Retro

Greetings good citizen,

Since I made the move to an ‘independent’ blog, space I ceased ‘parsing’ news stories.

Some of you enjoyed that format so today’s offering will be sort of a treat!

Due to the frightening subject matter contained in this rhetoric filled bit of reportage, I feel compelled to ‘dissect’ this top of the headlines article.

If you don’t have access to today’s NY Times, this is indeed THE headline story:

Next on the Agenda for Washington: Fight Over Debt

By JACKIE CALMES
Published: April 9, 2011

WASHINGTON — The down-to-the-wire partisan struggle over cuts to this year’s federal budget has intensified concern in Washington, on Wall Street and among economists about the more consequential clash coming over increasing the government’s borrowing limit.

Congressional Republicans are vowing that before they will agree to raise the current $14.25 trillion federal debt ceiling — a step that will become necessary in as little as five weeks — President Obama and Senate Democrats will have to agree to far deeper spending cuts for next year and beyond than those contained in the six-month budget deal agreed to late Friday night that cut $38 billion and averted a government shutdown.

Wait a minute Slim! You mean it AIN’T OVER? We’re going to go through this ALL OVER AGAIN six months from now?

This is the critical piece of the puzzle I sought in vain yesterday, the ‘how long’ qualifier.

I find it ‘odd’ that this piece of information wasn’t anywhere to be found yesterday…which leads to the next question: How many people will be ‘blindsided’ by a government shutdown six months from now?

Republicans have also signaled that they will again demand fundamental changes in policy on health care, the environment, abortion rights and more, as the price of their support for raising the debt ceiling.

In a letter last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told Congressional leaders the government would hit the limit no later than May 16. He outlined “extraordinary measures” — essentially moving money among federal accounts — that could buy time until July 8.

Once the limit is reached, the Treasury Department would not be able to borrow as it does routinely to finance federal operations and roll over existing debt; ultimately it would be unable to pay off maturing debt, putting the United States government — the global standard-setter for creditworthiness — into default.

The repercussions in that event would be as much economic as political, rippling from the bond market into the lives of ordinary citizens through higher interest rates and financial uncertainty of the sort that the economy is only now [not!] overcoming, more than three years after the onset of the last recession.

Like ‘Timmy’ says, this most recent stay of execution is nothing more than a bit of financial ‘Hocus Pocus’ to kick the can further down the road.

What should be obvious to you all, by the exponentially increasing mountain of debt the idiots in charge keep piling up is that’s something is ‘radically wrong’ with our economic model.

War time, peace time it doesn’t matter…we obviously don’t have enough economic activity to ‘balance’ our budget.

And the party of ‘Knows nothing’ continues to blame this on the people WHO DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING MONEY instead of their idiotic ‘tax cuts’ for the people who do!

Tell me again HOW a SINGLE conserative politician EVER wins election THAT DOESN’T involve FRAUD?

But that’s unfair…there isn’t a nickel’s worth of difference between a boot licking conservative and a spineless liberal!

Given the short time frame for action and the prospect of an intractable political clash, leaders in both government and business are already moving to avert a crisis that most likely would be “a recovery-ending event,” [You have to be one hell of an optomist to even imagine that anything resembling a ‘recovery’ is underway.] as Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, testified recently in the Senate. He described a sequence of events that “would cascade through the financial markets,” provoking another credit crisis like that in 2008 and causing interest rates to jump.

Mr. Geithner has been meeting privately with senior lawmakers of both parties to underscore the economic stakes. At the White House, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Gene Sperling, peeled away from the spending fight in recent weeks to turn nearly full time to developing the administration’s strategy for the debt-limit debate.[Not to be mean good citizen but so far the Obama administration has proven to be a one trick puppy and that singular trick has been ‘roll over and play dead’!] Central to that, administration officials say, is whether Mr. Obama initiates bipartisan talks on a long-term debt-reduction plan that tackles taxes, military spending and fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. [Fat lot of good ‘one sided bipartisanship’ has done so far…how many times does stupid need to get his teeth kicked down his throat before he smartens up?]

Executives of the nation’s largest financial institutions in recent days met with Mr. Geithner, House Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and other lawmakers, arguing for the importance of raising the debt ceiling. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told them that his bank had devised contingency plans to protect its global business in the event of a default.

“If anyone wants to push that button, which I think would be catastrophic and unpredictable, I think they’re crazy,” Mr. Dimon said recently at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Ah, the US Chamber of Commerce, providing a bully pulpit for multi-national corporations and Wall Street Bankers since its inception…

I’m gonna backtrack to the previous paragraph that details the President’s plans for a ‘bipartisan attack’ on the ‘increasingly expensive’ entitlement programs.

Most of us pay into these so-called ‘entitlements’ all of our working lives…except if you’re rich, then not so much…(there is, bizarrely, a ‘cap’ on annual SS contributions. Seems you no longer have to pay in after the first hundred grand, it used to be $90,000 but they kicked it up a little since then.)

Left to our unending exasperation is why healthcare costs keep spiraling out of control and why the fucktarded politicians NEVER attempt to make cuts to the world’s most inefficient military?

You don’t suppose it’s that ‘stupid’ thing biting us on the ass (again,) do you?

What would the (less than one percent of one percent) Tea Partiers say? Is that what keeps our politicians quaking in their collective shoes? Making them more willing to risk the political ‘third rail’ of attacking the social safety net rather than trim the fat from the sacred cow of our constitutionally enshrined ‘duty’ to protect the ‘interests’ of (very few) Americans around the globe? (via taxpayer supported ‘military force.’)

What the fuck, good citizen, what the flaming fuck!

Are these people THAT stupid or do they just think that WE ARE?

Sadly good citizen, the answer is the later…we have and indeed continue to ‘buy the lie’.

Talk about it all getting ‘hinkey’, well it don’t get much hinkier than throwing extremely expensive ‘mercenaries’ into the mix.

Mercenaries that we will soon no longer be able to afford…

Yet NOBODY (Democrat or Republican alike, never mind the sell-out media) has even proposed that we, er, ‘eliminate’ this extraordinary expense.

Is this being laid at the feet of the statistially and politically insignificant (at only 30,000 members) Tea Party too?

It’s like blaming ME, like anybody gives a fuck what I think!

That said, I deeply care about what you think good citizen.

Did I mention that this article is ‘particularly disturbing’?

There’s a lot to parse here, perhaps more than can be successfully done in a single session but I’ll give it my best shot.

Please bear with me for more backtracking.

I believe I have presented enough ‘evidence’ that should prove beyond a doubt that we are currently being ruled over by a ‘captive government’.

By extension, the media has also ‘fallen victim’ to the power of the usurper(s)

Remember the axiom ‘You can’t make informed decisions without accurate information.’

Thus do we end up with ‘nonsensical’ headlines like this one! (Not that I blame the writer, it has to pass muster with an editor before it gets to the press room.)

Isn’t the ‘chain of command’ wonderful (at shielding the guilty?)

But we digress (mightily) good citizen, back to the article!

The United States is one of the few nations that limits its debt by law, and votes in Congress to raise the ceiling, something that happens every few years, are perhaps the least popular that lawmakers face. [St. Ronnie doubled the national debt and so did his running mate’s progeny, talk about Republican ‘fiscal responsibility’]

Financial and government leaders alike have grown accustomed to some political brinkmanship over raising the cap, confident that Congress ultimately would do so, usually with the party holding the White House supplying most votes. (So it was that Mr. Obama, as a Democratic senator in 2006, voted against a Bush administration request to raise the debt limit; it passed with mostly Republican votes.) [Go figure, eh?]

What makes this year different, people in both parties say, is the large number of Congressional Republicans, including the many newcomers who gave the party a House majority, who are strenuously opposed to government spending, and egged on by the activist Tea Party movement to use the leverage of the debt-limit vote to make their stand. [Baffling is how a fragment of a party that only one in five voters claim membership in is ‘dominating’ the political dialog in this country…did I mention the ‘captive media’ that makes this even possible?]

“We want to see real structural, cultural-type changes tied to this debt ceiling. We’re not interested in a one-off kind of savings, or anything small,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a first-term Republican from South Carolina. “There has got to be game-changing kinds of changes to get us to vote for it.” [We just recently had a local incident where a fresham Republican member of the NH house resigned his seat over, um, a ‘compromising incident’. The telling part wasn’t the incident, a routine traffic matter, it was his admission that he ran (and amazingly won) by running as a ‘non-politician’…makes you wonder what kind of IDIOT(s) would vote for someone who purposefully DIDN’T INTEND TO DO THE FUCKING JOB! Talk about throwing your vote away, you could have accomplished the same thing by staying home!]

He dismissed warnings about default as “just posturing,” and said Democrats should bear the responsibility for passing any measure to increase the borrowing limit. [How much do you want to bet this jerk ran as a ‘non-politician’ too?]

“It’s their debt,” he said. “Make them do it. That’s my attitude.” [He certainly didn’t run on his ‘brainpower’, must have been his ‘charm’. Fortunately the reporter doesn’t let him getaway with his false ‘blanket assertion’.]

In fact, the debt was created by both parties and past presidents as well as Mr. Obama.

Of the nearly $14.2 trillion in debt, roughly $5 trillion is money the government has borrowed from other accounts, mostly from Social Security revenues, according to federal figures. Several major policies from the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress — tax cuts, a Medicare prescription-drug benefit and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — account for more than $3.2 trillion.

More evidence of a ‘captive government’ situation; if we follow this concept further we’d have to assume that this budgetary Kabuki Dance is merely more ‘window dressing’ for the gullible electorate. More re-enforcement of the Red State/Blue State memes intended to add to the impression that our society is more deeply divided than it actually is.

Understand good citizen, if our society were indeed as deeply divided as the media makes it out to be you wouldn’t be able to go about your normal business without getting involved in a fist-fight over politics with a passerby on a daily basis.

You’d be brawling at work OR teaming up with your co-workers looking for some liberal/conservative ass to kick!

Contrary to the conservative portrayal of liberals being ‘spineless’, they’ll kick our ass, hell 30,000 of them DIED bringing the rest of us the 40 hour work week!

But somehow the conservatives keep forgetting that inconvenient ‘fact’…

Back to the article or we’ll never finish!

The recession cost more than $800 billion in lost revenues from businesses and individuals and in automatic spending for safety-net programs like unemployment compensation. Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending and tax cuts added about $600 billion through the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. [We’d have been just as well served if he’d taken a match to the money considering where it went! Why do you think Jamie Dimon is flipping out? If they DON’T raise the debt ceiling, HE ain’t gonna be able to roll over HIS debts!]

Though the recent standoff that consumed Washington over spending for the 2011 fiscal year ended without a government shutdown, the messy process and 11th-hour settlement have stoked trepidation about the debt-limit fight to come. If Republicans and Democrats found it so hard to compromise over a few billion dollars, the thinking goes, how can they ever come together on a multi-year, multitrillion-dollar plan to cut the debt within weeks or months? [Indeed something to ponder…and I don’t see it ending well either!]

“If I were still Treasury secretary, it would worry the hell out of me,” said James A. Baker III, who served in that office for President Ronald Reagan, during a time when the total federal debt nearly tripled over his two terms. “But it doesn’t worry me as a good Republican, and one who wants to finally see some fiscal responsibility in this country.”[Um, considering his personal ‘contribution’ to the current mess you know that asshole is lying through his teeth…and I think we would be ‘worried’ if he was still Treasury Secretary because it would amount to ‘irrefutable proof’ of a captive government! Not that Mr. Obama’s totally illogical cabinet appointments aren’t all the proof one needs, including appointing a Republican Treasury Secretary! ]

Mr. Baker, long known as a deal-maker, said Republicans were right to say, “O.K., we’ll increase the debt limit, Democrats, if you will enact enforceable spending restraint.” [Wait a minute Slim! It was THE FUCKING REPUBLICANS who spent us here! The fact that the banking system collapsed not just once but during EVERY Republican administration over the past three decades!]

Neither the White House nor Congressional leaders are certain how they will get enough votes to raise the limit. The White House and Democrats in Congress will urge passage of a “clean” debt limit increase, without amendments, though they acknowledge that cannot pass in the Republican-controlled House.

While the House is the focus of most concern, passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate will be a challenge as well. Republican conservatives there, reinforced by Tea Party adherents elected last November, vow to filibuster any increase in the debt limit, which would require a 60-vote supermajority to overcome.

The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has privately urged the conservatives not to filibuster, without success, say three people familiar with the talks. He argued that if Republicans did not filibuster and just 50 votes were needed for passage, the Republicans could try to force all the votes to come from the 51 Democrats — including 17 who are up for re-election. But if 60 votes are required because of a filibuster, ultimately some Republicans would have to vote for the increase lest the party be blamed for a debt crisis. [How’s that for ‘under-handed’?]

In the House, Mr. Boehner said after the November elections that his new members would have to deal with the debt limit “as adults.” But with many Tea Party-backed [Read Koch industries] Republicans feeling that they already compromised more than they wanted on the current year’s budget, it is not clear how receptive the freshman Republicans will be to a deal this time.

The just-concluded budget fight has spawned talk that the White House and Congress will perhaps resort to a series of short-term extensions of the debt limit while they bargain over a debt-reduction plan or some other mandatory budget restraints. The question is, how might global financial markets react?

“We’ve never seen that before,” said Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a longtime Wall Street executive. “But I know this: It’s not a risk I’d take.” [Yet another ‘fine one to talk!’]

After this week, Congress recesses until early May, returning just two weeks before Treasury hits the debt ceiling. Even stretching the deadline for action to July, there would be little time to reach a debt-reduction accord.

So attention is turning to a bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the Senate. The senators, three from each party, have met for 10 months to negotiate a comprehensive plan on taxes, entitlement programs and military spending. They have considered recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission in December. [Excuse me but doesn’t this smack of ‘government by committee?’]

“It would be nice to have it in a package form by the debt-limit” debate, said Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican of Georgia. But even if the six agree, he added, “hitting everyone else with something this major, it’s going to take some time to be digested. Plus you’ve got to go through the various committees.”

House Republicans in effect outlined their starting position last week, when, amid the fight over 2011 spending, they unveiled their budget for the 2012 fiscal year and beyond. It would cut $6 trillion over 10 years, mostly from projected spending for Medicare and Medicaid. [Resulting in a major crisis for the retiring Boomers!]

But those savings would be offset by about $4 trillion in tax cuts. The result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be continued annual deficits until 2040 — necessitating more votes to raise the debt limit, even under House Republicans’ plan, for decades to come.

Jeebus good citizen, seems like we’re well and truly until we retake control of our captive government followed immediately by our decidely corrupt system of commerce.

Luckily, we’re only fucked ‘on paper’, none of the ‘crises’ facing our civilization is either ‘insurmountable or overwhelming’, they merely challenge the ‘status quo’, which should have been overthrown generations ago!

I think the most disturbing part of this whole article is level of arrogance on display in even publishing this tripe! It is insulting to the intelligence of the average citizen to be told up is down and black is white!

How can they tell us that we will be faced with budget deficits ‘for decades’ when it has become obvious to the average person that it is unlikely our civilization will survive the year!

Which is to point out that the US isn’t the only troubled economy on this goofy ‘run for the benefit of the few’ planet!

This is, as you might expect, doing nothing for my blood pressure…if I hope to avoid suffering a second stroke I’m going to stop belaboring the obvious for a while…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mr. Stiglitz sounds the alarm...

The Kabuki shuffle…

Talk about being ‘slow on the draw!’ I bow to Jesse, who has already posted the piece I, er, ‘intended’ to write…thus will I ‘lead off’ with a link to his piece

Naturally, Jesse didn’t say EVERYTHING I want to say so, after reading his brilliant commentary, we can press on.

My original lead story was intended to be a ‘bitch fest’ on the topic of the recent multitude of, er, at best ‘recent arrivals’ that somehow feel ‘qualified’ to tell the rest of us how to ‘fix’ our ailing republic. Sadly, the fact that they even THINK it is ‘repairable’ demonstrates their massive ‘ignorance’…

An ignorance bordering on ‘stupidity’.

But whatever. I think I’m more disturbed by the fact he managed to get by/win over supposedly progressive editors…raising a ‘red flag’ as to what they truly support

Moving on, we have a disturbing look at the Gov’t shutdown ‘averted’ and how the article goes on to say it could still ‘blow-up’. The actual agreement hasn’t even been drafted yet, never mind put to a vote.

‘richocheting’ back to the original topic of our broken justice system we have this article, which asks the question Is executive pay a sign top executives are being ‘bought off’?

here’s the ‘money quote’:

“There has been a massive wealth transfer from middle-class America’s retirement accounts to the bank accounts of the privileged few. The social consequences of this wealth transfer bear scrutiny.”

How many of you remember St. Ronnie declaring us all ‘millionaires’ thanks to the sky high interest we would all earn on our IRA’s?

Naturally, this all ‘ends’ with More self-aggrandizing spin that isn’t what it is being made out to be.

But what do you care about ‘thrift stores’?
No irony should be lost on the fact that these ‘recyclers’ of ‘other people’s trash’ will soon deplete their inventory of ‘gentlely used’ items, causing a crash of epic proportions

What I find, er, curious is the ‘silly money’ the dealers are asking for some downright ancient automobiles? How Stupid will you feel after paying damn near the price of a new car for some decrepit wreck that you can’t even afford to put gas into?

These chiseler’s are still asking five figures for 10 year old pick-up trucks!

My point being that fuel prices are rising again, despite high unemployment and lower overall demand around the globe.

Now look at the double whipsaw of rising fuel prices and rising inflation…throw in stagnant wages and stir well.

It won’t be the first time we’ve played ‘stick ‘em up!’ with the socially clueless but we can hope that we are inching towards ‘the last time’ we will be forced to bow down to economic blackmail.

We CAN fix civilization but I’m unable to even imagine why anybody would want to repair the barbarous system of exploitation we have suffered under for more than 200 years.

You may not like change, hell, you might now want change but one thing is certain, change is coming. If you don’t start making alternatives to choose from, it will be another game of their way or the highway.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tea Leaves

Greetings good citizen,

It seems I’m not the only one questioning what recent political developments mean to the future of our society.

Not that I’m dissing the rest of the blogosphere, they have issues too (although you have to wonder sometimes just where their priorities lie?)

The ever sharp Jesse provides this, er, ‘commentary’ (which confirms my own [amateur] observations:)

Looked a little wobbly in a relatively wide ranging, low volume day.

The wiseguys are the primarily the ones trading in this market, selling shares back and forth to one another in a Ponzi like manner, and using positioning advantage to skin any specs brave enough to venture in for a trade.

That is why it has a bias to drift higher when nothing happens, but is still a tough market for a non-professional without insider knowledge and tools.

At the first serious whiff of smoke, they will hit the exits and these markets will break hard and fast to the downside. But that's just my opinion and I could be wrong.

There is no sustainable economic recovery. This is opera buffa, a stage managed farce run by the one percent, and for the one percent.

Full stop good citizen.

Either you agree (as I do) with that last comment or you dismiss it as ‘sour grapes’ (before sticking your decidedly teeny head back up your rather capacious backside…)

Some may call Jesse’s remark ‘courageous’ but I suspect he wouldn’t think so, he is merely ‘telling the truth’ (if you can’t handle the truth it’s your problem, not his!)

Yet it is a shining example of that old axiom: In troubled times, telling the simple truth can be a ‘revolutionary act.’

Of course, one man calling out ‘the one percent’ isn’t going to, er, ‘sanitize’ the topmost reaches of society all by itself…but it’s a start!

Yessiree Bob, yesterday’s earthquake in Japan that depressed markets around the globe is, you guessed it, ‘yesterday’s news’.

Understand that global supply lines are shutting down due to the ‘lack of redundancy’ built into JIT, but hey, what do you want from MORONS?

Naturally, they didn’t become idiots UNTIL SOMETHING WENT WRONG and now IT’S TOO LATE to go back and fix things! Worse, ‘adding redundancy’ would probably ‘adversely affect’ your share price so it still WON’T GET DONE!

Which, bizarrely, brings us full circle to the STUPIDITY of basing ALLof your decisions on WORTHLESS MONEY!

But I (naturally) digress…

The, er, ‘theme’ of today WAS the unusual degree of agreement in the media (a media normally obsessed with ‘happy talk’) that things are, er, ‘off-course’.

No, that’s not right. The corporate owned media has made no secret that our nation is rudderless, if anything they have worked diligently to muddy the waters as much as possible on this issue.

As far as the media (and more importantly those who ‘own’ the media are concerned) we are as fragmented as it is possible to be, as divided on the issues as to defy logic and that’s the way they like it!

As long as they can convince you that ‘consensus is impossible’ your objections to business as usual are cancelled out by your (likely imaginary) opposite number.

This is how 1 in 5 wins elections!

A mathematical impossibility but IF YOU CAN’T VERIFY, there’s no way to be sure…is there?

Weirder still is how this ‘artificial divide’ CREATED BY THE MEDIA has never boiled over into ‘violence’.

But that day is coming…

What do you suppose will be the most surprising thing about our ‘conservative opposition’?

How many of you will be ‘astonished’ by how few of them turn up?

We’ve already seen it. Conservatives are (and long have been) a decided minority. Their interests are not the interests of the majority…but that’s what makes them ‘special’…

Sadly, not in a good way.

So, for the past quarter of a century we’ve been told (repeatedly) that our ‘diverse’ population has become increasingly ‘ungovernable’.

Since we have become so ‘divided’ on even the simplest of issues, the compromises finally arrived at would be ‘unpopular’ right out of the box.

But what HAS BEEN ‘consistent’ throughout that time frame?

The hollowing out of the nation, the one thing we can ALL agree on…well, not ‘everybody’ agrees, only the ones who trumpet ‘lower prices’ (like it actually means anything!) seem to be ‘heard’ on this issue.

Yes good citizen, the ‘dismantling’ of this nation’s infrastructure has continued ‘unabated’ since the conservative’s ‘return’ from the ‘wilderness’.

How ironic is it that ‘God’ lead them back to power?

Or more specifically, those ‘god fearing’ simpletons.

THIS is what happens when ‘the lessons of history’ are surpressed.

When people aren’t taught that god has been used repeatedly throughout history to justify unspeakable evil; usually with the ‘qualifier’ that said evil was ‘god’s will’.

Hell good citizen, ‘God’s Will’ was the primary justification for ‘the divine right of Kings’ (the ‘divine right’ to commit unspeakable acts against their own subjects and to call those acts ‘blessings’ afterwards, when people objected to being both robbed and raped.)

But they don’t teach that in school anymore…because some ‘holier than thou’ asshole doesn’t want you to know! Your ignorance is their strength!

It’s more than a little frightening to see the conservatives pushing for a ‘Christian nation’ after the founders made it a point to keep religion out of politics…because they knew what centuries of religious influence does to politics.

I know I go ‘off the reservation’ with what some of you might call ‘frightening regularity’…but I do so precisely BECAUSE of ‘the lessons of History’.

We have indeed been here before, there’s no need to fall into the same trap twice!

If not for your own sake then for your children’s…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Whose minding the store?

Greetings good citizen,

One thing leads to another, right? In yesterday’s post I posed the question of who supports/dreams up these bizarre/destructive initatives proposed by the Republicans.

Today we take that mind bending thought to the next level…

Who’s minding the store?

Once upon a time good citizen ‘redundancy’ was built into the system to prevent precisely this sort of thing from occurring.

As any accountant will tell you, redundancy is…expensive. How ironic is it that eliminating redundancy is also the, er, ‘quickest’ way to add to the bottom line?

There must have been an awful lot of ‘hundred year storms’ because all of a sudden every epic fail is being sold as a ‘hundred year event’.

Yes, good citizen, this is what happens when you both off shore AND crush the competition so alternatives are reduced to ‘nil’.

Shortage of Japanese Parts Puts U.S. Economy at Risk

“If you go to most small- and medium-sized factories in this country in particular, you are going to see a wealth of foreign made machine tools many of which are coming from Japan,” Tonelson tells Aaron in the accompanying interview. “[Therefore] if we have supply chain disruptions due to the Japanese earthquake … that is likely to affect much of the advanced high-value manufacturing sector because these machine tools and bearings and forgings, etc. are such an integral of advanced manufacturing today.”

Again, once upon a time the US WAS the world’s leading machine tool manufacturer…but the ‘rebuilding’ of Japan changed all that…and make no mistake about precisely WHO rebuilt Japan, it was US Capitalists who were even then anxious to ‘escape’ the ‘high cost’ of domestic labor.

This lead to the totally ficticious Finance Sector that specialized in defying logic and thumbing their noses at disaster.

Rather than hang these assholes we should impale them all…just a suggestion, ya know?

Although I still think ‘exile’ is the ultimate form of, er, ‘retribution’, especially exiling them with no one but those who are ‘just like them’.

‘Poetic Justice’ at its sweetest.

Ever wonder what a world full of ‘one-way, dead end streets’ would look like?

Not too pleasant considering the self-important’s normal ‘aversion’ to both suffering and forebearance.

By contrast, impaling is almost more ‘humane’.

But I digress…there are more ‘disturbing developments’ to consider.

Just as the push to fabricate ‘robotic soldiers’ should frighten any rational individual, we have this offering straight from the pages of Orwell’s 1984 to ponder:

“Drugs that affect our moral thinking and behaviour already exist but we tend not to think of them in that way,” he says. “[Prozac] lowers aggression and bitterness against environment and so could be said to make people more agreeable. Or oxytocin, the so-called love hormone … increases feelings of social bonding and empathy while reducing anxiety. Scientists will develop more of these drugs and create new ways of taking drugs we already know about.”

Which leads us to ponder the possibility of whether or not the 30,000 strong Tea Partiers are in fact the ‘test subjects’ of modern behaior modification research?

Leading to truly mystifying question of who, in their right mind, would even ADMIT to being Republican?

The ones who do (openly admit it) are definitely NOT in their right mind.

But it’s okay if you’re a Republican!

Worse good citizen (and I know I’m always pointing to the ever ‘darker side’ of the situation) is I am not alone in questioning the sanity of both our so-called ‘leaders’ and the plutocrats they suck up to.

Although Jesse does set the bar considerably lower…

I am not sure it is Bernanke that is killing the middle class, as much as they are committing suicide to please the top one percent, and differentiate themselves from the poor, who they see as hopeless victims. Nothing else explains why ordinarily intelligent people spout slogans and support ridiculous notions and theories that are designed to reduce themselves and their own children to perpetual servitude. The politicians and pundits are obviously paid to say and act as they do. But why do the many willingly march to their own doom?

Is this our ‘eureka’ moment good citizen?

That the ‘usual’ successors to the current elite have elected to commit suicide rather than to face off against against those who would crush them?

Under ‘normal play’ the, er, ‘upper middle class’ would be leading the charge against rather than playing the ‘lapdog’ to the rapacious rich.

What’s wrong with these people? Don’t the have what it takes or have the elite finally ‘smartened up’ and chosen their subordinates with greater care?

Who’s to say how short a leash most of them are on?

Making that article on behavior modification that much more, er, ‘sinister’.

It also makes one wonder what Huxley (of A Brave New World fame) was wise to? Was his ‘prediction’ of Soma prophetic or, like the fountain of youth, are we talking about ‘quest’ that persists to this day?

How sad is it good citizen that the two most common technological advances remain as ‘longevity’ being number one followed closely by ‘behavior modification’ as number two?

Considering both are a massive waste of brainpower…if you’re not a megalomaniac.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Over the edge!

Greetings good citizen,

Have a look at at this bullshit and ask yourself ‘Seriously, who voted for this?’

Does it seem like you are living in Crazyville, a place where nothing makes sense and nobody even attempts to explain what’s going on?

I think the progressive blogosphere has the right take on the political Kabuki Theater playing out on the headlines of the nation’s leading newspapers.

Some ‘fucking lunatics’ are doing their damndest to ‘repeal the 20th Century!’

So what’s more disturbing, the fucking lunatics or the fact that they are in a position to pull it off?

I’m confident that no ‘rational individual’ wants what the Republicans are trying to foist off on the nation so why is the (corporate owned) media giving them a pass?

Understand that the Republicans have brought this nation to the brink of destruction, they are the primary cause of the economic desert that has replaced what was the world’s mightiest manfacturering machine…and they did it all for ‘personal greed’!

Now, I know I sound like ‘a broken record’ but there is another name for what took place/is taking place, a technical name, a legal term that is seldom heard anymore.

Because that term strikes fear into the hearts of all who hear it.

Treason is still a charge one does not level ‘lightly’.

You see there’s no such thing as a little treason; a little treason is like being a little pregnant.

One need only look at the economic wasteland that has replaced what once was the world’s leading manufacturing zone and ask, ‘what happened here’?

On the surface it looks like ‘the rust belt’ fell victim to the ‘global race to the bottom’…but is that what really happened? Could no one ‘foresee’ the consequences of shipping all of that work overseas…so ‘a few’ could be rich?

Um, you see there’s another thing about treason, there is no such thing as ‘accidental treason’; treason is ever and always a deliberate act.

We are left holding a stinking bag of slime made for us by the very people who ‘swore’ to put the interests of society ahead of their own…and it’s not like they didn’t reward themselves handsomely for, er, ‘foregoing their global monopolies’.

I’d opine that most of you are at least aware of who did what to whom and some of you even lived through the ‘how’, multiple times.

So how do today’s headlines strike you?

Have you dismissed it as more ‘Republican Theatrics’ or are you disturbed by the fact that the last time a political party went this far off the political map it culminated in Nazi Germany?

Are the 2012 elections starting to look like the staging area for the next civil war?

One thing is certain, you can no longer look at any of this, er, ‘propaganda’ and dismiss it as mere ‘partisanship’.

For decades now the polls have been telling us that a majority of US citizens believe this nation is on ‘the wong track’…and yet no matter who we elect, nothing changes, or worse, things continue to deteriorate!

Hasn’t every president since LBJ been a little worse than the one who preceeded him?

Does this mean it’s ‘finally’ time for a female chief executive?

Believe me what I tell you, we’d be better off electing a Gerbil if who wears the big hat is the only thing we get to change!

Seriously good citizen, take a good look at the cesspool the privileged few are trying to push the rest of us into.

We can’t afford it (and I’m telling you right here and now most people will never stand for it!)

That’s perhaps the other, er, ‘dangerous’ thing nobody is paying attention to. Our civilization is like a pressure cooker that is perilously close to exploding…and yet the bastards keep the heat on full blast!

So nobody should be surprised when the same morons who haven’t said a word about the building pressure pretend to be ‘astonished’ when all hell breaks loose!

What might REALLY astonish them is their very public executions at the hands of the same people they have mislead for so long!

Pissed off is an understatement 99% of the time.

It’s well beyond the ‘oh bullshit!’ stage. Shutting down the government is serious stuff…not that the government has actually done what it was founded to do anytime in living memory…

Naturally I’m refering to the ‘stated purpose’ of government. That ‘protecting the people’ part most people mistaking believe includes them instead of the REAL reason governments are established and that’s to ‘protect the RICH PEOPLE’!

Although ‘rich’ isn’t an accurate descriptor considering the ‘funny’ nature of money, as currency is currently ‘abused’.

Someone once likened society, in particular ‘high society’ to pirates.

Extremes in ruthlessness seem to result in social success, at least in the upper circles.

You land ‘on top’ because of a ‘certain disregard for the rules’, once there, you write your own ticket.

No irony should be lost on the common ‘diagnosis’ for such ‘driven’ individuals being called ‘psychopaths’ but it does go a long way towards explaining the increasingly ‘insane’ nature of our civilization.

I’m gonna let it go now…but YOU shouldn’t.

I just wanted to point out that we are now witnessing ‘gradualism’ in the extreme. A decade ago what is happening around the world right now would be ‘unthinkable’ instead of being generally dismissed as mere ‘political showmanship’…

Just something else to think about…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

No way out

Greetings good citizen,

While the corporate media spews its incessant stream of continous ‘happy talk’, the fact remains that NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE to repair the ‘economic imbalances’ that are tearing human civilization apart.

Note I am not singling out Western or Eastern civilization as global commerce is So intertwined these days there is literally no place to hide.

Which is another way of saying there will be ‘no survivors’.

You can imagine what the reaction would be if the corporate owned media came right out and admitted this obvious fact…we’d finally see for ourselves that the normally complacent US Public does indeed know how to ‘riot’.

Um, it is, er, ‘unhelpful’ to point out that since the problem is ‘unsolvable’ using conventional methods that the choice has been made to, er, ‘ignore’ the problem as long as posssible.

Guess what? Time’s up!

You can only keep ‘life support’ going for so long before it causes the whole scheme to collapse.

It’s that all out and no in thing that eventually leaves you with an empty bag.

We’ve been running on less than nothing for more than three years, how much longer we’re going to be able to keep up the ruse is answered as ‘not much’.

Worse, the ‘budget battle’ I predicted would end up in a ‘failed government’ is upon us. It is no longer a question of ‘if’ the bastards will shut down the government but for how long?

I find it curious that the stock market has ‘recovered’ most of its losses while the real economy continues to lie in tatters, how the hell does Wall Street ‘justify’ this?

Because they said so.

And what do you suppose is going to happen when people stop believing what Wall Street says?

You read it here first; it won’t be pretty. How will you know? Mr. Merchant will no longer accept your ‘greenbacks’, he’ll demand something of ‘comparative value’ instead.

Understand good citizen, people are already thinking ‘these guys are full of shit’ when it comes to Wall Street, it won’t be long before they are ‘marginalized’ out of existence.

Those foolish enough to stick around after the ‘jig is up’ that is.

This is definitely a situation where you don’t want to be ‘the last man standing.’

Anyway, we have this article from the Automatic Earth for your consideration which begs the question of what do you do when there’s No way out

The massive U.S. debt problem that we have been discussing so often for many years has now become widely known both to investors and the general public. It has been a major topic of discussion in the media as well as a key issue in last November's elections.

To take just one recent example, Gregg Fleming, the head of Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, stated on CNBC that the total debt (including government, individual, corporate, and financial institutions) in the U.S. has increased by over $40 trillion since 1984 [which was, coincidentally, the beginning of Saint Ronnie’s second term] ($11 tn to $52.4 tn).

He stated that, in his opinion, the unusually sluggish recovery we are now experiencing is a result of the deleveraging of this debt. Furthermore, he did not even mention the "impossible to keep" promises that have been made by our federal government for entitlements, and by state and local governments' for health care and pensions. If these were included it would increase this country's total obligations to over $150 trillion.

You’ve heard both sides of the ‘entitlement’ argument, understand that the 150 trillion dollar figure is a ‘projection’ of what the debt will become if ALL members of the Baby Boom generation survive until they’re 75 years old!

It should also be obvious that the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system is ripping us off! Our entire healthcare system is riddled with prices that have no basis in reality, which is what the conservatives are basing their projections on.

Sadly there is ‘no way out’…short of revolt!

Prices won’t return to ‘realistic’ levels until we force them to.

If you have time, read Ilargi’s commentary above the linked article if you want a good chuckle.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Capitalism at its finest!

Greetings good citizen,

If we dealt in ‘allegory’ then today’s headlines regarding the spread of radioactivity into the waters off Japan could serve as a mirror for the progress the ‘poison’ of capitalism is making in extinguishing the global economy.

The fact that the two are ‘intertwined’ is ironic indeed!

Even a schoolchild knows that not all economic activity is ‘good’.

Since that statement is a direct contradiction of current conservative doctrine I offer exhibit ‘A’ as a classic example of Capitalism at its finest!

[Hat tip: Cynical Tendency]

This is the effect of “rent seeking” or the Economics of Extraction. So long as you can maximize what you can and then get out with your money it does not matter if you leave behind the wreckage of a system or service and which carries a huge burden of debt into the future.

And YOU thought I was talking about drugs! Understand, conservatives don’t give a shit if you take drugs, hell they ‘self-medicate’ all the time, which is part of the reason why their heads are full of insane bullshit! The ONLY reason they don’t want drugs legalized is because it would screw up their profits!

Talk about your ephipanies, I just realized that ALL of the conservatives I know are bigtime potheads!

How’s THAT for fucked up…mostly because conservatives are always accusing us leftists of being ‘irrational dope addicts.’

More disturbingly, just what is it about cannabis that destroys ones ability to reason?

Occasional use doesn’t appear to have any effect, it’s heavy users who tend to display high degrees of ‘irrationality’.

Now contrast that with the current fucked up state of civilization…

Houston, I think we has a problem!

I know the above reads a little ‘nuts’ but I‘m leaving it like that to demonstrate how my mind works. (The IQ test says ‘genius’ for whatever that’s worth. As I have stated before, ‘genius’ is extremely misunderstood. It is not ‘all knowing’ it is, as we see above, the ability to make connections that are already there but, due to conditioning, most others don’t see.)

What’s gonna fuck some of you up is that fact that you won’t be able to make the connection that’s right there in front of you.

And no, it’s not true because I say it’s true, it’s true because it IS true!

But maybe you’ve smoked a little too much dope…so nuthin’ go up top anymore!

Worse, and we’ve seen this countless times, is how ‘clinical research’ tends to produce the findings that agree with the preconceived notions of the people who ‘fund’ the research.

Brings us full circle to that ‘free press’ bullshit.

Just how fucked up is the ‘advertiser funded’ media? The ‘truth’ goes right out the window if the truth casts any particular funding source in an ‘unfavorable light’.

Which is to point out that there is no such thing as a ‘free market’ media.

So we come full circle to the purpose of this, er, ‘blog’…I’m not here to tell you what to think, my ‘job’ is to give you something to think about!

Like Mr. Panzer here although I have to admit, my methods tend to produce a lot more ‘blunt truama’ than his does.

Anyway, now that you’re bleeding internally my work here is finished. I’ll leave you to consider who’s in charge and just how fucked up that is all by itself!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner