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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Monday, May 26, 2014

Nationalism = Asperger's Syndrome Writ Large: You Can't Buck Rodger's Over and Out.

A Sharpener Image.

Okay, this isn't blog-worthy, I suppose, but before I start writing this post, I just have to mention the fact that a total stranger just called me on the phone, working for a private Corporation's phone harassment system, euphemistically referred to as Tele-Marketing, and started his conversation, and I use that term lightly, (harangue being a more apt description), by saying, in heavily Spanish-accented English, "Hello this calla is being monitored for quality purposes"....at which point I did what everyone should do upon hearing those words ... which is hang up immediately. For a company to advise you that they are recording your conversation when you call them is one thing, but for them to call you and tell you right off the bat that a call you never made and never wanted is being recorded for "Quality purposes", which is corporatese for, "Anything you say can and will be used against you," is a whole new and different form of the Corporate face-slap.

Which brings me, on the heels of yet another mass-killing in gloriously sun-drenched, water-challenged and kindle-wooded (they used to use redwood/pine "shake" to make roofs here ... seriously) California, to the topic of this post, which is the utter impossibility of escaping the consequences of our self-inflicted climate dilemma. It's partially addressed, and is in fact, though unplanned, illustrated by the above parenthetical comment (which there are myriad examples of in our Kamikaze Kultur) namely, externalities.

The structure of Kamikaze Kapitalism being such that anything that Corporations cause, such as the intense fires raging ever further and hotter and more out of control because the product you sell and assuage all your customers' reservations about with pseudo-science, is simply an "externality", your investors need never concern themselves that what you are doing will burn the entire neighborhood to the ground, because, after all, as pointed out in todays NYT article, written by Yale professor, Robert Shiller, that's what insurance is for. IE, forcing the entire polity to pay for the damage wreaked on it by profiteers who simply walk away from the suckers they looted with a great big smile on their faces: They weren't stupid enough to put their own families into incipient incinerators.

In an article that could have been written by our mass-killer of the week, Eliot O. Rodger, one of the more renowned Shillers for Kamikaze Kapitalism came out to suggest that "global warming needs to be addressed by the private institutions of risk management, such as insurance and securitization", you know, those two forms of legalized racketeering wherein, as in the subprime housing fiasco, companies such as AIG rake in huge amounts of Kapital, or what was referred to in the parlance of the 'industry' as "sucker's cash" to insure against a loss for which they had made absolutely no provisioning for, necessitating the public to cover their bets, while they ran off with the loot. And that was just for the Credit Default Swaps part of it, known as derivatives, but is in reality just another form of insurance, that the Shiller for Kamikaze Kapitalism proclaims they need to use to deal with such grand-scale issues.

Like the housing crisis itself though, the Shiller conveniently forgets to mention that the Corporations created the very crisis that they now plan to use to swindle the public yet again, using the blandishments of "economists", the high priests of the KKK (Kamikaze Kapilaist Kultur), to pave the way with incantations and gobbledygook such as, "They have deep experience in smoothing out disasters’ effects by sharing them among large numbers of people", which we will then dutifully believe, despite the fact that without FEMA, without the US Treasury, ie, without public institutions that were still solvent, there would be, (per Timothy Geithner, their most ardent acolyte) no more ATM's, AIG, GMAC or any of the Monoline insurers that the Credit Crunch squeezed to a painful death.

What the ex-head of the NY Fed, and the last US Treasurer has said in his attempts to publicize and sell his self-serving tome is that since without government backing up all the liabilities of the insurance industry and all of the banks, including the investment banks that, despite Volker and all the detractors of Clinton for signing Phil Gramm's gift to the Banks in the form of the repeal of Glass-Steagel, were never covered in the first place, so what's the use of separating them from commercial banks by an Act of Congress, such as Dodd-Frank, when the Fed can simply override said act and force the Taxpayers to bear those liabilities, with no clawback of the enormous sums that company exec's and insiders shoveled into their respective bank accounts, with the full blessing and outright complicity of Timothy Geithner by the way, for all the risks taken (ie money collected in the form of premiums) but never provisioned for, as the suckers' cash was all pirated away, by the Osama Binsurance companies.

So now, instead of all this needless worrying about Climate Change, much like the California Fires that raged all the more intensely because of Redwood shake roofs, or securitization that to any one with an analytic mind makes the home buying market, not Regional as BS Bernanke was insisting right up until the financial collapse (literally, he was still spouting that nonsense in July, 2008), even as securitization itself was making it exactly that, worse, in fact, it made it not only national, it made it international, and calling Climate Change just another "externality" of the KKK, which under no circumstances, must we consider altering in any way whatsoever, as if we do, the sky will fall (or the ATM's won't work ... ps I haven't used one in years, they are completely inessential, it is only habit that makes these dispensers of cash seem so necessary that Geithner, in speech after speech on his egotistical circuit, hung that over our heads like the sword of Damocles ...but ya know what? the world would go on and the service would be provided ... it was THEIR world that was threatened, ours would have readjusted, exactly what they and yes, there is a they, were afraid of. Instead the economy continues to bleed, as that particular open wound has yet to be cauterized).

The Shill goes on to claim:

"In short, we need to worry about the potential for greater-than-expected disasters, especially those that concentrate their fury on specific places or circumstances, many of which we cannot now predict."

Indeed we do, and when we do, such as in California with Earthquake insurance: If you want
coverage, private industry refuses to offer it, as the risk is too great, so they slough it off onto the State. Same with student Debt, hence Sally-Mae, private insurers refuse to touch it unless it's guaranteed by the government, ie, it's YOU, the Taxpayers, who are ultimately responsible for the risks, the insurance companies being nothing more than administrators. On and on: Flood insurance, Mortgage insurance, any insurance that is sold is ultimately passed onto the public, the latest being Obamacare, whereas it is private industry that rakes in the fees and enormous piles of cash which it then funnels to its shareholders. The formula is easy to work out:

War is a Racket
Capitalism is, by capitalists' own definition, creative Destruction
Capitalism's ultimate expression is therefore War, the epitome of Destruction
Capitalism is a Racket.

In the ultimate of scams, the very event for which coverage against is billed, is now nothing more than an externality, and like, Asperger's syndrome, societal claims outside the corporations' actuality simply don't exist. Like the "little professors" of Asperger, they site cant, but can't sight reality. You, and your insurance claim, to them, although an insurance corporation that gladly takes your money, simply aren't part of their reality. "Your call is important to us", because it validates them and gives them an opportunity to make a sale. The reason you called in the first place, however, is never a concern. Because dealing with it and you eats into profits as they have to use reources oto address them. Customers are now mo more than CO2 exhaust: externalities.

Everything in our Brave New World run by and for the KKK only, is an externality to Corporate America, and therefore, of no importance to the bottom line: "we need to worry about the potential for greater-than-expected disasters", the Shill says, but only insofar as they can then use that anxiety stoked by climate prophets to 'earn' climbing profits; but to mitigate its effects, or better yet, take steps to avoid them? Not so much.  The Shill shills, "Each country has a strong individual incentive to take a free ride on the rest of the world — benefiting the individual country while hurting everyone else" (to see his real meaning, merely substitute the word "Corporation" for "country" in that quote) but that pain is just another externality. If the balance sheet makes the world more and more unbalanced, it's the world, not the balance sheet that must change. And it will. But no amount of insurance against that change will do anything but squander our resources by placing them under the control  of those who are the least likely to do anything about it: Corporations.

AIG, anyone? Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, MCI, Lehman Bros., GMAC, Global Crossing, Goldman Sach's, Bear Stearn, JPMorgan, Radian, Marathon, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Countrywide Financial, Merril Lynch, Indymac Bankcorp, Fidelity Insurance, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Dexia, HBOS, Merit Financial, ACA, AMBAC, MBIA, American Century Financial, HSBC, MGIC, Ameriquest, etc, etc. All of these "companies", ie inCorporated scam machines - inCororated for the sole purpose of extending legal protection to insulate their financial officers from paying a price for their illegal deeds, so that their defalcations never threaten their own fortunes -  had investment-grade ratings from agencies that are still doing business right now.

 So let's just do as the KKK's Shiller advises, trust the future impact of Global Warming to corporations extending a hand to help make Catastrophic Climate Change nothing more than another form of creative destruction, just another profit center. Then, far from mitigating disaster, they help assure its occurrence by encouraging the risky behavior of pouring ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere as though it will then disappear (much like Fuckyoushima pouring a tsunami of radiation into the Pacific Ocean). Now, like subprime lending, it can be, in all good conscience, categorized as just business as usual. Why worry? We've got insurance!  It's called FEMA: Feed Every Madman's Ambition, I'm from a Corporation and I'm here to help myself. They shoot looters, unless their wearing a Corporate logo.





















Thursday, May 22, 2014

Noah's Arctic: Kamikaze Kapitalism Boards the Ship of Fools.

Kamikaze Kapitalism Kultur: Paving the Way Down the Road to Extinction.


As the NYT once again wonders why climate changing is accelerating, what it really is demonstrating is a lack of understanding of the nature of the world's only allowed form of business/political structure. Whether one considers liberal democracy's "End of History" backstory and its economic engine of Kamikaze Kapitalism Kultur a desirable outcome or not is rather immaterial. It has captured the War-mongering mindset of the USA in its haliographic grip, and the USA has since used its philosophy of Full-Spectrum Domination, Washington Consensus, and Dollar Hegemony to crush any nation or person that stands in the way of completely exhausting the resource base of "sovereign" nation after nation. That the end result should be the utter exhaustion into calamity is of no concern to the KKK.

It's always interesting to hear delusional people discussing possibilities of future outcomes of present day behavior, such as describing a future that is fossil-fuel free in a Kultur that is in the inescapable, self-imposed, grip of Kamikaze Kapitalism. Because even as they write about the future that is upon us now, they pretend that there is actually anything that humankind is interested in doing to stop this colossal hoax, this natural phenomenon, this geologic process that is completely out of the hands of a mankind that is blameless for its occurrence.

Those last phrases are considered to be the marks of the uneducated, the rantings of Climate deniers, and lunatics, but as the phrase "The end of history" suggests, they are in fact the only ones seeing, albeit from a demented standpoint, the reality of the situation confronting us. A nation that considers its political institutions so inviolable that it deems any perceived rise of a competing ideology, economic system or living arrangement as reason enough to launch a preemptive strike on the capability of such entity to propagate its beliefs or experiment with its ideas of new ways to inhabit the earth, is not exactly one primed for self-examination.

Instead we get nice little plans for permaculture and local gardens and solar panels delivering electricity from the sun to propel electric vehicle owners into a Jetson-like future of continued mobility for 400 pound humans in 6000 pound vehicles as something, not out of a nightmare, which is what it appears to most of mankind, but of the American Dream which, if you are so lame-brained to not see that this is the ultimate path to happiness, well, you just don't deserve to inhabit this planet that that lifestyle, although it could care less, will destroy.

This is where the KKK seems to have worked its best propaganda, because the proponents and defenders of it, who really believe because it's brought us all these wonderful toys and marvels, such as this internet and computer I'm using now, means that, despite the reality of the fact that it's a mammoth job and small-business destroyer, is a good way to, in fact, the only way to, organize our economic life. They deftly ignore the fact that all of the toys developed "for the Marketplace" were in fact developed and introduced into the civilian economy via Military Keynesianism. They were/are developed via the funneling of public monies into the R&D necessary, then implemented into their military niche, and only then are they delivered to the right well-placed Kapitalists to reap the rewards. The public, that unknowingly took the risks and sustained the losses for all those technologies that failed, are always on the hook for the investment and the losses, but never reap the benefits any normal investor would expect, being instead only offered the products. This is an avenue first traveled by atomic power and one that, following Gresham's Law, has pushed out all competing ideologies. Enron tried to follow the same path of hiding its losses and deceiving its investors, but without the full backing of a nation of tax-payers, that proved impossible.

So instead, the nation itself adopted Enron's strategy of turning financialization from a cost to a profit center, and being as that is an impossibility, adopted and finessed many of Enron's methods of deception, only this time, in full view of the public eye. Although nobody mentions the fact, one of the main drivers of the financial crash in 2008 were the SPE's SIV,' s or SPE's (Special Investment Vehicles/Entities) that the banks created to, Enron-style, pump up their balance sheets by creating entities that were supposedly independent of the banks, whereas, in reality, as evinced  during the so-called "Credit Crunch", were full-blown risk-sequestration machines whose liabilities and faulty accounting were the fully-owned responsibility of the banks who simply used them to hide that risk from investors.

This then, is what the entire global economy has morphed into, and has done so for a reason. Just as in the popular HBO series "Breaking Bad", the  protagonist, learning he has a fatal disease, becomes the guilt-free purveyor of crystal meth, which, being a chemistry teacher, he has the necessary knowledge to manufacture himself, the economy, with the Fed as maufacturer of the meth of "Free" money, follows the same doomsday scenario. But in the series, and all the brouhaha about it, this analogy to the current financial system, although apparent, is never made.

At the time of the so-called Reagan revolution, the dual threat of climate change, then usually referred to as Global Warming and Peak-oil, the twin dangers of which were mostly  unappreciated by the huddled masses, was completely known, and its ramifications totally digested, by the US ruling class. When confronted with such knowledge, one can take either of two paths. Either turn off the current road down which you've embarked, or continue down it, in full-knowledge that at the end of that road, there is a yawning abyss.

The path that they chose was, quite obviously, the latter. Just as in "Breaking Bad", once it was discovered that we had inoperable cancer, we, as a society, and now, via Full-Spectrum Domination, the world, have turned down the road of utter immolation and atavistic destruction. And the entity running the asylum and providing the fuel to those intent on driving the global SUV down its pell-mell descent into madness, is the Fed, the Central Bank of Central Banks.

It was only with the tacit approval and full knowledge of its role of "Lender of Last Resort", that all the investment bankers kept shoveling, via Shadowy banking practices, so accepted by the FASB, that they could,with impunity, refer to the entire enterprise as Shadowy banking, (again Enron-style, Remember "Death Star"?). It is the Fed, via ZIRP, QE's to infinty, and retention of its role as the enabler of TBTF, that supplies the crystal meth to the economy that keeps the river of liquidity flowing, which in turn creates the flood of malinvestment that threatens to inundate the actual, productive part of the economy in a tsunami of debt.

Now, should that debt be incurred because it was funding enterprises that were not simply vehicles for producing even more debt, and thereby funneling a larger and larger percentage of the capital of the world into the pockets of the most UNproductive members of its citizenry, then it maybe would have eventually had positive effects. But when it instead is doing exactly the opposite of that, committing dollars yet to be earned on investments that were never even designed to produce anything but lugubrious results for the vast bulk of  mankind, then we are already locked into a future of despair.

Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, having invested millions in the campaign to elect the scion of that family of criminals, the Bushes, was on the short list for consideration as Bush's Treasury Secretary, and would most likely have been named such if it were not for the fact that the Texas Triumvirate: Bush, Cheney, and Don Evans, all hailing, not only from Texas, but from the energy industry, deemed it inadvisable to have yet another overt Texan Racketeer in the administration. But what the very consideration of someone as unqualified for the position as Ken Lay highlights is the long-lasting repercussions that echo throughout the political system when criminals are allowed to run rampant. For without having the Lay of the Land's company funds and illegal gaming of the California energy market adding a billion more dollars to their operations on his side, it is very likely that GW would never have gotten elected, the PNAC would never have gotten their puppet into the Whitehouse, Arnold Schwarzenegger would never have been made Governator of California and the Saudis would never have decided to bomb the Pentagon and the center of the US financial industry that enables its outrages around the world. Which all in turn resulted in the two multi-trillion dollar imbroglios of Iraq and Afghanistan with which they are still bleeding the taxpayers of the US and the bodies of Iraq and Afghanistan citizens.

Now, whatever else may be said as to what the current resident of the Whitehouse brought us, "Change" is not the word that comes to mind. So it is in the same environment of officially sanctioned extortion and complete hijacking of the global economy to service the needs of an ever-dwindling middle class and their avatars of finance that serves as backdrop to David Spratt as he asks whether we are "facing up to what really needs to be done to avert Climate Change?"

As a contributor to "Breakthrough", it is understandable why he should ask that question, but as a citizen of the world alive during which all of the events described above took place, I can't really take his naive question seriously.

What we are doing isn't "nothing" as some would suggest, but, remembering that neither the Alaska's North slope, Russian Siberia, North Sea Oil, North Dakotan oil reserves were on-line in 1985, and that SUV's were nowhere in sight, the energy-gobbling Internet had yet to be devised, and horizontal fracking dismissed as both too expensive and environmentally destructive, it should be clear to anyone that humankind, once warned of both Peak Oil Production and the destructive effects attempts at averting it would result in creating, set out on a path of suicidal energy depletion and fossil fuel combustion that is as irreversible as the melting of the PIG and its sister glaciers in the Antarctic is now accepted to be.

Although it is never mentioned, the reaction of mankind to the knowledge that the continued use of carboniferous material to supply its energy needs would  have the effect of making the planet a most inhospitable place to live, looked at from the point of view as to when that knowledge was available and when our use escalated, they are seen as being simultaneous events. In other words, not to be too Rachel Madcow-like in hammering home a point ad nauseum, the more we have learned about anthropocentric Climate Change, the more we have made our entire societal infrastructure dependent on fossil fuels' continued and escalating combustion. Having learned that the ship is heading for an iceberg, we have lashed ourselves ever more firmly to its mast and shot anyone who tries to jump overboard.

And now that we are awash in liabilities incurred by the creation of that infrastructure, we have insured against the possibility that any competing architecture will be able to be created, because we  haven't even the wherewithal to pay for this one. While burning through more energy than ever before in the history of the world, it isn't enough to even maintain the standard of living we enjoyed before we had full knowledge of what we were doing to ourselves, so far from enabling the ability to retain our "American Way of Life" it has had the exact opposite effect, it has utterly destroyed it; and as we live in the rubble of its collapsing ruin, the evidence of which is all around us, we still have the Presidential avatar for "Change" spouting the exact same phrase as his predecessor, and we think that somehow it'll all turn out alright.

But it won't. Because, the more we proclaim our belief in Democracy, the more we expand those very structures: Nuclear Power Plants, Internet Businesses, Computerization of everything that moves, mammoth energy-intensive and capital-intensive wasteland creation such as those in Athabasca and the heavy oilfields of Venezuela and the Kashagan field of Kazakhstan, with its corrosive hydrogen-sulfide content eating through pipelines, the strip-mining of the entire state of Wyoming and the mountain top destruction of every peak in Appalachia, that, because they all consume enormous amounts of capital, all of which is borrowed, we can see by looking at Europe, that help to destroy Democracy and replace it with Autocracy, Oiligarchy (sic), and Plutocracy, as the Banks that made the loans eventually own the Governments and so it is they who tell them what to do, not the citizens.

And these fields are only the beginning of the long food chain that includes piping companies and chemical refineries, road pavers, electric utilities as well as the more familiar internal combustion engines of a billion automobiles, without which there is simply no economy left. And those running these enterprises are from exactly the same mold as those who ran Enron into the ground, they care nothing for the catastrophe that they set in  place, as their plans are to be out of the company and out of the way of the bulldozer of public opprobrium that will come rolling after them in the wake of the knowledge that they set in motion forces that would wreak havoc. But in a Kamikaze Kapitalism Kultur, nothing matters other than your own ascendancy: not how it was achieved, not how long it lasts, not who or what gets destroyed in bringing about its realization. All that matters is their Success. And that Freedom, is after all, the very core of "The American Way of Life".




















Thursday, May 8, 2014

The 21'st Century KKK: Kultur of Kamikaze Kapitalism.

FOMC: Federal Office of Monetary Crimes.


Now that even the  NYT is admitting that Climate Change isn't a Global Hoax (although there are certainly stalwarts among us who feel that's precisely why we should think it is), maybe we can discuss the criminality of the Fed and how they are, perhaps to the world's advantage, but, this is still a nominal Democracy, so such subterfuge should not go uncommented on, the fact that they are now, and have been for a generation, manipulating the economy, not to goose employment, but for exactly the opposite reason, to noose it:





As stated on Wolf Richter's Testosterone Pit blog:

"Advanced economies don’t automatically and inevitably have to suffer a labor force participation rate that is sinking into permanent decline, and savers don’t have to be demolished to get there."

But when that economy is fossil fueled, and the fracking its doing is pouring methane into the Arctic, along with the other "Ring of Fire" oil-extraction operations, at such an accelerating pace that the Arctic itself has joined in the frenzy, such that, were it a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter of methane, soon to be number one if the rapid proliferation of the fens in that region is any indication.

Now, whereas my stance on the connection between Capitalism and Global Warming is worn on my sleeve, one need not assume that others, those in positions of power, don't keeping their similar stance under wraps. But when the government goes so far as Darpa's program of using chemtrails to weave a worldwide web to veil the planet from the deleterious effects of CO2 and Methane increases in the atmosphere, it takes not too great a leap of logic to assume that other branches of the government are doing the same thing in their own respective realms. 

Making the wrong assumptions often leads one to drawing the wrong conclusions. For example, in 2004 when every step the Bush regime took resulted in the worsening of the disaster in Iraq, everyone assumed the plans of the Texas Triumvirate in the Whitehouse were going terribly awry, because they assumed that theresults the then-current occupants wanted were the same as those they promulgated. That however was not the case. Oil selling for under $15/bbl was a disaster for the oil interests, the only interests the President and VP were concerned with, as they coincided with their own. So getting the oil productivity of Iraq back to what it was before they attacked it, so that their War in Iraq could "Pay for itself" was the last thing on the minds of the digarchy to whom "Deficits don't matter". 
What most assuredly was on their minds, however, as revealed many times in many speeches by the Dark Lord, was the shortage of Oil supplies he foresaw and for which he chastised the Democrats during the 2000 presidential campaign for not having a plan to rectify (this from the party that eschews any and all government planning as Communistic, or Socialistic). They, however, had already formulated a plan, one that included the attack of the sovereign nation of Iraq, to put into place, as outlined in the PNAC,

"a substantial American force presence in the Gulf that transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein", this "-- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops --", the main rallying cry Osama Bin Laden used as his pretext for the 9/11 attacks.

Thus do the actions of the Bush/Cheney digarchy reveal its real understanding of the nexus of the three E's: Energy, Economics, and the Environment, that is the topic of not only this particular post, but of this entire blog, such that when I see certain government actions, I look at them with these three intractable factors in mind, because you can't address one without addressing the other two. So when the policies of the Fed decreases permanently the employment level of the country in which the largest carbon footprint is made by its citizens, and whose policies ensure that that will remain the case, but in such as way as to give them plausible deniability should someone confront them with the fact that that's what they're doing, I can't help but wonder, especially given the vapid reasons they give for their policy decisions, if what they say their reasons are are sheer fabrications.


Many people relegate this kind of thinking to the realm of conspiracy theory and in a sense, that is where it belongs, because you can never prove such idle musings. However, it's also true that many of the people making that judgement remember the days of the Hippy movement when college students, as the 60's turned into the 70's, were graduating and had to find employment, of the idea of "working from within" to bring about change. This is not a dead concept, as was just evinced to me via a Facebook exchange, where I made the apparently unforgivable indiscretion of making a quip about Noam Chomsky to the effect that he is, after all, an employee of MIT. I was severely chastised and informed he was doing precisely what I said above, working from the inside to effectuate change, worded in such a way that the interlocutor was basically justifying betrayal and sabotage, which, if you take that reasoning to its logical conclusion, such a person as Noam, being employed as he is by one of the major institutions of the military industrial complex, is engaging in (especially Noam, who, although I admire his work, (I'd wager the person arguing so vehemently on his behalf doesn't have "The Noam Chomsky Reader" in her personal library, as I do) has no need to retain his position there, having by now I should think, notoriety enough to eke (hah!) out a living from his writings and personal appearances).

So what I mean to say, is that if Noam, who has nothing to do with making policy, can work for an institution that's diametrically opposed to everything he believes in, just for a paycheck he doesn't ostensibly need, it isn't really a stretch to suppose that there are people working for the Federal government who would never be able to get a job in the current environment in the private sector, and so retain their position and, knowing, like the rest of us, that we're destroying the very capability of the planet to sustain mammalian life, would work to do whatever they can to undermine the system they believe is doing so. And how better to do that than in the heart of the monetary system by throwing sand in the cogs of the machine? If you saw a steam roller chugging toward even someone you didn't know, never mind someone you cared about, yet saw that the driver was armed to the teeth to shoot down anyone who dared to try and stop his progress, wouldn't you try any subterfuge possible in order to stop them? What's the point of staging a direct assault and getting killed in the attempt? Then you couldn't stop anything, or ever investigate and report on the actions of those who were fueling the steam roller, without which, no matter how well-armed the diver was, he couldn't proceed.

In which case, it is us who, given this opportunity they are providing us, are at fault for not clamoring more assiduously for leadership on these pressing concerns instead of trying to digest the daily toxic fare of what happened to flight 337, or who's doing who, or any number of nonsensical things broadcast on the television under the rubric of News. When are we going to grow up and realize that it's our acceptance of the Kultur of Kamikaze Kapitalism that keeps it going, and keeps us going ... right toward the precipice over which we insist on driving?











Tuesday, May 6, 2014

The Circle Game.


                                                                      The Circle Game.


(Sung to the tune of Joni Mitchell's, "The Circle Game")
                                                                     

Nowadaze the world's awash in Dollars
Mostly in the form of IOU's
Nations kept on leash-like doggie-collars
Their leaders jumping hoops on DC's cues.

As the Bankers practice ten new forms of treason
Coming up with pocket-lining schemes
Empty words and phrases act as frisson
While promises of "Get Rich" make us cream.

And the Debt wheel just goes round and round
Unbacked fiat money keeps whole nations down
We're captives on a Carousel of Crime
You can't resist you can only watch
Your hopes go up in flames
All spun round 'til run aground in this Circle Game.

Another Crash another theft we'll spawn now
"Assets" melt away like morning dew
But they'll tell you, just you wait it won't be long now
Until it's once again as good as new.

And the Debt wheel just goes round and round
Unbacked fiat money keeps whole nations down
We're captives on a Carousel of Crime
You can't resist you can only watch
Your hopes go up in flames
All spun round 'til run aground in this Circle Game.

All the tears you'll cry, I know there will be plenty
As your dreams you now know never will come true
They'll spin new schemes, fueling dreams you can live rent-free
Before the last revolving payment's due.

And the Debt wheel just goes round and round
Unbacked fiat money keeps whole nations down
We're captives on a Carousel of Crime
You can't resist you can only watch
Our world go up in flames
All spun round 'til run aground in this Circle Game.







Monday, May 5, 2014

Picketty Pocket Economics: All This "Capital" Fomenting seems a bit Labored.

Capitol Flight 101: US (hot) Air crashes into the Current Sea.

Does it seem a little late-to-the-table for this analysis of something that's as obvious as the nose on Adam Smith's face? Once the wealth of nations has been sequestered into banks and securities that are owned by the SupraClass and under guard by techno-marvelous murder-machines, ones that lately insist on being referred to as "warriors" for indiscriminately mowing down unarmed women and children, wielding weapons of mass destruction with no conscience whatsoever, but only a knee-bending, head-bowing, ring-kissing homage to Power to which it offers blind obedience, it is not the book, but the OMG! response to it, that is eye-opening.

What is sorely missing from all the reviews and all the cries of "it's Socialism" (gasP!), or "Capitalism is too broad a term", is the one basic truth that we wish to simply ignore, but which was roundly demonstrated by the so-called private sector's response to the financial panic, and the government sector's complete capitulation to their demands. The former one being, as former US Treasury Secretary George Shultz put it, "Using an atmosphere of presumed crisis, one can get something if you know what you want", enabling the wanton rapaciousness that took place, the very dynamic that precipitated the crisis in the first place, and the government's reponse, which was to throw open the public purse to disburse all of the country's, and really, the economy now being global in nature, the world's, savings, and handing them over to the plundering sector.

Which all means that, just like the Frank-Dodd bank reforms, or the ridiculous,"Volcker Rule", nothing means anything anymore, because, as we saw by the actions of the government and the Fed in 2008 it doesn't really matter what the Law, John or otherwise, says, or FASB accounting rules state (just change them), they will always default to the real rules by which everything is run, which is via accruel (sic) accounting that simply hands over the proceeds of a generation's saving to a small elite of rat-faced, trophy-wived Nazties, and then destroying their ability to generate any income from the rest of their savings via ZIRP. So what does it matter, if you siphon off a pittance of their ill-gotten gains via taxation as Picketty suggests, if they simply periodically, foment a new crisis, which they once again use as an excuse to have the government take back any gains in equality and redistribute the wealth back up the ladder to those already besotted with it? As the Fed's policy, still going strong, although, with all the tapering talk, you'd think it had ended, but no, it hasn't, the next trillion of QE being showered on the wealthy is even now showing what a sham, scam and slam the idea is. What the hell do the Supraclass care about a .1% tax on their wealth, even should it climb to the maximum 10%, as the author suggests, when they have a far greater amount simply conjured out of ions and flowing via the currentsea into their pockets?

When a small minority of the population can confiscate the savings of the all-too-silent majority, with nothing happening but a book being written to suggest that maybe we could tax a piddling amount of their hoard so that maybe a few less people will be thrown into the street, or that less people will die from lack of simple medical care, then Capitalism's metamorphosis into Criminalism has become totally accepted. Socialism, when it is run by the Wealthy to fund the wealthy is perfectly alright, just don't let a nickel get to any of what the Wall-Street boys like to sneeringly refer to as human debris, those left in ruin by men in high places with low morals and no humanity.