Zombies

Greetings good citizen,

Still ‘disoriented’ by this ‘backwards schedule’ (I’m up but I haven’t had breakfast yet because coffee will keep me awake and I need to go back to bed later!)

The posts are fewer but the message remains the same, the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace.

When it finally does collapse it will be swift and (insanely enough) unstoppable…mostly due to massive stupidity…but it is really just widespread ignorance.

Talk about your ‘dangerous games’, there will be no ‘recovery’ from the downward spiral our self-professed ‘betters’ have put us in until ‘justice’ has been served/restored.

And that is the one thing the guilty have no interest in…but they need to be tracked down and eradicated all the same.

Or they will serve as an example to a new generation of thieves, just as the ‘robber barons’ of old are the ‘heroes’ of today’s plunderers.

(You see, our grandparents thought they could ‘tax’ the robbers into compliance when letting them live [while keeping their plunder] was the original mistake.)

[And] justice won’t be restored until the link between prospering personally is severed from the exploitation of what we all need to live. (Forcefully creating a huge ‘underclass’.)

But I digress, let’s have a quick peek at today’s headlines:

Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads
By TANZINA VEGA
The strategy of advertisers sponsoring or producing content that looks much like traditional editorial content has become increasingly common as publishers try to create more sources of revenue.

Who needs ‘truth’ when you can pay to have your, er, ‘point of view’ published as the ‘truth’?

How ‘Orwellian’ (and I’m thinking Orson and not George) when we see this kind of ‘abuse’ of the system we rely upon for our information.

War of the Worlds (the radio broadcast) was an ‘example’ of the power of the media. People believe what they see or read in the media because it is our ‘trusted source’ for news.

They aren’t obliged to advise you that 99% of what they publish as fact is actually the opinion of the paper’s management/revenue department.

So, as you now know (kinda) you should only believe half of what you see and even less of what you hear (because most of it is BS.)

More disturbing was an article on one of the ‘top rated’ TV shows on cable…The Walking Dead.

Besides ‘outperforming’ almost every other major broadcast in its Sunday night time slot, the scientifically improbable event is also used as an allegory for our current political climate…if not our society’s entire political philosophy!

[Leading to my earlier comment regarding the ‘ocean of stupidity’ our civilization is being drown in…thanks to the same ‘profit driven’ media.]

Moving on we have this ‘obvious outcome’ making headlines once again:

Greek Banks Suspend Merger Talks
By NIKI KITSANTONIS 9:45 AM ET
National Bank of Greece and Eurobank said they could not raise the necessary capital under the terms of Greece’s agreement with foreign lenders.

Remember when we actually worried and fretted over how we would ‘pay’ for things?

This is that ‘revisited’. How unfortunate is it, good citizen, that the scoundrels who (and remain at large) bankrupted the global banking system (with impunity) have proven what we all only suspected, that all ‘money is ‘funny’, essentially meaningless.

Why else would Geithner’s replacement be taking this position (given the US’s new found role as being ‘on top’ of the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves?)

U.S. Treasury Chief Talks of Growth in Europe
By ANNIE LOWREY 11:53 AM ET
On his first trip to Europe as Treasury secretary, Jacob J. Lew met with European officials to discuss protecting the global recovery.

Difficult for me, after two years of being unemployed, to dismiss the nascent ‘recovery’…BUT, I returned to work by virtue of a skill that has all but disappeared from these shores, manufacturing.

I’m now in the position of being one of the few that knows how to do this stuff.

So my ‘good fortune’ isn’t due to a tide that is lifting all boats. I caught a lucky niche, bully for me!

Not so good for everyone else I’m afraid.

In our final snippet, let us examine yet another inescapable fact of the ground that is rushing up to meet us…

DEALBOOK
G.E. to Buy Lufkin Industries for $3.3 Billion
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 12:27 PM ET
The deal is the latest by G.E.’s oil and natural gas unit, one of the fastest-growing parts of the conglomerate.

So Mr. Dillenger, why DO you rob banks?

And he quipped, “Because that’s where the money is!”

Now how many of you are agree with Mr. Dillenger?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Morning in America

Greetings good citizen,

Still not up to regular posting but I thought you shouldn’t miss this excellent post by the incomparable Digby.

As many are noting of late, ‘the Reagan Revolution’ serves as a historical benchmark in the, er, ‘hi-jacking’ of the US government and its subsequent criminal takeover.

The ‘run it into the ground’ policy of the criminals (who disguised themselves as conservatives) becomes evident when we examine what they fondly refer to as “Morning in America.”

Tens of millions of US jobs flowed out of the country while imports flowed freely to hide the drop in GDP.

Our entire economy for the past 35 years has been an exercise in ‘creative accounting' (that has resulted in global bankruptcy.)

Which will soon manifest itself in the collapse of the global supply chain.

Sorry if I seem to be ‘cutting to the chase’ but my powers of concentration are greatly diminished by this disorienting shift change.

Shorter posts will likely be the rule until the situation stabilizes…or should I say ‘if the situation stabilizes.’

Time is running out.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hades:Circled

Greetings good citizen,

Largely because it’s the middle of the night and I don’t have to go in tomorrow I’m taking advantage of my ‘down time’ to create a new post.

Probably how it will go for the next couple of weeks until I adjust to a ‘regular’ 3rd shift pattern.

That said there have been MANY disturbing news items I have wanted to expound upon, including the typical beating of the war drums surrounding North Korea (and how the hopelessly stupid believe we are in danger of ‘eminent attack’!)

Seriously…but the same thing happened when W was drumming up support for an invasion of Afghanistan, followed thirty days later by a totally irrational invasion of Iraq!)

Which is to return to our main theme…the one where I belabor the obvious and point out the destruction of our civilization by the hopelessly greedy (and stupid.)

But let’s see what the ‘guardians of truth and justice’ have for us?

We’re One Big Team, So Run Those Stairs
By JED LIPINSKI
CrossFit, the workout fitness program, is viewed by some companies as a way to improve worker production and morale.

Yes siree, you are a ‘member of the team’ until it becomes more profitable to ship your job to Timbuktu (where your replacement will do what you do for two cents A DAY!)

Lying corporate America keeps insisting that they ‘value’ their employees until they don’t.

The rats have no loyalty.

Your circumstances hinge largely on their inability to replace you with a competent meat puppet that they will also tell what a valued member of the ‘team’ they are!

As long as stupid keeps getting the work out the door, they will remain a ‘valued member of the team’.

But if they start angling for a better, fairer deal, suddenly they are a ‘liability’.

Although complaining about working conditions will also result in ‘early termination’:

As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester
By IAN URBINA
OSHA, the watchdog agency that many Americans love to hate and industry often faults as overzealous, has largely ignored long-term threats.
Video: A Dangerous Trade
Documents: Investigating a Chemical’s Hazards

Why do workers ‘hate’ OSHA? Because the typical capitalist will terminate employees who complain about unsafe working conditions, often telling the media those workers were ‘unwilling to work’.

In our ‘desperation’ to hold on to our paycheck, many people will throw their would be savior under the bus, ultimately aiding no one.

It’s not until the ‘true blue’ employee loses an appendage and gets terminated for being disabled that they learn who their real ‘friend’ was.

But hey, we have bigger things to worry about:

Oil Pipeline Ruptures in Arkansas
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ 11:16 PM ET
An Exxon Mobil crude oil pipeline ruptured near Mayflower, Ark., spilling as many as 10,000 barrels of oil, the company said.

Somehow I don’t think it is particularly helpful to point out that a barrel of oil only has 33 gallons in it. When it’s 33 gallons of black guk it still mighty nasty business.

But locally two water department employees were terminated for ‘dressing’ deer they had shot at one of the town wells.

Now the paper is saying the town may have to pay a fine for ‘contaminating’ the drinking water along with not reporting the incident to the state environmental protection agency.

MORE LUDICROUS is the fact that the town wells are over 1,500 FEET deep…long way for deer blood to ‘seep’ into a portion of the town’s water supply (and the well in question is just down the street from where I live. So theoretically I’d be drinking ‘contaminated water’.

Mind you, Exxon Mobil probably WON’T be fined for spilling crude oil in Arkansas but two town employees who happened to take advantage of a public water source got fired for letting deer blood run 1,500 feet above the town water supply!

You know what the chances are of that blood even reaching the water table, pretty much nil!

Soil bacteria alone will gobble that stuff up long before it even begins to get under the earth.

So why are our environmental police so stupid?

Oh, that’s right, they don’t have to know anything about biology! All they need to know is law, which is written by equally as ignorant legislators!

Did I mention we have a problem with the ‘maladministration’ of our society?

Which probably explains why this myth persists:

Freed From Its Cage, the Gentler Robot
By ANNE EISENBERG
New factory robots, designed to work and play well with others, no longer have to be fenced in to protect workers from accidents.

Let’s leave aside the reality that robots don’t consume the products they make. Once again the ‘trend’ (driven by the greedy and short-sighted capitalist) is towards ‘total automation’.

You no longer have to keep robots isolated if you eliminate humans from the factory altogether!

Thus do we continue to read ‘happy talk’ about robots learning to operate ‘safely’ around their human counterparts.

How many robots will the capitalists need when nobody has a job anymore?

(Or the ONLY jobs left are in healthcare and law enforcement…) It’s a bit too nightmarish to even contemplate a healthcare environment utterly devoid of humans, sort of re-defines the innermost circle of hell, doesn’t it?

It certainly redefines being trapped with no way out.

And this is from Saturday’s NY Times.

How bad does it need to get good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

A tired mind...

Greetings good citizen,

Once again I apologize to my faithful readers for the scant postings of late but adjusting to this 3rd shift schedule at my age is proving quite the feat.

You don’t know what to do when (and you pay dearly for your mis-steps) you are also perpetually playing catch-up in the sleep department. (No matter how much you get you still wake up addled!)

I thought I had outgrown the wish that someone would bottle ‘rest’ but there it is!

This constant state of fatigue isn’t conducive to writing coherently and I deal in that which is barely coherent on a good day!

I am tempted to throw in the towel but after two decades I refuse to let a small thing like a change of shift defeat me.

That said, I am praying for your forbearance as I adjust my internal clock to its new schedule.

But enough with the ‘excuse shirt’, my inability to remain lucid does nothing to alter the predicament faced by our civilization.

Although some curious ‘background music’ has come to mind and it makes one reflect upon the world stage with a renewed sense of alarm.

IF we ‘assume’ a global capitalist take over (a coup if you will) then the world’s nuclear arsenal is all in the hands of a single ‘team’ so to speak.

This goes a long ways towards explaining the nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (aside from the ‘useful idiot’ argument we are currently expected to swallow.)

So what does Putin’s third term say to us?

Odd how we immediately return to the ‘useful idiot’ argument, don’t we?

Even more disturbing is the question of who is behind these ‘meat-puppets’?

Undoubtedly the one percent but who among them has the clout (to both remain anonymous AND push these otherwise powerful leaders buttons as well?)

Naturally the quick response would be to point out that NO ONE on the world stage is what we could traditionally call a ‘leader’.

And the one calling the shots is too smart to step into the limelight. (It means instant death.)

(See what I mean regarding the product of an exhausted mind? But these are the thoughts that occupy my weary head of late…)

So, are the men with their finger on the button really so spineless as to defy their lord and masters?

I suppose you’d be chicken too considering what these entities are capable of.

Which brings me to the darker still side of my musings…do these fools realize what they are unleashing upon themselves if they continue on their current course?

Even anonymity won’t save them! (Because the beast is mindless and can’t be reasoned with once it is loose!)

So these fools are relying on ‘luck’ (or worse, money) to save their sorry backsides.

We can only hope Darwin was right…(the stupid will eliminate themselves from the gene pool!)

How sad is it that these fools will take a lot of good people with them?

On that note my feeble powers of elucidation are giving it up…so I will (once again) thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

For Dummies

Greetings good citizen,

This night shift thing is kicking the crap out of me and posting is suffering. Again I apologize for slacking but at the end of the day health comes first (and I’ve gotta sleep!)

Anyway, one of the seldom touched upon topics…I don’t point to it often because if YOU visit THIS site (regularly and habitually) it doesn’t apply to YOU.

What doesn’t apply to you? The fact that a shockingly large percent of the adult population is STUPID.

Not just here in that ‘Awesome bastion of freedom and liberty, the good ol’ USA but around the globe, the hopelessly gullible are the rule rather than the exception.

As This article from Alternet points out:

In sum and all averaged out, it’s safe to say about 37 percent of Americans are just are not very bright. Or rather, quite shockingly dumb. Perhaps beyond reach. Perhaps beyond hope or redemption. Perhaps beyond caring about anything they have to say in the public sphere ever again. Sorry, Kansas.

Did you frown at that last paragraph? Was it a terribly elitist and unkind thing to say? Sort of. Probably. But I’m not sure it matters, because none of those people are reading this column right now, or any column for that matter, because reading anything even remotely complex or analytical is something only 42 percent of the population enjoy doing on a regular basis, which is why most TV shows, all reality shows, many major media blogs and all of Fox News is scripted for a 5th-grade education/attention span.

OMG LOL kittens! 19 babies having a worse day than you. WTF is up with Justin Timberlake’s hair?!?

It is this bizarre, circular, catch-22 kind of question, asked almost exclusively by intellectual liberals because intellectual conservatives don’t actually exist, given how higher education leads to more developed critical thinking (you already know the vast majority of university professors and scientists identify as Democrat/progressive, right?) which leads straight to a more nimble, open-minded perspective. In short: The smarter you are, the less rigid/more liberal you become.

And if you aren’t a meat puppet of the bloviating right wing noise machine, you already knew this…which is why you’re here, reading my blog.

The typical conservative can’t get through two paragraphs here without their heads exploding.
Seriously.

If we were to seek out this massive cognitive dissonance we’d need look no further than the invisible economic recovery that only exists in the corporate owned media.

We usually assume that economically distressed areas exist only in inner-city slums or rural backwaters. But areas plagued by persistent high unemployment almost never fit into conventional categories. Distressed areas share characteristics that make them unlikely to recover if the remedies offered rely only on the standard approaches to boosting the economy.

In distressed areas , government aid provides nearly one-third of residents’ incomes, compared to 17 percent nationwide. Upwards of 40 percent of the population in these areas lives on $30,000 a year or less, and the workforces there have low educational-achievement rates, with more than half possessing just a high-school degree or less. Most jobs are in low-end service industries, especially prisons, casinos, nursing homes, and retail. Such jobs offer few chances for upward mobility or skill enhancement.

For instance, unemployment in Yakima, Washington, has averaged 4 percentage points above the national average over the past 20 years—57 percent of its adult residents have only a high school degree or less. Similarly, in Rockford, Illinois, where the average unemployment rate has been 2.4 percentage points above the national standard for over 10 years, 53 percent of the population has no education past high school. To take one more example, a staggering 62 percent of the population in Danville, Virginia, has only a high school degree or less, and its unemployment rate has hovered 2.1 percentage points above the national average over the past five-plus years. In the country as a whole, by comparison, 43.3 percent of the adult population has no post-secondary education; in some thriving areas, the figure is much lower—for instance, Cambridge, MA (22.7 percent) and Seattle, WA (25.8 percent).

Oddly today’s headlines were crowing about a ‘building boom’ that has taken contractors ‘by surprise’.

This is (once again) a total ‘mis-reading’ of the housing situation. The few who can afford it want to buy ‘new’ houses, which has absolutely nothing to do with economic recovery and everything to do with economic outliers!

Time presses good citizen so I have to wrap this up, as disjointed as it may read.

I promise to do better come the weekend (although I have another ‘mandatory Saturday’ this week so my weekend is (virtually) non-existent.

I (once again) laud my readers mental alacrity and ability to read between the lines…if you couldn’t do that you wouldn’t be here (nor would you keep returning.)
Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Rub

Greetings good citizen,
The, er, ‘stress’ of acclimating myself to a reversed schedule has rendered me more ‘incoherent’ than usual.

Doesn’t help that my perspective is contrary to the BS you’ve had hammered into your head since childbirth. [A phenomenon I find extremely curious because once it is confirmed, you should see it for the ‘self-serving tripe’ that it is without my coaching.]

For those of you not so quick on the uptake I will be more specific, I’m talking about that illusion that increasingly makes less and less sense, money.

I was reading an article online the other night where this professional ‘money manager’ was telling his readers that he charges his kids ‘rent’ (forcing them to ‘save’) so they will learn about the ‘value’ of money.

Understand dipstick’s ‘lesson’ is centered on the no longer viable idea that money pays interest (although that wasn’t the ‘example’ he used, he was using his ‘savings’ to buy stocks!)

So he equated spending money with ‘firing’ his personal money making ‘robots’ (what he referred to them as.)

He went on to claim that he had ‘earned’ $3,000 in annual ‘dividends’ from his holdings.

Do you know how few stocks pay dividends or that companies are under no ‘obligation’ to pay a dividend AT ALL? (Even if they’re crazy profitable.)

Well if you didn’t you weren’t about to be ‘educated’ by this idiot’s article!

Which is to reflect just how ‘unreliable’ professional monetary advice can be.

Worse, the most prominent ‘risk’ when it comes to investing is listening to advisors peddling their own self-interest!

Naturally, you’d expect ‘financial advisors’ to focus on the traditional ‘backbone’ of investment, that of ‘savings’. These days ‘ordinary’ savings vehicles don’t pay spit, which is why chucklehead is ‘speculating’ in the market WITHOUT telling you…although he does ‘volunteer’ what stocks HE invested in (hoping YOU will be STUPID enough to buy them!)

Now, back to reality. Markets around the globe are bleeding from the eyesockets today (which has nothing to do with nothing. Wall Street is so far divorced from Main Street as to be on a different planet, as disturbing as that realization and what it implies means to the average citizen.)


Which leads us to this headline:

To Reassure Investors, Fed Stresses It Will Not End Stimulus
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
Concerns about the effects of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus policy can dilute the policy’s impact by causing investors to doubt that rates will remain low.

What do you suppose the Fed is going to do when people realize the Fed is inflating away their purchasing power?

Can you say Banana Republic?

How are our two stories ‘related’?

Note the extremely poor ‘quality’ of what passes for ‘investment advice’ these days and how shamelessly the pundit uses his (probably already grown and gone) ‘kids’ as a ‘teaching tool’?

How bizarre is it good citizen that this is a perfect example of ‘what you don’t know’ causing insurmountable harm?

Once again your (deliberate) ‘ignorance’ only aids the grifters the government has failed to protect you from.

Not that ‘government the concept’ failed, it was (of course) the humans running it that have failed.

We’re back to ‘weakest links’…as you well know.

How can ‘The Bernank’ maintain this false façade?

Let us return to lesson one shall we?

ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

I don’t mean just paper or coins, I mean ALL of it!

How ‘astonished’ would you be if I told you our financial system is based on Unicorns?

You’d probably think I was kidding but think about it.

You’ve seen money but you’ve never seen a unicorn so how can this be?

The whole concept of ‘debt’ is imaginary; that’s the first thing you need to wrap your head around!
The next step is really simple…there is absolutely zero difference between debt and unicorns…so there you are!

Even more disturbing is how prevalent the belief in Unicorns (debt) is.

Do you honestly believe Ben Bernanke has an endless supply of dollars at his disposal? (Especially after his masters have hollowed out the US economy?)

Of course you don’t!

But it works today because the price of disbelief is too stiff.

And there’s the rub!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What?

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we have the corporate owned media using trivia to distract us from the real issues at hand.

JPMorgan Ignored Warnings in Loss, Inquiry Finds
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and BEN PROTESS 49 minutes ago

JPMorgan Chase ignored risk controls and withheld information from regulators during big trading losses last year, a Senate inquiry found.

A Senate panel report says that Jamie Dimon, chief of JPMorgan Chase, withheld details about the bank's daily losses.

Then our ‘guardians of society’ double up the information, attempting to confuse the matter even worse than it already is.

How inconvenient the very next article points to the real issue?

Pearl Brady of Brooklyn worries that it will be years before she will be able to put money away.
Younger Generations Lag Parents in Wealth-Building
By ANNIE LOWREY 49 minutes ago

A study finds that younger working adults are not doing better financially than the previous generation.

With ‘wealth management experts' opining we need to set aside at least a half a million dollars to retire ‘safely’ and with most workers earning less than 25 to 30 thousand dollars annually, the only way the majority can retire ‘comfortably’ is magic.

They’d fall short of the mark even if they saved every penny they ever earned!

In order to be a low wage drone for corporate USA, retirement must be an impossibility. (Not that this is news to the people being compared in this article.)

We have been saying all along we’d have to work ‘til we drop’ (IF we were lucky enough to find work after being ‘churned’ into pauper-dom!)

But the 4th Estate knows thinks YOU are STUPID.

How pathetic is it good citizen that a majority of the corporate owned media’s Blarney is insulting to the average person’s intelligence?

If we back up to our first post we have to scratch our heads and wonder what anyone is supposed to make of the banking sectors alleged ignorance.
Which is to point to what ‘everybody knows’. The crash of the financial system was deliberate and these clowns drove it off a cliff KNOWING the taxpayer was going to ‘bail them out’!

So what’s this nonsense about the banks ‘ignoring warnings’?

We’re talking the biggest heist of all time here!

It sure takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend (never mind actually assert) that they had no idea this whole situation was going to end in bankruptcy.

Sort of like this next headline…where once again we are played for ignorant chumps powerless to stop what’s going to happen next:

The drilling rig Kulluk was grounded in January 40 miles southwest of Kodiak City, Alaska.
Interior Dept. Warns Shell on Arctic Drilling
By JOHN BRODER 8:32 PM ET

The government wants a detailed plan on how the company plans to address safety issues before allowing it to resume exploration.

A REAL government would never have permitted this nonsense in the first place but we all know the political lapdogs are ‘going through the motions’ of pretending to protecting the public while they allow private enterprise to doom our civilization.

We don’t need MORE fossil fuels, we need to use what little there is left much more judiciously.

But the >One Percent doesn’t do privation well (if at all.) Isn’t it bad enough they have to ‘put up with’ the rest of us using THEIR stuff?

Speaking of which:

DealBook
Fed Rebukes Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase Over Capital Plans
By PETER EAVIS

The Federal Reserve cited “weaknesses” in capital plans of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, while Citigroup and Bank of America got a green light.

Doesn’t God ‘rebuke’ people? The rest of us get called on our baloney. How sad is it that the other two thieves got away with their ‘plans’?

We’re back to the ‘appearance of propriety’ as opposed to actual legal oversight.
If YOU were this incompetent you’d be on the outside looking in already!

BUT if this clowns did what they were elected to do they’d be ‘pushing up Daisy’s’ in a remote field somewhere.

You are right to fear a government that has suspended both your right to a fair trial along with any prohibition against executing you out of hand but you SHOULD fear the MEN who made this possible even more!

But I digress, what do you suppose the deal is with this story?

The Galaxy S IV.
Samsung Introduces New Galaxy Phone
By BRIAN X. CHEN and NICK WINGFIELD 7:31 PM ET

Increasing the stakes in the smartphone battle, the South Korean manufacturer showed off the Galaxy S IV, the latest version of its flagship device.

comment iconPost a Comment | Read (1)

Since this is YESTERDAY’S Business section you won’t be able to ‘backtrack’ any of this but there was an article this morning’s news about Samsung being a giant ‘pretending’ to be a scrappy start-up like Research in motion. Or that other tiny company…Apple.

Seriously, good citizen…

New Jobless Claims at a 5-Year Low
By REUTERS 7:38 PM ET

The report on unemployment added to a range of data that suggested higher taxes were having a limited impact on the economy.

Like the whole theme of today’s reporting is ‘insult their intelligence!

The most prosperous time the US have ever known came when the marginal tax rate was at over 90% of income over a million dollars…so employers paid their people instead of handing it over to Uncle Sam.

And what we’re seeing today is the ‘blow-back’ of that policy.

Which is to opine that there is going to be a whole lot of ‘punishment’ going on before we get this ship back on an even keel.

Last but not least we have a token of open rebellion on display!

Media Decoder
Editor Charged With Aiding Hackers Group
By AMY CHOZICK 8:51 PM ET

Matthew Keys, a 26-year-old social media editor, was charged with assisting the hacking collective Anonymous in an attack on The Los Angeles Times Web site.

Perhaps someday we will be able to give Mr. Keys the medal he richly deserves for standing up to our tyrannical overlords.

But for now he’s going to have to live with being black-balled by an industry that insults your intelligence.

Maybe this one is a net win from a realist perspective.

How this landed in the business section remains a mystery but it is the ‘re-surfacing’ of ‘old news’.

Hoping to Save Bees, Europe to Vote on Pesticide Ban
By DAVID JOLLY 4:08 PM ET

European officials plan to vote on a proposal to sharply restrict the use of chemicals that have been implicated in the decline of global bee populations.

Once again good citizen we are witnessing the side effects of failing to prosecute the corporate guilty for playing God recklessly.

What do you suppose this ban on pesticide is going to accomplish?

Most likely it will result in a plague of pests! Then they’ll be spraying twice as much pesticide!

But you (evidently) aren’t smart enough to figure that one out…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rope Burns

Greetings good citizen,

Contrary to the Happy Talk being spewed by the Corporate Owned Media, the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace (to better protect the guilty from prosecution.)

Ironically our first headline is yet another exercise in ‘misdirection/manipulation’:

U.S. Retail Sales Jump
By REUTERS 8:44 AM ET

The Commerce Department said retail sales increased 1.1 percent, the largest rise since September, after a revised 0.2 percent gain in January.

Shares Slip Despite Economic Data

Given a how our entire economy (these days) is based solely upon ‘creative accounting’ it is somewhat disturbing to see the totally fabricated stock markets tanking in light of this alleged ‘good news’.

Can’t these people get on the same page?

But the whole ‘teamwork’ thing doesn’t work for the ‘rugged individuals’ these shills take their marching orders from.

More curiously, we have this bizarre headline focused on a topic that mostly affects the One Percent’s minions…seriously?

Europe Seeks Update of Law on Fliers’ Rights
By NICOLA CLARK 8:57 AM ET

For flights originating in Europe, new rules would clarify passengers’ rights to compensation for delayed or canceled flights.

How will this face-off between two One Percenter’s play out? (One who is picking up the tab for airfare and the other who owns the airlines…)

We may never know.

But this story is increasingly ‘in the news’

Chinese Solar Panel Maker on Financial Brink
By KEITH BRADSHER 8:10 AM ET

Suntech Power, a U.S.-listed company that is closing its Arizona plant, is poised to be taken over by the government of its hometown in China.

Where are the conservo-loonies (that basically chased this US company into the waiting arms of the Chinese?)

The management of this company should be drawn and quartered for treason…but that’s beside the point. Where are you going to sell Chinese made solar panels if you can’t sell them in the US?

And if you try to sell them here, a hundred million unemployed US citizens will tear them apart (along with whoever buys them!)

Then we have the point/counterpoint exercise that follows in two separate headlines:

Blessings of Low Taxes Remain Unproved
By EDUARDO PORTER

Paul Ryan of Wisconsin recycled an argument for lower taxes that surfaced in the ’80s and ’90s, but recent history suggests that higher taxes might help the economy.

The very definition of ‘insane’ is doing the same act repeatedly and each time expecting a different outcome…like conservo-loonies (by definition insane) for steadfastly advocating tax cuts for the rich as a vehicle for ‘prosperity for all.’

Is hasn’t worked in the past yet they somehow think it will work if we give it just one more try!

But wait, the conservo-whackos aren’t done!

We have one last headline from an arch Dumbo!:

Today's Economist
Hidden Costs of the Minimum Wage
By CASEY B. MULLIGAN

The federal minimum wage should be lowered, not raised, so as not to compound the damage it causes.

Lower the minimum wage so as not to ‘compound’ the damage to the economy presumably caused by the US’s ‘uncompetitiveness’

Is this dolt crazy?

You know it is a rhetorical question good citizen, Bobo is a conservative so it stands to reason that things like logic and truth are meaningless to him.

He expects Leprechauns to bring pots of gold to all of the good employers who make their workers suffer the most to better insure ‘class purity’.

How twisted is it good citizen that a certain segment of our society believes there are ‘good people’ who ‘own things’ and needy-greedy people who demand things like living wages and enough to eat.

These same people feel the needy greedy people have to be taught their proper place, that they are ‘entitled’ to nothing.

While those of us condemned to the One Percent’s dung heap think shills like this guy belong at the knotted end of a stout rope with their feet at least twelve inches off the pavement.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tragedy

Greetings good citizen,

The cheats on Wall Street are ‘taking a break’ from pushing the Dow (which is mostly bank dominated) higher.

We are supposed to ‘assume’ this condition is natural when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Dow could be pegged at 20,000 TOMORROW and NOTHING would change except the one percent would be richer and YOU’D be poorer…on paper of course.

How sad is it that the ‘back of the envelope’ is ‘as good as it gets’ for most of us?

Once again we must ask ourselves how did we come to this place?

Let’s have a look at our predatory commerce system:

5 Ways Privatization Is Poisoning America
We all live better lives when the common good is not for sale.
March 10, 2013 |

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

The free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said "We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money."

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

Long recognized as an elementary evil, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the very reason we have/establish government.

How sad is it good citizen that the people who control the printing presses keep selling the rest of us out?

What is the ‘inevitable outcome’ of profits before people? You’ve been living in it’s ‘death spiral’ for decades.

Why can’t Japan ‘recover’ from being robbed by its corrupt?

Predation, plain and simple.

Those who are robbing you blind ‘own’ the government that was established to ‘protect’ you.

This is the thing ‘treason’ (and it’s terrible punishment) are made from.

So…where is our White Knight? Who will rescue us from the nasty, evil predators?

Historically it has been the ‘professional class’ that has led and nurtured revolutions but our better educated rabble now know there is barely a nickle’s worth of difference between the predators and their well paid lackeys.

Why these ‘stupid people’ continue to replace the system they’re rescuing us from with a virtually identical one defies comprehension.

I suspect a ‘lack of imagination’ has nothing to do with it.

In many ways a revolt can be like hitting the lottery for the sublimely mentally deficient.

Which is a big reason why so many revolts are ‘stillborn’ technically dead before they start.

But people are stupid and continue to believe the funny money they’re bought off with is actually worth something more than it really is.

Worse, a reliance on scrip that has no actual value can be a powerful weapon in the, er, ‘wrong hands’.

(Or so argue the gold bugs/hard money crowd.)

Read my lips, ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

When taken in this context ‘the tragedy of the commons’ is put in its proper perspective.

Usually followed by the, er, ‘swift sword of justice’ cutting down those who would cheat you out of your just share.

Those who would privatize the commons for their own benefit.

How tragic is it good citizen that besides suspending rights you have enjoyed for 900 years our bought and paid for ‘Supreme Court’ has also re-purposed commerce to ‘profit’ the shareowner at society’s expense?

Which is to ask why is there no revolt? (Are the lackeys so well paid this time or have they become so stupid as to be blind to the danger our current course represents to themselves as well as their ‘masters’?

A truly troubling question good citizen.

It can’t be because we’re afraid of dying, those who rob us with impunity have taken everything worth living for!

Government, it’s supposed to work FOR YOU, not for THEM!

Just another painfully obvious point I felt compelled to belabor.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Uncommonly Good

Greetings good citizen,

I have no idea what we’re going to do when this fine fellow moves on from our midst.

He has consistently expressed with unusual (and enviable) clarity the real issues facing our civilization and done so unflinchingly.

Look up the word courage and you’d find his picture next to it.

To say he is an ‘inspiration’ is an understatement.

Even his opening paragraphs cut right to the point:

Whether public education contributes to the Common Good depends, of course, on what kind of education it is, to whom it is available, and what we take to be the Common Good. There’s no need to tarry on the fact that these are highly contested matters, have been throughout history, and continue to be so today.

One of the great achievements of American democracy has been the introduction of mass public education, from children to advanced research universities. And in some respects that leadership position has been maintained. Unfortunately, not all. Public education is under serious attack, one component of the attack on any rational and humane concept of the Common Good, sometimes in ways that are not only shocking, but also spell disaster for the species.

All of this falls within the general assault on the population in the past generation, the so-called “neoliberal era.” I’ll return to these matters, of great significance and import.

The ‘liberalization’ of trade relations that has effectively ended global capitalism (turning it into a global monopoly) and crucified the global economy.

Um, he points to (without specifically saying so) the twin ‘illusions’ of liberty and prosperity and how the corporate owned media dispenses ‘dis-information’ (which benefits the oligarchs.)

Two crucial changes were financialization, with a huge explosion of speculative financial flows, and de-industrialization. Production didn't cease. It just began to be off-shored anywhere where you could get terrible working conditions and no environmental constraints, with huge profits for the Masters. Within the US that set off a vicious cycle, leading to sharp concentration of wealth, which translates at once to concentration of political power, increasingly in the financial sector. That in turn leads to legislation that carries the vicious cycle forward, including sharp tax reduction for the rich and deregulation, with repeated financial crises from the ‘80s, each worse than the last. [The Reagan ‘revolution’] The current one is so far the worst of all. And others are likely in what a director of the Bank of England calls a “doom loop.”

There are solutions, but they do not fit the needs of the Masters, for whom the crises are no problem, they are bailed out by the Nanny State. Today corporate profits are breaking new records and the financial managers who created the current crisis are enjoying huge bonuses. Meanwhile, for the large majority, wages and income have practically stagnated in the last 30-odd years. By today, it has reached the point that 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans.

In parallel, the cost of elections has skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into the pockets of those with the money, corporations and the super-rich. Political representatives become even more beholden to those who paid for their victories. One consequence is that by now, the poorest 70% have literally no influence over policy. As you move up the income/wealth ladder influence increases, and at the very top, a tiny percent, the Masters get what they want.

Or as I like to phrase it, the deliberate mismanagement of our planet’s resources for the benefit of the privileged few.

How we remove these parasites from our midst is simple, we unite and purge them…but they will endeavor to use our lack of information against us.

Yes, the oligarchs have been ‘careful’ not to show their faces and only the faces of their proxies are in jeopardy.

It will take a lot of ‘sifting’ to ferret out the guilty. Removing their hands from the levers of power is the easy part, stopping them from committing further atrocities will be the difficult part.

Thanks to the human proclivity for stupidity, the guilty will enjoy the use of their proxies long after they’ve lost the ability to reward them.

This is the danger of ‘entrenchment’. The name alone will be enough to compel otherwise good people to perform treacherous acts…as we see repeatedly in Harry Potter.

Thus we must be ruthless in rooting out the turncoats who would risk the stability of civilization itself to curry favor with those who would cheat even them.

Funny how the ‘proclivity for stupidity’ is a self-fulfilling loop.

The sad part is how the greedy conspire to strengthen this ‘failure of reason’.

If we were all ‘born smart’ we wouldn’t be having this sad discussion.

Perhaps that is the last obstacle for natural selection to overcome. Oddly we are born with the ‘seed of wisdom’ (or at least most of us are…it is what the conservo-whackos are trying to snuff out via ‘quibbling’.)

We instinctively know the difference between right and wrong. Yet ‘political expedience’ twists our inborn views to favor the unscrupulous.

Throw ‘spirit in the sky’ into the mix and pretty soon even otherwise ration adults no longer know which end is up…

Once you realize you are parroting the words of those who would stick it to you in a heartbeat, you somewhat regain your bearings.

But if they fool you into thinking they are your ‘friends’…then you’ve got trouble…possibly bigger than you know.

With that chilling thought, thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Holes

Greetings good citizen,

I am still struggling to adapt to a work routine (two years of being a slug doesn’t help) I am, er, ‘worried’ by this first sure sign of ‘economic recovery’.

Unemployment at 4-Year Low as U.S. Hiring Gains Steam
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The joblessness rate sank to 7.7 percent as 236,000 positions were added across a broad range of sectors, but analysts warned that federal budget cuts could slow the recovery.

Jobs Fuel Stock Rally
Economix: The Rise of Part-Time Work | Shrinking Government

Why would I be ‘worried’ good citizen? Because I’ve seen this before…many times.

They ship work overseas and the ‘customer base’ collapses. (The unemployed can’t afford your product.) As local economies ‘adjust’ (the unemployed pull up stakes and head to where the work is) ‘recovery’ is declared and they start farming out work again!

As you can see, the so-called ‘recovery’ is the final stage of this cycle.

Now how much longer can they keep this up is unknown, they’ve almost completely hollowed out the US and Japanese economies (and completely destroyed the Real Estate markets in both countries in the process.)

Now, I count myself as fortunate. I landed a ‘real job’; 40 hours with full benefits and not the part-time/no insurance or benefit purgatory that most of the ‘inexperienced’ find themselves condemned to.

And the looming energy crisis seems to be driving a movement to restore some local capacity in basic industries while there is still some talent who remembers how to do it!

Whether or not this movement can sustain itself when a renewed contraction strikes remains to be seen.

But we’re talking patterns here.

Now the ‘new normal’ can form the basis for a real recovery BUT you need to ‘let it ride’ and establish itself.

Why don’t I think this is what they have in mind for us good citizen?

Would that it were that we have finally reached the end of the global race to the bottom that was completely 'unnecessary’ in the first place.

But you know as well as I that this thing won’t be over until the oligarchy can protect itself from prosecution.

And short of wiping out an entire generation I don’t see how they can do that.

But it’s not stopping them from trying:

Blocked Bids to Fill Judgeships Stir New Fight on Filibuster
By CARL HULSE

Republican senators have so far kept President Obama from filling any of the four vacancies on the nation's most important appeals court, reviving talk of a change in Senate rules.

Graphic Graphic: Filling the D.C. Appeals Court

Our best, er, ‘indicator’ of social health has been our badly broken political system. The very fact that most of the commerce system is in private hands contradicts the precepts of a ‘democratic’ society.

We even have our ‘activist’ (conservo-loony) judges to prove this argument.

No civilization can stand without justice…sometimes they take a long time to fall but in the end the final destination remains unchanged.

The bad apples use the ‘holes’ left in the legal system by the founders to drive civilization off a cliff.

Why do those holes exist?

Because the founders didn’t want to leave themselves open to prosecution!

No society founded on theft can survive for long so how sad is it that the backbone of capitalism is the ‘fake ownership’ of that which belongs to us all?

Understand good citizen, the ‘well, it’s not yours’ argument leads directly back to the ‘why don’t I kill you where you stand?’ question.

Were I writing this for the firewalled version, there would be some mighty choice expletives employed here.

Especially surrounding the argument as to whether or not lynching someone for being a greedy blockhead is ‘justifiable’…

Or perhaps just for being a blockhead as we can observe in our final offering:

Law Backs Guns in Class for Teachers in South Dakota
By JOHN ELIGON

South Dakota became the first state to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Um, as I commented repeatedly and I’m sure you have noticed the same phenomenon in your own local news organs, the local rag exists to highlight the bad behavior of people in positions of public trust.

No doubt this is sometimes ‘witch hunts’ like the recent attack [by Fox News] on a local animal control officer but half of the stories center on malfeasance and inappropriate behavior of wide range of, er, ‘public servants’.

Now we hire (and supposedly psychologically screen) our police forces to carry guns…and our most recent nation headline shows once again that the ‘screening process’ isn’t ‘infallible’. [re: the Park Ranger who blew away the reality show host for being in the company of his wife while he was elsewhere.]

The ‘green-eyed monster’ is probably the most powerful of them all but it still provides an case in point. Kids are designed to frustrate you, even if you’re taught to deal with that, kids can ‘get under your skin and push your buttons’ because you’re in the protectors role.

They trust you not to harm them.

They even have the chutzpah to give you that knowing little smirk after they’ve twisted the knife and you’ve retaliated by suspending them (although you’d prefer to have had them drawn and quartered!)

Do you really want to add handguns into that volatile environment?

Not that we humans are overly smart…like the young lady who wanted to ‘play with the kitty’…what part of ‘wild’ didn’t she understand…because she sure understands it now!

Mother Nature is VERY ‘unforgiving’ and we need to respect that…or we will pay.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Poison Pill

Greetings good citizen,

As we, er, ‘enjoy’ the calm before the storm (with the Dow setting ‘new highs’ to fall from.) We have some time to reflect upon the ‘sequester’, the Republican sponsored ‘poison pill’ designed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Ironic that this could be viewed as the ultimate ‘win-win’ scenario as far as the conservo-whackos are concerned.

They already have all of the tax cuts they want for the uber-wealthy. They know if they keep pushing, they risk having the carefully built loopholes currently in the system slammed shut.

So how do they achieve their ‘true goal’ of killing off a significant portion of the ‘entitled rabble' and show them who’s boss?

Enter The Sequester.

Note El Sequester only cuts the social safety net and initially only cuts the direct programs that assist the ‘truly needy’.

Meals on wheels was the very first bird to have its wings clipped…and it wouldn’t exist if those senior/disabled individuals had a choice!

Perhaps a bad analogy there but a majority of the people on mobile meals programs lack the ability/mobility to secure/prepare their own food. It’s meals on wheels or starve!

Now our heartless conservo-whackos have labeled the recipients of this benefit as ‘the entitled’ (as opposed to what they really are, ‘needy’) and acted to ‘correct’ this costly problem by ‘unfunding’ the program.

Left unsaid is what will happen to the money saved by not performing this social service (often prepared and delivered by VOLUNTEERS!)

What do you think will happen, good citizen?

Will it be diverted to more ‘corporate welfare’ so the financial sector can pay their executives even larger bonuses? (Or will the ‘savings’ be consumed by the added cost of moving these formerly independent meals on wheels recipients into an ‘assisted living facility’ AT THE TAXPAYER’S EXPENSE!)

Did I mention the CONSERVO-WHACKOS were behind this?

You know, the ‘nothing go up top’ crowd?

Not that it helps but what’s the difference between one of these facilities and those other taxpayer funded institutions we call prisons?

Cute(r) nurses?

The Daily Show’s host Jon Stewart ran a piece the other day lambasting BOTH political parties (that you can no longer tell apart) for failing to ‘derail’ the sequester.

It really would have been simple…but it seems the ‘political will’ didn’t exist…in either (alleged) party…is this ‘true bipartisanship’ at long last (or is it a brazen example of our ‘captive government’ at work?)

So WHOSE ‘representative’ did you elect last November? Certainly wasn’t YOURS!

(Yet another prime example of how badly broken the, er, ‘original system’ was and is.)

What’s the point in dragging yourself down to the polls every November if the ballot you cast does you zero good?

It’d be a different story if you voted directly on the laws. (Where you’re supposed to have ‘your say’.) [But that’s not how our ‘elitist’ founders saw things. We were all a bunch of ignorant sodbusters, barely worthy of consideration. That’s how the ‘invitation only’ crowd who gathered in Philadelphia to draft the constitution thought! They thought YOU’D mess things up!]

But I digress, that’s all water over a long ago dam.

It is important you understand that this is where the revolution was hijacked by the soon to be ‘privileged few’.

One despot for another, same as it ever was. Still, it would be interesting to know which one of them had their hand up Washington’s backside…

But again I digress…We are on this path BECAUSE the system we were saddled with long ago is now in such a state of disrepair that it must be replaced.

How sad is it that the ‘truly ignorant’ will die defending ‘original intent’ that was totally against their children’s ‘best interests’?

Riddle me this, would YOU trust a new system openly operated by the SAME PEOPLE who (through their ineptitude) brought the previous system crashing down?

Heck no!

Which is why YOU won’t have a choice in the matter good citizen.

In other news Hugo Chavez died yesterday causing capitalists everywhere to rejoice. The thought running through the back of my head is what will become of the poor people up in the frozen north that benefited from Hugo’s generosity?

Will they freeze to death? Will the capitalists cheer this development too?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sequester

Greetings good citizen,

How fitting to say, ‘another week down the drain?’

Which is what it will look like to the survivors of our collapsed civilization.

Did they really need to flush everything down the drain?

And the answer is yes; (if they wanted to escape prosecution then they ‘had to do it’.)

While it is unlikely that the collapse will be traced back to this particular incident (The actual ‘trigger’ is forty years in the past…far too late to stop or change course.) This ‘budget madness’ (brought on largely by political psychosis) will be viewed as one of the shoves that knocked civilization over the edge.

Note how the media is still ‘pretending’ that there are two parties. It makes you wonder whom they think they’re fooling? The half dozen or so Republican ‘true believers’ perhaps?

Today’s headline reads:

TOP NEWS
As Cuts Arrive, Parties Pledge to Call Off the Budget Wars
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JONATHAN WEISMAN

As a deal to break a budget impasse failed to emerge on Friday, both the president and his Republican adversaries said they would not carry the fight over the cuts into the coming effort to finance the government.

Since ‘neither party’ (and it’s become impossible to tell one from the other as they are both the lapdogs of the ‘One Percent’) blocked the dreaded ‘sequester’ the only logical conclusion to be reached is the One Percent WANTED the draconian budget cuts.

(Less money the government needs translates directly into more in THEIR pockets, right?)

How long do you think it will be before they (the One- Percent) abandons the pretense and starts issuing ‘royal decrees’?

I suspect it won’t be too much longer as the psychosis deepens with each passing day.

We can only assume the beatings will continue until moral improves…

One of the factors ignored by the corporate owned media (and they know its there) is what the ‘sudden discharge’ of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is going to do to the job market.

Only a tiny portion of these guys have ‘civilian jobs’ to return to. If it weren’t for the military they’d be unemployed too!

What do you suppose their sudden return (en masse) to civilian life is going to do to an already staggering job market?

Because that’s what the ‘sequester’ is going to do. It will slash the military budget and the generals aren’t going to take it in the shorts… so this leaves?

Now, veteran-hiring preference will put yet another obstacle to an already reeling over 50 crowd, desperate to save what they’ve spent their whole lives building.

But what the heck, the over fifty crowd has proven to be both passive and complacent, unwilling to ‘rock the boat’ even to save themselves…(or their kids) from oblivion.

Because in a cosmic karmic kick in the pants, the kids who are throwing their parents on the scrap heap today will see the same thing happen to them in the not too distant future.

Where does this stop?

When the safety net gives way…which actually means it is unlikely that karmic retribution will be visited upon the blind children of the privileged.

While civilization has taken some incredible punishment recently it doesn’t mean it will tolerate abuse indefinitely.

Eventually the switch will flip and the words on everybody’s lips will be ‘death to the tyrants!’

(Because we are ‘herd animals’ after all, despite Republican rhetoric to the contrary. The ‘rugged individual’ is a [downright dangerous] myth perpetuated by the ‘more for me’ crowd.)

The interesting thought experiment here is you WILL NOT FIND ANYONE who professes to ‘love capitalism’ after it causes the collapse of society.

It will make you wonder why, if everyone hated it so much, did they put up with it all of their lives?

Should you be impertinent enough to ask, you won’t get an answer, at least not a straight one out of the average sheeple.

Instead you’ll hear what you hear today, the ancient ‘bad advice’ about going along to get along.

Evil flourishes whenever honest people do nothing and that’s the ‘net yield’ of the go along to get along rubric.

Unquestioned is the fact that no one will (openly) oppose the destruction of our civilization.

Those elected to ‘uphold the law’ have failed utterly and deserve what’s coming to them.

I suspect it is more than just my opinion that our politicians won’t be judged kindly by those they have rendered destitute…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shadows

Greetings good citizen,

It’s one thing for me to repeat (ad nauseum) that our civilization is on the verge of collapse and quite another to present the evidence that proves it.

Thus it is my pleasure to present to you the ever popular Shadow Stats!

No. 505: January CPI, Real Retail Sales and Earnings, Existing Home Sales, Subscription required February 21st, 2013
• Real Earnings Fall Year-to-Year • January Year-to-Year Inflation: 1.6% (CPI-U), 1.5% (CPI-W), 9.2% (ShadowStats)
• Aside from Not Measuring Constant-Standard-of-Living Inflation, The Chained-CPI Is Too Unstable for Setting Cost-of-Living Adjustments
• Outlooks Unchanged for Ongoing Economic and System-Liquidity Crises and for Inflation Crisis to Develop in Year Ahead More ...

Yes good citizen, while all of the picky pundits continue to insist the problem will be ‘deflation’ and not hyper-inflation, the central banks of the world are running the presses in ‘hyper-drive’.

WHEN (not if) the global supply chain shuts down we will instantly be faced with ‘too much money chasing too few goods’…typically notable by the frantic ‘bidding up’ of prices…also known as ‘hyper-inflation’.

No. 504: January 2013 Housing Starts, PPI and PPI and CPI Revisions Subscription required February 20th, 2013
• January 2013 Housing Starts 61% Below High of January 2006
• Annualized January PPI Headline Inflation of 2.5% Was 7.1%, Before Seasonal-Adjustment Muting
• *Revised Seasonally-Adjusted Inflation Data Suggestive of Instabilities in Monthly Headline Reporting More ...

Inflation is still in ‘runaway mode’ while the government continues too ‘cook the books’ (just like they do with the unemployment numbers.)

*Note Mr. William’s subtle nod at the accountant’s difficulties keeping the data, er, ‘credible’.

No. 503: January 2013 Industrial Production
Subscription required February 15th, 2013
• Annual Production Growth in January Slowed to Pre-Recession Levels
• Monthly Production Decline Was In the Context of Continued Volatile and Unstable Reporting
• Production Benchmark Revision in March Should Show Weaker Activity Than Previously Estimated More ...

‘Pre-recession levels’…so how’s that recovery (that nobody but the pundits and the financial sector has been able to see) coming?

You know as well as I good citizen that there is no recovery. There isn’t going to be one. The plunge stopped (temporarily) to let the economy ‘adjust’ to the new normal. Then it will plunge again.

In this case the ‘it’ in question is the economy and the global one if you want to be more specific.

No. 502: January 2013 Retail Sales
Subscription required February 13th, 2013
• Retail Sales Continued to Stagnate, Reflecting Intensifying Structural Liquidity Issues for the Consumer More ...

A single (harrowing) bullet point but what does it point to, eh, good citizen?

Anyone? (Bueller) Anyone?

(and the geeky kid in the back says,) “It’s pointing to the failure of capitalism!”

Does the teacher hand the kid an ‘attaboy’ or detention?

What would YOU do?

No. 501: December 2012 and Annual Trade Balance, Consumer Credit Subscription required February 8th, 2013
• Little Changed for the Year, 2012 U.S. Merchandise Trade Deficit Still Reflected [the] Cumulative Loss of 6.6 Million Jobs
• December Trade Reporting Suggested Upside Contribution to First Revision of Fourth-Quarter GDP
• New ShadowStats Graph of Consumer Credit Outstanding More ...

Not that there was much of a ‘choice’ (The whole system is designed to provide an ‘illusion of participation’) but where was this data during the run up to the election?

Or were conservo-whackos worried that bad jobs numbers would bite THEM in the backside…because we all KNOW who is responsible for destroying the economy.

No. 500: SPECIAL COMMENTARY U.S. Government GAAP-Based 2012 Financial Data
February 5th, 2013
• GAAP-Based Federal Budget Deficit Hit Record $6.6 Trillion in 2012
• Five-Year Average Annual Shortfall at $5.2 Trillion
• With U.S. Facing Mortal, Long-Range Solvency Issues, Hyperinflation Remains a Virtual Certainty More ...

I don’t know what to tell you good citizen, there is obvious fraud in the markets and impending collapse in the supply chain, both of which spells disaster for our species.

What needs to be understood up front is both are the result of mis-management…to the degree of criminal negligence.

There is profit in crisis and the capitalists intend to inflict the ‘long emergency’ upon the rest of us.

This WILL lead to civil unrest and revolt.

DUMP CAPITALISM NOW!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner.

Amazing!

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow is regaining yesterday’s losses (if only because they can) which is to point out the obvious, that NOTHING has been done to ‘fix’ the economy…although (apparently) YOU aren’t supposed to be ‘concerned’ about that…

Like my ‘economic desert’ scenario, a ‘broken economy’ spells disaster for the residents thereof.

Currently the global financial system is on central bank life support and is (thanks to ‘creative accounting’) doing much better than the ‘real economy’ as this article demonstrates:

U.S. Banks in 2012 Post Highest Profits Since '06 – FDIC
By REUTERS
Published: February 26, 2013 at 11:54 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. banking industry in 2012 recorded its highest earnings since before the 2007-2009 financial crisis, according to data released on Tuesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The FDIC said the industry's full-year earnings were the second-highest on record at $141.3 billion, an increase over 2011 of $22.9 billion, or 19.3 percent. But the head of the agency said growth would probably slow this year, and warned that bank profits could dive if Congress does not reach a federal budget agreement that prevents automatic cuts.

Bank earnings peaked in 2006 at $145.2 billion.

Much of the earnings growth in 2012 came from banks reducing the amount they set aside in case of losses on loans, the FDIC said. Banks also saw gains on loan sales and higher servicing income.

"While there is still room for further income growth, we don't expect the pace of earnings growth to continue at these levels," FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said.

Um, se habla ‘creative accounting’?

Why does it look to me like the predatory banks are looting the public treasury?

Facts on the ground tell us that banks should be shedding people like mad, they don’t have the ‘income’ to support the people they have because a vast majority of their customer base is a serious credit risk.

Again we bash into the solid fact that fifty percent of US families are on some kind of food assistance program…why is that? Because cheapskate capitalist employers won’t pay their people enough to buy food AND keep a roof over their heads!

[Have to ‘stay competitive’ you know!]

Followed by, “What does how big a bonus I got have to do with anything?”

Same thing in the financial sector…how can these criminals reward themselves for screwing up the global financial system beyond repair?

We’re back to the need to re-define why you get a bonus!

(Because these guys clearly don’t understand the concept.)

Worse, they seem to think we don’t either…

The world clearly isn’t falling apart (Because all money is Funny) but that’s the ONLY reason. (Otherwise we’d be up to our buttocks in reptiles right now!)

Let me explain it a bit more clearly…because you won’t hear this from one of their stooges or anyone else who can get within a thousand miles of a major media outlet.

The banking ‘business model’ is broken!

There aren’t enough customers to keep these monsters afloat.

ALL of the banks (around the entire world) went bust in December 2007.

And until the global economy is re-balanced, they’re NEVER going to be profitable again!

It’s simply not there to be had!

Interest rates locked at Zero are ‘self-explanitory’. There is no money in banking…So, how did the banks have one of their best years since the crash?

Can you say ‘Loot’?

Not that this really matters…what you SHOULD be losing sleep over is that sudden stop that will occur when they decide to ‘derail’ our existing civilization.

(And they’ll do this to throw the law off of their trail.)

Do we have weeks or days remaining good citizen?

The nasty problem here is even they don’t know.

You have to keep your eyes on the exits and even then there will be about a jillion ‘false starts’.

Like the market going up and down for no discernable reason.

I preach to the choir when I point out that our civilization is already ruined.

I was watching the run up to WWII on the Military channel last night and experienced serious ‘déjà vu’.

Nobody dares prosecute the criminals for fear of what they’ll do…

Well good citizen, they’ve already bankrupted us…And A Simple Plan can stop that in its tracks (because it only deals in real assets in real time, none of this derivative nonsense.)

But the decision to change from today’s predatory system to tomorrows equitable one remains to be made…

And guess who gets to make that choice?

YOU!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cinderella Liberty

Greetings good citizen,

Among the many signs that our civilization is rotting away from the inside is the return of crippling interest rates.

As I mentioned yesterday, the Republican’s ‘repealed’ anti-usury legislation just prior to the economy collapsing. how opportune?

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.

[Enlarge This Image
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Subrina Baptiste of Brooklyn says JPMorgan Chase allowed payday lenders to seize child-support funds in her account. ]

With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.

While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.

Laws? We don’t need no stinking laws!

Did I mention that our (global) banking system is already F.U.B.A.R.?

Understand good citizen, the emphasis in that statement of fact rests in the ALL part. There is no way to ‘repair’ the banking system without totally re-wiring how it works.

[Like A Simple Plan does.]

How hard do you have to be whacked over the head good citizen? This is war (and they’re holding all of the ammo!)

They have ‘spy in the sky’ while all you’ve got is a Zippo and a can of fluid.

How ironic is it that you have a lot less to lose?

Even more ironic is how ‘fire cleanses’…cuz we could sure use some ‘cleaning up’ around here!

Once again we confront the question of how did it come to this?

And the answer is our government was ‘hijacked’ long ago by the very people it was established to protect us from.

EPIC FAIL.

Now how do we prevent that from happening (again) because it HAS HAPPENED EVERY TIME, sometimes even before the revolt is over!

That’s why revolt for the sake of revolt is stupid.

YOU, the average citizen, needs to know AHEAD OF TIME, PRECISELY what you’re buying into.

Which is why A Simple Plan is laid out for you examination, so you can learn the specifics of what’s at stake BEFORE a single drop of blood is spilled.

Not that Mao’s ‘little red book’ did anything to preserve the purity of ‘the people’s revolution’. But capitalism has a way of ‘perverting justice’, as today’s headlines show.

You should all find it most disturbing that the first ‘constitutional convention’ was an ‘invitation only’ event.

Worse, our ‘representatives’ to that historic event were ‘self-selected’ (and thus did they do their utmost to protect THEIR interests…to the doom of the rest of us.)

The idea behind gaining popular support for a new way of running things is so the ‘assassins’ can’t kill the revolution’s leaders (another ‘curious’ historical phenomenon) before they can alter the people’s situation too radically.

Yes sir, things are the way they are because the ‘entrenched interests’ will murder anyone who attempts to change them…

Which should give you some idea as to why you are being denied your right to ‘due process’ (again) after 900 years.

Worse, according to the deceptively named Libertarians, you are endowed with NO Rights. None what so ever.

What gives you ‘rights’ under a Libertine banner? Money.

How STUPID IS THAT? (Considering ALL money is FUNNY!)

So the, er, ‘authority’ who coins the money has a monopoly on rights!

Can you say Seig Hiel?

How ironic is it that the absolute dictatorship championed by the ‘Libertarians’ is indistinguishable from monarchy?

Which is to point out that today’s royal wannabe’s hide behind a ‘mask of liberty’.

Liberty for them; tyranny for you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shame on You!

Greetings good citizen,

I received a rather bizarre e-mail yesterday inviting me to attend an economics ‘summer school’ in Italy.

Five Nobel Laureates will teach the class in English, so the Italian setting is merely to make the surroundings more…’realistic’ (While not currently in the headlines, Italy is one of the PIIGS in case anyone was wondering why they spelled pig with two i’s.)

How ‘appropriate’ that these five, er, ‘nitwits’ expound upon their economic theories in a country that likely practiced (and definitely suffered) from them?

Which brings us to yet another long neglected hobby horse…the one that each of these ‘Nobel Laureates’ needs to have hammered into their squeany little heads…

(Sing it choir!)

ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

(Now give me an Amen!)

Hallelujah!

(Where the heck is MY Nobel Prize?)

Yes good citizen, I would ‘opine’ that you don’t know squat about economics if you turn a blind eye to this most basic of economic facts.

(Apparently my opinion is worthless to the rabid capitalists who hand out Nobel Prizes.)

Neither YOU (nor anyone else) can live in an ‘economic wasteland’.

That’s why the ‘global economy’ is in the tank (and it going to stay there until it gets ‘re-balanced’.)

Somehow these, er, ‘gentlemen’ believe this problem is going to solve itself. (and it very well might…however, the fabric of society can only take so much tearing before it shreds completely.)

Which is to ‘opine’ that IF society is ‘left to its own devices’ the fabric of civilization will be ‘obliterated’.

How complete will the destruction be?

Total (barring last minute intervention…which may or may not be successful.)

Sort of boggles the mind to see who’s still drinking the Kool-Aid after all these years.

Considering how lethal that stuff is you have to be amazed that they’re still lining up to down a shot or three!

But that’s all part of another ‘self-correcting’ genetic defect, the tendency to trust people who don’t have your best interests at heart.

Add in the ‘stupid factor’ and we find an endless line of potential Kool-Aid drinkers!

What Kool-Aid is that, you ask?

It’s the kind that blinds you to the existence of the ‘economic desert’.

“There are plenty of jobs out there! You’re just not trying hard enough.”

Yeah, the hundred million unemployed are just a figment of your imagination, especially considering how they ‘don’t want to work’…(which is right next to deciding you no longer want to live…but conservo-whackos will swallow anything regardless of how jagged the hooks are.)

How sad is it good citizen that these facts are also being ignored by the (alleged) alternative media thus our current political dialog is centered on NOT trimming the military budget?

Mighty sad.

Even more disturbing is this headline from today’s NY Times:

White House Tactic for C.I.A. Bid Holds Back Drone Memos
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

The administration may deny Senate Democrats information on targeted killings but tell Republicans more about a militant attack in Libya to win confirmation for John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director.

Um, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Obama run as a Democrat?

WTF is going on here?

Seriously good citizen, how far gone is our situation?

It’s looking mighty tough to me…but who cares what I think, surely not the rabid capitalists!

Which makes me ask, just who has to live among these animals?

Why, (by gum) YOU DO!

And if you don’t do something to help yourself (hint, it all starts with the politicians) then shame on you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Contract

Greetings good citizen,

While every other index is flat, the Dow is (inexplicably) up…not a lot but it shouldn’t be anywhere near where it is and I’m wondering where the outrage is?

Why outrage?

Every point the Dow climbs ‘irrationally’ represents a corresponding drop in your personal purchasing power.

Soon there will be little difference between funny money and confetti!

Makes you wonder where the boss is going to get his hands on all of that ‘confetti’ (and how he expects to stay in business after he cuts most of his employees so he can afford the rest (thanks to Wall Street.)

There is much talk about the ‘looting’ of our (global) civilization but, perhaps unsurprisingly, no action.

Which tells you what about our ‘justice system’, the same justice system that decided it was okay to kill those it was established to protect…

For some INSANE reason there was yet ANOTHER ‘random shooting rampage’ out in the land that burns and shakes yesterday…and yet another somewhere in the Mid-west the day before…

But these are just ‘crazy people’, if we take away their guns, the cops can exterminate ‘em without getting shot, making society so much ‘safer’!

Which is to opine that there is a point where danger is preferable to the (faux) safety of the go along to get along plan.

They acknowledge and deplore your grinding poverty but that, as they have told you repeatedly, is ‘YOUR PROBLEM’ (and they’re running out of patience waiting for you to ‘fix it’!)

They won’t shoot so long as you don’t complain, or point fingers or try to take the guilty to court.

Can't you understand it isn’t ‘all about YOU’ (it’s about them!)

THEY had the ‘good sense’ to be born to parents who could provide for them, you didn’t!

Look at all of the trouble that’s caused!

But I digress…the ‘attitude’ of those born to wealth isn’t worth criticizing. It’s those over ambitious ‘ne’er do wells’ that we need to take down a few pegs!

While the wealthy don’t appreciate what they’ve got because they’ve always had it (and can’t imagine life without it) this doesn’t necessarily make them ‘bad people’.

The problem comes in when they use what they don’t know to make decisions.

They fail to comprehend that they live on a different planet than the rest of us.

Thus do they make lousy policy…and our politics make little sense.

Because they aren’t rooted in reality as the average person understands it.

Now we will touch upon another of my favorite hobby horses, The Human Social Contract’

Something the conservatives mistakenly like to refer to as ‘the law of the jungle’…(Ah, but how quick they are to deny this when they step into a courtroom!)

The basic human social contract is pretty simple. I let you live if you let me live.

It’s an agreement not to kill one another.

USUALLY (but not always) there is an implied ‘I’ll help you out if you help me out’ added onto this agreement but most of the time that one falls short because neither wants to go first.

So we have the ‘surface agreement’ that we don’t kill each other on sight. An agreement that was later solidified by the courts to include not killing one another for violations of the original agreement.

Like the act of claiming the water hole for yourself.

Now you aren’t trying to kill me directly but if I can’t find another source of water you’re killing me indirectly.

So now I’m thinking I made a bad deal by not clubbing you to death when I first laid eyes on you.

So if I go to your house and off you for messing with my ability to live, I get arrested for assault (if I don’t succeed in killing you…)

But we have a different problem here don’t we?

The ‘human social contract’ is no longer just between you and me. Now we have ‘non-human entities’ playing on the same field.

Corporations get to tell you that you will pay what they demand or you won’t get what you need to live. Doesn’t matter if you can ‘afford it’ or not (and it’s usually not.)

Now a whole groups decides what’s good for them and its ‘nuts to you!’ If you can’t afford it, tough!

And they wonder why history is written in blood…

Well, one thing never changes, stupid is as stupid does.

So is the Human social contract still ‘relevant’?

Only if you want peace…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Burn

Greetings good citizen,

While some of you are appalled that the problems of the world CAN’T be solved with a spoonful of sugar. Let me offer the comforting thought that I designed the plan more so with an eye towards what most of you WOULDN’T like done to you rather than the conservo-whacko way which is we’ll do this, this and this…but ONLY to BAD PEOPLE.

Weirdly, everybody can get behind castrating a hypothetical stranger…but it’s not such a good idea anymore when you find YOURSELF on the receiving end of the bargain.

This is why A Simple Plan was designed to be ‘HUMANE’. We don’t ‘execute’, er, those who refuse to live by some pretty basic rules. We merely strip them of their right to live among us.

Not that playing ‘defense’ has helped. You either support the plan (which is holistic, it’s ALL or NOTHING) or you don’t.

If you take nothing away from this web page take that. You can’t ‘cherry-pick’ A Simple Plan and get anything even approaching the correct/workable results.

(And if you want the creator here to guide its implementation, you all had better shake a leg ‘cuz I haven’t got a lot of time left.)

Not much of a sales pitch but it is the truth.

Readership would rapidly dwindle to zero if all I did here was pitch A Simple Plan, I’ve taxed your patience enough.

today’s offering tackles the issue of the ‘dehumanizing’ nature of capitalist society.

The human body, with its need for rest, nutrition and hydration, is such an inefficient tool for capitalist production. But while machines are unlikely to replace human workers anytime soon, new technologies can deftly strip workers of their humanity!

The Irish Independent reports that grocery giant TESCO has strapped electronic armbands to their warehouse workers to measure their productivity, tracking their actions so closely that management knows when they briefly pause to drink from a water fountain or take a bathroom break. These unforgivable lapses in productivity impact workers' performance score, which management then apparently uses to terrify them into working faster.

"The devices give a set amount of time for a task, such as 20 minutes to load packets of soft drinks. If they did it in 20 minutes, they would get 100pc, but would get 200pc if they were twice as fast," writes the Independent. Although TESCO denied that bathroom breaks impact productivity scores, one former staffer the Independent spoke with said he got a "surprisingly lower" score when he took a bathroom break.

"Sometimes, management would call staff to an office and tell them they had to do better if their scores were low."

"I had really easy assignments and when I'd come back after a break, I would get a horrendous score and wonder why," he said.

The rational mind screams ‘how did we come to this?’ While the capitalist sees nothing wrong with ‘squeezing as much value’ as he/she can out of their workers.

What’s ‘wrong’ with this picture is why we do what we do.

We ARE NOT ‘machines’, tied to a specific task for certain number of hours BUT that is how our COLLEGE EDUCATED MORONS are taught to treat us.

When we ‘work for money’ the purpose becomes secondary…despite money being an invention, a tool.

It is tool that is all too commonly abused. More often used as a hammer than a reward.

What do you suppose management’s ‘complaint’ was when the employee took a bathroom break?

You’re costing me MONEY! When the correct employee response would be, ‘I was keeping your floors clean which, overall, saves you money.’

(Get a clue fathead, ALL money is FUNNY!)

Yet we are evicted from our homes and have to subscribe to supplemental nutrition programs for a lack of the ‘funny stuff’!

Which is to point out that our social model is broken and headed for collapse…because the bean-counters have decided to see how far they can ‘push it’.

Weirdly, they are pushing for riots in the street.

What would those charged with ‘protecting us’ from exactly this sort of treatment think if they knew what our self-professed ‘betters’ had in store for them?

You KNOW this ends with cops in body bags (more civilians than cops but still…)
All because ‘stingy’ wants to see how much he/she can get away with (and it secretly ‘tickles them’ to wield this kind of ‘raw power’.)

For some reason they don’t believe ‘The Horror’ lurks just beneath the (mostly placid) surface of a (‘desensitized’) modern civilization.

What do I mean by ‘desensitized’?

Let’s just say ‘mercy’ isn’t one of modern societies strong suits.

They have shown none so they shouldn’t be too surprised when they don’t receive any in return.

Somewhat surreal to frame the coming debacle as similar to admonishing a child not to play with matches.

They do it and they get burned for their…impudence.

How sad is it good citizen that this time they are going to ‘burn’ us all?

Thanks for letting me inside you head,

Gegner

M & A

Greetings good citizen,

As it has for the past quarter century, the global marketplace continues to shrink and the capitalists continue to call this ‘progress’.

Now let’s conduct a thought experiment to see how many of you understand what’s happening.

You all know what the objective of the game of monopoly is, don’t you?

And nothing yet invented demonstrates capitalism in action better than this straight-forward board game!

The objective is to ‘bankrupt’ all of the other players.

Now marvel for a moment, once over the game’s popularity and marvel again that it is the WORLD’S primary operating principle!

NOT that you had any say in this…our self-professed ‘betters’ laid out the ground rules and have ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ regarding who gets what, when so nobody (except the hired help) really ‘loses their shirt’.

What do you make of this headline?

TOP NEWS
DealBook
With Confidence on an Upswing, Mergers Make a Comeback
By PETER LATTMAN

Merger activity has suddenly roared back to life, with the latest megadeal being the Berkshire-led acquisition of Heinz.

Berkshire and 3G Capital in a $23 Billion Deal for Heinz

Are you ‘happy’ that you are being pushed closer to insolvency by being denied yet another choice?

The Heinz ‘merger’ is bad enough but after losing Eastern and United now we see American Airlines ‘merging’ with US Air…and what do you suppose the first thing they’ll do will be?

Why it will be ‘eliminate redundancy’!

Tens of thousands will lose their jobs and my, oh my what a fine job market it is to be cutting thousands of ‘service industry’ jobs in!

What do you suppose corporate controlled Washington will do about this?

Same thing they’ve always done, of course…launch more drones and have the cops beat more protesters!

Here I am, protesting ‘monopolies’ when, under A Simple Plan there will only be one, er, ‘airline’ (But you can fly for free! Restrictions apply…) just as other public utilities will be operated ‘monolithically’ to better serve mankind.

The difference between monopolistic ownership and no ownership is the ‘profit’ angle.

Under A Simple Plan, public utilities (like Airlines) exist to ‘serve the public’, under capitalism they exist solely to enrich the capitalist.

The ‘affordability’ of airfare never even enters the calculation (under the current system.)

If you’ve gotta get there quick, they’re the only game in town and you’ll pay what they tell you to pay…until the pool of paying customers shrinks to the point where it can no longer support the industry, then the industry will collapse catastrophically!

But that’s capitalism for ya!

(Actually it isn’t ‘for you’; it’s for them!)

Back to the original question, does the sudden appearance of the Heinz merger mean the M&A drought has ended?

HA!

Seriously?

Well, you can believe what you like but Bubba, there isn’t enough ‘market share’ out there to fill a thimble, but knock yourself out…try to buy more!

We can only assume the ‘logic’ behind the take-over of Heinz is not only is it a condiment, it can double as a soup!

Heck, hit it with some Italian seasonings and you’ve got spaghetti sauce, who knew!

Which represents the ‘danger’ of capitalist tampering. The drive to maximize applications often ruins the product across the board.

Which is to say after ‘cost reducing’ the production process the product will taste like watery tomato juice and there will be no ‘going back…’

Am I belittling one of the fundamental processes of the free market? You bet I am!

If you’ll allow me the liberty I would backstep to yesterday where we discussed money’s one useful function.

And yet Heinz will be ruined in a futile attempt to squeeze more ‘money’ out of the basic set up.

If you like your ketchup, best to head out and buy a few cases now, before they wreck it chasing ‘imaginary’ gains.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner