Self-Defense

Greetings good citizen,

Does anyone else find it curious that these clowns understand economics (some of the time) but do things they know will hurt (what’s left of) the economy anyway?

Let’s start with our top story from today’s NY Times:

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Experts estimate so-called budget sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, but Wall Street doesn’t expect the cuts to substantially alter corporate profits or threaten stock markets.

.7 percent of the much-modified workforce will lose their income source but this WON’T affect the ‘bottom line’ of US based corporations?

Which is to point out that 700k is in fact a much smaller percentage of ‘working aged citizens’ but the workforce isn’t measured ‘rationally’ considering the bizarre idea of if you don’t have a job you don’t count skews the whole picture…

Is Wall Street ‘right’ about this assessment?

Sadly yes. Your job was exported and you were made ‘redundant’ to the new global economy. The individual they gave your job to ‘replaced’ you as a customer as well…making you totally superfluous.

The only reason there hasn’t been blood in the streets is because our ‘globalization is good’ cheerleaders haven’t been telling YOU the whole story.

They concentrate on the ‘lower prices’ part of the story (won through lower wages/benefits) as a ‘win-win’ situation.

The part where you lose is the few hundred million competitors who (completely) took YOUR place via the heavily manipulated ‘funny money market’ (which is about to collapse!)

In this respect it is more than a little amazing to see the corporate owned media laying this fact out in a way that shows everyone what capitalism has done!

How else can the US workforce lose such a large percentage of its workforce and not affect profits an iota?

This is where the rubber meets the road good citizen, If you have never considered yourself as ‘surplus’ before…it’s time to LOOK AGAIN!

Did I not point out that the policies of the past three decades point directly towards an effort to kill off as much of the 'surplus population' as possible?

Headlines like today’s TOP STORY should leave you with NO DOUBT who the cannon is pointed at…

It points at YOU!

If you aren’t a bona-fide member of the >One Percent, you’re toast.

Like things weren’t desperate enough, it gets more interesting:

Chinese Stocks Fall on Steps to Curb Property Prices
By DAVID BARBOZA 5:13 AM ET

China’s cabinet, or State Council, said home sellers would soon pay a 20 percent capital gains tax.

You don’t suppose Chinese equity prices are being ‘propped up’ by a ‘real estate bubble’ do you?

What do you suppose is going to happen when that little episode plays itself out?

Can you say ‘cascading systemic collapse’?

I knew you could!

For our last installment of ‘belaboring the obvious’ (seems to be the day for it.):

As Hacking Against U.S. Rises, Experts Try to Pin Down Motive
By NICOLE PERLROTH, DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Motives for a cyberattack, which could range from industrial spying to disabling the power grid, remain obscure.

Given what we have already discussed, especially the part where it becomes obvious that YOU are being played for a patsy however you slice it, are YOU ‘mystified’ as to why ‘the capitalists’ are under heavy attack from the cyber-warriors?

I’d say it was ‘self-defense’.

The curious part of this unforeseen development is just how far will they let it go?

You know they’ve been looking for an ‘escape hatch’ for quite some time…could this be it?

Get out of dodge under the cover of a crippling (and likely self-inflicted) cyber attack?

We all know today’s capitalist/opportunists are a little light in the honesty department so I’d opine that it wouldn’t ‘surprise’ me.

But the corporate owned media is repeatedly astonished by such mundane occurrences as sunrise.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Impasse

Greetings good citizen,

The Kabuki dance that passes for our government is being presented to convince you that the BAD (non-existent) LIBERALS are responsible for the ‘automatic austerity’ that somehow found its way into law.

Naturally, to that end, we have this headline:

Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts; G.O.P. Cheers
By ASHLEY PARKER

Speaker John A. Boehner seems to have decided that he may have more to lose by negotiation over the impending spending cuts than letting them happen.

Just to provide a clear starting point you must be aware that the ONLY reason the Republicans have retained control of one branch of Congress is to provide the ‘illusion of conflict’.

The voters of this nation aren’t that stupid…but they are powerless, thanks to the mis-steps of the founders.

Conservative rhetoric aside, we all KNOW who is responsible for the economic devastation being visited upon us.

The conservo-whackos keep pointing to the liberals (who no longer exist) claiming they are responsible for policies that passed during conservative administrations!

Why is there A SINGLE conservative in government today? Because the electoral process is rigged!

Hanging chads and all…(like we need to go there.)

The >One Percent tells their very willing puppets what to do and they do it.

Is this eventually going to get those puppets lynched? Undoubtedly! But that day has yet to come.

I remind you good citizen that the only people who need secrecy are people who are up to no good as we see in this headline from today’s front page:

Soldier Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Pfc. Bradley Manning confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.

Even more tragic than his arrest is the track record of the current administration towards ‘whistle blowers’.

And naturally, the, er, suspension of the young Pfc.’s rights makes the whole situation reek of justice being steam-rolled.

But that’s the funny thing about coups…they don’t give a fig about justice! They exist to PROTECT THE GUILTY!

Once you start doing that your whole justice system falls apart.

World’s largest inmate population…broken justice system, guess what? They’re related!

Record income inequality and a corrupt banking sector…related again!

You don’t have to look very far to find links that stretch right down to the local level.

The ‘rot’ goes right to the core!

Here you sit, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Miraculously things haven’t come unraveled (yet) but tick-tock good citizen, that old clock just keeps ticking off the seconds to zero (and you know it's going to happen soon because nothing is being done to head it off.)

(Ironically, acting to prevent derailment will be the most likely cause of one!)

Hmmn…maybe that’s what’s behind the latest Republican strategy!

Hanging in the balance here good citizen are school systems across the nation.

However, this situation is not unprecedented, across the south school systems closed during the (former) Great Depression due to ‘lack of funds’.

Given our inevitable conversion to a Banana Republic, this will be viewed as ‘no big loss’.

Thanks to ‘financial manipulation’ we have already been rendered ‘uncompetitive’ by those (union busting) conservative ‘haters of freedom’!

You either cut the schools or you cut fire and police…and you know the only reason Fire and Police protection exist is to protect the >One Percent…

YOUR tax dollars at work…protecting those who oppress you!

Same as it ever was.

So…what do we do about our ‘runaway government’?

Short answer, replace it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Land of Broken Promises

Greetings good citizen,

The rubric of ‘gradualism’ crept into public awareness during the (largely fabricated) ‘Red Scare’.

The analogy of a frog in a pot of water was used to exemplify how ‘gradualism’ worked (by the time you realized you were being boiled alive it was too late.)

We’d go about out lives and the insidious ‘commies’ would be infiltrating American Institutions and ‘contaminating’ them with their evil socialist poison!

(Which is what capitalists call every social ‘protection’ you have that they are required to fund.)

At the end of the day Bubba, it’s not their money but yours! But they still ‘view’ your social welfare as money THEY could have kept.

Who gives a fig what happens to you when you stop working? (Or at least that’s how the typical capitalist thinks.)

How disturbing is it that you can easily exchange the word capitalist for the word Republican? Even more disturbing is how the label Republican is now synonymous with the notorious >One Percent!

Now let’s bring the two concepts home

Water Torture, as American as Apple Pie
What does it mean when torture, already the definition of “cruel,” becomes usual?
February 24, 2013 |

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Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re in agony.

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “ tormenta de toca.” Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.”

How evil is it that you are being denied your RIGHT to ‘due process’ while the (hijacked rogue) government reclaims the right to torture its ‘enemies’ with impunity?

Even more disturbing is how even you might come to find yourself on the ‘enemies list’.

The question creeping through the back of everybody’s mind these days is whether or not, somewhere in their murky past, they may have (unknowingly) befriended a current Enemy of the State…and how that accident of fate has made YOU a ‘Person of Interest’.

Put two and two together. Let’s suppose this ‘old acquaintance’ that you haven’t laid eyes on IN DECADES is blamed for some act of civil disobedience. For the sake of argument let’s say this act resulted in the loss of a multi-million dollar facility and some first responders were injured will doing their job…but nobody died.

Guess who becomes a lightening rod if they can’t find a more recent ‘acquaintance’ of the suspect?

Let’s make it even more interesting…let’s suppose you never said a word to this geek, the only thing you’re guilty of is being a member of the same high school class as he/she was.

They’re not about to water board you…unless the suspect was one of those people you stayed in touch with after leaving school.

Now it gets more ‘interesting’…guilt or innocence is irrelevant, so is the, er, ‘intensity’ with which they pursue clues to the suspects whereabouts.

You get to take a ride on the government’s new toy whether you know anything of not!

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Your lawyer can’t get you out of this because you won’t be allowed to contact him…yes good citizen, in the name of ‘national security’ you’ve lost that right too.

Counsel will be advised he/she will be disbarred if he/she files any action against the torturers…and that should be the end of your search for ‘legal representation’.

Welcome to the NEW U.S.A. good citizen, (if you’re smart you’ll find the nearest exit before you’re trapped here and can’t escape!)

THIS is what those commie hating, capitalism loving patriots were trying to create to block the insidious spread of ‘socialism’.

Sort of puts the >One Percent thing in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

Bad enough they made you struggle through seven years of college and didn’t even offer you a job. Now you’re supposed to be ‘happy’ they’re not water-boarding you!

Yessiree Bob, the good ol’ U.S.A. has become precisely what the Native Americans called it long ago, “The land of broken promises.”

With that chilling thought in mind good citizen, I’d be extremely careful about who you cross.

The point of a gun is the only ‘law’ these psychos understand.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

SOTU

Greetings good citizen,

Well, the SOTU speech last night has us all scratching our heads, because it was nothing we haven’t heard a thousand times before.

Maybe it was comforting when more competent leaders told us we were in the process of rectifying longstanding wrongs…but in my mid-fifties, I’ve heard all of this crap before and guess what, it’s getting worse!

Isn’t insanity defined as doing the same act repeatedly, each time expecting a different outcome?

Pray tell, explain to me how throwing money at an education system that trains our kids for jobs that aren’t here any more is going to help?

This is nearly as ludicrous as letting banks ‘audit’ themselves. Given the, er, ‘integrity’ of modern banking, just how ‘trustworthy’ would these self-audits be?

I wouldn’t touch ‘em with a fifty-foot pole!

But I digress, back to the ‘how we doin’ speech…

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills to get those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?"

PRESIDENT OBAMA, in his State of the Union address.

I’d start with a different first question. I’d start by asking how much longer are we going to put up with this BS?

Because the answer to the first question is moot. There used to be a lot more jobs here BUT our sell-out politicians signed ‘free trade agreements’ with every Banana Republic on the planet, pauperizing the nation as a result.

So don’t ask STUPID QUESTIONS like ‘How do we ‘attract’ more jobs to our shores?’ when you already know the answer.

We have to ‘out Banana Republic the Banana Republics’ and throw our STANDARD OF LIVING IN THE TOILET…(so ‘a few’ can be rich.)

Worse good citizen, you’d all have to be blind not to see that this is exactly the direction we are headed in!

Good for the capitalist, not so good for you and yours.

I’d use a stronger adjective than ‘good’ but this has to go on an unfirewalled page too.

Left unchecked good citizen our civilization is headed the way of Easter Island…all because nobody has the courage to stand up to ‘the insane money men’ and tell them ‘no!’

I do it regularly but as you can see a single voice has no effect…all I do is annoy them. (Even that remark is ‘vanity’, it far more likely they don’t know I exist!)

But we left two statements ‘unchallenged’, let us return to our ‘quote of the day’…

Our number two ‘mission’ is to how do we ‘equip’ our people to do the ‘jobs of tomorrow’?

Again, stupid question, we do it the ‘old fashioned way’…ON THE JOB TRAINING!

Our numbskull politicians would have you believe the people who perform commerce’s heavy lifting learned to do what they do in college.

We old people know better, AFTER college, your new employer TRAINS YOU on how THEY WANT IT DONE!

To the point that most college grads wonder why they bothered taking on all of that debt only to be spoon-fed everything they do.

But they don’t say anything because they write it off as ‘the cost of the job’. They invested tens of thousand in an education that will pay them back a million over the course of their career.

Without the degree (that they don’t use) they wouldn’t have gotten the job.

Simple.

But they want YOU to believe it was hard…when nothing changes.

Now we arrive at the last, er, ‘assertion’, which is as comical as it is farcial!

How do we ‘insure’ these new jobs pay a living wage?

How sad is it nobody has an answer to the second half of that statement (What is ‘a living wage?’)

Once upon a time after Europe was desolated by WWII and the last man standing was the US, a living wage was a ‘middle class’ income. Where the multiple redundant ‘middle manager’ made enough money to swing that (modest) home in the suburbs, put his kids through school and sock away enough for retirement all before reaching age 55!

Jr. got his twenty year mortgage in his twenties so it was paid off by the time he turned forty(ish) and he had the last twenty years to sock away cash to retire ‘in style’.

Now things are different.

There are no ‘middle managers’ just as there is no ‘redundancy’, the ‘market’ is supposed to take care of those trifles…if a void presents itself, the market will fill it (despite the enormous cost.)

The few have already waxed richer than their needs, pauperizing the rest of the world. Now we have enormous sums with no place to go and the global economy is locked in a dead stall…all so a few could be rich.

Since the rest of us have been condemned to death by this reckless action of our politicians, let us pray the rich are enjoying their wealth…and will enjoy doing their own heavy lifting after we’re gone.

Although I doubt we’ll vanish completely…

Stupid is as stupid does.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(This post is ‘related’ to the larger series examining our civilization and how to repair/replace it.)

Government

Greetings good citizen,

In our ongoing series to highlight how we can change the world we discussed (briefly) the economic changes that need to be made in order to return society to prosperity.

What we didn’t do was touch upon the social ‘third rail’…not out of fear but due to the great degree of ‘ignorance’ that surrounds what politics should be about.

We have a landscape populated with starving, unemployed homeless people and all our politicians can talk about is gay marriage and gun control (along with Federal subsidies to get more cops and build new schools.)

Worse, politicians (and people with political ambitions) don’t see the need to change the conversation from what it was 200 years ago when the hot button was States rights Vs Federal rights.

Our new government, er, (bear with me) will be (as opposed to ‘should be) centered on Human rights.

How did our (Slaving) founders get it wrong? They had to avoid the issue of human rights so as not to offend the ‘monied interests’.

Worse, the founding of the US was seen as the birth of a ‘capitalist utopia’…which they rapidly learned would not work! But you have to give the capitalists credit, they are persistent if nothing else…(like intelligent, for example.)

Here it is two hundred years later and they are trying to pull the same stunt in China (which I predict will go horribly and catastrophically wrong.)

They tried to ‘capitalize’ the former Soviet Union and it blew up! (Just to give you an idea how toxic capitalism really is.)

So if capitalism is so toxic, how have we survived it for two hundred years?

Well, not all of us did. The death toll keeps rising as capitalism continues its death spiral.

Make no mistake about it, 99% of the murder rate is tied directly to capitalism.

And while it (again seems like) I am digressing, I am not. Capitalism is so ingrained in how we manage our society as to be inseparable.

And THAT is what I mean when I point to ‘ignorance in politics’.

Politicians regularly separate politics from commerce when, under capitalism, they are the same thing.

Ironically under A Simple Plan there are no politics…and political parties will be illegal.

I’ll go you one better, the ‘lie machine’ will be shut down too.

People who make their living molding public opinion will have to find a ‘real job’.

But now I digress, the ‘fourth estate’ is the subject of its own essay.

Under the new way of doing things we will have ‘direct democracy’…which means YOU will get to decide what is or isn’t illegal (within reason.)

Understand that our ‘leaders’, who will ‘earn’ their positions, will be in charge of the day to day business of keeping our society running. YOU will get to decide on the guidelines they’ll operate under.

Unlike today, leadership will NOT be in charge of the justice system. It will be an independent body charged with protecting society with a focus on preserving personal liberty.

These days money buys favorable legislation while ‘short-circuiting’ existing prohibitions. That will no longer be the case because we will not have ‘elected’ officials.

Our leaders will ‘win’ their positions by demonstrating they are the best candidate for the job via the tests!

Better! The tests are open TO ALL!* (Yeah, there is an exception that needs to be included here despite this being a far from definitive layout of A Simple Plan architecture.

(* You will not be permitted to test IF you are accused of an exile offense…and since false accusation is an exile offense we would hope nobody would bring such charges ‘frivolously’.)

IF we are to get ‘money’ out of the management of our society we need to put an end to political process designed to make candidates ‘beholden’ to the money interests.

And if we are to put human rights where they belong (number one) we must eliminate the influence of greed that routinely crushes compassion and understanding.

Spoken like a ‘true liberal’ wouldn’t you say?

Makes me wonder how many conservative heads explode reading my exhibits?

Because a true conservative doesn’t care about humanity or an uneven playing field, all a true conservative cares about is themselves.

Well our streets are full of hungry, homeless, unemployed people who are the ‘by-product’ of ‘compassionate conservatism’.

“We’re gonna end these folks suffering by farming out their jobs!”

Then we’ll cut their welfare and let them eat Democrats!

This, good citizen, is what ‘politics’ in the US has devolved into.

If you think it’s time for a change, I’m pointing the way.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wildly Optimistic

Greetings good citizen,

I was watching the idiot box by myself last night and what should come on but a show about global warming titled 2100. I am fully aware that the Discovery network is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by the amazingly optimistic timeline presented as a ‘worst case scenario.’

Turns out this little ‘made for cable’ pseudo horror show was produced in 2009 in association with ‘Mr. Flat-Earth’ himself (Thomas Friedman, a bonafide >One Percenter.)

The premises put forth were optimistic in the extreme. Fantasies such as commercial air travel (in futuristic jetliners and not dirigibles, which would have been more ‘realistic’) still existing in a post energy scarcity world, a topic which was, for the most part, ignored!

I shouldn’t say that, they did include a mention of gas stations being out of fuel but the knock on effects of this event weren’t factored it.

Oh, the real icing on this fantasy cupcake was that the nation’s most populous city (and the hometown of Mr. Flat Earth) was showcased as a shining example of sustainability!

The (cartoon) buildings all had wind turbines on them and the rooftops all had gardens to sustain the residents below…which is total BS, the numbers don’t work.

Another ‘curious’ feature of this ‘countdown to doomsday’ (after Humanity becomes sustainable it still manages to collapse!) is how the global population keeps dropping as the true bogeyman of global warming and over population is revealed to be water shortages.

Incidents of civil unrest are met with lethal force by the, er, ‘government’…and nobody protests. (Although in the show our protagonist protests a rate hike by the privately owned desalination plant and the people ‘win’…and she meets her future husband…

But again, like most ‘capitalist fairy tales’ this too goes against its own principles!

Anyway, the hero of this epic has a baby girl of her own, which she and protest boy (both allegedly ‘liberal do-gooders’, she’s a nurse and he’s an engineer.) move to NYC to raise…(it’s now around 2040)

This is during this cross-country trek that the energy situation is touched upon, yet they make the trip in a gasoline-powered vehicle!

Oh, and they show gas stations advertising $5 a gallon gasoline…when as soon as this summer we will be hit with pumps that can’t handle the new ten plus dollars a gallon prices.

And if you can’t pay…or worse, how much more ‘irresistible’ will this increase in prices make knocking over convenience stores?

Remember, all crime is ‘cash and carry’!

The same people who can’t afford double-digit gasoline will likely be the ones robbing the place after dark.

The ‘wildcard’ here is next generation ‘gangs’.

Will outlaws start traveling in numbers again?

But this, er, ‘eventuality’ wasn’t explored in last night’s (wildly optimistic) ‘worst case scenario.’

After the sustainable grid fails (inexplicably…well, okay, there is a plague but the assumption that it only kills the people maintaining the equipment is a bit far fetched…(although you can see one of the deep seated fears of the One Percent in this situation.)

The plague won’t get them (or the damn liberals) they’re ‘too good’. It will be their faithful servants who will be struck down by the terrible disease, leaving them helpless and alone in the dark and the cold.

Funny how this whole scenario circles back to the inability of the wealthy ‘to conceive of a society without slaves.’

More ironic is how these worthless creatures will perish without someone to do the heavy lifting for them…

This is how it will end for the champions of the ‘rugged individual’.

But not so for our liberal protagonist! At 75 years old (and recently widowed, her husband dies when the dam he designed fails…) She sets out through the wasteland on foot to find her long lost daughter living in upstate NY.

And like most capitalist ‘feel good’ disaster films, she finds her…and isn’t she widowed too!

I wonder how much of this story Tom’s wife contributed? I’m seeing a pattern here.

So, back to reality…

The ‘slow fizzle’ depicted in this 2009 ‘dramatization’ wasn’t even close to how it will likely go down.

They use the (failed) global warming summit of 2009 as the ‘turning point’ that sets mankind on its path to doom.

Makes you wonder how disappointed the One Percent are that the retail economy collapsed, basically shutting down worldwide consumption?

Somehow the pinheads don’t see this as an ‘opportunity’.

Remember what I keep saying, ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL! Here is the ‘chance’ to rebuild local economies around the globe, considerably lightening their ‘carbon footprint’.

It starts with LOCALLY PRODUCED ‘renewable energy products’. You know the capitalist pinheads want to sell you CHINESE wind turbines and solar collectors…but unemployment is too high!

So the turbines and panels need to be built locally (maybe incorporating A FEW ‘imported parts’) Unfortunately the idiots don’t understand what ‘a few’ means but this can be straightened out at the border, so to speak.

Maybe the capitalist pinheads will figure out that the Chinese need solar panels and wind turbines too…

But for this to work the rest of us need to abandon capitalism and its predatory ways…and we may want to put the boots to communist leaders whose ‘cats don’t hunt’ as well.

Because the worst case is a lot closer and much worse than the >One Percent ‘imagines’ it will be…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Animals

Greetings good citizen,

In a rare trifecta, the top stories on today’s NY Times provide us with a ‘snapshot’ of the current status of, er, ‘our’ civilization (Which is actually two societies that are no longer even pretending to ‘co-exist’.)

What do YOU make of this puzzling first piece?

Israeli Airstrike in Syria Targets Arms Convoy, U.S. Says
By ISABEL KERSHNER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

Israel carried out a strike deep inside Syria, American officials reported, saying they believed the target was a shipment of antiaircraft weapons meant for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So, was it a ‘surgical strike’? Did the Israeli ‘aces’ only destroy the boxes ‘addressed to Hezbollah’?

Of course not, this was like a drone attack at a funeral (anyone who was a friend of the deceased was a terrorist…and therefore deserving of ‘summary execution’, which, make no mistake about it, is PRECISELY what a drone attack is.)

Um, I’m not the only ‘unbeliever’ out there but if I’m wrong then hell is filling up mighty fast, wouldn’t you say?

How much sympathy do you think anyone has for ‘tiny Israel’ when they dispense with the entire justice system and murder with impunity?

Which is to opine that this is not ‘civilized’ behavior. If the rest of the world behaved like the Israelis regularly do it would be paved in glass already.

Moving on, we have this perplexing story that hints at communism not being completely crushed in China…(to the chagrin of the capitalists.)

Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months
By NICOLE PERLROTH

The timing of the attacks coincided with reporting for an investigation that found that the relatives of China's prime minister had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Seems it doesn’t matter what kind of government you are subjected too, it has a price and the capitalists are paying whatever it takes!

So the ‘politicians’ sell out their countrymen for a ‘better life’ for themselves…

Funny how that ‘monkey see-monkey do crap works, isn’t it?

How do you suppose we break that ‘cycle of corruption’ if NOBODY is ‘trustworthy’?

How about ‘your money is for you’?

Stopping the ‘counterfeiters’ is where it all starts. Most of what’s floating around like turds in our badly broken financial system is ‘fluff’ and prices no longer have any basis in reality.

How bad is it? Did I mention ‘trifecta’?

U.S. Growth Halted as Federal Spending Fell in 4th Quarter
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The government played a role in slowing the economic recovery as cuts in military spending and other factors overwhelmed the Federal Reserve's expanded campaign to spur growth.

Stocks Slip on Wall Street

[That last blurb snuck in and wasn’t intentional despite it being pertinent.]

But that’s nothing, I reported yesterday that GDP slipped and it had something to do with government spending.

Today it appears the story is a bit deeper and much more disturbing, our economy (such as it is) is on ‘life support’ tied to a printing press!

(Worse, the printing press is tied to a machine gun aimed at the hornets nest we call the Middle East!

How long do you think the ‘hosers’ in charge can keep this crapshoot afloat?

Probably just long enough to steal a lifeboat and load it full of the family jewels before bugging out to a tropical nirvana!

They won’t make it…but they ‘believe’ they will and to them that’s all that matters.

(Soon to be the plot of a major motion picture, yes, Hollywood IS ‘shameless’, which is bizarrely unrelated to its pervasive tastelessness… (Which has more to do with the bean counters than the art itself.)

all of which becomes moot when there is no longer a civilization to play to…

How ironic is it that the >One Percent thinks we are already there?

So, in aggregate, what do our top stories tell us?

In the first we see absolute ruthlessness in support of the ‘status quo’. Why is Israel ‘helping’ Assad? Because he keeps the Syrians out of Israel.

We’re back to the old ‘Devil you know’ scenario. Doesn’t matter if his people hate him as long as he holds up his end of the bargain and ‘peace’ reigns in the region.

Put a ‘wildcard’ in Assad’s slot and who knows what will happen next? Perhaps this new leader will unite the rest of the Arab world against the (thieving, murdering) West and upset the delicate balance of global energy supply and demand.

And everything north of the tropic of Cancer will freeze, in some cases, to death.

Our next story points at pervasive governmental corruption. How can anyour civilization survive if our ‘self-professed betters’ keep throwing the rest of us under the bus?

Then we have our ‘war-driven’ economy. What does this say about our children’s future?

As a sidebar/closer has anyone else noticed the, er, ‘eruption’ of desperate acts across the nation over the past couple of weeks?

While many of these incidents appear to be mental health related, we should still view them as the proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine’, a makeshift ‘barometer’ of social health if you will.

The more ‘nothing left to lose’ you see, the less control they have over the situation.

And it CAN BE STOPPED, they just have to ‘change course!’ (And stop treating people like animals…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rare Form

Greetings good citizen,

Oil has edged up to $97 a barrel (which is only 36 gallons when they’re measuring oil) and the Dow is in the black at the moment at 13,916 again, for no discernable reason.

Well, Pfizer did ‘beat expectations’ but Pfizer isn’t a component of the Dow…Under the category of Wall Street’s useful purpose, maybe the optimism is derived from the markets being used to ‘focus’ our politicians on the goals of the One Percent.

And it seems the One Percent needs some new legislation to protect profits from those pesky ‘generics’…(the devil with the consumer! It’s his inability to pay that’s causing this whole mess, (says the One Percent…)

So if any of you are wondering what our (bought and paid for) ‘legislators’ will be working on next…chances are it will be this:

Biotech Firms, Billions at Risk, Lobby States to Limit Generics
By ANDREW POLLACK

The industry’s lobbying effort could blunt new competition to its products and reduce the savings anticipated in the federal health care overhaul.

You can understand the ‘no vaseline’ but did they really need to throw the ground glass in there too?

If we take the point of view that the price of ‘LIFE SAVING MEDICATION’ doesn’t matter ‘cuz the ‘precious few’ plan on exterminating us anyway then stories like this aren’t worth getting angry over.

Since ‘United we aren’t’ we’re all alone in our death march. Nobody’s going to help us because they are all in the murderer’s pay.

How’s that for ‘dim’?

Worse, I can sit here and plead that we’ve got to get our act together but it falls on deaf ears.

Nobody’s going to stick their neck out until this thing reaches critical mass, then it will be too late (to guide it.)

Although you want to talk about ‘tap dancing on a land mine’, the bad boy is gonna blow any day now.

All it’s going to take is one more good push. And nobody knows what direction that push is going to come from.

Which should serve to tell us that things are pretty far-gone when a single headline about the manipulation of our legal system is enough to launch a tirade on the (largely unacknowledged) 'war between the classes!'

But that’s not all that’s going on good citizen…

11:24 AM ET NYTimes
When Good Drivers Pay More for Insurance than Bad Ones

11:22 AM ET Reuters
Goodbye Goodwill as European Firms Pay High Price for M&A

11:16 AM ET NYTimes
Report Gauges Companies' Approach to Advertising on Social Media

11:10 AM ET NYTimes
New Home Office Deduction Is Simpler, but Smaller

10:51 AM ET IHT
French Central Bank Workers Strike Over Job Cut Plans

10:38 AM ET AP
CNN Executive Mark Whitaker Quitting

10:34 AM ET Reuters
Financial Fears Hit Consumer Confidence in January

10:25 AM ET IHT
Appeals Court Suspends Peugeot's Job-Cut Plan

Maybe it just us old people but every time we look at the media we see more jobs going away. Obviously to make us ‘more competitive’ but that hole appears to be ‘bottomless’.

Which is to opine that when we finally achieve ‘parity’ we will simultaneously achieve pauperdom!

But that’s our ‘lot in life’ (according to ‘the One Percent’) and who are we to complain.

We should be GRATEFUL we aren’t euthanized when we are born! (Fear not, legislation along this line is being drafted by Alex as you read this. So much for the conservative devotion to the ‘sanctity of life’, eh?)

Of course, if you talk to one, practically the first words out of their mouths is what a waste of perfectly good butt-wipe the rest of the human race is.

Yet these psycho’s are ‘anti-abortion’, what’s up with that? (Because once you’re born these same freaks are pro eugenics!)

Needless to say good citizen it’s been a rough 48 hours, thus am I in ‘rare form’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tinman 2

Greetings good citizen,

I feel good today (despite the gods having gone mad!) Which seems to be today’s theme. Yesterday I complained about society losing its values, today we will take in the leading headlines and scratch our heads, wondering what ‘our betters’ were thinking…because it is obvious they weren’t!

Robot Makers Spread Global Gospel of Automation
By JOHN MARKOFF

Manufacturers of robots and similar machines gathered in Chicago, casting automation as an indispensable engine of economic growth.

Read the last line and marvel over the twit who stated it! Employers LOVE robots, they will work around the clock without taking a break, doing whatever it is they were designed to do, until they break.

The fly in this ointment is a society filled with robots needs nothing but the energy to power them, there is no ‘economy’ for robots.

Do we really need to ask HOW STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE to not understand that?

And yeah, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy kicking the capitalists in the shins every chance I get!

Because it is capitalist stupidity that gives us stories like this:

BUSINESS
Boeing's Battery Problems Cast Doubt on Appraisal of New Technologies
By JAD MOUAWAD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

The 787's difficulties have raised questions about how regulators certify new technology and how they balance advances in design and engineering with safety.

Hold everything! I thing we found the twit who think robots are the answer to the automation problem [idiots!]

Was it an accident or by design that the corporate owned media runs the ‘perfect’ follow up story next?

Share of the Work Force in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low, 11.3%
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the percentage of American workers in labor unions fell to 11.3 percent last year, the lowest since 11.2 percent in 1916.

That’s the other thing employers LOVE about robots! They don’t join unions! So the union isn’t in their face demanding more humane working conditions and that demand they really hate, more wages!

Although it has become the hallmark of capitalist stupidity that people who can’t afford your products won’t buy them, so cutting heads when sales drop is not an ‘effective strategy’.

Oh, and since robots don’t get paychecks (or benefit packages) they also don’t buy your products!

Bottom line. The same people who can no longer afford to pay for your products will eventually STEAL them…but you’re insured, right?

And when the heads you’ve cut burn your plant down, same answer, right? (Naturally, you re-open in China!) But your new employee/customers won’t be able to afford our products either so what will you do?

Same thing as these guys?

Nokia Shows a Profit, but Shares Drop
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN 50 minutes ago

Investor hopes were raised when the Finnish cellphone maker said it would turn a profit, but sales of its flagship Lumia were less than expected.

The homeless don’t need a phone, nobody they want to talk to that isn’t within arm’s reach…which is the fertile soil revolutions are sown in.

How sad is it good citizen that we lack a unifying ideology? [Like A Simple Plan?]

Like a ticking time bomb, how long do you think we have before this bad boy blows?

Euro Watch
Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone
By REUTERS

While the euro zone economy moved a step closer to recovery this month, Spain’s unemployment rate surged to 26 percent.

Sure looks to me like that headline is missing an ‘s’, should read ’points’ but hey, I just cut and paste, ya know?

What’s up with the mixed message? On one hand they are, er, ‘asserting’ that conditions in the euro-zone are ‘improving’ then they point to sky-high unemployment and shrug…

Did I mention our civilization is SEVERELY ‘mismanaged’?

These people shouldn’t just be fired, they should be made to walk the plank into shark infested water (but that would constitute cruelty towards sharks!)

No living organism can eat that many ‘empty calories’ without being adversely effected.

I am no Luddite good citizen. In many cases automation is a larger boon to the employee than it is to the employer.

What I am pointing to is SOME things can tolerate automation and others CAN’T. Wisdom needs to be exercised rather than idiotic profit/loss ratios.

Our civilization is collapsing because society has become unbalanced due to the reckless/relentless pursuit of profits.

When profits supercede people without mitigating factors it is beyond destructive, it is catastrophic!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Disgusted

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace but the top of my head exploded when I read this nonsense!

The New Tao of Trade: Don’t Just Import from China. Sell There.

Like many American businesses fighting to keep their prices competitive, Vision Quest Lighting turned to China about six years ago. It now imports about a sixth of the two dozen to three dozen parts required to make its lighting fixtures from there. Recently, however, the Long Island company began to see China in a different light: as a sales target. The growing economy of the world’s most populous nation made it ripe for Vision Quest’s architectural lighting fixtures, many custom-made for hotel and restaurant chains like Hilton and KFC.

When one such client, a clothing retailer, ordered 1,500 lights for five stores, Vision Quest’s chief executive, Larry Lieberman, decided it made sense to start manufacturing lights in China. Other American clients, he reasoned, would no doubt begin placing similar orders as their chains sought to capitalize on the world’s fastest-growing consumer market. And with high-quality products from the West coveted in China, Mr. Lieberman also imagined his products on display in Chinese showrooms.

And yet, selling goods in China is not easy. Mr. Lieberman made the 1,500 lights only to see them gather dust in a warehouse in Guangzhou for more than four weeks because he had not yet established a local enterprise approved to process sales.

Pssst! We wouldn’t need to listen to IDIOT SUGGESTIONS LIKE THIS if we castigated (as well as castrated) our legislators for letting work that was originally here to migrate there!

And guess what? Once energy becomes scarce, the ‘cheaper there’ vanishes…and the ‘silent majority’ will be standing here, holding on to an empty bag, unable to afford the goods we ‘used to make for ourselves’.

What seems to be the main problem here?

Looks to me the problem is men like Skippy, who the moment things get busy, the first thought that pops into his teeny little mind is “I could really rake it in if I could farm this out to China!”

Take it from a manufacturing man, 1,500 pieces ain’t nothin, most shops would turn the work away. You also aren’t going to see appreciable saving in those quantities. You aren’t buying enough material to take advantage of the volume discount.

How will Skippy ‘get lucky’? He’ll be directed to a manufacturer who is subsidized by the Chinese government to do work that originates in the US.

That’s where Skippy will reap his profits from and the Chinese shop owner will make his off of the government…and the government will get theirs by charging the Americans more interest as they subsidize predatory capitalism around the globe.

As our ‘standard of living’ descends into the basement and we start moving back towards the trees, the shrinking mindless and clueless ‘middle class’ will continue to wonder why their purchasing power keeps shrinking.

I must admit, I started this post in an ‘agitated’ state, marveling over how we have gotten this far with 20 CENTURIES OF FAIRY TALES being passed off as history.

We are either A.) incredibly STUPID or B.) unbelievably tolerant…(to the point of stupidity.)

I think we’d all be at least a little cranky when the only two possible answers arrive at the same conclusion.

I got started on this (what’s wrong with my species) jag considering the ‘gold paradox’.

True, the stuff is ‘rare’ but it is also ‘useless’ if we consider its electrical properties weren’t discovered until the advent of the electronics age in the 1950’s. It’s been considered ‘precious’ since pre-historic time, a fact that has given rise (and a degree of credibility) to ancient alien theorists.

And this preciousness is based solely on its resistance to oxidation! Shiny gold stays shiny! Whoop-de do!

Well, look at where this ‘silliness’ has landed us?

A global economy on the verge of cascading systemic collapse…because boneheads like Skippy think farming things out to China is a ‘good idea’!

FULL STOP!

What does Skippy’s desire to make pockets full of cash through outsourcing and the value of gold have to do with one another?

Our value system is bankrupt! We have been ‘hoodwinked’ into pursuing ‘representative wealth’ while others step in and simply take the stuff worth having from us.


This is like the people ‘upset’ by Russia’s sudden ban on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens…don’t they think there are enough kids right here in the US that need a good home?

[They’re going to Russia so they can adopt White kids, as sad as that is.]

Perhaps this would be a good time to bring up the issue of not knowing anybody who ISN’T in some kind of fertility program (because they squandered their prime reproductive years chasing their capitalist enforced goals?)

Why isn’t the media paying any attention to this crisis…or does the corporate owned media think (the rabble being unable to reproduce) is a ‘good thing’

I’m too disgusted to continue…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sanitized...

Greetings good citizen,

Instead of the usual run down of the financial headlines, what jumped at me this morning but this article, written by one of the most clueless economists ever to hold a seat on the Federal Reserve Board.

I only clipped the end of the whole article to give you an idea, a ‘taste’ if you will.

Financial Collapse: A 10-Step Recovery Plan

The meek won’t inherit their fair share of the earth if they are constantly being fleeced. What we learned in the crisis is that failure to protect unsophisticated consumers from financial predators can undermine the whole economy. That surprising lesson mustn’t be forgotten. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should institutionalize it.

Mark Twain is said to have quipped that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. There will be financial crises in the future, and the next one won’t be a carbon copy of the last. Neither, however, will it be so different that these commandments won’t apply. Financial history does rhyme, but we’re already forgetting the meter.

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and the author of “After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response and the Work Ahead.”

His advice in the snippet is surprisingly ‘sound’ (if you believe, as he obviously does, that capitalism can be ‘salvaged’.)

And you already know my position on that particular topic, it can’t and there is no sense in trying…or worse, pretending that there is ‘no alternative’.

Although you won’t find a capitalist who believes such a thing exists, how ironic is it that the part these people love the most about Capitalism is the ‘my way or the highway’ part?

Should you click through to read the article you will find that bullet point number one blames the consumer for ‘regulatory capture’ by making the point ‘Remember that People forget’.

Worse, there is a whole generation coming of age that has no idea what a moron/‘tool’ Ronald Reagan was.

All they know is how dysfunctional our current political system is and they’ll (hopefully, for the usurpers sake) be eager to embrace a ‘more traditional’ form of governance.

(And the elites who were ‘disappointed’ when Washington turned down the crown will have their day!)

There is a reason why the role-playing video world is dominated by medieval culture. It was the time of ‘kings’ and who but our Royal Wannabes wants to step out of their nations' treasuries and ‘take charge’ of the kingdoms their (alleged) great grand-parents walked away from so long ago.

And it's been the video game industry that has 'glorified' monarchy and popularized the notion that a commoner can, through noble deeds, become an accepted member of the 'noble gentry.'

They want to ‘help’ us good citizen but first you have to want their help and be willing to surrender you’re ‘right to choose’ which you weren’t using ‘properly’ in the first place.

(I wonder why we weren’t ‘using it properly’? Could it be ‘the framers’ put power safely out of the citizen’s reach?)

Rumor has it there were some ‘arguments’ over this decision but the proof is in the pudding and we can plainly see which side ‘won’.

Central to the dominance of the criminals over our species is the idea that we CAN’T rule ourselves, we NEED them to tell us not only what to do but how to do it.

This is just what it looks like, a self-serving lie.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of us that only a few need to be, er, ‘persuaded’ to go along with this outrageous idea while the rest of us are forced into bloody revolution to throw off the yoke of the criminal tyrants?

Take a hard look good citizen, the only missing piece is naming (and subsequently crowning) the ‘new king’.

In case you were wondering, there will be no ‘elections’…worse, discussion of the monarch’s ‘fitness to rule’ will be ‘strictly prohibited’.

But wait good citizen, the nightmare is only beginning! The ‘new monarchy’ will make a big display of putting every ‘royal decision’ to a public vote…but, and this is the but that caused the original downfall of monarchy, we will have the return of the ‘infallibility of the monarch’.

What good is being king if it’s not ‘my way or the highway’?

So the monarch will modify whatever policy proposal is before him 'to his liking' regardless of what YOU think of it. Which is to point out the whole voting thing will be a mockery to beat you over the head with!

And don't even entertain the notion of not voting. It will be mandatory.

Worse, the King (or Queen, if they think a female will be more malleable/easily embraced by the public.) will still be subject to that age-old nemesis ‘intrigue’.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term it basically means your relatives, especially those in line to 'inherit' the crown, will kill you if they think they can get away with it.

Remember, once you’re king you can derail royal investigations with the snap of your fingers…(or the wave of your hand if snapping is too much for you.)

After everybody moves up the ladder, the ‘next in line’ clan does whatever it can to pin the former regent’s death on the new one…if they succeed, Yachtzee!

But people are ‘buy-able’ as our current ‘cleptocracy’ has proven repeatedly.

Meanwhile, the culprit in the last regent’s untimely demise has been made a Duke, making them virtually unassailable.

And under the ‘law of unintended consequences’ we find ourselves faced with the classic “meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” scenario.

All because today’s kids are ‘unaware’ that Ronald Reagan (and by extension, W.) should never have been president.

This is what happens when money contaminates the electoral process.

Worse good citizen, it is already ‘too late’.

The ONLY way to ‘fix’ this mess is to flush it down the toilet and start over (while the criminals learn to cha-cha with the Gila monsters!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner