Signs and Portents II
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By Gegner
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March 30th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
If we were to just look casually over the past couple of months we would notice several rather disturbing developments taking place…not that the MSM hasn’t done an excellent job of downplaying/dismissing the implications of these events.
While, alternately, doing their damnedest to whip the public into a frenzy over a largely ‘uninspired’ health care reform bill that nobody particularly likes.
But, backtracking a few steps into yesterday’s post, the fact that excessive profit taking by the investor class has shrunk our economy to something that could be blotted up with an eyedropper. (This is what is meant by my statement that they have ‘sucked up all of the money’ from our society. Instead of re-distributing the profits, they pocketed them!)
The question is whether or not we are ready to take a swan dive off of a high cliff into an extremely polluted river…or if we have already jumped?
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Pinheads, Punks and Plutocrats...
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By Gegner
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March 29th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Headlines across the spectrum are screaming for attention today but I, moron that I am, choose to ‘revisit’ a topic we haven’t touched upon…er, ‘recently’. (Probably more than six months have elapsed since the last time I raised this particular ‘red flag’.)
Naturally, it comes at a ‘price’. So I’m gonna start ‘back-peddling’ in defense of the individual who will be the recipient of tonight’s kick in the gonads because what he stated here may not be what he meant…
What could be so ‘offensive’?
Let us examine this seemingly innocent statement found in the second paragraph of today’s editorial:
“preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression”
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Yawn...
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By Gegner
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March 28th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Once again we encounter MSM political maneuvering intended to distract us from what has become the ‘norm’. After more than a solid year of ‘inaction’, the president has decided to start exercising some of that power Mr. Bush left for him. (Which is to point out that the newly elected president has done absolutely nothing to ‘roll back’ the power grabs made by his predecessor, adding them to the pile being slowly built up by many past administrations.)
Hard to say what is more disturbing, this sudden flurry of activity or the fact that the Executive office once again finds itself beleaguered and besieged by a Congress so influenced by lobbyists that it can’t break free from the constant state of deadlock?
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Overkill
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By Gegner
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March 26th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Seems as though I’ve turned into quite the ‘contrarian’ as things go flying off the rails during this slow motion train wreck. It seems as though there is nothing the status quo can do that isn’t related to preserving their own interests, while their tactics are paraded for us in the media as ‘government benevolence’.
Which is to ask if this isn’t an ‘agenda within an agenda’? The people are already hopping mad and ready to march on Washington (but won’t…yet) because they don’t want to be perceived/portrayed by the media as (Whacko) ‘Tea Partiers’.
(And you KNOW that is precisely who will be ‘credited’ with the next massive protest, especially if it turns violent!)
The latest ‘assault’ on our battered and bruised consciousness is the most recent plan in the government’s ceaseless efforts (not to ‘save’ homeowners) but to save the (banking industry’s cash cow) ‘housing market’.
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More questions than answers
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By Gegner
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March 25th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Conservative calls for civil disobedience (actually the destruction of public property) in reaction to the passage of Health Care Reform fell on deaf ears yesterday after the MSM (once again) displayed its (willful) ignorance of the ‘will of the people’.
The public isn’t nearly as ‘outraged’ as the MSM claimed…nor was the MSM able to provide ‘proof ’ of an outraged populous, (action shots of rioters in the act…even protesters carrying signs) further shredding their already mangled ‘credibility’. It seems the Tea Party ‘movement’ isn’t nearly as large as the corporate owned media would like you to imagine it is. (This ‘man-power’ shortage is evidence; they didn’t have enough people ‘on the payroll’ to ‘spit’ on passing Democratic politicians inside congressional offices AND to picket outside as well.)
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Striking a Blow against Wealth Inequality
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By Gegner
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March 24th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
My attention isn’t attracted to the same things that rivet ‘normal people’ to their preferred news source. I can only begin to guess how many of you are ‘genuinely interested’ in the behind closed doors Kabuki Dance that produced ‘mandated Health Care’ without the advantages of a ‘single payer’ system.
As residents of my State will tell you, this isn’t Obama Care, it’s Romney Care! Yup, Mitt did it first…and being a Republican, he really did it all right! If you should find yourself on the ‘free’ version of Romney Care, good luck finding a care provider! (Cue ‘Mission Impossible’ theme.)
Naturally, this is not what the media is telling us. Um, nope, for some bizarre reason the MSM thinks that the largest economy in the world being dead last (and basically failing again) to implement ‘universal healthcare’ is something worthy of a page in the History Books.
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Where do we go ?
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By Gegner
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March 23rd, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
One would not be mistaken if they interpreted the ‘conflicting signals’ sent by ‘economic analysts’ as ‘bi-polar’. That said, for the average individual, discerning the difference between ‘inflation’ and ‘deflation’ will be similar to picking fly shit out of ground pepper (without the assistance of a microscope.)
Which is to say that those who would ‘deceive’ you into thinking these two terms are ‘opposites’ are yanking your crank, good and hard.
It’s like damning you for smoking while they have a burning cigarette between their fingers, when you point out their hypocrisy, they reply: “I’m not smoking, the cigarette is smoking, I am merely sucking on it.”
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Wanna buy some Dope?
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By Gegner
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March 22nd, 2010
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Pssst…wanna buy some Dope?
Greetings good citizen,
As one might expect, the Stock Market is (once again) drawing unwanted scrutiny as it becomes more difficult to defend what are, arguably, sky high valuations.
Um, you know, as I know, the stock market serves as the ‘parking lot’ for the wealthy, it’s were the world’s ‘pirates’ have, er, ‘dumped’ their booty for (as it has turned out) ‘safe keeping’.
So what do irrationally high stock prices tell us? It tells us the already wealthy have been ‘made whole’ by their Wall Street minions (at our expense.)
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Words of Warning
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By Gegner
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March 21st, 2010
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Words of Warning…
Greetings good citizen,
There’s rain in the forecast and yesterday’s summer like weather is gone, unlikely to return for another two months. It’s still mid-March and most of us (ski-bums excluded) are thanking our lucky stars that the 10 inches of rain that recently soaked the region wasn’t snow.
Conventional wisdom has it that an inch of rain equals a foot of snow. The absence of single storm (ever) dropping ten feet of snow (at least in this neck of the woods) casts some doubt as to the accuracy of that particular ‘rule of thumb’.
Naturally, tonight’s first offering provides us with a brief examination of the topic of ‘conventional wisdom’.
Curtain of Tragedy Will Be Raised Soon Enough, But Perhaps Not Next in Japan
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Ruinous Fiscal Mismanagement
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By Gegner
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March 20th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
It’s a lovely day in the neighborhood, sort of a sin to be sitting here in my dungeon typing away with so many projects begging for my attention outside.
But I think we’ve already made peace with the idea that this is how I’m ‘twisted’.
Good thing Mother Nature has a ‘to-do list’ five times longer than any one of your arms or I’d probably hari-kari come TEOTWAKI, the day when the Internets go dark. Which is not to say that more than a few people won’t make the transition to life without their daily dose of pixels successfully.
Sort of a bizarre admission, most of us will be so busy trying to survive that we won’t even miss our technological ‘crutches’. You may find yourself going to bed with the sun, which will be okay because your backside will be dragging (from hauling buckets of water to your thirsty garden plants all day) and you will have run out of candles by then anyway!
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Not Again!
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By Gegner
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March 19th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Is it a bad thing that one day is pretty much like any other? While many of us would enjoy a smorgasbord of events and activities, others would soon long for the same old, same old.
Which is to point out that when we are living in an unrelenting time of darkness, many of us will wish for a return to the (comparatively) ‘boring’ days when all we had to deal with was pesky ‘financial crisis’.
Um, will anyone appreciate the irony of the fact that the time of unrelenting darkness was a ‘foreseeable outcome’ of our failure to effectively arrest the crumbling financial system?
Why would such a thing be ‘foreseeable’? The criminals who pillaged the world’s financial sector needed to set off some kind of distraction so they could [temporarily] evade capture.
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Connect the dots
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By Gegner
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March 17th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Um, just want to let you know the markets closed ‘up’ today for the seventh session in a row…and what are the ‘headlines’? Aren’t the imbeciles crowing about the markets hitting levels not seen since 2008!
Oh well, what are you gonna do? There’s ‘Happy Talk’ and there’s, uh, ‘mountains out of molehills’ talk. Which is to point out just how ‘poisonous’ conservative propaganda has become, programs that people paid into their entire working lives are now being labeled ‘entitlements’, like it’s something ‘nice’ soft-headed politicians decided to do (at the public’s expense) purely to capture more votes!
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Playing Chicken with China
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By loosecannon
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March 16th, 2010
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In my post last night I loosely grouped a gammut of apparently unrelated events and circumstances that had a common underlying theme, one of our own government playing a kind of end game. As if something, some game changer/ender was indeed looming.
Which it is. The certainty now that we are in a debt crisis has become a fact of life for many folks who understand our economy.
Moody's said for a second time that the US and Britain were edging closer to losing their AAA ratings.
Today's news brought the looming crisis into focus.
Senate Lawmakers To Introduce China Currency Manipulation Bill
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--A bipartisan group of senators will introduce legislation Tuesday that would oblige the Obama administration to take reciprocal action against any country deemed to be manipulating its currency.
The bill will be introduced later Tuesday, but details of it were reviewed by Dow Jones Newswires.
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Neo Dark Age?
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By Gegner
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March 16th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Tough getting old…just went to post tonight’s offering without entering either a link or an intro.
Of all the things I’ve lost I miss my mind the most!
Um, no irony should be lost on the fact that the author of tonight’s piece probably shares my lament…
On with the show!
Prognosis 2012 – a Neo Dark Age
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The end of the world as we know it
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By loosecannon
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March 16th, 2010
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and I feel fine.
This isn't gonna be my best topic introduction. I am distracted, but the topic is well worth consideration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/business/global/16rating.html
The gold-plated credit rating of the United States — an article of faith across America and, indeed, around the world — may be at risk in coming years as the nation copes with its growing debts.
That sobering assessment, issued Monday by Moody’s Investors Service, provided a reminder that even Aaa-rated United States Treasury bonds, supposedly the safest of safe investments, could be downgraded one day if Washington failed to manage the federal debt.
Moody’s said the United States and other major Western nations, particularly Britain, have moved “substantially” closer to losing their gilt-edged ratings. The ratings are “stable,” but “their ‘distance-to-downgrade’ has in all cases substantially diminished,” the credit ratings agency said.
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Taking (it) On (the) Chin (a)
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By Gegner
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March 15th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Apparently last week’s revelations surrounding the ‘financial improprieties’ involving Lehman Brothers will be ‘the next big distraction’ for the foreseeable future. (Which is to say a couple of days, anyway.)
In a 2,200 page report, it has been revealed that Lehman management, with the assistance of accounting firm Ernst & Young, ‘cooked the books’ a la Enron, which, in essence, ‘defrauded’ the shareowners.
Um, the CEO as well as the CFO of Enron ended up being convicted of criminal wrongdoing in the Enron case but only the CFO actually did jail time…the CEO (Ken Lay) died before commencing his sentence.
More damning is how the Enron ‘scandal’ gave birth to Sarbanes-Oxley, which essentially required the CEO and the other officers of the company to ‘swear’ (via affidavit) that the company’s finances were ‘as advertised’.
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The New Poor
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By Gegner
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March 14th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Central to the unwritten ‘capitalist social contract’ is the onus of making oneself ‘useful’.
Oddly, with no guarantee of success, this onus falls not upon the employer but upon you!
Understand that once upon a time the employer took it upon themselves to ‘train’ employees in ‘their way’ of doing things. Most mainstream employers had ‘apprentice’ programs but you’d be hard-pressed to find such a thing today in our rapidly evolving ‘Banana Republic’.
Why do you suppose this is good citizen? Could it be related to the dwindling number of available jobs? The enormous ‘void’ created by the lack of new manufacturing facilities? Hell they’re still putting our old facilities in crates and shipping them overseas! Why the hell would anyone be building ‘new facilities’ here in the ‘overpaid’ US of A?
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Rhetorical Idiocy
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By Gegner
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March 13th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Don’t you just LOVE stupid rhetorical questions? Almost as heinous as blaming the underpaid and rapidly vanishing US worker for their ‘financial cupidity’, we encounter stories such as tonight’s offering which ‘assumes’ YOU are ‘fearful’ of doing what our elected officials have flatly refused to do. Regardless of WHO we send to Washington…
While this points directly to a 230 year old ‘design flaw’ in our system of government, nobody, not the politicians or the media, ever raise this, er, ‘glaring oversight’.
Let’s take a moment to ponder why we ‘mindlessly accept’ the fact that once a politician is elected there is nothing you can do to ‘discipline’ them until the next election cycle. How can we expect ‘change’ to occur if/when a politician breaks their promises upon achieving election?
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2B or not 2B?
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By Gegner
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March 12th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Do you ever wonder about where you’ll be when civilization comes unglued? When I was working in town the thought crossed my mind quite a bit, along with the logistics of how I’d navigate the roughly 40 miles to return home…safely.
Did I mention driving executive sedan is fairly boring work? I used to chew through novels like nobody’s business. If you have nothing to read you’d end up playing mental games like how the hell would I get out of here (without getting killed by some panicked asshole.)
Yeah, when the shit hits being ‘out and about’ has its pluses and its minuses. To the plus side, you’ll be the first to know that civil order is dangling by a thread…to the minus side, you may not survive that knowledge!
Which is to point out that you will definitely be ‘somewhere’ when revolution breaks out and it behooves you to have your wits about you regardless of when/where it happens.
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Sales Pitch...
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By Gegner
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March 11th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
I sort of missed my mark when closing yesterday’s rant about, for lack of a better phrase, ‘the price of peace’.
It is no secret to my regular readers that I am not a ‘pacifist’, I believe the only way we are going to turn our situation around is to fight. The ‘criminals’ will never ‘surrender’ even after they have sucked the last drop of vitality out of our mummified corpse. They won’t even dispose of the body, they’ll keep it as a ‘warning’ to anyone who challenges their, er, ‘authority’…a macabre kind of ‘trophy’ if you will.
“See that (pointing at the corpse,) that’s what happened to the last guy(s) who opposed us!
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