Out of Commission

Greetings good citizen,

I'm experiencing computer troubles (again.) At first I thought I blew the power supply (again) but now I suspect it is the on/off switch itself.

Got to strip it down and have a look.

Thanks for your patience,

Gegner

Reverse Robin Hood

Greetings good citizen,

Little behind the eight-ball here tonight as my ‘puter inexplicably gave up the ghost this afternoon. I can likely repair it so it’s more annoying than anything else.

As you know, the markets were closed today in deference to the ‘superstorm’, which is still blowing outside.

Which is to say thus far the storm has been a ‘non-event’ locally, just a lot of blowing rain and the lights flickering on occasion. However, my kids had the day off from school and it looks like the NYSE will miss another day of trading:

U.S. Markets to Be Closed on Tuesday
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 7:55 PM ET
The New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and BATS Global Markets said in separate statements that they have agreed to close, after consulting with other exchanges and clients.

So far it appears the kiddos will be back to the grind tomorrow.

But wait, it gets worse:

Political Memo
In Middle of a Messy Election, a Nightmare Makes Landfall
By PETER BAKER
Recounts, contested ballots, an Electoral College at odds with the popular vote: now adding to the campaigns' potential horrors, a freakish storm may warp an election two years in the making.

Um, why do you suppose they are pointing to the hated Electoral College BEFORE the elections? Worse, with early voting going on across the nation the contest may be decided already.

Or maybe it was decided long before now…as I have, er, ‘opined’ as early as last year.

Why would the corporate owned media being trying so hard to convince us that we are still, er, ‘deeply divided’ when the truth of the matter is that ‘deep divide’ is more economic than philosophical.

And so far the money is winning.

So we are left with the question of what we are going to do when the team of Romney and Ryan start dismantling what’s left of this nation’s safety net, all the while telling us about the ’urgent need for austerity’ (while they dole out more tax cuts for the super wealthy!)

It is laughable indeed to think nothing will happen when the sock puppets of the superrich continue to loot the nation while they slash programs intended to help the poor.

And I don’t need to remind you that the rich don’t need what they are being given.

The purpose of this ‘reverse Robin Hood’ in not to enrich them as much as it is to make you destitute…and the object of making you the victim of ‘grinding poverty’?

They want you DEAD!

I know most of you can’t bring yourselves to believe this dire prognosis but that doesn’t make it any less true.

And it won’t be until the streets run red that you will finally know their ‘true motive’.

Um, if the power give out I’m going to lose this…and if their power doesn’t give out, we’re all gonna lose!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Soaked Rhubarb

Greetings good citizen,

While it’s too soon to tell yet the media has certainly turned the latest weather event into a three-ring circus…and it seems like everybody is getting in on the act!

DealBook
N.Y.S.E. Plans to Close Its Trading Floor
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

The New York Stock Exchange plans to close its trading floor on Monday as Hurricane Sandy approaches, in the first weather-related closure in 27 years.

Um, how much longer will it be before we start reading claims that this is ‘The Wrath of God’ personified?

But let’s not get started on our long absent omnipotent and omnipresent supreme being…remember our minds are too feeble to grasp his motivations. Which bizarrely serves as justification for the evil men commit, also ‘in his name’…he ‘lets it happen’ for his own reasons…

Speaking for myself good citizen I have zero use for a God who sits on his hands while we murder one another, or while the innocent starve for that matter. No use at all.

But I digress…where were we?

Oh yes, my kids don’t have school tomorrow thanks to ‘Superstorm’. The kids are plenty happy about it (especially considering my kids had a half-day on Friday, making the weekend that much longer!

With that said, we should be looking backwards at the last, er, ‘Super Storm’ to lay the US low, Hurricane Katrina.

What do we do if this (much less intense) Hurricane busts up a bunch of already fragile infrastructure and leaves large swaths of the East without power or communications?

Don’t look now but thanks to our anti-government ‘Republicants’ there are parts of Louisiana that STILL haven’t been rebuilt, seven long years later.

What are we going to do if they pull that shit on us?

Probably the same thing the folks down in New Orleans are doing about their neglected needs…nothin’.

Are you gonna sit there and accept the ‘we don’t have the money’ excuse? Because you KNOW whose fault that is, it’s the One Percent’s fault!

THEY exported our jobs (after their bought and paid for congressmen tore down all of the trade protections our workers USED TO enjoy!)

Sort of ironic to see the energy situation turning that whole equation on its head.

But that’s the real reason why we no longer have the tax base to rebuild after disaster strikes. Because the One Percent exported our jobs!

It’s also the reason Unions became a non-factor in the electoral process…because the one thing above all else that was exported were Union jobs.

Why do you suppose that was, good citizen?

Worse, why do you suppose the only remaining unions, the unions that represent civil servants, are being ‘demonized’ by the anti-government right?

It’s interesting to watch the politicians selling the people who work for them down the river, the same way the union bosses sold their people down the river for a ‘pocket full of mumbles’ that are ‘promises’…

Oh, verily good citizen do we need to put the brakes on corruption, especially the promise of ‘easy street’ dangled before the likes of simple men who don’t fully understand the true nature of money!

But how do we accomplish this lofty goal?

Well, we sure ain’t gonna get her done as long as we have ‘tangible’ currency.

Anything you can hold in your hand can be faked.

And guess where all of those ‘trillions’ came from?

You guessed it, they’re ALL ‘funny’!

Now how do we ‘arrest’ the fraud we know as ‘payola’?

Under A Simple Plan YOU (and EVERYBODY ELSE, NO EXCEPTIONS) only have ONE source of income, your job! It’s a pretty simple calculation to determine who much you should have vs. how much is in your account.

Oh, but wait, aren’t YOU the clever one…you’ll have another ID so you’ll have TWO paychecks and maybe that ‘alter ego’ is a high level executive!

Well, nice for you but you still have to show up for your real job or they’re be an investigation. And if you get caught with more than one ID on you, you will be summarily exiled. No trial, just a quick trip to the badlands for the rest of your natural days which we can guarantee will be brutal and few.

Now, if the bio-metrics on your Id match the bio-metrics on your REAL ID, you’re caught!

You’re gonna have to be super smart about this and demand to be paid in gold or some other precious metal…which will be totally worthless to you because there is no way for you to convert gold into money!

The ONLY way to get money is to work for it…period!

And the only way to spend money is via your biometric ID card. And you’ve already been told what happens after you ‘spend’ your money…it’s erased.

If you try to ‘hacky-hacky’ the system, you’ll get whacky-whackied by the enforcement division!

And yeah, in this context to ‘get whacked’ has the same meaning as if a mobster used it.

So, you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?

Not if it’s in cans!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pig Lips

Greetings good citizen,

If you thought the wheels were ready to come flying off this rickety old broken down economy wouldn’t you step up the spending to prepare for a time when you couldn’t spend even if you wanted to?

Worse, wouldn’t the nincompoops who monitor and misdiagnose the economy all of the time say it was something stupid like the consumer is through deleveraging’…so now we can all take on more debt and everything will be just marvelous…(until we find ourselves overextended again!)

For the first time since the Great Recession hit, American households are taking on more debt than they are shedding, an epochal shift that might augur a more resilient recovery.

Many American households had cut back spending on cars, food and other goods.

For two of the last three quarters, American households’ total outstanding borrowing on things like credit cards, mortgages and auto loans has increased after falling for 14 consecutive quarters before then. Some economists even see an end to the long, hard process of deleveraging — as they refer to the cutting of debt relative to income or the nation’s economic output. That process, they say, has been a central reason for the extraordinary sluggishness of the recovery.

“We’re at an inflection point,” said Kevin Logan, the chief United States economist for HSBC. “Debt is less of a burden” for households, he said.

Closely watched economic figures released Friday underscore households’ nascent sense of strength. Despite tepid growth and still-high unemployment, consumer confidence has soared to a five-year high, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. And economic growth numbers for the third quarter showed household spending picking up pace as well.

Let’s look at the facts for a moment good citizen, prices are rising and nobody is getting pay increases…add the push to the shove of a family has to live and you’ve got ‘increased debt!’.

Now wait a minute, numbnuts SAYS people are taking on debt to finance things they were doing without…like transportation.

You know ‘wheels under your ass’ is part of the equation that makes up the debt cycle, right?

You get a job so you can have the things you need to live. If you can’t get to the job you don’t get paid and a whole avalanche of bad things happen. So spending money on cars is considered a necessity (despite being charged an ‘excise tax’…which translates directly into a ‘luxury tax’ because the butt-head capitalist thinks you don’t NEED a car to get to work!

You COULD ride a horse!

Now, almost nobody rides horses as ‘basic transportation’ these days yet everybody gets charged excise tax on their automobile as if they did (or could if they wanted to.)

Just another example of the flawed thinking that has led to the mismanagement of our civilization.

You know, the capitalists do get ONE THING RIGHT…it is the assertion of ‘how can we expect you to do the big things right when you can’t manage to do the little things correctly?’

Which is to opine that we have overwhelming evidence of their incompetence…what’s taking so long putting corrective action in place?

And you’d (rightly) ask ‘What corrective action?’ Belaboring the obvious fact that nothing is being done to correct the imbalances throughout our civilization so nothing is ‘getting better’ regardless of what these scatter-brains say!

So what about you, good citizen? Do YOU think the tapped out US consumer is ‘on the mend?’

And would your belief do anything to affect reality?

Short answer, no.

How long would you continue to ‘believe’ while the situation continues to go ‘downhill’? As poverty rises and desperation becomes widespread would you allow yourself to be ‘deluded’ by those paid to lie to you?

As this train wreck progresses we are increasingly going to see pigs wearing so much lipstick you won’t be able to tell what the hell they are.

And THAT will be pointed to as more evidence of the non-existent recovery!

Um, enough is enough and it’s time to put this post to bed.

You deserve a break,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dueling Realities

Greetings good citizen,

Really should have had this done earlier but other matters pressed. In case you didn’t notice we had another ‘sideways’ day in the markets today, after they headed for the basement first thing.

Equally as disturbing is how Europe was having an absolutely horrible session…until (you guessed it) the NYSE opened!

Speaking of contradictions and other nonsensical happenings, the headlines say the Mittster is on the attack after the latest economic news broke…

Could numbnuts be talking about this headline?

U.S. Economy Grew at 2% Rate in 3rd Quarter
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

More positive consumer activity and a healthier housing sector outweighed the effects of the drought, caution on the part of businesses and weaker exports.

Maybe Mitt is championing those downtrodden exporters, you know the guys who send work overseas? (because besides raw materials and food, the same products third world countries export, we don’t export Jack…unless you count our fucking jobs, which are exported wholesale to the lowest bidder thanks to assholes like Romney!

But that’s not what the corporate owned media reports. No, instead we get stories like this:

Olympics and Asset Sales Help Lift Comcast Profits
By BRIAN STELTER

An increase in the average payment for a video subscription — to more than $150 month — helped the cable company offset a decline in the number of subscribers.

People cutting back on expenses because their bosses can’t find it in their hearts to give out raises will commonly cancel their cable service.

And nearly doubling their fee is how the cable company keeps their shareowners smiling!

Don’t you wish YOU could do that to your employer?

But if you tried it you probably end up like these guys:

Spain’s Economic Misery Hits New Threshold
By RAPHAEL MINDER 3:20 PM ET

Unemployment passed 25 percent, a picture so dark that it could help Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in his case against more austerity.

Naturally good citizen, the problem isn’t high unemployment in Spain; it’s intolerably high unemployment across all of Western civilization!

But that isn’t a problem the further East you go:

Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader
By DAVID BARBOZA

It is unclear how much Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has staked a position as a populist and a reformer, knows about the $2.7 billion in assets his family has amassed.

If that same story were unfolding here in the US the politician in question would remain adamant that they knew NOTHING about any, er, ‘self-enrichment’ and power brokering that is performed by relatives of the powerful around the world…because we don’t have laws that prevent it.

That is why the global economy is fucked too! The corruption is ‘universal’ and because of that the collapse will be total because the whole system needs to be replaced.

And of course we have the issue of what do we replace it with?

Should we try communism, maybe hoping to get it right this time?

Um, no…I’m pretty sure communism won’t work…because it fails to address the weakness inherent in money.

So, should we try capitalism again, honestly this time?

Fat fucking chance. Honest capitalist is the very definition of the term ‘oxymoron’.

Why don’t we try that anarcho-syndicalyism thingy?

Because they don’t do anything about the printing press either!

I know, let’s return to the ‘gold standard’!

Which way do you want to ‘dial it in’? Do we make gold worth a billion dollars an ounce or do we go back to $20 an ounce and start going in the other direction with fractional cents to make what we’ve got stretch far enough?

Naturally, this too will, er, ‘finance’ crime in all of its myriad forms. There is but ONE viable answer and that, good citizen is A Simple Plan which has NO ‘tangible’ currency.

It also makes it illegal to place anyone in debt…which is the primary basis for coercion. If somebody breaks your favorite toy, go get a new one…and maybe pick up a back up while you’re at it!

Shit happens and you can’t live life holding others responsible for every tiny thing that goes wrong!

Just like the idiot practice of awarding somebody money when they suffer a loss. Money doesn’t bring the lost item back and, if it can be replaced with money then it wasn’t ‘lost’ in the first place.

No cash is a small price to pay for a world free of crime and corruption, not that the chiselers among us won’t try to make you ‘pay’.

And that’s why YOU will be granted an avenue of recourse that has long been outlawed.

If you want to know what that avenue is you’ll have to look it up.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Beneath it all...

Greetings good citizen,

Every few months I feel compelled to restate the mission of this blog, which, due to its subject matter, is widely considered a ‘Doom and Gloom’ site.

How sad is it that it isn’t my purpose to frighten anyone nor am I intent upon twisting your mind toward my way of seeing things. (Although part of my mission involves, er, ‘educating’ you in the finer points of my creation, A Simple Plan.)

That said, some of you might find that education bordering on ‘indoctrination’.

I can be rabid when the feeling moves me and I’m forever racing ‘off the reservation’, a fault I readily admit.

Um, to opine that my posts are, er, ‘unbiased’ would be exactly that, an opinion. We’re all biased and there’s no getting away from that fact.

The editor of the local rag was ‘editorializing’ on the subject of biased fact checkers just last night…and you know why the conservative liar was crying about that subject, don’t you?

Yes indeed good citizen, the closer we get to the election the more it looks as though Ol’ Mitt is gonna pull off an ‘upset victory’ much Like W. winning Florida due to ‘hanging chads’.

And they’ll pin it on ‘waitresses’!

But I digress.

We all know those waitresses are working in dives across the nation, just waiting for a One Percenter (like Mitt) to waltz in and sweep them away from the drudgery of being a working class drone.

Billionaire, Princess, same difference.

And, bizarrely, YOU are expected to BELIEVE that it was that sort of BULLSHIT that swung the election in favor of the man who gave HALF OF US the fucking MIDDLE FINGER less than a month ago!

I don’t know how they expect this to play in Peoria but I’m fairly certain it won’t go down well with the decidedly non-conservative 80% of the NATION!

Especially when we have seen first hand how the bullshit with the banks went down.

But again, I digress.

Let us return to the topic that underlies the foundation of modern civilization, a topic that will ultimately bring an end to life as we have come to know it, peak oil and those whose power derives from fossil fuel.

We seem to hear two versions of the story of limited oil supply:

1. The economists’ view, saying that the issue is a simple problem of supply and demand. Substitution, higher prices, demand destruction, greater efficiency, and increased production of oil at higher prices will save the day. [HA!]

2. A version of Hubbert’s peak oil theory, saying that world oil production will rise and at some point reach a plateau and begin to decline, because of geological depletion. The common belief is that the rate of decline will be determined by geological considerations, and will roughly match the rate at which production increased.

In my view, neither of these views is correct. My view is a third view:

3. An adequate supply of cheap ($20 or $30 barrel) oil is no longer available, because most of the “easy to extract” oil is gone. The cost of extracting oil keeps rising, but the ability of oil-importing economies to pay for this oil does not. There are no good low-cost substitutes for oil, so substitution is very limited and will continue to be very limited. The big oil-importing economies are already finding themselves in poor financial condition, as higher oil prices lead to cutbacks in discretionary spending and layoffs in discretionary industries.

The government is caught up in this, as layoffs lead to more need for stimulus funds and for payments to unemployed workers, at the same time that tax revenue is reduced. There can be a temporary drop in oil prices (as there was in late 2008), as recession worsens, but eventually demand rises again, oil prices rise again, and the pattern of layoffs and increased governments financial problems occurs again. [snip]

What the Economists’ View Misses

The economists’ view misses the fact that it is external energy that makes the economy operate the way it does. (See my earlier posts, here, here and here.) If energy products are higher priced, energy importers can afford less of them, and there is a tendency of their economies to shrink back to what their economies can afford—fewer employed workers and fewer government programs. I talk about the connection between employed workers and energy consumption in The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment and Recession.

Back to the beginning, where I was explaining the objective of this blog.

I can’t help it if the truth sucks…that said I am also not telling you that ‘all is lost’ (although it might be if we don’t, er, ‘rid’ ourselves of those who were born thinking they are the only ones who deserve to live here. The rest of us are ‘excess baggage’ to be disposed of however and whenever necessary.

Worse, the only thing saving our sorry asses in their indecision about how many of us to keep around!

Although there is a building consensus that they should exterminate us wholesale and then let the few that survive breed the ‘servant class’ back up to full strength.

Pretty gloomy, but it doesn’t have to turn out this way.

There are alternatives to the eminent return of a ‘slave economy’ and the bloodshed this will cause.

We just need to bring everyone associated with this ‘New World Order’ (more commonly known as ‘The One Percent’) to Justice…after we purge the now corrupt beyond belief justice system.

The situation IS salvageable…but you need to have faith.

It all starts with small steps and A Simple Plan points the way!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Web of Lies

Greetings good citizen,

Under the damn it, did it again! category, I just went to post this and found that I skipped the whole ‘intro’ portion of the post…

So now I have to duck back into my mail and check how the stock market did, and it was another weird one. Markets around the globe did, er, ‘okay’ today…except for the US which headed further into the basement.

Counterintuitively, yesterday’s dogs haven’t yet turned into tomorrow’s foxes…but you know its coming, especially for the ‘only game in town’.

But that is not the topic of tonight’s post, nope, tonight I use one of my precious 'ten clicks' to bring you this neglected topic from the corporate owned media which asks why neither candidate is addressing the issue of the West’s sinking standard of living.

Which should put tonight’s title into perspective for you…

What is the solution to this thicket of economic forces?

That question is the one that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are trying to convince voters that they can best answer. They both accept that the government and the market have a role, but they put a different emphasis on those roles.

It is hard to see how either globalization or automation can be stopped. The proposed solutions instead tends to involve managing them. [This is true. Even A Simple Plan uses automation for its ‘intended purpose’ of shortening the work week rather than trying to go back to the ‘old way’ of doing things…although the coming energy scarcity is going to force our hands in that department.]


If the economy can be made to grow fast enough, incomes can still rise across the board, as they did when the unemployment rate fell below 5 percent in the 1990s and briefly below 4 percent in 2000. If educational attainment rises, more people will be able to get jobs that benefit from technology and global trade, rather than suffer from it. [Huge pipe dream and fucking whopper of a lie!] And if inequality continues to soar, the government could choose to use the tax code to ameliorate it — a solution that Democrats favor and Republicans say will hurt economic growth. [Not that you didn’t notice but you know it was 'fucking around with the tax code' that got us here in the first place. Time to fix it for good and do away with taxes altogether…by eliminating the reason for taxes, ‘private ownership’.]

Maybe the biggest reason for optimism is that there is still a strong argument [by greedheads] that both globalization and automation help the economy in the long run. This argument remains popular with [improperly trained] economists: Trade allows countries to specialize in what they do best, while technology creates opportunities to extend and improve life that never before existed.

Let’s finish that last sentence because we all know it is incomplete…

The ONLY way technology ‘extends and improves life’ is IF you aren’t on the ‘wrong side of it’…and most of us ARE!

Read my lips: ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL. No exceptions!

Need further clarification? Try living in an ‘economic desert’. (A place whose ‘economic engine’ has been exported.)

There is proof all around us the ‘myopia’ is often fatal, especially when that ‘tunnel vision’ afflicts the misguided and overly greedy decision-maker.

Whole regions of the US have been lain waste by the reckless decision of the greedy few.

Decisions that could have been prevented if those we elected to ride herd on the greed heads HAD DONE THEIR FUCKING JOBS!

But no, instead they are all guilty of treason and all need to be, er, ‘punished accordingly’.

And how many of our ‘One Percenter’ representatives…(now there’s a disturbing little factoid the corporate owned media often overlooks, that you can find a whole boatload of for real ‘one percenters’ wandering the corridors of Congress.)

Could THAT be the reason we can’t seem to alter our disastrous course?

Because we CAN’T elect people who actually have SOMETHING IN FUCKING COMMON WITH US?

This is the ‘ILLUSION OF PARTICIPATION coupled with the ILLUSION OF EQUALITY’.

Which brings us back to the decidedly disturbing reality of the political ‘sniff test’. Where those who, er, ‘oversee’ the ‘party apparatus’ get to decide who they will AND WON’T endorse.

The entire pool of political candidates comes from BEHIND CLOSED DOORS!

You get to choose from only a pre-selected pool, this keeps the riff-raff and the radical ‘non-capitalists’ off the ballot.

But it’s time to throw ALL of that nonsense on the scrap heap and cut to the chase.

From here on out we only vote DIRECTLY on the laws, which shall, by definition, be few. Fuck this bullshit of somebody deciding for you without ever asking you how you feel on the issue…or IF it is even an issue to you!

So where were we? Oh yeah, standing athwart the march of history screaming ‘halt!’ like a bunch of Luddites!

Or at least that’s what the conservo-loonies think.

This isn’t a contest between ‘personal prosperity’ versus the general welfare as the conservo-whackos have made it into.

This is about truly elevating the circumstance of ALL mankind, the ‘rich’ should be indistinguishable from the average individual, honestly.

If one is ‘truly exceptional’ they will ‘stand out’ in ways other than accumulating massive fortunes (that in turn ultimately decimate society.)

Money is a tool, not an end in itself.

How many of you are sighing right now and muttering ‘good luck with that’ under your breath?

Not that our salvation requires universal acceptance of this truth…but until we become hardcore about managing the use of money within our society, it will continue to do more harm than good.

This is why under A Simple Plan your money is for you. Only YOU can make it and only YOU can spend it…when you spend it, nobody gets it, it is simply erased. When you die your money dies with you. Everybody is on their own…in a society that meets your every need, from the cradle to the grave.

You no longer need to worry about your kids, they’re all set!

A Simple Plan, an idea whose time has come, and we could do it tomorrow (if the fucking greed-heads would roll over and play dead…)

Ironically, it IS ‘in their interest’ to do so!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner