watch those short positions into this Friday's Non-Farm Payrolls report. The President has declared that an economic recovery is at hand. [What’s that old saying, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same?’ Which is to ask whether or not the more we see of Obama, the more he looks/acts like Bush! (In ways most of us wouldn’t have thought possible!)]

Obama gave a longish speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh today blaming most of the problems in the US on the Republicans and a few greedy Banks, extolling the reforms in healthcare and the financial system that he has been able to push through despite the minority opposition, and recalcitrant leftish supporters, after he saved the country by the unfortunate but unavoidably necessary bank bailouts. [I know I’m not alone when I say ‘the country’ is far from being ‘saved’. What has been done so far is both illogical and impractical; none of it will produce results!]

His speech sounded good. And if you do not look too closely at what is going on, and how things are being run, and the lack of actual reform, you might have had a feel good moment. It was about as effectively staged as the case that George W made to the American people for the invasion of Iraq. And it was probably just as phony and self-serving.

I come away feeling that Lincoln had it exactly right. There will be a die-hard group who will never lose faith in their party, or any of their chosen leaders, and will find desperate comfort in partisan blindness. [There exists a disturbing tendency to ignore the deluded until they seize something vital, and by then it is too late!]

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Abraham Lincoln

But the great majority of the American people are waking up, and that spells trouble in the November elections for most incumbent politicians. So the pace and velocity of the spin will have to be adjusted. Hence the speech today. And the outlook for the tortured American economic system, and the official descriptions of it. [Um, I tend to think we already had a serious level of ‘political engagement’ during the last election. The ‘crisis’ facing the electorate this time around is the ‘shattered illusion’, that the vote, due to the heavily gamed system, alters nothing…and there’s no time to overhaul the process!]

For a refresher, here is Matt Taibbi's caustic expose of the financial reform process. Wall Street's War

Dow Jones Newswire
Obama Says He Expects Strong US Jobs Report Friday
By Jared A. Favole

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- President Barack Obama, speaking Wednesday at Carnegie Mellon University on the economy, said he expects strong job growth to be reported Friday.

The Labor Department is scheduled to report May's employment statistics Friday. Economists expect the unemployment rate to slide to 9.7% from 9.9% in April and for the report to show the U.S. added as many as 515,000 jobs last month after non farm payrolls rose by 290,000 in April. [This is pretty ‘miraculous’ considering there are still NO ‘help wanted’ ads in the damn papers! Like the rest of the nation, we have to ‘assume’ that these jobs are somewhere else…like HP’s announcement yesterday! They may not even be in the US! It is not a dumb question to ask how many of those half million jobs are the hiring activity of US based companies outside the US?]

Obama said an economy that was "once shrinking at an alarming rate" has now grown for three consecutive quarters and is moving in the right direction. [Too bad most of this is ‘creative accounting’! What little ‘growth’ there is could just as easily be attributed to inflation/deflation! Shrinkage in purchasing power is not an ‘economic positive! (although it is often ‘spun’ as such!)]


I watched this speech live on Bloomberg television. It is no exaggeration. Obama was declaring mission accomplished, for the record. So if something beyond his control should happen to derail the recovery, well, that could not be his fault.

You’d think even He knows he’s not going to get re-elected in 2012, so I wouldn’t be putting too much emphasis on the fulfillment of campaign promises that do him zero good. In the end even Bush didn’t give a crap about his so-called ‘legacy’.

Like Bush, Mr. Obama has been promised some kind of a ‘sweetheart deal’ for playing ball with the ‘big boys’…he’s even been promised ‘protection’…although it is tough to tell how ‘reliable’ that protection may be. They could kill him to keep up their end of the bargain.

It’s not up to us to ponder if shooting is ‘preferable’ to being hung or burned. Given the alternatives, the bullet looks mighty attractive! (If we had to/got to choose. Most times you don’t.)

At last look the markets were off a little but that was early in the trading day and lately the markets have been like basketball, you only need to watch the last two minutes to see who is going to win.

Like the electoral process, the markets are so ‘gamed’ you are a fool to play them much less pay attention/draw meaning from their performance.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Things that make your head go 'boom'!

Greetings good citizen,

How many of you are thinking what I’m thinking? How the hell did BP get a permit to drill without having a failsafe method of capping the fucker IF something ‘went wrong’?

This brings us full circle to another ‘bizarre’, er, ‘coincidence’…have you noticed the fuckers are more concerned with being able to ‘get at’ the oil than they are in preventing an extinction level event in the Gulf?

They don’t want to ‘cap’ the fucking well! WTF is wrong with these people? This is way beyond stupid and the fact that the media has ignored this ‘option’ should tell you something.

If it were up to me, there would have been a HUGE HONKIN’ ROCK sitting on top of that puppy the day after the feed snapped! May not have sealed it ‘perfectly’ but at least it wouldn’t be blowing hundreds of barrels a minute into a sensitive eco-system either!

And we don’t even have that!

The level of, er, ‘ignorance’ displayed here is positively staggering! Once again ‘incompetence’ doesn’t even BEGIN to cover the level of ‘stupidity’ that has been indulged thus far!

Which brings us to tonight’s offering for another installment guaranteed to make your head explode!

I think we would gladly exchange all of the ‘artificial knowledge’ conferred upon the leaders of the world by their prestigious ‘college degrees’ for a ‘lick of common sense’!

HP to Cut 9,000 Jobs in Shift Toward Service Work
By Hugo Miller and Katie Hoffmann - Jun 1, 2010

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest personal-computer maker, plans to cut about 9,000 jobs and retool its computer-services business to help it compete with International Business Machines Corp.

HP will take a $1 billion charge for paying severance and modernizing its data centers to provide more automated services to customers, it said today in a regulatory filing. The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to replace about 6,000 of the eliminated positions with workers in different countries. [Somebody please explain to me why every Hewlett-Packard plant/retailer on US soil isn’t in flames right now? Why isn’t there a bill in Congress being ‘fast tracked’ to BAN HP products from the US market? Better, why isn’t HP’s charter being revoked? Or are the MORONS we elect to Congress TOO STUPID to understand what is in the public’s ‘best interests’?]

“These sets of actions will enable HP to grow better than the market,” Ann Livermore, executive vice president for enterprise business, said today on a conference call. “This is a substantial opportunity for us and something that we think is a good opportunity for our clients as well.” [You can insert ‘shareowners’ in there as well because this is another ‘cost based’ effort to reduce expense that will ultimately result in fewer customers!]

The job cuts come after HP raised its 2010 forecast last month for the third time since November as results beat analysts’ estimates on a revival in business spending. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, who has announced more than 48,000 job cuts during his five-year tenure, has expanded into more profitable services as the recession crimped corporate budgets for equipment. He bought Electronic Data Systems Corp. for $13.2 billion in 2008, vaulting HP to No. 2 in services behind IBM. [Ironically, we can’t fault Mr. Hurd because he is following IBM’s example! Those, er, ‘ratfinks’ should also be banned from the US market and have their charter revoked as well!]

HP said the $1 billion in expenses for severance costs and asset impairments will be applied between now and fiscal 2013. The moves will result in net annual savings of $500 million to $700 million by the end of fiscal 2013, the company said. [Savings? You mean the company will ‘keep’ that money and it won’t be taken by Mr. Hurd as a well-deserved ‘bonus’? Heaven forbid the price of HP products might drop a few bucks, making them ‘more competitive! Because we all know this has NOTHING to do with competitiveness and everything to do with screwing the people who built the business from the ground up!]

Job-Cut History

The company had 304,000 employees at the end of its fiscal year in October. Hurd, 53, has cut jobs before to shift the workforce and expand the sales staff. When he became CEO in 2005, he cut 10 percent, or more than 15,000 positions, to lift profit. [And mostly to prove he had a pair…] In 2008, he announced a plan to eliminate 24,600 jobs over three years to save $1.8 billion after the purchase of EDS.

Livermore said today that the cuts and the new hiring will take place over a multiyear period. HP’s services unit will be hiring 6,000 workers in sales and in some “global delivery centers,” she said. [You can insert ‘call centers’ here…and don’t even imagine these jobs will be located within US jurisdiction. The corporate world are avowed ‘slavers’.]

“This company is focusing more and more on revenue growth in their services business,” said Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in St. Louis. “IBM’s always going to have a big presence in services, but these guys are going to battle it out for big deals.” [And US workers can go suck rocks!]

HP said last month that services revenue rose 2.5 percent to $8.71 billion, while PC sales rose 21 percent and orders for server computers and storage devices jumped 31 percent. Services accounted for 28 percent of HP’s overall $30.8 billion in quarterly revenue.

Dell, Xerox

Hewlett-Packard isn’t the only hardware maker trying to gain ground on Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services company. Dell Inc., the No. 3 personal- computer maker, bought Perot Systems Inc. in November for about $3.9 billion. Round Rock-Texas based Dell said in February it plans to acquire more computer-services companies.

Xerox Corp., based in Norwalk, Connecticut, completed its purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. for about $6 billion in February to accelerate its focus on computer services amid declining sales of printing equipment.

Hewlett-Packard fell 43 cents to $45.58 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has dropped 12 percent this year.

“We are very supportive of this move,” Louis Miscioscia, an analyst at Collins Stewart Plc in Boston, said today in a note. “We believed there was more to be done” for HP to catch up to IBM, he said.

Never mind the obvious ‘pro-corporate’ spin of two US companies ‘slugging it out for market share’. What we’re seeing here is the reason why you (or your kid) can’t/won’t find a decent job! They’re all being ‘outsourced’ and the ignorant morons in Washington aren’t lifting a finger to stop it, despite campaign promises to the contrary!

Well don’t look now good citizen because believe it or not it’s even worse than it appears

Dead Cat Labor Market

Rebound in the labor market? Looks more like a dead cat bounce, where a great many of the jobs being created are either temporary, part-time, low wage, or stripped down, like those detailed in the following CNNMoney.com report, "Say Goodbye to Full-Time Jobs with Benefits":

Jobs may be coming back, but they aren't the same ones workers were used to.

Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.

In 2005, the government estimated that 31% of U.S. workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.

James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation's workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today. [What Bobo isn’t saying is that ‘churn’ has already devastated over fifty percent of the working aged population’s ‘benefit packages’.]

"The traditional job is not doomed. But it will increasingly have competition from other models, the most prominent is the independent contractor model," he said. [Why do you suppose that is? Because I.C.’s are ‘responsible’ for their own benefits, as well as making sure their taxes are paid! You think the government is in trouble now? Picture a largely ‘self-employed’ workforce where you have all of the downside and none of the upside of working for yourself!]

Doug Arms, senior vice president of Ajilon, a staffing firm, says about 90% of the positions his company is helping clients fill right now are on a contract basis.

"[Employers] are reluctant to bring on permanent employees too quickly," he said. "And the available candidate landscape is much different now. They're a little more aggressive to take any position."

Cathy, who asked that her last name not be used, lost her job as a recruiter for a financial services firm in February 2009. She started working on a contract basis four months later. She believes that many employers are taking improper advantage of the weak labor market.

"I work in HR, I understand that sometimes you need to hire a contractor because you have a project and you won't need the person when it's done in three months," she said. "But that's not what's happening here."

Cathy said her co-workers who had permanent jobs didn't treat her differently, but she still felt like a second-class citizen.

"At one job they were giving out H1N1 flu shots but the contract workers weren't eligible to receive them," she said. "I said 'You guys are still in trouble if I get the flu.'"

Much of the change is due to employers' desire to limit their costs. Stoechmann equates the shift to the one seen in retirement plans, in which employers moved away from the traditional pension plan toward defined contribution plans, which passes more of the burden onto the employee.

Yippee yi yo ki yay! Geez mo’ fo, ‘The Deal’ done got changed somewhere down the line and today’s kids are ‘too stupid’ to know things weren’t always like this!

Understand that you ‘surrender’ your right to ‘fend for yourself’ in exchange for having your needs met by society…but the ‘private sector fuckers’ think they are not bound to this ‘arrangement’.

The coming ‘energy crisis’ (which may be a lot closer than you think, considering what’s going on in the Gulf.) Will ‘short circuit’ the out-sourcing of physical products and the difficulty of long distance troubleshooting (think the Boeing ‘Dreamliner’, which still isn’t flying!) will claw back a percentage of jobs that are currently being done ‘over a wire’ solely to enrich the capitalist pigs.

It’s obvious the focus on ‘expense reduction’ was the primary driver behind the crisis in the Gulf today. The cheap fucks couldn’t even spend the money to change the batteries on the friggin safety device! It’s not like they weren’t making it ‘hand over fist’ or that oil was ‘dirt cheap’!

A little ‘trite’ to be saying ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ but there it is!

Better, the whole ‘loyalty’ thing will get a serious re-working because what you care about and why will suddenly matter very much!

The whole ‘profit’ thing is going to go right out the window because it has nothing to do with survival.

Funny how ‘life’ changes everything!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

News or Happy Talk?

Greetings good citizen,

The return of warm weather brings increased social and maintenance obligations. If you’re not shoveling snow, you’re mowing grass!

Did we just enjoy four days off? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re trying to squeeze in things that should have been done months ago…

I know, ‘excuses, excuses’ but hey, what can I do?

After yesterday’s ‘smoke monster’ scare (where the wind pattern blew smoke from Canadian wildfires into the region, making us wonder, ‘if it’s this bad here, it must really suck there!’) Something that becomes more frightening if you’ve read my first novel, where the first days of the ‘collapse’ are marked with thick smoke from local and some not so local wildfires.

To preface the ‘real deal’ there would also be a co-responding failure of the communications networks…so yesterday’s ‘smoke’ was just that…smoke. Although I don’t think the day when both things occur at once is too far off…but that’s just what I think.

There are some very disturbing signs out there if you’re paying attention and one of them is coming from Wall Street. Markets around the globe are ‘bleeding to death’ but not here in the Dream Factory! Every index around the whole globe is printing red ink but it’s not happening on Wall Street! If you look at the chart, Wall Street ‘opened’ in negative territory but climbed steadily upwards.

Does this make sense to you, good citizen? I read this morning that the 5 US States that border the Gulf of Mexico contribute 2.2 trillion dollars to nation’s economy. Those five states also represent the newest ‘frontier’ in the ever expanding ‘economic desert’ here in the US, a desert neither our politicians nor our Captains of Industry are lifting a finger to correct!

But enough of that, let us proceed with tonight’s offering where we take a peek at The New Normal

Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting

By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: May 31, 2010

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras, foreclosure is becoming a way of life — something they did not want but are in no hurry to get out of. [Um, for most people the ‘hole’ is too deep to EVER be filled in, that is the nature of the current ‘crisis’, one you could see coming from a mile away IF you knew what you were looking at…and most didn’t!]

Foreclosure has allowed them to stabilize the family business. Go to Outback occasionally for a steak. Take their gas-guzzling airboat out for the weekend. Visit the Hard Rock Casino.

“Instead of the house dragging us down, it’s become a life raft,” said Mr. Pemberton, who stopped paying the mortgage on their house here last summer. “It’s really been a blessing.” [Understand what you’re seeing here good citizen, the entire ‘credit market’ is going up in smoke…this spells ‘certain doom’ for the financial sector as well as anyone who ‘thought’ their property was a ‘liquid asset’. Guess, what? This also screws anything you can’t pay for ‘out of pocket’. If you can’t pay ‘cash on the barrelhead’ you ain’t getting the sum bitch because the days of ‘trust me’ are finito!]

A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by. [Ironically, this is merely a ‘re-prioritizing’ where people shift the order of things they can’t do without…how sad is it that principal among these is wheels under the ass? Or the second largest single expense anyone takes on. Um, more disturbing is what this ‘drying up’ of credit means to an already crippled Auto Industry?]

This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads. [Ironically, the ‘snookering’ part comes from industry’s failure to keep up their end of the ‘Ponzi Scheme’, worker’s paychecks were ‘supposed to’ expand ahead of their expenses, not equal to them. No irony should be lost on the fact that the funds to pull of this magic act ran out around thirty years ago!]

“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.” [That’s not how THEY see it Wendy…in fact, their courts would label YOU as the ‘crook’ (even though these were the same courts that didn’t lift a finger to stop ‘free trade agreements’ from turning the nation into a financial desert!) Which begs the question, are YOU guilty of a crime they failed to prosecute?]

Foreclosure procedures have been initiated against 1.7 million of the nation’s households. The pace of resolving these problem loans is slow and getting slower because of legal challenges, foreclosure moratoriums, government pressure to offer modifications and the inability of the lenders to cope with so many souring mortgages. [The ‘numbers’ are truly staggering good citizen. There is a ‘backlog’ of some 20 million unsold homes and as we stare out over the ‘scorched’ economic landscape there are nowhere near enough ‘qualified buyers’. Um, this has been going on for three years now so the 1.7 million figure is extremely ‘misleading’, the ‘true number’ of foreclosed homes is much higher!]

The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics. [Understand what they are telling you good citizen, the ‘financial system’, as it stands, IS BANKRUPT, whether you ‘pay them’ or not!]

While there are no firm figures on how many households are following the Pemberton-Reboyras path of passive resistance, real estate agents and other experts say the number of overextended borrowers taking the “free rent” approach is on the rise. [Soon this ‘strategy’ will dominate…there’s nothing stronger than ‘monkey see, monkey do!’]

There is no question, though, that for some borrowers in default, foreclosure is only a theoretical threat for a long time. [Like ‘real estate’ itself, the key here is ‘location’ there is ‘safety in numbers’. Although they’re still asking for ‘stupid money’ for a home in this neck of the woods, I have a close friend who is part of that ‘two years’ in foreclosure dynamic…sadly, he also hasn’t worked in more than 24 months. Mathematically, his situation is ‘insoluble’.]

More than 650,000 households had not paid in 18 months, LPS calculated earlier this year. With 19 percent of those homes, the lender had not even begun to take action to repossess the property — double the rate of a year earlier.

In some states, including California and Texas, lenders can pursue foreclosures outside of the courts. With the lender in control, the pace can be brisk. But in Florida, New York and 19 other states, judicial foreclosure is the rule, which slows the process substantially. [Either California and Texas will ‘get with the program’ and put the brakes on the foreclosure process or they will suffer the ‘consequences’ of an outsized ‘homeless population’.]

In Pinellas and Pasco counties, which include St. Petersburg and the suburbs to the north, there are 34,000 open foreclosure cases, said J. Thomas McGrady, chief judge of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit. Ten years ago, the average was about 4,000. “The volume is killing us,” Judge McGrady said. [Ironically, even conservatives can appreciate the ‘delicacy’ of the situation. I’d imagine the judges are in no rush to let foreclosed properties ‘go wild’ because the banks are in no position to maintain them!]

Mr. Pemberton and Ms. Reboyras decided to stop paying because their business, which restores attics that have been invaded by pests, was on the verge of failing. Scrambling to get by, their credit already shot, they had little to lose.

“We could pay the mortgage company way more than the house is worth and starve to death,” said Mr. Pemberton, 43. “Or we could pay ourselves so our business could sustain us and people who work for us over a long period of time. It may sound very horrible, but it comes down to a self-preservation thing.” [yet another ‘damning indictment’ of capitalism! Profits before people never has and never will ‘fly’!]

They used the $1,837 a month that they were not paying their lender to publicize A Plus Restorations, first with print ads, then local television. Word apparently got around, because the business is recovering. [One could only guess their ‘best customers’ are probably people like themselves, people who are ‘pocketing’ their mortgage money and using it to make life more managable.]

The couple owe $280,000 on the house, where they live with Ms. Reboyras’s two daughters, their two dogs and a very round pet raccoon named Roxanne. The house is worth less than half that amount — which they say would be their starting point in future negotiations with their lender.

“If they took the house from us, that’s all they would end up getting for it anyway,” said Ms. Reboyras, 46.

One reason the house is worth so much less than the debt is because of the real estate crash. But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck they used as a contest prize for their hired animal trappers.

It was a stupid move by their lender, according to Mr. Pemberton. “They went outside their own guidelines on debt to income,” he said. “And when they did, they put themselves in jeopardy.” [Um, alternately one might question the wisdom of ‘giving away’ a truck as a ‘prize’ to a trapper when something significantly cheaper would have achieved the same net result…]

His mother, Wendy Pemberton, who has been cutting hair at the same barber shop for 30 years, has been in default since spring 2008. Mrs. Pemberton, 68, refinanced several times during the boom but says she benefited only once, when she got enough money for a new roof. The other times, she said, unscrupulous salesmen promised her lower rates but simply charged her high fees. [There’s a knife that cuts both ways! It is also ‘proof positive’ of a badly broken financial system! One that CAN’T BE FIXED without hitting the ‘reset button’.]

Even without the burden of paying $938 a month for her decaying house, Mrs. Pemberton is having a tough time. Most of her customers are senior citizens who pay only $8 for a cut, and they are spacing out their visits. [Where the hell is that ‘economic recovery’ the papers are always talking about anyway?]

“The longer I’m in foreclosure, the better,” she said.

In Florida, the average property spends 518 days in foreclosure, second only to New York’s 561 days. Defense attorneys stress they can keep this number high.

Both generations of Pembertons have hired a local lawyer, Mark P. Stopa. He sends out letters — 1,700 in a recent week — to Floridians who have had a foreclosure suit filed against them by a lender.

Even if you have “no defenses,” the form letter says, “you may be able to keep living in your home for weeks, months or even years without paying your mortgage.”

About 10 new clients a week sign up, according to Mr. Stopa, who says he now has 350 clients in foreclosure, each of whom pays $1,500 a year for a maximum of six hours of attorney time. “I just do as much as needs to be done to force the bank to prove its case,” Mr. Stopa said.

Many mortgages were sold by the original lender, a circumstance that homeowners’ lawyers try to exploit by asking them to prove they own the loan. In Mrs. Pemberton’s case, Mr. Stopa filed a motion to dismiss on March 17, 2009, and the case has not moved since then. He filed a similar motion in her son’s case last December.

From the lenders’ standpoint, people who stay in their homes without paying the mortgage or actively trying to work out some other solution, like selling it, are “milking the process,” said Kyle Lundstedt, managing director of Lender Processing Service’s analytics group. LPS provides technology, services and data to the mortgage industry. [It also provide jobs for the ‘truly desperate’ who like working under an ‘alias’.]

These “free riders” are “the unintended and unfortunate consequence” of lenders struggling to work out a solution, Mr. Lundstedt said. “These people are playing a dangerous game. There are processes in many states to go after folks who have substantial assets post-foreclosure.” [Ironically, you’ll never see any of these processes utilized if say BP declares insolvency after destroying the Gulf of Mexico!]

But for borrowers like Jim Tsiogas, the benefits of not paying now outweigh any worries about the future.

“I stopped paying in August 2008,” said Mr. Tsiogas, who is in foreclosure on his house and two rental properties. “I told the lady at the bank, ‘I can’t afford $2,500. I can only afford $1,300.’ ” [Um, just how bad are we supposed to feel for ‘Flipper’? This is a ‘self-inflicted wound’ if you ever saw one! How much do you want to bet that the figure he’s ‘willing to pay’ coincides with how much he is collecting in rent?]

Mr. Tsiogas, who lives on the coast south of St. Petersburg, blames his lenders for being unwilling to help when the crash began and his properties needed shoring up.

Their attitude seems to have changed since he went into foreclosure. Now their letters say things like “we’re willing to work with you.” But Mr. Tsiogas feels little urge to respond.

“I need another year,” he said, “and I’m going to be pretty comfortable.”

Um, this article is ‘disturbing’ all by itself good citizen, nowhere do we see a ‘rebuke’ of either the, er, ‘irresponsible’ borrower or the ‘reckless’ lender!

Worse is the total absence of the ‘ramifications’ of this article. Has ‘investigative reporting’ sunk so low that editors won’t allow reporters to comment on the stories they write?

This is ‘the end’ of consumer credit…and nobody is even hinting at what this means to the rest of the damn economy!

Burn, burn, twist and turn baby! Things are going to get mighty uncomfortable awfully quick!

Will the general public welcome the iron fist of control once they have witnessed the wanton destruction unleashed by the slumbering giant?

The ‘bet’ says yes but I’m not quite so sanguine. They’ve pushed it too far. They are counting on people ‘forgetting’ what has gone before, but contrary to popular belief; the public has a longer ‘memory’ than you’ve been led to believe.

They ‘hope’ they can short circuit ‘retribution’ by installing themselves as the ‘arbiters of justice’ but the public already knows they are thieves! Once the ‘Claret’ starts to flow, putting the cork back in the bottle will prove to be devilishly difficult!

Long have we bemoaned the collapse of the 4th estate but this shit is getting ridiculous! There’s ‘real news’ here and the dunderheads just skip right over it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Some things never change...

Greetings good citizen,

Maybe I’m ‘late to the party’ (again) and should have seen this one coming BUT no! After years of watching Japan ‘languish’ in ‘economic hell’ do we/I see evidence that they are suffering from the exact same malaise that afflicts the US.

That ‘Japanese quality’ (idiotic) US ‘middle class’ consumers are so fond of doesn’t come from Japan…it has ‘Made in China’ stamped on it!

Understand good citizen that ‘super efficient’ Japanese workers are literally starving to death while their jobs were ‘off-shored’ to cheaper labor markets.

This is not a ‘local’ or even an ‘isolated’ phenomenon…the ‘buy and sell’ crowd has ‘fucked’ the entire global economy due to their ‘disregard’ for basic economics…your workers are also your customers!

Not paying your workers enough to purchase your products isn’t ‘somebody else’s problem’, it’s yours!

Screw your workers and pretty soon, everybody’s got a problem!

Welcome to Amerika!

We have two offerings tonight, both ‘illustrate’ the depth of the problems we face as a society…problems caused by seriously twisted individuals, acting in concert to serve their own warped self-interest.

As I have said multiple times in the past, we really do need to redefine the term ‘criminal’.

Partly to prevent this shit from spreading and partly to correct this insanity from destroying civilization…if it isn’t already too late!

Let us proceed with our first article:

Honda Strike Becomes a Rallying Point in China
Joe Tan/Reuters

Security guards on Friday at a Honda manufacturing plant in Foshan, Guangdong Province, that was shut after a labor dispute at a parts facility.

By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA
Published: May 28, 2010

FOSHAN, CHINA — A strike at an auto-parts factory owned by Honda in southern China has unexpectedly become a cause célèbre in the nation’s struggle with income inequality, with Chinese media reporting extensively on the workers’ demands and calling on the government to do more to increase wages nationwide. [How will the Chinese government ‘deal’ with this well publicized worker uprising? The article even goes on to point out that this is not ‘new’ and usually it is ‘hushed up’ so the, er, ‘effected parties’ don’t suffer from a well-deserved ‘Black Eye’ in the marketplace. The fact that this story is even appearing in the US MSM tells us to anticipate price increases on Honda products (if you’re still stupid enough to buy them after reading this article!)]

Strikes have occurred before at Chinese-owned factories and on rare occasions at foreign-owned plants. But the authorities have typically hushed them up and either sought a quick deal or sent in the police. [Which of these two tactics do you think is most prevalent, considering the nature of the capitalists who, er, ‘escaped’ to China?]

The 1,900 workers at the Honda factory here have been on strike to demand higher pay since early last week, and on Friday there was no resolution in sight. The resulting shortage of transmissions and engine parts has forced Honda to halt production this week at all four of its assembly plants in China, with one closing on Monday and the other three on Wednesday.

The work stoppage is the clearest sign yet of growing labor unrest in a country that is now the cornerstone of many companies’ global supply chains.

Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said that the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history because the workers appeared to be well organized and united. [We can only wonder how much of this ‘unity & organization’ can be attributed to their ‘communist indoctrination’?]

“The strike at Honda is the largest strike that has ever happened at a single global company in China,” he said, adding that, “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.” [Do I need to ‘translate’ that for you good citizen? The ‘employers’ moved to China to escape unions, never mind environmental regulation. How much do you want to bet this dissolves into union busting that ‘re-ignites’ the currently latent ‘communist fervor’ of their forebearers? The resulting ‘bitch slap’ will be so richly deserved that it is a royal shame civilization won’t survive to witness it!]

Workers here have discovered the same weapon that the United Automobile Workers used to become the most powerful industrial union in the United States: shut down a crucial parts factory, and auto assembly plants across the country have to close. [This is the problem the predators have yet to crack: what do you do when the stooges wise up and say, “fuck you, I’m not gonna do it anymore?” Ultimately, it’s cheaper to pay them.]

“In terms of shutting down a multinational’s entire operations, I think this is the first” in China, said Geoffrey Crothall, the spokesman for China Labor Bulletin, a labor advocacy group based in Hong Kong.

The official English-language China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages may be fueling tensions between workers and employers. [Ya think?] The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of opposition from employers.[snip]

Ahem, this is PRECISELY what these mercenary motherfuckers moved to China to get away from!

Speaking for myself, I think it serves them right, fools who refuse to learn the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them!

Sadly, the short term result of this foolishness can be found in the article below:

Private pay shrinks to historic lows as gov't payouts rise

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010. [Um, USA Today is a ‘true blue’ patriotic news organization that would NEVER even suggest capitalism was faltering, much less failing. So instead you’re being told that these numbers are a ‘statistical aberration’ caused by the ‘poor economy’ that is still in the ‘early stages’ of recovery…]

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs. [You have to be either extremely ‘optimistic’ or downright ‘deluded’ to not realize the massive shrinkage in our total payroll figures means there is nothing to support the ‘consumer economy’ globalization was to provide for us.]

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.

The recession has erased 8 million private jobs. Even before the downturn, private wages were eroding because of the substitution of health and pension benefits for taxable salaries. [Yeah, having to devote increasing amounts of previously ‘disposable income’ towards future expenses resulted in putting a massive drag on consumer spending.]

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that individuals received income from all sources — wages, investments, food stamps, etc. — at a $12.2 trillion annual rate in the first quarter.

Key shifts in income this year:

• Private wages. A record-low 41.9% of the nation's personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007. [Stop! What does this tell you? It tells me ‘capitalism’ doesn’t need all of the workers we have…in fact, it can’t use half of them…a fifty-percent ‘redundancy’ rate is unsustainable.

•Government benefits. Individuals got 17.9% of their income from government programs in the first quarter, up from 14.2% when the recession started. Programs for the elderly, the poor and the unemployed all grew in cost and importance. An additional 9.8% of personal income was paid as wages to government employees.

The shift in income shows that the federal government's stimulus efforts have been effective, says Paul Van de Water, an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

"It's the system working as it should," Van de Water says. Government is stimulating growth and helping people in need, he says. As the economy recovers, private wages will rebound, he hopes says. [Um, that’s the ‘theory’ behind stimulus spending but there is nothing in our current economic environment to make that happen. There WON’T BE any ‘new, good paying jobs’ that come out of this disaster.]

Economist Veronique de Rugy of the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the riots in Greece over cutting benefits to close a huge budget deficit are a warning about unsustainable income programs.

Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. "People are paid for being rather than for producing," he says.

Do you find it curious that USA TODAY felt compelled to close the article with not one but two conservative talking points? That damn ‘Liberal Media’ is everywhere!

So labor ‘unrest’ in China mixed with, er, ‘labor surpluses’ everywhere else. What do you suppose is wrong with this picture?

Is it time for capitalists everywhere to ‘pack up their tents and resume the search for the new ‘cheaper there’?

Of course it isn’t! It’s never really been about ‘labor costs.’ It is and has always been about ‘market share’. It drove the capitalists crazy that the world’s largest markets were dirt poor…and naturally, these pinheads failed to think through the ramifications of, er, ‘reversing’ that situation. Now they’ve done what comes ‘naturally’ and the piper is looking to be paid!

At the end of the day good citizen it would be nice to think everything is going to work out all right…but we all know there is little chance of THAT happening.

‘It would be nice’ if this resulted in a fairer, more equitable world instead of pretty much universal destruction…but hey, who knew?

I find myself in agreement once again with Ilargi and Stoneleigh…’who’s your friend’ is probably the most important issue to focus upon right now…the people fighting alongside you will hopefully out number the ones your fighting against.

Certain truths are immutable…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hand Waving...

Greetings good citizen,

I’m ‘trying’ to tackle a lot of chores I’ve been putting off until better weather arrived and, naturally, they have expanded (or worse, ‘exploded’) beyond the time allotted to complete them.

Sadly, neglecting issues until they become ‘do or die’ comes at a price. Waiting to install new brake pads caused the tire to, er, ‘weld’ itself to the hub, requiring me to pound it free…which bent the rim. So now I have to deal with a slow leak that will cost me 75 cents a day until I can locate and have a replacement wheel installed.

Um, don’t even get me started on the freaking alternator, what a friggin horror show! Three bolts and a belt…who knew it would turn into a four day project!

But I digress…but not so much good citizen because the nation is ‘mirroring’ my personal woes. The longer our ‘so-called leaders’ keep twiddling their thumbs while the media continues to report meaningless hand waving rather than the important issues facing our civilization, nothing is being ‘fixed’, much less addressed.

So we encounter tonight’s offering where the media invokes the largely ‘imaginary’ recovery and blames Europe for its persistent ‘invisibility’.

The longer these things are ignored, the worse they’re going to become.

Europe Pain May Impede U.S. Upturn
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: May 25, 2010

Only months after most economists forecast that the recession could be viewed safely through the rearview mirror, the European fiscal crisis poses an unsettling new challenge for the United States economy. [Same old same old, good citizen…how can the US economy be in ‘recovery’ if our supposed ‘customers’ are broke? Is someone lying their ass off here or are these people really that stupid…or worse, do they really think we are?]

Few economists predict the United States will pitch into another recession soon. [This is true since we haven’t really ‘recovered’ from the original one.] But a still weakened American economy could be slowed by its wounded European allies and trading partners. Even the optimists are wondering aloud if the United States will encounter a slower and bumpier recovery than expected. [What do you suppose this idiot means by this? How much slower and bumpier can ‘non-existent’ be? How deep does a ‘purely imaginary’ recovery go?]

“Look, a double-dip recession is a genuine risk — I’d place it at 20 percent as opposed to 5 percent a few weeks ago,” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist for ITG, who has been notably bullish on the United States economy. “We have some chronic problems in Europe, but I don’t see it leading us to a Lehman-style contagion.

“At some point,” he added, “you revert to a focus on our fundamentals, and those are decidedly better than conventional wisdom has it.” [Um, what planet is he making this observation from because it sure as hell isn’t here! The global economy is so badly broken that we are faced with ‘emmenient’ worldwide social collapse.]

Perhaps so, but vertiginous drops in stock markets, belligerent rumbles from North Korea and an American economy throwing off mixed signals has economists treading carefully. Rarely have so many central banks taken such extraordinary steps to stave off banking and national collapses. Their wariness about what they have wrought is palpable. [‘Wary’? These fuckers KNOW they’re ‘tap dancing on a land mine’, is it really all that surprising they are paying extra close attention to public sentiment right now?]

James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, traveled to London and assayed a noticeably careful defense of the global economy in a speech. He did not discount the risk of a financial contagion jumping the Atlantic, given the weakened state of global finances and the risky nature of the bailouts. Governments and central banks must strive to re-establish credibility, he said, even as markets shake and gyrate. “This new threat to global recovery will probably fall short of becoming a worldwide recessionary shock,” he said. [Um, no irony should be lost considering this is definitely a situation when ‘probably’ just isn’t good enough! It should also be noted that the only way to ‘restore confidence’ in government and banking is to tear them both down and replace them with far more ‘transparent’ institutions.]

There is no shortage of storm clouds to bolster a gloomier take. Japan and Europe are perched near the edge of deflation. And as one European leader after another takes a vow of austerity amid talk of layoffs and deep spending cuts, American manufacturers — which have led the domestic recovery — could find their goods piling up in warehouses and on docks. [Um, this is either an ‘isolated incident’ or an outright falsehood, the US manufacturing sector is easily small enough to be drown in a birdbath or a fairly shallow puddle, bathtub not required!]

“We were counting on a weak dollar and a strong European economy; instead we got a strong dollar and a weak Europe — that is clearly not good for our economy,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and a professor of economics at Columbia University. “It certainly increases our likelihood of a double-dip recession.” [Pay attention to Joltin’ Joe’s words here because it won’t be too long before we’re all wondering why the ‘strong dollar’ won’t buy you a hat full of shit!]

As well, the rate set in London that banks charge each other for short-term loans, known as Libor, has marched steadily upward in recent weeks, reaching a 10-month high this week. Such loans act as the fiscal grease that lets banks lend freely. [To who? The only ‘qualified borrowers’ have been the Investment banks and they’re using the money to pump up the stock market!] Their rising cost slows lending — something Mr. Stiglitz says is a consequence of governments’ bailing out banks without forcing them to make a clean accounting of their losses and bad loans. [Um, pointing out the obvious does nothing to alter the outcome.]

“The credit markets’ reaction is sending a strong message that the banks don’t trust each other’s balance sheets,” Mr. Stiglitz said.

There are, too, lingering questions about the strength and sustainability of the American recovery — questions that loom as more important than ever given the weaknesses in Europe.

The American economy has picked up recently, with consumer spending jumping higher and debt falling sharply. Manufacturers, too, have put a collective toe back into the hiring market, and bankers are exhaling — even if they are not lending at their former levels.

Mr. Barbera speculates that the quirks of federal data collection have understated the strength of hiring. “All the measures of industrial production are better than expected,” he said. [What numbnuts isn’t saying is what passes for ‘industrial production’ these days has little to do with either ‘industry’ or ‘production’!]

But state governments, from California to New Jersey and New York, are readying draconian spending cuts, with forecasts of layoffs of hundreds of thousands of state workers. Residential housing inventories continue to grow and prices continue to soften. And large businesses have yet to begin hiring in considerable numbers; the ranks of long-term unemployed have swelled to a number not seen for decades. [Is this ‘magic or even ‘coincidence’ good citizen? NO! It represents our badly broken economy that won’t be fixed as long as it is more ‘advantageous’ to let it remain broken. But that ain’t gonna happen either!]

“This has to go down as one of the most fragile economic recoveries in recorded history,” said David Rosenberg, chief economist for Gluskin Sheff, an investment firm. “We’ve had jobless recoveries before, but this recovery has been totally devoid of income growth, and that’s very disturbing.” [Who else thinks Mr. Rosenberg is being ‘extremely charitable’? If you ‘deny’ that the economy is recovering, the pundits will point at the…stock market as proof they are right, even though it has long ago become obvious that the stock market has little to do with the state of the ‘real economy’.]

Salvation could come from unexpected corners. The United States, in the words of the St. Louis Fed chief, might be “an unwitting beneficiary of the crisis in Europe.” That is the lesson suggested by recent history. When the Asian economies shuddered and currencies nearly collapsed in 1998, many economists predicted the tremors would take down the United States and European economies. Quite the opposite occurred. [Um, the ‘safe haven’ effect does absolutely NOTHING for the ‘paycheck peasants’…which is where the trouble will originate.]

A stream of money flowed from Asian banks into United States Treasury bonds, and interest rates fell as a result. Oil prices also dropped. And the United States emerged stronger. [It is this kind of ‘blissful ignorance’ that created the current fiasco, the inability to recognize what is ‘good’ for investors is ‘bad’ for the nation is wholesale stupidity because investors make up less than one percent of the population…even less if we look at it globally!]

“Everyone competed to reduce their G.D.P. forecasts and it ended up being much stronger than forecast,” recalled Mr. Barbera. [Um, there is so much ‘wrong’ with this ‘blanket assertion’ that it isn’t even worth parsing…what would Mr. Barbera be measuring?]

There is suggestive evidence that this could happen again. American interest rates have fallen in recent days, as investors apparently seek refuge in Treasury bonds. And talk of a slowdown has caused the price of oil to fall, which helps the American consumer. [Um, it is ‘astounding’ that this evidence that the wheels are flying off is being interpreted as mere ‘turbulance’ in the economy, but this is what the media is trying to ‘distract us’ from examining too closely.]

A risk attends here, too. Pumping so much money into a nation can be like pumping adrenalin into a sick patient — it masks the underlying infection. It could be argued that the infusion of cash in 1998 further inflated the Internet stock bubble, which popped several years later with disastrous consequences. [Not nearly as disastrously as it would have been without the ‘pump and dump’ Real Estate scam following right on its heels!]

Mr. Bullard raised that warning obliquely in his speech Tuesday, suggesting that while the United States might draw temporary advantage from the European crisis, it must “directly address” its fiscal problems if it is to retain credibility with credit markets. After all, along with the countries of the euro zone, Britain and the United States are running outsize deficits, compounded by their spending to stimulate the economy.

The ability of American officials to pull this off while markets jump and twist poses a considerable challenge.

“A lot of our recovery was financed by government handouts, and the sustainability of that is open to question,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist for MFR Inc. “I see lots of fits and starts ahead.”

He said, She said…and it’s all self-serving bullshit! All of these opinions the media quotes (and they are ‘opinions’ make no mistake about that!) come from people whose job it is to sell stocks and other financial products…you don’t suppose they may be a little ‘blind’ to the true state of ‘economic activity worldwide?

The disaster in the Gulf is only going to exponentially expand the economic desert at the worst possible time.

Worse, instead of cleaning up the disaster, it will be left to ‘fester’ causing decades of financial ruin that the fucking irresponsible capitalists will use their control of the media to ‘ignore’.

The longer you let a situation go, the more it costs you later.

Just something to think about as the fucking political class tries to distract you with useless ‘hand waving’ over largely meaningless issues.

Makes you wonder, what the fuck is wrong with the media?

Short answer, nothing…it is doing what it is paid to do, and that’s a damn sin.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner