Workie-workie!

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s topic is the world of work. While some, er, ‘freethinkers’ argue that work is unnecessary, they can’t argue their way around that fact that if nobody works, nothing gets done.

And you’d be amazed at how few people want to participate in ‘productive ventures’ (at least on a ‘trade basis’.)

They’d rather ‘decorate’ rocks and trade those for food than do the actual hard work of tilling the soil and growing crops or tending to the needs of the livestock because if someone doesn’t do either, there won’t BE any.

But our ‘why workers’ point to nature shows like ‘Yukon men’ or ‘Alaska the last frontier’ and their ‘self-sufficient’ lifestyle and claim that’s how it should be.

When the shows themselves focus on how as the population rises, it becomes harder and harder to bag enough game to make it through the 8 month long winters.

Yet each episode demonstrates how Mother Nature herself is a cruel taskmaster. You’ve only got so much time to get the job done and if you don’t finish or if things are a little ahead of schedule, too bad.

Which is to say every one of our ‘frontiersmen’ works their ass off just to survive.

Mind you, nobody ‘pays’ them to do what they do. (Well, the TV crew must pay ‘em something but there isn’t anyplace up there to buy the stuff you need.) So the money buys fuel, ammo and tools like ATV’s, new boats and bigger guns.

Most of us grew up in a society that doesn’t make us work ‘hard’ (Compared to what our ancestors had to do to survive.)

The miracle that is ‘money’ enables us to live comfortably without having to do EVERY LITTLE THING for ourselves.

So it is that we have encountered a different, er, ‘situation’ than the one our ancestors faced…although, truth be told, this situation is far from ‘new’.

Now we have more workers than work…what a happy situation because now everyone can do a smaller chunk of the task at hand and everybody wins more ‘free time’.

But that’s not how it works under (more for me) capitalism.

Worse, more for me capitalism is extremely wasteful…now that the population is approaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet, don’t you think it’s time we start addressing the inefficiencies and inequities of the ‘more for me’ mindset?

Yes, ‘need’ drives the entire picture…and it’s what keeps the ‘more for me’ crowd living in the lap of luxury.

How, er, ‘frightening’ is it that the already filthy rich don’t need but a fraction of the wealth they have gouged out of the rest of us?

It SHOULD scare you spitless.

Because if money were being used ‘correctly’ the more for me bunch wouldn’t have the lock they have on our species survival they have now.

The very fact that the uber wealthy exist demonstrates the main flaw in capitalism.

Sadder perhaps is the >One Percent’s ‘legalization’ of their unjustified avarice.

When the giants of our society had the Supreme court (which they own, lock stock and barrel!) declare that the purpose of commerce was to enrich its owners!

Whereas the original and most commonly accepted definition of the purpose of commerce is to serve society’s needs ‘at a reasonable profit’.

How much trouble do you think ‘we’ (as a species) are in considering the conservo-whackos did away with the anti usury laws? (Never mind stripping you of your right to due process!)

Um, boys and girls, the >One Percent have declared ‘open season’ on us and there isn’t a darn thing we can do about it! (I was going to say they declared war upon us but that would imply we have the ability to fight back…which we don’t!)

The real riddle is what these weasels are going to tell our sons and daughters when they order them to open fire on us?

Now here’ s a scary thought. Considering the basic theme of most video games, how many of ‘em will even hesitate?

We aren’t ‘The Family of Man’. We are a collection of (pseudo) ‘rugged individuals’ a la John Wayne or Captain Kirk.

And guess who has fed our children THAT particular illusion?

While we did nothing to stop them.

Which is to point out good citizen that there are some real ‘monsters’ loose at the top of our society.

And they should be made to PAY for their CRIMES.

Illegal and immoral are two separate concepts and you can only wonder why…because immoral SHOULD BE illegal. Yet these sicko’s are going to use the ‘I’ve done nothing illegal’ defense as they stand amidst the smoking landscape that their actions turned to scorched earth.

Then, the real coup de grace, they’re going to ‘apologize’.

And we will respond with ‘take a hike mac!’

So let’s recap, shall we?

We have a world that we have ‘tamed’ and COULD BE working a lot less than we currently do…but we have been saddled with a system of commerce that doesn’t need all of the available workers.

Now the, er, ‘beneficiaries’ of this twisted system are trying to keep things from changing, which HAS RESULTED in the collapse of the commerce system.

(In case it looks like I went screaming off the reservation towards the end there…I did not.)

The question, good citizen, as always, is ‘what are we going to do about it?’

Anyway,

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

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

Self-Extermination

Greetings good citizen,

The hard won holiday has ceased activity on the NYSE, sparing the world from its toxic influence.

Um, a (now long neglected) common theme of my posts is desperation. People will do unimaginable acts of violence if they are ‘desperate’ enough.

It underlies everything I predict, such is the incredible ‘power’ of desperation. Increasingly we are seeing the acts of the desperate and the cowardly corporate owned media is covering them up as the random acts of the ‘psychologically unstable’ (which the feckless capitalists abandoned shortly after ‘privatizing’ health care.) Yet another stick pin on the social map with St. Ronnie’s name on it!

It may be just me but ‘gold bugs’ are very practical when it comes to money (although they don’t get the ‘funny’ part, which sort of erases the appeal of their arguments regarding the ‘conservation of value’.)

Then we have guys like Mr. Hedges here, who have their fingers firmly on the pulse of civilization but take the same ‘wicked left’ when it comes to solving those problems.

How blind do you have to be to see that only the truly wicked claim to ‘speak for God’?

Republicans regularly go ‘on record’ as having had ‘personal dialog’ with ‘the supreme being.’

In most circles this is evidence of insanity but not in US politics where the feckless corporate owned media is involved!

But I, as usual, digress. Let us move forward with today’s offering:

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

As Mr. Hedges indicates, there WILL be a ‘kill-off’ that will be disguised as a ‘Die-off’ (through gross mismanagement.)

Worse, the bought and paid for media will play it as a ‘natural disaster’…although the capitalist’s deliberate mismanagement of the economy has already begun the nutritional squeeze that will lead to the most devastating ‘global pandemic’ the world has ever seen.

Slip an unintended whoopsie in there (such as a real ‘natural disaster’) and it could spell extinction for our already ‘reproduction challenged’ base population.

But the ‘What if’ game is always a ‘dead-end’, we won’t ‘know’ until we get there.

Worse, the rhetoric surrounding climate change has taken on a harder edge, which is making it less credible. Global warming didn’t kill the dinosaurs and it sure isn’t going to kill us!

Which is to opine that we won’t ALL drown and sustainability (along with what it takes to get there) remains an ‘unknown’.

If we are to save ourselves from extinction (by self-extermination) we must manage the resources that remain to reduce desperation to an absolute minimum. (It wouldn’t hurt to put the brakes on the predatory capitalist's worship of gratuitous violence either! The hatred and the killing of your own species is a learned thing, it is NOT natural.)

The article misses another important point and that has been the cessation of all ‘forward scientific advance’ to preserve the ‘patents’ (profitability) of past discoveries.

Again, we need to refocus on the definition of ‘progress’ as the benefit reaped by all mankind from discovery and research rather than the imaginary benefit reaped by a few over the rest of us.

So we have it that stagnation, driven by self-interest, has resulted in creeping ‘desperation that is shredding the fabric of our civilization…so ‘a few’ can be ‘rich’.

When true progress makes us ALL rich!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Occupy Who?

Greetings good citizen,

Monday again and the ‘nonsense markets’ are up to their usual shenanigans, mostly reflecting the ‘will’ of the One Percent.

But that isn’t the headline that caught my eye. In fact it was the opposite question that popped into my head when I saw this story in today’s AlterNet newsletter

Is the Tea Party Over?
The answer all depends on what you mean by "Tea Party."
January 12, 2013 |

Photo Credit: A.M. Stan

There's a new parlor game in your nation's capital, played by reporters and pundits who begin with a single question: Is the Tea Party dead? Endlessly entertaining to ponder, it's a question whose answer depends on your definition of the Tea Party movement.

Are you talking about the 900 grassroots Tea Party groups in 2010 whose numbers have now dwindled to 600? Or the popularity of the movement among most Americans?

Or do you measure the "Tea Party" as a marketing plan by the right wing in its 50-year quest to bend the Republican Party to its will and bring the nation to its knees?

The opening question, as C.K. Michaelson is fond of phrasing it, is ‘asked and answered’.

The Tea Party has been around for years and isn’t going anywhere. Conspicuous by its absence (and thus the title of today’s offering) is ‘Occupy Who?’

What happened to that ‘loose confederation’ of ‘concerned students’ who peered into the future and saw stuff that would have made even Orwell balk?

Did they scare themselves into submission or did those magical acronyms do the trick?

(I’ll never get a job teaching with a FBI record hanging over my head!)

Thus did the ever so tenuous ‘movement’ to protest the rule of the oligarchs ‘vanish’ in pretty much the same way it coalesced.

Which is not to say the OWS ‘participants’ have, er, ‘abandoned’ the cause, they haven’t.

What they were looking for then and what they are looking for still are ‘answers’.

The trouble with being young and knowing all the answers (as they were spoon fed to you) is you begin to realize how little you actually ‘know’ with any degree of certainty.

Everything you have been taught has six inches of ‘whitewash’ covering it, whether it needed it or not! It’s done for ‘consistency’…so it all ‘blends’.

As I age I am seeing this ‘goo’ being applied to days of my youth and the national tragedy that was Vietnam.

The misguided vendetta against already wobbly ‘communism’ was really just a ‘trial run’ for the GWOT!

If we get kids young enough, will they ‘kill on command’?

And the answer turned out to be yes.

Well, good citizen, what do you suppose ‘the answer’ to that one is?

You’re correct again, I don’t ‘know’ either BUT I’m pretty sure throwing EVERYBODY in the INTELLIGENCE community in the big house would provide a clear starting point to correct 50 years of military ‘adventurism’.

I know I am not alone in ‘theorizing’ that something went radically wrong after WWII and the introduction of the ‘nuclear age’.

Just how far would/did ‘our betters’ go towards insuring that nuclear technology didn’t fall into the hands of ‘the rabble’? [Iran anyone?]

Aren’t those the ‘battle lines’ we are seeing today? Did the ever-paranoid capitalists see their doom written in a mushroom cloud wielded by those they have oppressed?

Worse, the ‘hate’ doesn’t stop there. There are those among us who ‘believe’ the human race isn’t worthy of the (totally fictional) ‘kingdom of heaven’, and would see us all ‘eradicated’ so that nasty Jesus wouldn’t be able to ‘save’ us (allegedly) again.

Which is to opine that there are some mighty unbalanced individuals out there. (Start with ANYONE who claims to speak for ‘spirit in the sky’…then proceed to the entire crowd born with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’ stuck in just about any orifice!)

But I digress, somewhat anyway.

Where is OWS and more importantly, where are its ‘children’?

The Tea Partiers have been with us for long time under different guises, soon they will abandon their tri-corner hats and start pretending it wasn’t them at all! (In typical conservo-looney fashion!)

I, perhaps unkindly, predicted the demise of OWS when it became obvious they were as ‘rudderless’ as the alleged 99% appear to be.

They ‘identified’ the enemy easily enough…and then they sat there and did nothing. And when the cops came they fled.

Somehow I don’t think that will be the case next time but I’m just ‘thinking out loud’ here.

When the ‘second leg’ of the downturn hits and the people take to the streets, chances are good the One Percent will be A.) long gone and B.) quick to ‘appease’ the protesters with mock trials for low level offenders…

But seriously good citizen, justice, five years delayed, will not repair the economy or our badly broken society.

While the Libertarian leaning ‘progressives’ speculate on the fate of the Tea Party, the rest of us can continue forgetting the movement that wasn’t…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Uncertainty

Greetings good citizen,

As we slog forward into an uncertain future those who would drive our civilization over a cliff to mask their crimes against humanity care not what happens after that.

My advice, as always, is to prepare. (And NOT like the idiots on ‘doomsday preppers’ who obviously have a screw loose…besides being decidedly homicidal! If you need further convincing that the world after the collapse is going to be uncommonly hazardous, watch the show!) Hint: it’s the trigger happy preppers you have to watch out for! Stumble upon their ‘hide’ and they will open fire first and ask questions afterwards!

In a flicker of insight on an otherwise direction-less horizon we have this article that belabors the obvious in a couple of directions…

Our Economic Pickle
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The debt-ceiling debate is unlikely to alter one major factor contributing to income inequality: stagnant wages.

Now that it is ‘on the table’, who (and how) will the issue of ‘stagnant wages’ be addressed?

‘Employers’ have no problems raising their prices in pace with inflation (driving inflation ever upwards) but are ‘strangely reluctant’ to raise their ‘employee/customers’ purchasing power.

The ‘strategy’ could be called ‘out-waiting the competition’, the longer they wait to raise their employees pay, the more they keep for themselves.

Ultimately, your NOT being paid a living wage is being driven by the ‘owners desire’ to wax rich (at, ultimately, ALL of our expense.)

It’s lower prices we don’t pay and fair wages you don’t get, because the idiots who sign your paycheck follow their mother’s advice and PAY THEMSELVES FIRST!

Funny how this advice isn’t so sound when you put it into this context, is it? It creates a ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ situation that is crumbling all around us as we sit here contemplating how we got ourselves into such a, as the article calls it, ‘Pickle’?

We will see in the article after this next one who WON’T be working to save us from employer greed

But the other article first:

News Analysis
The Low Politics of Low Growth
By ANNIE LOWREY

What if it is the weak economy that is driving the fiscal failures in Washington?

How odd is it that the question answers itself? (But this can be attributed to the ‘muzzle’ the ‘write for hire’ crowd is forced to wear.)

I find it astounding that our, and let’s face it, none of them has a grip on reality, ‘politicians’ continue to flog the concept of ‘perpetual growth’ as the key to future prosperity.

How can you ‘grow’ when there has been NOTHING ‘new’ since Pong? Every other technological marvel is merely the ‘fleshing out’ of potential that was already there.

So ‘exporting jobs’ (to make it more profitable for the ‘owner’) also doesn’t encourage (local) economic growth. It really only serves to make the owner richer than he/she deserves to be.

But are our politicians focused on their ‘primary job’ of managing our civilization for the benefit of our species?

Let’s have a look:

TOP NEWS
Obama Will Seek Citizenship Path in One Fast Push
By JULIA PRESTON

President Obama and lawmakers from the two parties believe that their best chances for passing substantial legislation on immigration will come early in his second term.

Like healthcare, NOBODY is looking for a ‘solution’ to an already over-populated, far too competitive job market!

It’s been opined that this (European satellite) was built by ‘immigrants’. (It was even somewhat true when most of the immigrants hailed from Europe…)

Not that providing EMPLOYERS with a ‘cheaper labor pool’ to exploit is ever a justification to ‘streamline’ the immigration process, especially when you get a load of how they intend to go about it.

You’ll get your ‘citizenship’ all right but first you’ll have to do your military service. You will be sent to foreign lands, meet new, interesting people and kill them.

What used to be scabs to keep the factories humming (cheaply) will become fodder for the endless wars the capitalists wage, merely to keep the population (and by extension, the unemployment rate down.)

There won’t be any ‘resource wars’. Resources are all sold openly on the (alleged) ‘free markets’ so what’s to ‘fight’ over?

Even the current conflict in the Middle East is over a police problem that should have been handled ‘internally’ by local law enforcement.

BUT NO! Our (block-headed) government had to use military force instead of foreign aid and providing foreign governments the tools to handle the problems itself.

Worse, our (rogue) government supports criminal regimes like the Israelis who openly subjugate the former inhabitants of the nation they now ‘occupy’ and use military force to maintain the upper hand, in open defiance of international law…not that ‘respect for the law’ is real strong here either.

But that’s another issue altogether as the ‘over fifty crowd' prepares to fight for its survival!

BUSINESS
Over 50, and Under No Illusions
By CAITLIN KELLY

Many people aged 55 to 64, who had been dreaming of easy retirement, have had to remake their lives to find work during the recession and its aftermath.

As many of us close in on the ‘finish line’ of our professional careers (most of them in tatters…the careers and our humble selves.) We are encountering the above mentioned ‘lawlessness’ that offers us no recourse to what is likely to turn into a very deadly confrontation.

While we have long lamented the ‘rudderless’ condition of our crumbling society, this was no accident. It didn’t ‘wear out’, it was snapped off by those who could (through manipulation) afford to ‘buy’ the justice system…(something many will pay dearly for because so many already have!)

Note how the capitalist credo is parroted here in the headline. How the ‘over fifty crowd’ are (unsuccessfully) ‘making themselves useful’ as they ‘sprint’ (more like limp/drag) themselves toward a finish line that (mysteriously) keeps backing away! (So a wretched few can be rich…)

Yes, good citizen, we’re all going to be each other’s ‘financial advisors’ and manage each other’s money and sell each other houses neither of us can afford.

With those ‘encouraging words’ I thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Voting with their wallets...

Greetings good citizen,

Happy Saturday! (A day of ‘respite’ in the bad old days of the seventy plus hour week without any ‘overtime’ pay.)

How sad is it that these days you can’t get 40 hours and paying overtime will get some managers fired! (Weirdly, that part hasn’t changed…)

And yes, thanks to the ‘elimination’ of the Blue Laws (seems the founders didn’t completely separate the Church from the State, the Church, up until forty years ago, kept ‘Sabbath’ legislation in place.

We won’t even go into the ‘coincidences’ (The Jews celebrate the sabbath on Saturday and the ‘Sun-worshippers’ keep ‘Sun-day’ as their sabbath!)

How the Christians, who are basically Jews that believe their ‘savior’ has already come…(and now anxiously await his return.) As opposed to the orthodox Jew, who is still waiting for the savior to arrive for the first time…

Well, how did those two groups ended up shifting the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday remains pretty much a mystery.

Maybe they wanted to ‘break from tradition’…and this from a guy who has no truck with ‘Spirit in the Sky’.

The ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ are BOTH within YOU!

Since I didn’t start off writing a post about superstition (although the main topic borders on it…) I need to ‘re-wind’ and start over.

While the pundits on both side of the issue have prostrated themselves, attempting to convince the rest of us that ‘guns’ should be ‘restricted’

The public in general is (in typical capitalist fashion) ‘voting with their wallets.’

TOP NEWS
Sales of Guns Soar in U.S. as Nation Weighs Tougher Limits
By MICHAEL COOPER

The rapid growth in gun sales began after President Obama's re-election and surged after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn.

The ‘anti-gunners’ will claim this is the knee-jerk reaction of ‘a few’ loony radicals, saying the numbers aren’t high enough to prove conclusively that ‘everybody’ (or even a majority of the population) is ‘girding their loins’.

But have you checked out the prices on weapons lately?

They sure aren’t giving them away…Which is to say the ‘heat or eat crowd’ may WANT to ‘improve their security picture’ but for the most part can’t.

Even a battered Saturday Night Special represents a week’s worth of food for people living on the edge (of starvation.)

The people buying guns can be divided into two groups. These are people who have ‘talked about’ getting a gun for a long time but haven’t done anything about it because they couldn’t justify the expense. (Never mind hit the broad side of a barn, but that’s another issue entirely!)

These are the ‘would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it’ crowd.

The second group are people who have been considering ‘upgrading their firepower’ since their initial purchase of a weapon after (one of) the recent massacres.

9 mm have loads of penetration power but almost no knock down power, that’s why police forces have been switching to 10’s.

Most people can take a couple of 9mm slugs and still keep running…for a while and those fat boys want you to stop.

Which brings us to the second part of our, er, ‘discussion’.

Who is ‘safe’ to be armed?

The front page of the local rag could be re-named to read as the daily exploits of ‘Cops behaving badly’.

Hardly a week goes by without somebody in uniform (and half the time it’s the Chief!) getting caught doing something outside the bounds of or in direct conflict with their position of authority and the public trust.

I think we’d all breathe a sigh of relief if we started by disarming those clowns (making the job like that of the English Bobby) but you know that ain’t going to happen.

Take away the guns and you might as well declare ‘open season’ on the banks!

And I will remind you once again that the police force IS NOT there to protect YOU. It exists to protect THE ONE PERCENT(s)! (Er, ‘interests’, it’s their bank you’re robbing or their plant you’re pilfering from!)

But I digress…

Now we cross into the delicate area of military veterans and the stunning number of them who parrot the deeply disturbing credo ‘my country RIGHT OR WRONG!’

Is it just me or is this evidence of our leadership’s determination to harvest the youth of this nation and convert them into mindless killing machines?

Is anyone else disturbed by the high number of mentally stressed soldiers who return from (pointless) foreign service on the very edge of snapping?

War isn’t a career choice…but that isn’t how the reckless and self-centered ‘One Percent’ sees it.

If not for the military, our ‘unemployment problem’ would be even worse than it is!

And what is the One Percent’s ‘solution’ to the unemployment problem?

More War!

Let’s back up a step and re-examine ‘why’ there is a ‘surge’ in the number of people purchasing personal defense weapons.

You don’t suppose they see what I see, do you? A society coming ‘unraveled’ before their eyes?

Could it all be as simple as ‘Gun Rules’ (The one with the gun makes the rules…you’ve all seen enough suspense movies to know how this one ends. How sad is it that the one with the gun has seen the movies too…making him that much more likely to kill you before that incredible lucky break happens that allows the 'hero' to overpower him.)

How ironic is it that you don't need a gun until you do? (Worse, when this need presents itself, usually it is desperate!)

Bang, bang, good citizen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Problem, what problem?

Greetings good citizen,

It turns out if you keep playing with the web address tool you can eventually get something it will accept…which is why the ‘new’ (firewall-less) site is not Civics 101 but Civics 202.

A Simple Plan remains behind the firewall for the moment while I let the new site ‘come up to speed’.

How ironic is it that A Simple Plan has twice the number of Russian readers than it has US?

They have seen the worst of both (economic operating systems) and are more open minded than the typical ‘patriotic’ US citizen.

Well, I’m going to see how the new site ‘draws’ before I open up the ‘main attraction.’

It is curious how those who have been ‘told’ they already live ‘in paradise’ are oddly resistant to new ideas, even new ideas that ‘fix’ long standing injustices in the old ways…

But we really start walking the tightrope when we get into determining ‘what is ‘injustice’ and ‘who decides’.

It is a mystery to no one that the One Percent decide, they are the sole arbiters of ‘what is just’

It is their viewpoint that YOU are incapable of understanding what it’s like to be them, you aren’t ‘smart’ enough (probably how wealth and brains came to be equated when they have nothing to do with one another!)

So what are to make of our first headline?

A Bold Dissenter at the Fed, Hoping His Doubts Are Wrong
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in Virginia, has warned that the central bank’s efforts to stimulate growth are ineffective.

Economix Blog: The Great Dissenters

One need not be the president of a Federal Reserve Bank to realize (5 years after the fact) that the Fed’s ‘stimulus’ has had zero impact on ‘growth’. But that would be missing the whole point of calling the exercise ‘stimulus’.

What the Fed has been doing has nothing to do with ‘stimulating’ the global economy, what the Fed has done is to stabilize a badly broken global banking system.

How sad is it good citizen that despite trillions pumped in (and billions leaking out as ‘bonuses’) it is still broken beyond repair!

So what are we to make of this Fed President’s assertion?

He’s correct, but what are they supposed to do?

Cut off the stimulus and the global banking system collapses, pretty much immediately.

In a related story we are asked how ‘credible’ this situation is:

James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.

Bank Hacking Was the Work of Iranians, Officials Say
By NICOLE PERLROTH and QUENTIN HARDY

The skill required to execute the attacks convinced American officials that Iran was behind them, likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

After being, er, ‘hoodwinked’ into a ten year long war by one desk of ‘the office for strategic studies’ chasing imaginary ‘Weapons of Mass destruction’ (for which no one was ever prosecuted, by the way.)

We are now being presented with ‘Quid Pro Quo’; we levied sanctions on Tehran so they ‘retaliated’ by hacking the (decidedly corrupt) US banking system…

With all of the chicanery going on in the TBTF banking network, how the heck can they tell? (It was ‘hacked’ and not outright theft or fraud?)

Short answer, they can’t!

For our next trick:

Former Analyst Cooperates in Insider Trading Case
By PETER LATTMAN 9:57 AM ET

Wesley Wang, a former analyst at SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge fund, has given federal agents the names of about 20 people that he said engaged in insider trading.

Or ‘touche’ as they say in fencing!

Of course ‘one incident’ isn’t proof that our whole financial network is corrupt…but it’s been more than one incident, in fact it’s been a long string of them ever since Saint Ronnie (Reagan) ‘privatized’ the healthcare system, unleashing a juggernaut!

Fund Titans Battle Over Herbalife
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED 29 minutes ago

Daniel S. Loeb’s Third Point disclosed that it had acquired more than 8.2 percent of the nutritional supplements company. That puts him at odds with his friend, William A. Ackman.

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘titans of capitalism’ have been reduced to squaring off over control of a MLM network?

Well, as they say, you just can’t make this stuff up. That said, how’s that future looking to you now?

HSBC Sale of $9.4 Billion Ping An Stake in Jeopardy
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER 57 minutes ago

The British bank HSBC’s bid to sell its stake in China’s Ping An group is in jeopardy after China Development Bank decided not to finance a large part of the transaction.

Um, not for nothing but 9 billion balloons is still a lot of cake even in these days when everything is measured in billions (millions are for pikers.) Worse, I’ve never heard of the Ping An group (but I’m going to assume it’s not the guys who make the popular brand of golf clubs…although I might be wrong!)

And speaking of trouble from across the Pacific:

A 787 had to be towed back to the gate Tuesday in Boston because of a fuel leak. On Monday, a parked 787 caught on fire.
Dreamliner Is Troubled by Questions About Safety
By JAD MOUAWAD 5:34 AM ET

All Nippon Airways canceled a domestic flight on Wednesday after a computer on board a 787 Dreamliner erroneously showed problems with the aircraft’s brakes.

Capitalism at its finest! Buyer BEWARE!!!

Once again we see the folly of ‘sold to the lowest bidder’ when it comes to producing complex objects that must work in harmony with one another!

The Dreamliner was 3 YEARS behind schedule due to the inability of the engineers to deal with problems continents away. Sometimes ‘tele-conferencing’ just doesn’t cut it.
But hey that’s capitalism for ya, if the product doesn’t float/fly it’s not management’s fault, they aren’t engineers!

Um, does anyone else have a problem with this?

I have no need to fly…and for that I am grateful!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner