Job Opportunities

Greetings good citizen,

You have to wonder what will they think of next? when it comes to exploiting the tens of millions of homeless/ unemployed created by their mis-management (that their fucking statistics don’t keep track of!)

I mean WTF good citizen!

A marketing agency touched off a wave of criticism and debate when it hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conference goers Internet access in exchange for donations.

BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, outfitted 13 volunteers from a homeless shelter with the devices, business cards and T-shirts bearing their names: “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.” They were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the conference, which has become a magnet for those who want to chase the latest in technology trends.

The smart phone-toting, social-networking crowds often overwhelm cellular networks in the area, creating a market that BBH Labs hoped to serve with the “Homeless Hotspots” project, which it called a “charitable experiment.” It paid each participant $20 a day, and they were also able to keep whatever customers donated in exchange for the wireless service.

How fucking pathetic is it good citizen that we can look at this situation as, “Well, it was $20 they ordinarily wouldn’t have had…”

When the reality is that it is unlikely they’ll be seeing it again anytime soon!

Not like you can hop a bus and criss-cross the nation, going from event to event as a “homeless wi-fi hotspot”, even Greyhound isn’t that cheap and you’ve got to eat at some point in the game.

Pass out from hunger and your mobile device will disappear, then what are you gonna do? You’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere, both homeless and jobless.

Worse, the local capitalists would probably try to turn you into dog food!

(If the selfish fucks are willing to turn YOU into a mobile wireless hot spot (for a ‘generous’ $20 A DAY, they aren’t too far away from considering how much you’d fetch as ‘scrap protein’!)

Which is to ask, where is the borderline of human depravity?

Does it really hinge on how much you dare to push the limits or is the switch drawn from the other direction as the Milgram experiments demonstrate?

(Which is to draw attention to the ‘I was just following orders’ defense, where ordinary people were instructed give a fellow human ‘harmless’ electric shocks [of increasing intensity] to a victim who was strapped to a chair in another room.

When the victim pleaded for mercy, most people stopped and questioned the examiner (but continued when ordered to do so!)

Only one woman refused to participate from the onset. This, as it turns out, was an act of extraordinary bravery! How lucky would most of us be to draw that one dissenter from the 99 percent who go along to get along?

Which is to say good citizen, if you find yourself strapped to a chair with electrodes wired to your sensitive parts. It’s a pretty safe bet you’re about to experience something very unpleasant at the hands of somebody who is glad it’s not them in there strapped to a chair…in fact, they’re doing it because they’ve been told that it is the price of refusal!

Don’t push the button? Fine, then it’s your turn in the chair and I’ll (the sadistic examiner) will be the one pushing the button!

But, naturally, I digress!

It’s easy to do considering the mounting evidence of the collapse of our civilization.

More insidious, perhaps is the probability that what currently passes for ‘order’ WON’T collapse completely.

You’d think once the paychecks dry up that the whole shebang would come to a screeching halt…but not so!

How frightening is it good citizen to realize that not everybody is ‘money motivated’?

It’s a concept that is so frightening that most of us never consider it…but the ‘normal mind’ rejects out of hand the very idea of harvesting your fellow humans for their ‘meat’…

But we aren’t dealing with ‘normal minds’ here, which is why they are running circles around us!

The ‘unthinkable’ is happening because we continue to make the mistake of projecting our values onto people who don’t share those values!

Like the Walrus, my words mean exactly what I say they mean, nothing more and nothing less.

And like the Walrus, we are all plagued by the ‘imprecision of speech’ (that words often have more than one meaning, so ‘context’ is everything)

I deliberately chose the word ‘unthinkable’ because of its association with nuclear war and the ultimate annihilation of the human race.

Make no mistake about it, the ‘unthinkable’ is happening right under our very noses, right here and now and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it (short of revolt!)

The sad truth is you’re better off dying on your feet because they don’t need all of the sheeple willing to live on their knees…they’re gonna exterminate ya regardless!

Oh and nuclear war, don’t be stupid! Sure, nukes will be tossed around and major population centers will be wiped out BUT, it will all be ‘surgical’, the perps aren’t interested in ‘exterminating us’ entirely (someone still has to do the ‘grunt work’) but they are ‘intent’ on demonstrating that they mean business!

So…are you feeling ‘lucky’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS: it’s gonna be one HOT summer!

The dim future...

Greetings good citizen,

The pundits, ‘talking shit’ (as usual), ‘predicted’ markets would be ‘up’ with the, er, ‘alleged resolution’ of the Greek Crisis.

And what do you know, the pundits were…WRONG! (But that surprises no one.)

Well, when I saw the actual, er, ‘disappointing’ performance of the global markets, this article caught my eye.

They will also wrangle over whether to increase the firepower of their bailout fund — a move that is still vehemently resisted by Germany.

No final decisions are expected on these issues Monday, but the talks will set the tone for how the eurozone plans to deal with an economic crisis that continues despite recent market calm.

Ministers will also examine the next steps for Greece's euro130 billion ($171 billion) rescue, including the first aid installment and shoring up the banks.

How sad is it good citizen that what you see here is more than half of the whole thing?

Which is to point out that the Euro-zone (like the rest of the West) doesn’t have a ‘future’ to look forward to.

Look up and take note of the italicized text.

I’m gonna say it one more time, slow and in English…the so-called ‘investors’ ARE NOT LIKE you and me! They are as ‘ALIEN’ to us as the ONE PERCENT is!

Fortunately, a little further along, I encountered this article which provides us with more insight into the ruinous Euro-zone situation:

Problems at banks led to steep declines in lending. The weakest banks in Europe — Greek banks and those identified by European regulators as being short on capital — cut new lending by 14.6 percent in the last six months of 2011, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The remaining, healthier banks cut new lending by 6 percent.

The European Central Bank’s emergency loans, as well as more decisive action by European political leaders, led to a steep decline in the rates that banks had to pay to issue their own corporate bonds, to borrow money from other banks for short periods or to obtain American dollars, according to the data.

But, Mr. Cecchetti said, “this definitely does not mean we are out of the woods.”

“Financial conditions have improved, but they are still strained,” he said. Many countries are still trying to return to the same level of economic output they had before the financial crisis began, he noted.

“There has been basically no growth in advanced economies in five years,” he said.

Elephant in the room time again! If nobody is ‘creditworthy’, who do you lend to? Worse, how do you ‘profit’ from lending when the borrower’s cost keep climbing exponentially, reducing their ability to pay? (Peak Energy, which boosts the cost of EVERYTHING, across the board!)

Now, tell me again that you don’t believe in collapse…

Worse, good citizen, the ‘window of opportunity’ is closing and it is already going to be devilishly difficult to establish sustainable systems as it is. (Which is to opine it will be tough even without a determined [and decidedly self-interested] minority fighting it every step of the way!)

But I think that last sentence sums things up nicely, don’t you?

There has been basically NO GROWTH in the Advanced Economies in FIVE YEARS!

Now, who needs me to explain WHY that is?

Is it because of the United States, who readily attacks anyone who so much as looks like it is going to lift a finger to protect the people that elected them?

No, and all of this ‘hype’ about an American Empire is just more bullshit mis-direction. There’s an Empire out there all right but it has NO ‘nationality’, it obeys (nor fears I might add) no government.

This Empire ‘owns’ all of the governments that matter…which bodes very poorly for the majority of us. Psychos who are rich enough to ‘own’ governments usually use those offices to protect themselves…no matter how many (of their own) people get killed in the process.

‘Paranoia’ drove Stalin to murder 25 million…and the ‘new boss’ will be no different.

Why do you suppose we are suddenly seeing, er, ‘legislation’ legalizing the murder of a nation’s own citizens?

Well, the kings were famous for dispensing ‘capital punishment’ on a whim, if anything displeased them, the solution was always a hand wave away, ‘kill it, kill it now!’

And there wasn’t (and worse) ISN’T a fucking thing you can do about it!

Who among us can question The President?

According to those ‘flag waving patriots’ (who call themselves conservatives) the President (especially a Republican president) is ‘infallible’ and is therefore, beyond reproach, never mind question.

Worse, state sanctioned murder automatically falls under the cloak of ‘State Secret’, they can’t tell you the answer for fear of ‘jeopardizing’ National Security…

Like a lot of things that have slid into oblivion, (thanks to the corporate owned media) the government’s newly acquired right to murder YOU on a whim has more or less (permanently) ‘escaped’ the news cycle.

If the government murders YOU (OR a loved one) it is ‘automatically’ a State Secret and it would be a crime itself to have to answer for its actions!

Can you say ‘fucked’?

I knew you could…and I also know will demonstrate just what that means to the cowards who voted for this vile legislation!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bullshit!

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘litany of woe’ continues to grow as the pile of bullshit grows deeper. It’s difficult to decide which is more worrisome, the parade of imbeciles clubbing one another senseless for the Republican nomination or the FACT that we won’t do any better if the (pretend) Democratic incumbent wins re-election.

And I use the term ‘win’ in the loosest possible sense…

Like in how comrade Putin just, er, ‘won’ re-election for his third term as president of the Soviet confederacy.

How fucked up is it good citizen that the ‘president’ is whoever the (corporate owned) media tells you it is?

More ‘troublesome’ is how the cheerleaders in the media (what a shitty way to earn a paycheck, being a professional liar) keep shoveling it in!

The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, and though the unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 percent, that was largely because nearly half a million people had joined, or resumed, the search for work in hopes their prospects had improved.

“We’ve seen a lot less Eeyore,” said Sherry Leginski, operations director at CareerPlace, a job placement center in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. “Maybe they’re turning a little bit more Tigger instead of Eeyore. They’re feeling better.”

Looking over her recent cases, Ms. Leginski cited a new college graduate who found work helping the developmentally disabled, a 60-year-old manufacturing specialist whose contract job in Mexico had led to full-time work back home, and a financial services worker who had landed a management job in Charlotte, N.C.

Skipping the ‘happy talk’ about a handful of exceptions (capable of traveling to take on a new job.) what’s worrisome here is ‘the math’.

Let’s suppose we are ‘charitable’ and give the hiring rate a boost to 250,000 (for the sake of round numbers…

A quarter of a million a month for twelve months (again being VERY charitable!) makes 3 million jobs a year. (Let us not lose sight of the fact that over HALF of these jobs are ‘churned’ on an annual basis as employers look for a better ‘fit’ and employees seek management they are ‘more compatible’ with.)

So what are we saying here? That most jobs aren’t ‘new’ they’re just ‘recycled’. But that’s not how the ‘workforce’ operates, it’s step in as a teenager then it takes forty (plus) years until you can ‘legitimately’ step out (barring catastrophic injury.)

So when we were through with, say, the Clinton years, there were supposedly 21 million jobs ‘created’ (and again, most of ‘em were ‘churn’, the same jobs getting filled by different people, over an over again…)

While it might be the, er, ‘inclination’ of the corporate owned media to look back at the nineties as a ‘go-go’ era. I’m here to tell you, as somebody who lived through them, that this is a TOTAL FABRICATION! The 90’s sucked for 99% of us (and the payroll data proves it!)

And UNDERSTAND that the, er, ‘recession’ of 1989 to 1991 was the First ‘jobless recovery’ (the stock market ‘miraculously recovered but unemployment remained, er, ‘stubbornly elevated’.)

The Dot Gone bust (just after Bush Jr. took office) marks the second consecutive ‘jobless recovery’…the crash precipitated by Bush’s economic policies have resulted in the third/most recent ‘jobless recovery’.

No irony should be lost on the fact that most ‘doomers’ have lived through these ‘challenging times’, which has contributed to their, er, ‘pessimistic’ outlook.

Then we have this bullshit to contend with!

The decision by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association ends months of speculation that a Greek default might not set off the swaps, a result that could have undermined their role as insurance against debt defaults.

“We saw today that the credit-default swap market worked,” said the association’s chief executive, Robert Pickel. “Market participants expected it to work.”

Still, doubts about the instruments’ effectiveness may linger. European officials initially shaped the Greek debt restructuring to avoid activating them. The concern is that future restructurings could be arranged to stop swaps from paying out.

So, for some bizarre reason, the swaps were (finally) activated (this time) but (and it’s a mighty big one) the could, er, ‘restructure’ the debt so they wouldn’t be activated in the future…

Is this starting to look like MF Global writ large?

Throw in a broken justice system and we have all of the fixings for Alice in Wonderland!

A madhouse where if there were any rules at all they would be ‘do as I say and not as I do!’

So what’s going to happen tomorrow?

Perhaps more ‘incredible’ is how the Greeks managed to 85% of their creditors to ‘agree’ to a 50% plus ‘haircut’.

Worse, good citizen is they are ALREADY SAYING that Greece will be in trouble again in the very near future!

And it looks like they will be forced to ‘poison (what remains of) the well’ when they get there.

And that’s just a couple of the more obvious things that sticking in my crusty old craw this morning…

Hope the rest of the day gets better from here as I doubt it could be much worse…but then again.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

'American' Empire? (not!)

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s hiatus resulted in today’s frustration over (re-) learning how to type on a ‘proper keyboard’ once more.

Which is to say I spent yesterday ‘resurrecting’ the computer that has lain in pieces down in the ‘man cave’ since last fall. (Blew the CPU, but what do you want for a hundred bucks?)

But that’s neither here nor there, we have larger fish to fry, don’t we?

In yet another display of exceptional myopia the book promotion agency that doubles as a mouthpiece for the ‘progressive’ arm of the long defunct Democratic party gets it ‘wrong’ once again…

Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream.

This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by definition be at someone else’s expense.

In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for "more" -- for individual accumulation of wealth.

Yet another, er, ‘common mistake’ of the thinly disguised alternative press is to circulate the notion that there won’t be any ‘retroactive retribution’ (that will be delivered sooner than most of you would imagine!)

Then there is the curiously myopic illusion that the Empire was that of the sole remaining ‘superpower’, the crippled and crazy USA.

Here is a nation that is running amok in every which direction, killing the natives of other lands with impunity while claiming that ‘God’ had granted them the right (and let’s not forget the ‘solemn moral obligation’) to protect unbridled capitalism around the globe!

(And all of this from a nation headed by a ‘socialist’, not that those leveling such charges have a freaking clue what a socialist is!)

But that’s the media for you! They have reality so twisted around that they need both hands and a hunting dog just to find their asshole!

You, the average citizen, need to set this nonsense aside!

We aren’t ‘at war’ with a cadre of crazed, ideologically challenged fringe right wing militants, hell bent on establishing a Christian nation, under (their) ‘god’.

Nope, what we’re up against is an ‘Ancient Enemy’ that has been around as long as civilization itself (and before you get it wrong again, understand that the Devil has been around longer than civilization and is no more real than his ‘nice guy’ bookend. (Who has proven to be mighty helpless for an ‘almighty’ being…)

That ‘Ancient enemy’ is the one who is always questioning both your patriotism AND your ‘worthiness’…most because they are so ‘unworthy’ (and the only way to defend their worthlessness is to ‘invent’ an even less worthy…er, (wait for it!) Class!

Yes good citizen, I detest ‘beating around the bush’ as much as the next guy but the unjustly rich have done such a fine job of convincing you that the ‘problem’ IS NOT their predations, their unjustified and selfish self-enrichment (at YOUR expense)

This is not the collapse of the ‘American Empire’, it is the collapse of both Western civilization and (in case you haven’t noticed) the entire ‘rule of law’ concept!

Somewhere down the line, our self-professed ‘betters’ have decided that what we, as a society, NEED is a ‘return to ‘basic values’. A return to a time where (almost) everyone had a place and nobody DARED to question it…because the KING could have you executed with a snap of his fingers (and on a whim!)

It was more than a ‘Freudian slip’ going on when ‘Bush, the Lesser’ stated that things would be much easier (for him) if he were a dictator…

Think about it good citizen, ‘dictator’ is just another word for ‘king’…

How about you good citizen, would you be willing to give up this messy crap we call ‘democracy’ (even though what we suffer today couldn’t be more removed from ‘real democracy’ if they tried…and they have tried!) in order to welcome back a new royalty?

The French accepted a return to Royalty after violently deposing of their king and killing off their royal family…so we have, er, ‘proof’ it is possible.

But such a thing being possible DOESN’T make it any more desirable.

The first thing we need to set right is our shattered legal system.

Their mission is not just to ‘crush’ the (semi-educated) Middle Class but to obliterate it!

And, (again, in case you hadn’t noticed) they intend to ‘re-write history’ so that freedom is redefined as being the mercy of the king!

God help you if you cross the king because the king will soon assume his ‘rightful place’ as ‘god on earth’…

And if that happens, our species is doomed!

Thanks for letting me inside your head (‘cuz the king would never permit it!)

Gegner

Small things...

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are (as usual) ‘up’ around the globe and again, for no discernable reason, raising disturbing questions about ‘moral hazard’ and the ‘self-serving’ nature of the financial sector.

Because the weather isn’t the only thing that isn’t ‘normal’ around here!

Prepare to shift mental gears with me good citizen as we examine the, er ‘plunge’ in street crime most often associated with our growing Police State:

James Q. Wilson, who died recently, was a political scientist who often studied the government response to blue collar crime. The public knows him best for his theory called "broken windows." The metaphor explains what happens to a vacant building when broken windows are not promptly repaired. Soon, most of the windows in the abandoned building are broken. The criminals feel little compunction against petty destruction because the building’s owners evince no concern for the integrity of their building. Wilson took social norms, community, and ethics seriously. He argued that as community broke down, fewer honest citizens were active in monitoring and policing behavior. The breakdown in community led to widespread serious blue collar crime. Wilson urged us to take even minor blue collar crimes and breaches of civility seriously and to demand that they be contained through social pressure and policing. [snip]

"This book [does not deal] with “white collar crimes”…. Partly this reflects the limits of my own knowledge, but it also reflects my conviction, which I believe is the conviction of most citizens, that predatory street crime is a far more serious matter than consumer fraud [or] antitrust violations … because predatory crime … makes difficult or impossible maintenance of meaningful human communities (1975: xx).

I am rather tolerant of some forms of civic corruption (if a good mayor can stay in office and govern effectively only by making a few deals with highway contractors and insurance agents, I do not get overly alarmed)…." (1975: xix)" [snip]

The Supreme Court has held that banks and other entities that aid and abet securities fraud are immune from suit by the victims of securities fraud. Only the federal government may sue those that aid and abet fraud. The federal government has cut the number of financial fraud prosecutions by over one-half over the last twenty years even as financial fraud has grown massively. No elite CEO leading a control fraud that helped drive the current crisis has even been indicted. Elite CEOs can defraud with near impunity and become wealthy. Elite white collar fraud is a “sure thing” – the only strategy likely to make a mediocre CEO wealthy and famous.

Um, if you read the article you will learn the obvious, Mr. Wilson was a conservative…thus did he have a rather ‘skewed’ worldview.

(Ironically, Mr. Wilson would have argued with me when I point out that MOST crime is ‘cash and carry’, save ‘crimes of passion/hatred.’ He would have insisted crime was mostly ‘class related’ while pointing to the rarer ‘crimes of passion’ which know no ‘class lines’…

Thus do we have the situation we are faced with today…

It is, in fact, the same thing I was bitching about yesterday.

‘No cops at the top’.

Which is a weirdly conservative idea…that policing ‘the best of us’ is totally unnecessary…(at least until the revolution breaks out!)

Yeah, social backlash can be wicked sometimes!

And it promises to be real ball buster this time. (Probably make ‘the terror’ look like a Church Social…)

But you never know until it happens.

I sort of wrestled with the title of this piece…we are all familiar with conservative reasoning that states, ‘How can we trust you to do the big things if you can’t do the small things right?’

This, naturally, is the same thing only it’s ‘omni-directional’ as in ‘top down’…

Yes, much has been made of ‘plummeting’ crime rate (while White Collar criminals go unmolested…as well as being largely ignored!)

Why our politicians never connect the new, improved (and heavily militarized) police force of today with the relatively stable level of violent crime across the decades is either stupidity on their part or a bad case of ‘willful ignorance’ on the pundits part.

Even the local police force has quadrupled since I moved to this sleepy little burb twenty years ago….and there wasn’t a crime problem then either.

Which brings us back to a different issue entirely, one tied directly to the mass exportation of our jobs, why did the police force get expanded without reason?

Which is wrong…there WAS a reason, just not one they could talk about…directly. They made no secret about the last TWO economic recoveries being ‘jobless’ (and when you boot large numbers of people out of society there is an ‘inevitable’ amount of ‘social backlash’.

So what did our leaders opt for?

Did they choose to put an end to the export of our jobs or did they double down on law enforcement? (and jail time…our prison population is the largest on the planet!)

Which is to ask good citizen, don’t you think somebody else belongs ‘behind bars’? (or at the end of a rope?)

Without equality there can be no justice and without justice there can be no peace (and without peace there can be no prosperity!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Extremism

Greetings good citizen,

The European markets are up slightly this morning and one can only assume this is due to ‘bargain hunting’ after two days of plunging share values, which is likely to be repeated here in the US, isn’t it (being the home of the ‘greater fool’ and all?)

Mind you, Asian markets took it in the shorts overnight but that’s because this two day ‘burn-off’ was centered on the (inevitable) slowing of the Asian economies.

Wonder if the goobers in the financial markets are still scratching their heads as to ‘why’ all of their customers stopped buying after they were PRICED OUT OF THE MARKET?

But you know the old saying, ‘Stupid is as Stupid does’…

Thus our first offering provides us with a look at the grass in the other fellow's yard

That is because of strong growth in countries like Brazil, India and especially China, which helped buoy economies in Africa and South America. High commodity prices also aided exporting nations.

Market conditions also favored developing countries. Economists had theorized that the credit crunch and recession would cause a flight to the safety of developed nations. But shortly after the recession, with growth stagnating in countries like the United States and in western Europe, the world’s investors plowed money into emerging markets.

“In the past, economic crises in the rich world had a big and immediate impact on the developing world,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research institution based in Washington. “But this time, the impact was much smaller, and we did not see developing countries follow the United States and Europe into long recessions and slow recoveries.”

Looks like Puss Nuts forgot to add ‘invisible and imaginary’ to the long and slow recoveries the West is, er, ‘struggling’ with.

Er, just a thought but I bet the recovery would go a LOT faster and smoother if we started HANGING financial executives for TREASON!

(Not that there is a way out of this financial quagmire that doesn’t involve paving the swamp over and starting over again from scratch!)

And the sooner we take those first steps towards sustainability, the better off we’ll all be!

Because, in case you didn’t notice, The US (and the rest of the West) wasn’t as, er, ‘lucky’ as the ‘developing world’.

"Extreme Poverty In The U.S. Has Doubled In The Last 15 Years" (Think Progress)
According to the latest Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent of Americans are either low-income or living in poverty in the wake of the Great Recession. And a new study from the National Poverty Center shows just how deep in poverty some of those people are, finding that the number of households living on less than $2 per day (before government benefits) has more than doubled in the last 15 years:

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds. The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million…and the rich are getting richer.

Yes, good citizen, in a nutshell the poverty the developing world has, er, ‘miraculously avoided’ has, in fact, manifested itself here…in the greedy and corrupt West, brought to you by your ‘freely elected’ representatives (who won’t even take your phone call!)

Which is to (once again) point out that it is, er, ‘counterproductive’ to keep pointing to facts that you are all well aware of, You don’t need me to tell you that our, er, ‘method of government’ has been hijacked and is now broken beyond all recognition.

Worse, we all know WHO and HOW this came to pass…and it sickens us all to see that it is, once again, THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

Yesterday being ‘Super Tuesday’, it (naturally) solved nothing as we once again find the nation being RAILROADED into choosing between which ‘flavor of conservatism’ they want to fuck things up worse then they already are!

(And until we remove the law from the hands of the, er, ‘self-interested’, things can only get worse!)

To me, I find it amazing that we keep circling back to this exact same impasse.

How we keep having to ‘re-establish’ the Rule of Law BECAUSE we don’t take the necessary measures to prevent it from returning to ‘the Rule of (the rich) Man.

This is WHY A Simple Plan is set up the way it is, not only does it eliminate ‘the grotesquely rich’ but it also eliminates their ability to ‘buy’ the legal outcomes they desire.

And it has ‘teeth’!

But in order to be effective all, er, ‘systems’ have to have ‘enforceable consequences’.

How odd is it good citizen that people who think nothing of condemning complete strangers to be slaughtered on the battlefield (for [usually] nebulous reasons) are against the idea of ‘dueling’ or personally defending their honor/beliefs?

Then there is the time tested practice of ‘exile’. Why do the criminals keep coming back?

BECAUSE WE NEVER RID OURSELVES OF THEM!

I’ll be quick to add that few who are locked up today would be exile worthy criminals…the ones who deserve exile today like to refer to themselves as ‘public servants’.

Why they are allowed to keep dropping the ‘self’ identifier remains a matter between them and their campaign contributors…

Which is to correctly point out ‘fuck their constituents!’

To rectify this heinous situation we must strip away the benefits of civil society from those who fail to appreciate them.

Just another thing to muse over as we plunge headlong into the abyss…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Let's Pretend...

Greetings good citizen,

Global Markets bled from the eye sockets for the second straight day, opening sharply down this morning on the NYSE, that fabled home of ‘the greater fool’.

I was originally going to ignore this story because we long ago established that the stock markets no longer reflect the health of the economy in any meaningful way.

HOWEVER, in light of the very real danger of a systemic collapse of the global financial network. (It appears we will soon get to witness what happens when all of those ‘credit default swaps’ get actuated…which will be especially curious since most of them are ‘unfunded’.) I decided it was a good idea to shout ‘HEADS UP!’

Here’s the problem WE ALL KNOW the global banking system ‘sank’ four years ago, BUT, thanks to ‘extend and pretend’ none of the associated shoes have dropped…YET:

All three major stock indexes on Wall Street -- the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq composite index -- were off more than 1 percent in early trading.

Heightened tensions over Greece come a day after China cut its growth forecast and data showed the European Union is unlikely to avoid a recession. The data was a worry for the market, which has rallied largely on hopes of a strengthening economy.
“What is driving the market now is the outlook for economic growth elsewhere and, pretty importantly, the U.S. and China,” said Jack De Gan, chief investment officer at Harbor Advisory Corp in Portsmouth, N.H.

European shares fell more than 2 percent, and the euro declined, as riskier assets bore the brunt of fears that the global growth outlook is darkening. Wall Street fell hopes that this week’s unemployment report for February would show a significant rise in new jobs.

Quick note good citizen, when I see typos like the one in the last sentence I will USUALLY take a stab at correcting it…but in this instance I can’t even imagine what the writer was thinking when he (obviously) shifted mental gears mid-sentence.

Hopes fell is one thing but ‘fell hopes?’…baffling!

We could ‘reconstruct’ the entire sentence to say “Hopes fell on Wall Street that this week’s unemployment report for February would show a significant rise in new jobs.”

But maybe he’s not supposed to tell us that on Tuesday…I’m just surprised it got past an editor.

What should baffle us all is how the corporate owned media can talk about an eminent recession in Europe and not warn of one here?

Or do they think we are ‘uninterested’?

One thing obviously hasn’t changed, we (the US) sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold!

Shop clerks in a wholesale market complained about the scarcity of customers. At a factory gate, workers said that few jobs were available except at the minimum wage. And at an employment office, the jobless fretted that even if they found work, they would have little hope of buying apartments typically priced beyond their means.

Su Weizhong and three other clerks late Monday morning stood at a desk with little to do at a plumbing supplies store in the wholesale market. “A year ago, there were people in every shop, looking and asking about the prices,” Mr. Su said. “Projects are finishing, but there are absolutely no new projects this year.”

With China having been the world’s main growth engine in recent years, a slowdown is hardly welcome news for the global economy. Neither is the prospect of a restive population — a continual worry for Beijing, if it cannot meet the aspirations of a rising middle class.

What’s odd is this time around nobody is predicting disaster because China’s economy ISN’T growing at a ‘double digit’ rate.

Left to our imagination is whether or not 7% growth is sufficient to keep China’s billions employed…

For their 1.2 billion people, their workforce is only a few hundred thousand larger than ours!

Which should tell you something very worrisome about their variety of ‘State Sponsored Capitalism’.

Worse, if you’re too old to work on the production line (30) then you’re a sustenance farmer, literally living off of the land.

Can you see your doom yet? (if you’re too old to keep up with the kids on the production line then you’ll be back on the farm, living hand to mouth…

Oh, and if you don’t have a farm…that’s not their problem it’s YOURS!

Well good citizen, I have decided to spread this warning because the consensus is growing that the Euro-zone WILL ‘crash an burn’ by the end of the month.

PLEASE don’t be deluded enough to think that this won’t effect the rest of us. You’re ‘beyond stupid’ if you let them fool you that easily.

And to my international readers, same deal.

There is no irony here, the global race to the bottom is OVER and they all crossed the ‘finish line’ at the same time…so there wasn’t a clear winner…but what is pretty clear is that we all lost.

The time to start suffering those losses is almost upon us.

Even extend and pretend couldn’t go on forever.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner