Psychobabble

Greetings good citizen,

Some of you must think I’m being quite cheeky with the title of this post and some of you might call it ‘truth in advertising’.

As the article says, markets around the world have slid for the past six consecutive sessions.

Some have speculated this has something to do with the end of Quantative Easing (which means the Wall Street bankers will now be compelled to use ‘private funds’ to prop up share prices.)

And naturally, in case you haven’t been paying attention, ‘insiders’ across the board have been ‘cashing in’ every share they could get their hands on over the past year. (While private investors quaked on the sidelines, absorbing the shocking implications of this sacking of the global economy.)

Left to your imagination is what, precisely, do you do with all of that cash? (Cash that is being SERIOUSLY discounted to prevent it from blowing up the global economy!)

Geez Louise, you COULD chase commodities with it, as the screaming inflation in energy and food prices will attest.

And to further stretch your ‘bug out’ dollar you could invest it in an ‘alternative domicile’ located in a nation that is governed by an industry friendly regime or you could beef up the security of your domestic hideout…in case you don’t get away in time.

So many bases, so little time!

What do YOU think the sudden slide in stock prices mean ?

European markets fell about 1 percent Wednesday after Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, acknowledged the economy has slowed but offered no hint that the United States central bank was considering any more stimulus to accelerate growth. But Asian markets were mixed.

Wall Street stock index futures also fell, pointing to a sixth day of losses in an enduring downtrend as investors worry about the bleak economic outlook and technical market indicators point to more weakness ahead.

Oliver Pursche, president of Gary Goldberg Financial Services in Suffern, N.Y., said the market was probably hoping for some hint of action from the Fed after its second round of bond-buying expires at the end of the month. He said the market sell-off would continue past the end of the second phase of the Fed’s quantitative easing program, known as QE2, into July.

Considering what passes for the ‘global economy’ is nothing more than an exercise in ‘creative accounting’, what are the implications for the end of, er, ‘propping’ that was quantitative easing?

Will the ‘Black Hole’ created by the financial sector finally be revealed? (Worse, will the idiots keep trying to plug it with money?)

While we are here, let us take a look at what’s going on in the ‘global economy’

Every country has given in to temptation to some degree. Brazil increased tariffs on tools and toys. China opened antidumping investigations against American grain imports and imports of photographic paper from the United States, the European Union and Japan. The United States imposed a special tax on some foreigners who win government procurement contracts.

This course is not surprising given the sluggish recovery. In Europe and the United States, the end of fiscal stimulus has left communities and industries foundering. And with the international solidarity sparked by the global financial crisis eroding, governments want to give domestic firms an advantage.

Since the financial crisis began in 2008, G-20 countries have imposed 550 measures to restrict or potentially distort trade. Such measures disrupt international supply chains, reduce economic activity and dent the sense of common purpose that was needed to survive the economic crisis. Giving in to the protectionist impulse now can only make matters worse.

No irony should be lost that this was an ‘anonymous’ editorial from today’s NY Times. A good percentage of these ‘unattributed’ opinion pieces are, er, ‘contrary’ to current mainstream positions.

I’m not kicking the ‘anonymous’ part in the shins; I use a pen name myself.

Is it an ‘act of courage’ to speak your mind when what you’re advocating is totally wrong?

Which, ironically, brings us back to ‘opinions’…you can be sure our anonymous scribe ‘thinks’ they have ‘god’ on their side, even if the ‘little people’ don’t agree.

What have we got here? We have another opportunity to hop on my favorite hobbyhorse and flog A Simple Plan for a few minutes!


What is often called the ‘basic flaw’ with both capitalism and communism? They both assume resources are set to ‘infinite’. They also ‘assume’ economies are just as ‘flexible’ (despite massive evidence to the contrary.)

How was A Simple Plan developed?

A Simple plan works on the premise that all economies are LOCAL and that the most efficient use of resources requires minimum movement of those resources.

(This is due largely in recognition of the fact that shipping shit halfway across the globe will soon be cost prohibitive, and redundancy is in fact a ‘net social good’.)

Or are you like the author of this piece of tripe and think that the global race to the bottom produces the ‘ultimate good’?

While he has lately been doing doing his damnedest to paint himself green, the guy who wrote a book about the ‘flat earth’ is the likeliest individual to express the misguided opinions put forth by this article.

He has also, of late, been distancing himself from his prior support for globalization (although he has yet to repudiate his early ardor.)

But, as I point out in the beginning, the article is ‘anonymous’ and all we can do is ‘speculate’.

At the end of the day ‘economics’ (real economics and not capitalist bullshit) is simple and straightforward.

So good citizen put all of the cards in the order they belong and economics is like a clockwork, affected only by the cycles of nature.

Probably too much of a simplification for some of you but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

It IS different this time!

Greetings good citizen,

As the disaster stretches into its fourth year (remember, this shit all started in August of 2007.) we see more and more ‘comparisons’ being made to past economic, er, ‘downturns’.

I belabor the obvious when I exclaim It really IS different this time

A little-discussed aspect of this downturn is that many Americans never fully recovered from the last one before the crash hit. In 2000, before the dot-com bust, a person right in the middle of the economic pack took home $27,833 inflation-adjusted dollars, and since then, that same person has only earned more in one year – 2006 (Excel). By 2008, the median income was a thousand bucks less than it had been in 2000, and then in 2009 and 2010 we saw the largest two-year drop in wages and benefits since 1962-'63.

Depressions don't always unfold in the same way. The bleak period following the 1929 stock market crash has come to be known as the Great Depression, but it was not the first brutal downturn to be characterized as such. Between 1873 and 1896, the big industrial powers went through what was then called the Great Depression, and has since become known as the Long Depression.

The Long Depression never reached the grinding severity of the 1930s downturn; in fact, it was actually two severe recessions that bookended a period of rapid growth in the 1880s. Today, having “lost” much of the past decade, and with the economy looking like it may well head into a second period of recession – or at best a gradual, drawn-out road to economic health – historians may well come to view this period as another kind of Long Depression.

And they’d be WRONG because this time has too many factors that didn’t even exist when the other, er, ‘thefts’ were taking place.

Yeah, it’s been almost forty years of ‘down’, despite the ‘presto chango’ exhibited by the stock market to provide us with the ‘illusion’ of forward economic motion.

Many factors are different this time. During previous economic downturns they didn’t face the exhaustion of the central premise that under pins our civilization, cheap abundant energy!

That alone is a game changer that staggers the imagination with its implications!

The idiots among us believe the exhaustion of fossil fuels will cause the ‘social clock’ to roll back a mere century, when the reality is it will roll back more than a thousand years!

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that our self-professed ‘betters’ tend to believe unrealistic fairy tales like a return of the more civilized ‘horse and buggy’ era?

There are (roughly) TEN TIMES as many people now as there were then so the ‘logistics’ of the situation both stagger the mind and would quickly overwhelm Mother Nature.

Imagine EVERYBODY trying to meet their basic energy needs with wood? (Understand, in the beginning even the assholes who could afford to ‘buy’ energy would adopt the ‘quaint’ emergency measure of burning wood for fuel.)

You know, for the ‘romance’ of it…until they started choking on the smoke, then the pricks would try to ban the practice on ‘environmental’ grounds…(who cares how many freeze to death?)

And their bought and paid for politicians would pass such nonsense…because the ‘main objective’ hasn’t changed, they are indeed trying to ‘kill-off’ as many of us as they can without a fight.

Weirdly, they consider this ‘natural selection’ when there is nothing ‘natural’ about it.

Mother Nature don’t have no bank vault, she don’t care about money.

Which will likely doom us as a species IF the rest of us are ‘stupid’ enough to let the self-interested get away with it.

But I digress…

There is a third major factor that didn’t exist in previous economic downturns that is causing a considerable amount of despair, do you know what that is?

I’ll give you a hint, it is the primary reason we have gone four years without any improvement.

The term normally associated with this factor is the one thing capitalists deny (because it makes the whole structure of capitalism invalid) and that term is ‘market saturation’.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to expand saturated markets!

Not that ‘demand’ is the primary problem here, not at the moment anyway. (Oh would that it were!)

As I have stated repeatedly our civilization is seriously ‘mis-managed’ (although those who benefit from the current arrangement would vehemently disagree/deny this.)

I can ‘lobby’ for class war ‘til the cows come home but until the reality that the bastards really are trying to kill you sinks in, I’m just flapping my gums.

Oh, and I am not taking credit for having an ‘original idea’ here. Admit it, you’ve had this exact same thought cross your own mind on more than one occasion, haven’t you?

Anyway, under the category of How spooky is that? we have this article on the same topic from across the pond!

(This snippet is out of context as it sits, Demetri’s ‘central premise’ is the same as my own, comparing the past with the present excludes some major game changing factors.

The snippet refers to how his local ‘downtown’ has changed since the 1950’s, where the main square that was once filled wih banks is now populated with employment agencies.)

None carried pension plans and it was clear that there was no question of a “job for life” or indeed much employment protection given the likely nature of the contracts. How you compare this with say in 1951 a reliable factory job with an established firm I do not know and it is still very different from 1981.

What I do not like is the prevailing fear and defensive attitudes of people in the workplace, the uncertainty and the need to compete personally, to deceive and to betray. We may not have earned much at the bottom end of the ladder in the 1950’s but often we managed to laugh and “teamwork” was real and not a formula for controlling dissent or a box to be ticked for the CV for the next job move.

Rather than casting our minds back to a distant and alien past the question should be how should incomes be distributed in a society that is very new and within which we expect a good deal of public provision paid for by taxation.

The answer at present is that nobody has the answers.

At the end he touches upon a topic that I, myself was musing on earlier this morning.

For all of the general agreement in the media that the current system is broken there seems to be very little ‘discussion’ (among those expected to pull it off) about alternatives to the way things are currently done.

Worse, there are precious few non-Ivory Tower alternatives to capitalism and its kissing cousin, capitalism lite known as Communism.

Once political decision making becomes a ‘club’ you may as well re-instate monarchy!

I have devised a viable ‘third way’ with A Simple Plan.

By placing the law beyond the reach of the self-interested and restricting new legislation with ‘the golden rule’ (universiality) further tempered by the Human Anti-exploitation law, we won’t be making a lot of trips to the polls to defend our rights.

Under ASP there are no legislators to buy and no way to buy them, your money is for you, period!

Alterations in the way income is derived and distributed make ASP ‘fair’. (If you have a ‘problem’ with fairness then you don’t deserve the benefits of civil society…and they will be withdrawn from you.)

Energy scarcity brings with it the necessity of living closer to one another, if we are to pull this off we need to make society more equitable and just than it curently is.

Capitalism favors individualism (read selfishness) something our slender resources will no longer tolerate.

This will remain a major stumbling block going forward but exile will eventually ‘weed out’ those who don’t have what it takes to live in a cooperative environment.

Exile is the ‘stick’ that makes ASP work.

There are other ‘safeguards’ that need to be followed because like any system, leave something out and it won’t work ‘as intended’.

It is easy to see this ‘holistic’ plan turn into a nightmare if the, er, ‘self-interested’ are put in charge of implementing it.

ASP is far from ‘utopian’ but is does provide a much more level playing field than has ever previously been available.

The question without answer is whether or not we are civilized enough to implement it.

I vote yes, but that’s just me.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Who Are These People?

Greetings good citizen,

Hope you enjoyed your weekend! I started this post on Saturday but never got back to it until now (Monday morning.) It’s been one of those weekends.

What might be of interest is how the ‘theme’ of this post didn’t change with the shifting news picture. I started off with the topic of ‘who are these people’ and found myself in the same place when I returned Monday.

In fact, I had a rather disturbing encounter at yesterday’s family gathering on a subject more closely related to ‘semantics’ and definitions rather than politics.

So is it with our first offering, where we ask Who are these people?

We have already learned that the R and the D after their names has been rendered meaningless; scratch either one and you’ll find a corporate synchopant underneath.

The number of limousines in the federal fleet has fluctuated, but GSA's "unreliable" accounting makes determining exactly how many federal limos have been in circulation difficult.

Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, was outraged by the GSA's number games. "They can't figure out a way to define a limo? How hard can it be? If the government can't track limos, I'm not sure we should trust the numbers they put out there on anything," she said. Maybe for the government and the GSA, limousines are so routine that they have become continuous with the concept of "car."

Spoiled as government officials may be, some federal agencies and departments may have been victim to unfair limousine distribution. The State Department's 259 limos surpassed every other agency's limo stash in 2010, and the department has gained 194 limos since fiscal year 2008. Of the new 194, 98 were defined as "law enforcement." According to the GSA, these limos are either used for surveillance or undercover operations or decked-out with sweet additions like sirens, lights and high-performance drive trains.

Which is to point out some of what the GSA is defining as limousines may in fact be Chevy Suburbans, ‘tricked out’ for, er, ‘security work’.

Hell for the past six years I drove a Mercury Grand Marquis, which nobody mistook for a limo, even though it was registered as one…

Thus ended Saturday’s ‘digging’, rudely interrupted by orders to do some actual digging out in the yard!

I barely got to read my mail on Sunday and it was off to a graduation party for one of my many nieces and nephews.

This is where I encountered the somewhat disturbing semantics issue. A situation where the guy (in this case) obviously didn’t understand the definition of the word he was using.

Well, you know the old saying, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and have people THINK you’re an idiot than to open it and prove them right!

Which, ironically, I think is the basis for 99% of our media induced disagreement…and brings us full circle to the ‘stupid’ argument that I have promised to ‘back-off’ on for a while.

Our second offering is an issue most of you will comprehend although few of you will agree on the causes of it:

State, Local Governments Set to See Record Job Cuts, Layoffs

June 6th, 2011

Via: CNN:

Don’t look to state and local governments to prop up the job market.

To the contrary, this cash-strapped sector is set to go on a record-breaking layoff binge when the new fiscal year starts on July 1.

State and local governments are forecast to shed up to 110,000 jobs in the third quarter, the first time the blood-letting has risen into the triple digits, according to IHS Global Insight.

One of yesterday’s attendee’s was a local police officer, who was chatting with a retired fireman about the sorry state of public finances…

‘Straight from the horses mouth’ comes this comment: ‘if this shit keeps up, we won’t bother to show up anymore!’

What ‘shit’ is that you may ask?

‘More with less’. As most of you are aware, police work is dangerous even at the best of times. I would hardly call the current ‘working conditions’ most officers’ face daily anything even approaching ‘ideal’.

Desperation levels are sky high and you know what happens when people get desperate…

although that specific topic wasn’t discussed. He neither complained about the cutbacks that will have him facing an increasingly hostile environment with less ‘back-up’ than is prudent, he merely pointed out that he doesn’t do what he does ‘for free’.

If they weren’t going to pay him then he wasn’t about to risk his ass.

Apparently (rumor has it) that a certain amount of ‘extra effort’ was being ‘requested’ from ‘all’ employees to help the municipality with their budget problems.

And you know what ‘request’ means, don’t you?

You will do it and like it.

Anyway, it seems the Average American is wondering where they can go to experience the economic recovery for themselves…

U.S. House Price Collapse Worse Than During Great Depression

June 5th, 2011

Via: Independent:

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn.

The latest Case-Shiller house price index was just one of a slew of disappointing economic data from the US yesterday, which suggested ebbing confidence in the recovery of the world’s largest economy. The Chicago PMI manufacturing index showed a sharp slowdown in the pace of expansion in May, missing Wall Street forecasts and sending the index to its lowest since November 2009.

Ironically, this subject DID come up in yesterday’s little political debate!

Not the housing market specifically but how the economy was statistically ‘worse’ than the original ‘Great Depression’.

Of course, this being our third consecutive ‘jobless recovery’ most of us have been down so long it looks like up to us!

Naturally, the housing market ‘follows’ the employment market. You CAN’T buy a house if you don’t have a reliable job that pays well. (Although under A Simple Plan, housing, suitable to your circumstances, is both free and one of your rights!

More succinctly, to ‘charge’ you for shelter would be a violation of the Human Anti-Exploitation Law, an exile offense!

As we can plainly see, there is no ‘social benefit’ to turning a basic necessity into an income stream for the predatory capitalists among us.

The effects of which we can see demonstrated by this article

More Americans Think Economy Will Never Recover

June 4th, 2011

Recover to what? Happy motoring on Chinese credit?

Via: CNBC:

Americans are growing increasingly doubtful about direction of the US economy, according to the latest survey from business-advisory firm AlixPartners.

In fact, an increasing number, some 61 percent, say they don’t expect to return to their respective pre-recession lifestyles until the spring of 2014, if ever.

What’s worse, a full 10 percent said they expect they will never return to pre-recession spending.

That’s a more pessimistic view than last year, when those surveyed expected that they could be back to pre-recession spending levels by the middle of 2013.

“Americans continue to push their expectations for return to a pre-recession ‘normal’ further and further into the future—close enough for comfort, but far enough away to seem realistic,” said Fred Crawford, CEO of AlixPartners. “But as that happens, more and more it seems normal is actually where we are right now.”

It’s that last line about ‘normal’ being where we are right now that I find most disturbing. We have only just begun our plunge into the deep abyss of energy scarcity, an event that will redefine the gap between the ‘Haves and the Have Nots’

This will be especially contentious considering the ‘gap’ consists entirely of ‘funny money’ that will become totally worthless to the people who do the actual ‘heavy lifting’ around here.

Like most polls, we can only wonder who, precisely, was polled and how this particular population segment was selected.

Because let’s face it, the data exists to tell pollsters before hand what they are likely to expect from data-mining a particular area.

So anyone who thinks they conduct polls ‘at random’ should be wearing a dunce cap.

But I digress.

Did I mention that the collapse of our civilization proceeds apace?

But you knew that!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Food for thought

Greetings good citizen,

By this point in the game I am reasonably confident that nobody is paying much attention to the irrationally priced, plunging stock markets.

The game of ‘pocket pool’ intended to enrich the already wealthy no longer holds the unwashed masses in thrall.

The stock market never made sense to them and the closer they watched the more the ‘hocus-pocus’ aspect became clear.

Which is to point out that the markets AREN’T real, they ARE ‘theater’, an act put on to beguile the gullible while their pockets are being picked.

A ‘godlike’ (think imaginary, all powerful and therefore, irrational) structure used to hide criminal wrongdoing, which brings us to the topic of today’s first offering

This modern Corporate Police State differs from what we call "corporatism" in that it is not merely about funneling public dollars to private interests à la the Wall Street bailout. Indeed, this new monster has bigger goals than the occasional bailout. It is all about using the government's position as society's supreme rule maker and law enforcer to create a fully- functioning corporate state -- one that doesn't just channel police power into crushing the occasional protest, but constructs an entire legal and military framework around preserving and expanding private profit. And, as we're now seeing, that includes a radical reimagining of the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, good citizen, the ‘difference’ between the Hollywood version of a police state and the real deal is we don’t see jack-booted thugs goose-stepping down Main Street like you see in the movies.

The ‘goons’ dress discretely and seldom draw attention to themselves while they keep them close, they seldom ‘flash’ their ‘get out of Jail free’ cards (otherwise known as ‘badges’) if they don’t have to.

Whilst Mr. Sirota speculates that the Police State veneer is simply becoming more obvious, I suspect the more prominent presence is proportionately related to the measurable increase in public anger. (The criminals fear retribution)

By this point in the game it has become apparent we are no longer dealing with a ‘few bad apples’ or a ‘whoopsie’ how did that slip past us situation.

Whether you believe it or not, our ‘betters’ have taken it into their heads that it is time to ‘cull the herd’ and this time they’re going to do it without a ‘world war’.

They’ve already deployed mass sterilization techniques but given the way things are headed they see no reason to stop there.

You can bet there is a hotly contested debate going on as to whether or not to deploy nukes against the ‘surplus population’ (their term, not mine!) and so far the ‘no nuke’ crowd is winning…but we don’t know for how long.)

Understand good citizen, we will mourn the passing of democracy when it finally occurs, not that most of us would notice the difference, considering the farce democracy has become.

We can use all the statistics in the world, appeal to every historical parallel, bring out every expert, cite every non-partisan study, and it isn't going to matter. We will not convince them that their way lies destruction.

And there is no stopping them. When Reagan's tax cuts ballooned the deficit, they forgot it happened. When Poppy's tax hike fixed the problem, they were happy to see him go. The success of Bill Clinton's economic recovery act did not impress them. They learned nothing from Dubya's destruction of the global economy. They didn't change their beliefs or behavior after getting drubbed two straight times in 2006 and 2008. They just doubled-down on the obstruction and the propaganda and the poison, and repeated a now well-worn pattern of exploding the debt only to turn around and blame the Democrats and social programs for the deficit.

Until ‘direct democracy’ is enacted, we will not be free to control our destiny, nor will we enjoy anything even remotely resembling 'justice'.

Understand that the ‘centerpiece’ of A Simple Plan is ‘direct democracy’, there are no ‘legislators’, the laws will be made and passed by the same people who must live under them.

It is only right and just.

As I have asked repeatedly in the past, since we are all in this together, just who the hell is this ‘opposition’ we keep seeing in our political affairs?

Well, guess who it is? It’s the mo-fo’s who are ripping our asses off blind!

Worse, they have placed themselves ‘above the law’.

Just one more ‘common practice’ to be guarded against…which is to point out that the choice to go with ‘representative democracy’ wasn’t ‘accidental’.

So as we speak of our collapsing civilization
We are once again ‘treated’ to a display of Corporate Capitalism at work:

Foreigners and the wealthy have moved their dollars offshore, forcing Yemen’s Central Bank to hold onto its declining foreign reserves. [Sound familiar?] That in turn is causing the Yemeni riyal to slide in value. On the black market, the price of a dollar rose to 250 riyals from 217 in just a few weeks. [Did I mention the ‘irrational, nonsensical aspect of modern monetary management/valuation?]

Economists say that if the riyal reaches 300 to the dollar, an additional 15 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people will be under the poverty line, living on less than $2 a day. Already, an estimated 40 to 50 percent of Yemen’s people are under that line, though reliable statistics are difficult to obtain in Yemen and some economists put the figure even higher. [And these people are NOT groaning under the yoke of Communism, or Islamism (which is a religion and not an economic system.) what is the source of Yemen’s pain? Why International Capitalism, of course!]

Since mid-March, when tribesmen allied with the opposition blew up a pipeline and disabled one of Yemen’s two main oil-production facilities, the government has been forced to import almost all of its fuel. (The other main complex is used for exports.) That has further strained the government, which depends almost entirely on dwindling oil reserves for its revenues.

Let’s see, gas lines at home while the ‘other’ port exports domestic oil to the Western world and their economy is in chaos?

Can you say ‘mismanagement’?

It boggles the mind to see criminal acts like this go unpunished…but that’s ‘capitalism’ for you!

In case you have ‘forgotten’ (considering how the media has long since ignored the ongoing unrest in Yemen) neighboring Arab states have intervened militarily to keep the (US centric) monarchy in power.

These are, as I’m sure patriotic Republicans would urgently downplay, your tax dollars at work!

‘You’d be paying $5 a tomato if we didn’t have migrants willing to pick ‘em for nothin’!’

Fuck heads!

Which, naturally, segues nicely into our next story of financial ‘hocus pocus’.

Back when the original 2009 Obama stimulus was enacted, some of us warned that it was both too small and too short-lived. In particular, the effects of the stimulus would start fading out in 2010 — and given the fact that financial crises are usually followed by prolonged slumps, it was unlikely that the economy would have a vigorous self-sustaining recovery under way by then.

By the beginning of 2010, it was already obvious that these concerns had been justified. Yet somehow an overwhelming consensus emerged among policy makers and pundits that nothing more should be done to create jobs, that, on the contrary, there should be a turn toward fiscal austerity.

Um, I’m hellbent to inject relevant portions of ASP into my essays to illustrate what a holistic, workable system looks like.

As I have criticized many times, money is only useful to the individual.

Sit back and think about that one for a moment. Neither the state nor the commercial sector needs ‘profits’ to operate!

This is contrary to what you’ve been taught but money has been ‘abused’ (by the self-serving) for a mighty long time.

Understand that removing the requirement for both the state and commerce to generate profits eliminates the need for ALL taxation!

Taxes exist to enrich the owners of resources at the public’s expense!

It’s a ‘scam’ and all taxing bodies should be exiled…oh and P.S. by the way, Libertarians and Randites right along with them!

This ‘scam’ was dreamed up by the ‘owners’ of the world (quite literally the kings started this tax bullshit…and Pharoah was nothing more than a king pretending to be god!)

Where has the practice of paying for civilization gotten us?

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the United States added 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, following an increase of 232,000 jobs in April. May’s job gain was about a third of what economists had been forecasting.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.1 percent from 9.0 percent in April.

“The economy clearly just hit a brick wall,” said Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics. “It’s almost as if it came to a complete standstill.”

Did I mention ‘mismanagement’?

Do you have ANY idea on how grand a scale our collapsing civilization is being mismanaged?

You already know this but these people have a lot of nerve calling themselves our ‘betters’!

They are the scum of our society, the worst of the worst who somehow manage to claw their way to the top…mostly because we are too nice to stop them!

And THAT good citizen, is the hell of it!

I don’t know about you but from here on out it’s ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

More of the same...

Greetings good citizen,

In what is liable to be a ‘short one’ today (other matters demand my attention) we have a couple of offerings that add to the growing cry of alarm and concern surrounding the impending death of our civilization.

The trouble is most will not recognize that the old civilization is gone, they will continue to operate on the premise that the situation continues to deteriorate rather than realizing the whole game has changed.

Anyway, first up we have we have this straight-forward article that belabors the obvious because it demonstrates precisely who and how the ‘budget’ got so far out of whack.

There isn’t a lot of text and I still don’t have a ‘photobucket’ for stealing charts. You may call this ‘lazy’ but I’d turn that right back on you; just click the freaking link already!

In a display of what can be called ‘typical’ Republican tactics, first you create a crisis and then you use the crisis to attack popular public programs that you dislike.

Here we talk about ‘trade-offs’ good citizen. If we fail to provide for the poor then we will find ourselves up to our eyeballs in beggars (who will also double as thieves.)

Is that what you want?

Or would you rather move granny onto your living room sofa while you wait for her to die of some easily treated disease YOU can’t afford the medication for?

These are the choices the pro-corporate GOP would force upon you…and you will once again shake your head in amazement as you marvel at how the ‘one in five’ manage to win elected office.

And guess who provides THAT outcome? The corporate owned media!

Second up is is this piece from Ilargi’s new ghostwriter

Therefore, it is very unlikely that the current crises of capitalism will lead to a new reserve system based on physical gold, and is instead likely that they will lead to systemic collapse of financial and productive markets around the world. In the final part of this series, Part IV, we will discuss what this process of collapse really means for physical gold as a means of preserving wealth over time. The discussion will focus solely on financial collapse, rather than the demographic/environmental issues mentioned above, but the latter should obviously not be ignored when considering various means of preserving "wealth".

With regards to systemic finance, we can explore the realistic likelihoods of short-term deflation and HI, which are obviously very important considerations, as well as the specific properties of locations in which financial deterioration occurs. These properties may belong to anything from one's region or country to one's state, local community and household. As the trend towards centralization and concentration of capital grinds to a halt, our perceptions of a unified and "small" global society will also give way, as we are forced to observe the simple and enormous world existing right in front of our eyes and at our feet.

The ‘cartoon’ is both entertaining as well as illuminating although it leaves you in the same place most articles of this variety do, asking all of the right questions without providing any answers.

Is Marx’s ‘answer’ to capitalism the right way to go?

No, as I explained yesterday Marx got money all wrong, thus is Communism deeply flawed.

If you don’t get the money part right any proposed alternative is NEVER going to work!

Under a sustainable social model the entire ‘FIRE’ portion of the economy would be outlawed!

Just a little litmus test for the uninitiated to use when considering a ‘new’ economic system…not that you will ever be asked…yet another drawback to letting the self-interested run things.

Funny how our economic problems/crises continue to loop back to two things that don’t exist, bill of sales from God and Mother Nature’s cash register.

Some would call the finite nature of resources the ‘cash register’ used by nature but there is a huge difference between wisely using what remains and having the courts enforce an individual’s false claim of ownership. (Like the crisis we are facing with fossil fuels.)

Which is to point out that the old ‘social model’ is broken, if we don’t develop a new one, those who do ‘get to choose’ are likely to force a less than palatable choice upon the rest of us.

Remember, the ‘enlightened’ civilization all of these assholes have been trained in ‘couldn’t conceive’ of a society without slavery.

Peckerhead may provide you with a paycheck for now but think about where you’d be if they threw you on the scrap heap?

Time to ‘return the favor’ while we’re still here and able!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Police State (an offshoot of the Class War)

Greetings good citizen,

If you haven’t already I want you to picture in you head what ‘Class War’ would look like.

Would there be riots and confrontations with the Police State in your mental image?

Or would it be a day like today, where the stock market dropped a hundred points due to ‘fear’ of bad news?

Seriously good citizen, the class war is blazing all around you and it has been for the past ten years but thanks to our closely muzzled media, most of you remain ignorant.

The biggest ‘giveaway’ is the 30,000 strong Tea Party (funded by billionaires! Real ‘grassroots’ organization, isn’t it? And popular too, the fucking media can’t stop fretting over them…which should tell you something all by itself.)

Then, like the last administration’s penchant for torture we have this bullshit, which has been building for quite some time.

Those who suggest that the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Kentucky is ‘no big deal’ or that it’s ‘alarmist’ to think otherwise, must not understand the extent to which the boundaries are pushed when the Court makes exceptions to our rights. Nor do they comprehend that once lost, civil liberties are impossible to reclaim. With SWAT teams already injuring and at times killing the wrong people to serve warrants, just imagine the abuse to come given the increased power the Court has bestowed upon the state.

Considering the level of brutality we have been dishing out around the world, from the “war on drugs” to the “war on terror,” the erosion of our civil liberties is sadly inevitable. Did we really think that we could wage war and occupy other nations with checkpoints, invasive surveillance, and brutal violence without these same policing tactics spreading to our country?

Like many things that have happened over the past thirty years, the ever expanding Police State started out as concern for the ‘safety’ of the officers…and as the (civilian) death toll mounted, the ‘blue wall’ got more funding and less accountable.

Sadly good citizen we have already seen ‘the next step’.

It happens every day in Afghanistan and Iraq and soon it will be happening in El Paso and Tuczon. In the interests of ‘officer safety’ police will soon start lobbing missiles into ‘suspect neighborhoods’, Hell, the Isrealis do it all the time!

Should you object (or worse become the victim of such an attack) you will be shit out of luck! Because their goofball ‘supreme court’ has deemed their actions ‘perfectly legal’.

Which is to ask how rapt you will be watching THEIR trial for treason? (I’ll bet you’ll be glued to the set!)

When the justice system starts to unravel ‘justice’ takes some pretty bizarre bounces.

Understand that the idiots responsible for this latest twist towards ‘do as I say not as I do’ don’t intend to ‘lose control’…so when the backlash comes they will be taken pretty much by surprise.

And they will know full well that ‘sorry’ isn’t going to cut it.

Also under the header class war, we have this article that until only recently was being billed as the salvation of all who made the effort.

Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 face an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the rest of the population, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. 2010's 18.4 percent rate for youth was the worst in the 60 years that economists have collected such data. ColorLines notes that in 2010, 8.4 percent of white college graduates were unemployed, 13.8 percent of Latino graduates, and a dismal 19 percent of black graduates.

Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren't worth the paper they're printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven't increased by anything close to that number -- not for the bottom

Worse, most are at a loss when it comes to deciding what to study. Why spend a fortune for a low paying service industry job? (And you WILL spend a fortune because like most loans, it’s not the principle but the interest that drains you dry!)

Just how ‘fucked up’ is our badly broken economy?

I think most of you know the answer.

And if you don’t this excellent article from Jesse’s crossroads café provides a good primer:

When this natural progression of change can no longer be resisted, things might start moving more quickly, perhaps remarkably so.

But until then bear in mind that these big changes happen slowly and for the most part quietly. With sudden bursts of change and release of energy, often over a period of years, until the pressure breaks into the public arena, and then voila, a full-blown crisis appears as if out of nowhere. And most swear that it could not have been foreseen or predicted.

I am telling you, again, that it is happening now. With this continuing resistance to change and reform it may very well break upon the world financial system in the next few years with what could be a terrific. An astonishing effect that will sweep away whole institutions and many long held beliefs and assumptions, old lessons that have been unlearned, and must be accounted for again.

While I have not asked him I’m reasonably sure Jesse doesn’t like being the bearer of sad tidings any more than I do.

We (the paycheck peasants of the modern world) are under attack, good citizen.

While they’d like us to march willingly into the gas chambers, most of us will resist once we know what’s going on.

Are they gassing people? I dunno but they sure as hell are sterilizing the next generation wholesale and there isn’t anything being done about it! (Because fertility clinics are cleaning house!)

Do you doubt there is a class war raging all around you?

All they need to win is for you to do nothing…

Wake up…and then spark it up!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Legally Goofy

Greetings good citizen,

The collapse of civilization proceeds apace, which is to say ‘unabated’. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that statement with the caveat of there is no hiding place, when Western civilization ‘falls’ it will take everything else with it.

Thus is the ‘collapse of civilization’ is intended to be ‘universal’. This is an ‘all-in’, nobody is exempt situation. This is not to say there won’t be the occasional (heavily policed and severely restricted) ‘oasis’ scattered here or there.

It will be from these ‘secure compounds’ that our betters intend to reassert their control over the rest of us…after they’re finished ‘spanking’ us for being ‘uncooperative’.

(It’s not too late to run their ungrateful asses up their own flag pole! By the neck, for those of you who require a more specific mental image.)

Where were we? Oh yeah, the collapse of civilization!

The question on some of your minds might be ‘what evidence do we have that civilization is collapsing (everything seems to be running ‘fairly smoothly’?)

Does the term ‘boob-proof’ mean anything to you?

99% of what we consider ‘normal’ has been boob-proofed so the world will always appear to be operating ‘normally’ if you don’t know what to look for.

Like yesterday’s little rant about (out of control) National Park service cops.

Or this article, which asks if we are living in a ‘post legal’ society?

Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?

Regular readers know I’ve been pointing to our ‘legal problem’ for decades now, just to give you an idea how long this (am I) go back.

The collapse of our civilization starts with the collapse of our legal system.

What was initially a little decay has blossomed into full-scale rot.

Our laws have always had a price tag, all they needed was a willing seller…and the top authority’s willingness to look away on cue. Now they no longer need to pretend, they have the ‘top authority’ tucked away in their own vest pocket.

How fucked up is it considering that all money is ‘funny’ (which is to say ‘fake, counterfeit’?) Our freedom and future well being were sold for a handful of virtual confetti!

There is no ‘suitable punishment’ for a crime like this, which is why I developed ‘exile’.

But I digress.

Next up, we have this bit of Ivory Tower drivel as a reminder that ‘academics’ have no ‘real world’ foundation with which to build upon.

This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on institutions whose priorities are broader than those that typically flow from the corporate emphasis on the bottom line. At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food. And all this is to say nothing of 1.6 million nonprofit corporations that often cross over into economic activity. [snip]

Along with the rapid expansion of small and medium-size businesses committed to building the new economy has come a sense of community and shared mission. Staff, managers and owners at many of these companies are finding more opportunities to share ideas and pool resources with like-minded professionals. The American Sustainable Business Council, a growing alliance of 150,000 business professionals and thirty business organizations, has emerged as a leading venue for such activity. Most members are “triple bottom line” companies and social enterprises committed to the environment and social outcomes as well as profits.

How many of you are looking at this bullshit and thinking ‘SSDD’?

Because that’s what we have here, I’m amazed this asshole isn’t advocating starting up a ‘charity’ economy because when it’s all said and done we would be right there. The only ‘social good’ to come from these ‘special corporations’ will be the ‘special drawing rights’ and ‘preferred stock’ the directors will bestow upon themselves.

Which is to remind you that the original idea behind the corporate charter was to insure that these for profit ventures ‘served’ the public rather than preyed upon it. So Bobo’s proposal is far from ‘new’, it’s the same old bullshit ‘re-treaded’ and fitted with a few (soon to be forgotten) bells and whistles.

We’re back to ‘lipstick on a pig’.

Speaking of which we have yet another article pronouncing the death of the American Dream

Housing is in persistent trouble, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out.

The desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.

Show of hands now, how many of you are ‘surprised’ by this story? No one? I think a few of you are fibbing! You’ve been eyeing those foreclosures and thinking it’s almost time to realize your dream of becoming a real estate tycoon!

You’ve even dusted off your old Tom Vu seminar materials (not without wondering what the hell you were thinking at the time) boning up on the ‘right way’ to build your empire!

Schmacky, good citizen, guess what’s NEVER coming back?

One would like to think that our species would ‘mature’ by the time we figure out how to reach the stars (because that’s what it is going to take for the idea of ‘personal real estate’ to come back into fashion.)

There’s a reason I developed A Simple Plan as a ‘cashless’ society, chief among these is the fact that all crime is cash and carry BUT (and it’s a pretty big one) by the time we get around to implementing ASP, people will no longer ‘trust’ fiat currencies.

Worse, there isn’t enough ‘hard currency’ (which is also ‘fiat’…think about it) to establish a viable economy.

Speaking of which here we find 8 financial advisers who are all on the same page… as I am.

Just in case you were thinking it might be a ‘happy’ article.

We are faced with some daunting problems, none of which are ‘insurmountable’ IF we can get the self-interested to step aside while we apply the necessary repairs.

And that is ‘the challenge’ good citizen, just one of many.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner