Resource Wars
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By Gegner
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March 9th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
In a society built on ‘cheap and abundant’ energy it is difficult to determine if the latest price hike is speculative or a concession to producers who can no longer increase their output.
While there have been recent reports of the discovery of new oil fields, most have only added ‘days’ to the amount of time we have before we exhaust this non-renewable resource. What’s a billion barrels to a world that burns a couple of hundred million barrels every day?
Understand good citizen, they would LIKE to club us over the head with ‘whatever the market will bear’ price hikes but doing that will result in the near immediate ‘evaporation’ of ‘civil order’.
Civilization will literally ‘stop in its tracks’.
Which is to ask what $50 per gallon gasoline means to you? (That’s an ‘out of a hat’ number…$20 a gallon would achieve the same net result.)
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Whacked with the 2 X 4 of Truth
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By Gegner
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March 8th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Every once in a while you encounter something that provides a glimmer of hope, if only faintly.
Earlier today I kicked Libertarianism in the nuts…and I haven’t changed my mind about that, it (to me) still constitutes the epitome of predatory thinking…so why bring it up?
As, er, ‘luck’ would have it, tonight’s first offering deposits you on the web page of a card carrying 'Randite' (note the quote in the header…)
For those of you who have never made the connection between Ayn Rand and the Libertarians, the former’s ‘fame’ is derived from her ‘glorification’ of ‘Social Darwinism’ and the Libertarian’s subsequent ‘worship’ of the same.
So, what would give a crusty old Anarchist ‘hope’ coming off of the pages of his arch nemesis?
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Casting stones....
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By Gegner
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March 7th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Well, I guess the ‘thought experiment’ landed flat on its face…oh well.
For my next trick I am going to put you all to sleep in under thirty seconds…
Time me now because here we go!
Tonight’s offering examines the one sector of society that still has a strong, functioning Union…the public sector.
Yessiree Bob, whether you’re a teacher or you work for the highway department, chances are excellent that you are also a dues paying Union member.
And over the years your union has taken good care of you (although one could argue that the ‘kindest’ employer of them all employs you…the taxpayer!) [Better, while the taxpayer cuts your paycheck, unlike the private sector, you don’t answer to them! Your boss is a weasely politician and he doesn’t dare mess with you because of the grief the union can cause him!]
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Lost in Space (fixed)
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By Gegner
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March 6th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
It seems as though some of you enjoy ‘intellectual exercises’ and, being Saturday, there isn’t anything else going on. I COULD bore you to tears with ‘another’ unsatisfying dissection of MSM ‘Happy Talk’…but after the umpteenth time, it starts getting old.
Which is to say MOST bloggers have smartened up and only provide links to especially lame MSM reporting…but I’m a little slow on the uptake.
I don’t regularly do ‘thought experiments’ because they aren’t particularly ‘productive’. Sure it’s great to hear the various untried ideas tossed around but the quality of the discussion is limited to the ‘skill’ with which the simulation is crafted.
Which is to point out that each of us will leave gaping holes that others will exploit (If they’re of a mind to) and I’d like to make that a central premise of this experiment.
Consider the players, the set-up and look for situations to exploit.
Ready?
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More shameless mis-direction
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By Gegner
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March 5th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Don’t you just LOVE economic reporting? Only in economics can you IGNORE the truth and point to data that is driven by an entirely different reason…playing YOU for the CHUMP!
So it is with the latest round of Retail sales…
What do you think is behind this?
Could it be a whole boatload of CLOSED STORES driving sales at ‘surviving’ outlets?
Nobody is getting a raise and contrary to heavily doctored ‘government statistics’, prices are still rising! So the consumer not only has less money to spend but they also have fewer places to spend it…which produces what, good citizen?
Let us proceed with tonight’s offering , which redefines the term ‘Happy Talk’.
Despite Storms, Stores Beat Expectations With Relatively Strong Gains
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: March 4, 2010Bookmark/Search this post with:
Political Meat Puppets
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By Gegner
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March 4th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Where is our ‘Hero’? Who is poised to spring into action and thwart the evil plans of those who would conspire to throw the beautiful ingenue under the train?
Didn’t we elect a ‘savior’ last November, putting an end to the reign of the evil (albeit clueless) Meat Puppet?
I mean the new guy had a good head on his shoulders…so WTF happened? Did somebody whack him between the eyes with a baseball bat, knocking him silly…or was it all just an act?
Perhaps we need to back up a few steps here and have a good, hard look at what this poor slob ‘inherited’.
The nation WAS badly broken, even then. You could even make a solid case that it’s been broken since the Gipper turned over the reins to his faithful Indian companion…George. (Who, like the current incumbent, will also fail to win re-election…talk about your massive coincidences.)
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Two Ideologies: both wrong
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By loosecannon
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March 3rd, 2010
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IMO.
The first ideology holds as it's core tenant that the ruling principle is survival of and prosperity for the fittest.
The second ideology holds that society exists as a means to serve all equally.
Applied across a topic that profoundly shapes our world, economics, the first group of idealogues believes that it is best to have a stratified society with no limits on the ability to acquire wealth or no limits to the width and depth of poverty.
The other group of idealogues believes that the economy EXISTS to provide jobs and basic requirements for all.
Personally I think both ideologies are crap. Try as I have for decades, I can not accept or support either.
Keep in mind that society, government etc are explicit social contracts committed to the stated purpose of providing equality for all, which surely includes basics like economic equality and justice. A goal decidedly at odds with the notion of unlimited wealth disparity, or disparity of privilege and power.
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The Devil is in the Details
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By Gegner
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March 3rd, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
It is not uncommon for ‘like-minded’ writers to ‘echo’ each others point of view, which is to say tonight’s offering could be considered an ‘echo’ of last night’s post.
While last night dealt with the ‘breadth’ of the global crisis by looking at the slow motion/long term destruction of global civilization, tonight’s piece looks at a specific aspect of the crisis that has yet to be corrected, much less concluded.
As some of you may have noticed, I have taken to making my ‘arguments’ here in the intro rather than saving them for the end. It keeps the articles themselves cleaner and, mercifully, ends these missives faster than would otherwise be the case.
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Descent
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By Gegner
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March 2nd, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
It often appears as though we are hurtling towards eminent disaster when we are in fact, inching our way off the cliff. In fact, given the ‘slow motion’ manner in which this sort of thing unfolds, most of you would be surprised to learn we’ve already leapt off the edge and are plummeting towards, er, ‘terra firma’ (a.k.a. the hard stuff down below.)
Like they say, it’s not the fall that kills you…it’s that sudden stop!
Naturally, we do not ‘appear’ to be falling; haven’t the pundits been assuring us that we are ‘on the mend’ (even if nobody else can see it?) Hell, they just announced that GDP is growing at a blistering 5.7% annual rate…despite unemployment and wages being stuck in reverse.
Which is to wonder if our GDP reporting process has been taken over by the same accounting firm that handles ‘mark to fantasy’ accounting for the bankrupt banks?
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Re-writing the social contact
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By Gegner
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March 1st, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Of late, I have been dancing around the subject of the, er, ‘deluded’ General Public. Those who don’t necessarily ‘believe’ the codswallop regularly dished out by the MSM as ‘the truth’…but they don’t ‘disbelieve it’ either…because of what ‘casting off the blinders’ means in terms of ‘social cost.’
Tonight’s offering covers a vast swath of social territory (and a goodly number of pages, of which, only the last few paragraphs can be found here.)
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Lil Bo Peep...
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By Gegner
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February 28th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Some speculate that we are drifting closer and closer to, er, ‘civil war’ (which is what the deniers of ‘class war’ would have you believe.)
Again, it’s difficult to determine which is more disturbing, the ‘cluelessness’ of the Tea Party movement or the MSM, which persists in providing them with a stage?
ONE OF the rallying cries of the original ‘revolution’ was ‘taxation without representation’…why nobody notices that once we got representation, nothing changed, nor will anything ‘change’ should the ‘Tea Partier’s get their mis-guided way! (Which is the likely the best explanation for why the MSM provides this idiotic movement with so much ‘free play’.)
One need only look as far as the badly crippled ‘Golden State’ (California) for a modern example of what happens if you allow the, er, ignorant electorate to ‘control’ the tax structure.
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Economic imbalances
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By Gegner
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February 27th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Sorry about last night’s post but these dip-dang ‘puter thingies don’t work for a damn without juice
In eastern Massachusetts, where the storm brought rain and high winds — but only a trace of snow — about 68,000 customers were without power Friday afternoon. There were also outages in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Vermont.
Talk about ‘can’t get your facts straight’ (probably because NYC is 200 miles SW of Boston) local sources put the number of affected customers north of 100,000 with some areas not expected to have service restored before Sunday.
Thankfully, service was restored here right about sundown.
Could I have posted last night? Probably, but I had to thaw out first!
Enough bitchin’ and cryin’ about local events, thanks to ‘Global Warming’, 49 states out of fifty are currently under a layer of…snow.
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What the heck are they smokin'?
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By Gegner
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February 25th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Yesterday the markets picked up what they dropped the prior day…and today they dropped it again!
Which is the ‘same old, same old’…who cares, right?
Naturally, ‘market performance’ isn’t ‘where the news is’…
Tonight’s offering (brief as it may be) points directly to a phenomenon that has puzzled ‘rational people’ since before the crisis began. How can the markets continue to rise when the news is so negative?
Do they know something the rest of us don’t?
Or do they really think we are that STUPID?
Let’s have a look see: [Purloined from: The Automatic Earth]
February 24 2010: Bumping along the bottom of the credit cycle
Bookmark/Search this post with:
The Way Forward
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By Gegner
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February 24th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
There is one ‘issue’ I’ve seen repeated on the web pages of many financial sites (admittedly, these are sites who share my, er, negative outlook on the prospects of capitalism’s survival.)
Which brings us to the lament I’ve seen repeated on a dozen web pages; what do we replace our currently badly broken system with?
I suspect most of you would favor simply hitting the ‘reset button’ on the current system and maybe turning back the ‘legal clock’ to before Glass-Stegal was repealed. The wiser among you would turn the clock back even further, to 1972 when Richard Nixon took the nation off of the gold standard.
Which begs the question as to whether or not our remaining saddled with ‘the standard’ would have saved our economy when the rest of the world had already left it in the dust?
There’s no ‘way back’ machine so we’ll never know for sure.
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No longer a 'viable entity'
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By Gegner
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February 23rd, 2010
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Greetings good citizen!
I have many times pointed to 'currency manipulation' as the principal cause of the destruction of our economy.
Do you know why I make such an outrageous claim? I make it partially because the people living in the 'cheaper there' should be dead, but that's only the half of it.
Letting the bankers play both ends against the middle is how the economy crashed and burned...note I use the present tense...the economy IS gone, it's 'cooked' and there is no 'bringing it back (although that's not what dopey thinks. Who is 'dopey'...you'll see.)
On the other hand, I learned something from this piece. I learned the importance of the gold standard and why the global economy 'turned to shit' once the 'gold standard' was, er, 'abandoned'.
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Social Cohesion
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By Gegner
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February 22nd, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Finally, someone (besides myself) is raising the issue of ‘social stability’. Maybe it’s a ‘sign of the times’ but this piece also attempts to tackle/explain the, er, ‘abnormally stable’ social environment…even if it concludes the current stability is ‘temporary’ at best.
Indeed, even I have been made to look foolish for predicting bloodshed that has, thus far, failed to materialize. That said, every additional day of ‘social cohesion’ since roughly last summer has been a ‘gift’.
With the commencement of the withdrawal of financial support to our economy, what has passed for civilization will crumble and fade away.
When the days grow short and the 2010 Holiday season gets underway, the snow will fall on a vastly changed landscape. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘how bad’?
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Nothing to see here...
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By Gegner
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February 21st, 2010
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Greetings good citizen!
What joyous tidings are in store for us today? How about the top headline from today’s New York Times?
“Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs”
Methinks the operative word here is ‘YEARS’, especially for people who have already been out of work more than two years now.
This is a disaster and it’s even worse than it appears because we were already ‘carrying’ a third of the workforce/population. (The over 80 million ‘discouraged workers’ not counted as being ‘in the workforce.’ Never mind the 40% of the ‘official’ workforce that only works part-time because that’s all there is.)
What two questions pop into your mind good citizen? What is being done about the (obviously) incompetent management of the US economy?” [Answer: we’re giving them bonuses!] and ‘What does this mean for the future of the Republic?” [Answer: You’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto…]
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Export Leaderboard
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By Gegner
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February 20th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
How’s that ‘economic recovery’ working out for you? What’s today’s latest lie…foreclosures are ‘slowing down’ (although the volume of homes in foreclosure increased, the number of people late on their payments dropped…
Which proves what? That more people tapped their 401k’s to get current rather than walked away? The principal ‘attraction’ to purchasing a home is, unlike rent, mortgage payments have the potential to be recaptured, rent checks are ‘gone for good’.
Which is to point out that a lot of people who should ‘walk away’ won’t…because renting is like taking a match to the money. That and (especially these days) ‘landlords’ have become mighty picky about who they will rent to and what they will permit under ‘their roof’.
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Beware of Monsters....
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By Gegner
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February 19th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
For the first time in over a year the Fed raised interest rates, and, unsurprisingly (although it will inevitably ‘surprise’ Wall Street analysts, they are ‘surprised’ if the sun rises!) the dollar also…(ahem) rose as well. (I saw a graph… it didn’t rise much!) Like most ‘economic indicators’ the ‘rises’ have been limited to the hundredths of a percent, literally not enough to lift the results out of the ‘margin of error’ for these dubious measurements.
But what the hey, there’s no law against investors being both stupid AND crazy…
The rest of us aren’t ‘blameless’ either, who do you think is picking up the tab for these idiots crazy bets? Yeah, I’m looking at you…not that there is anything you can do about it. Just saying, ya know?
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A Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail: A challenge to the progressive community
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By Pen
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February 19th, 2010
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Cross-posted a Firedoglake
A failure to plan is a plan to fail. So said a poster here on a different diary today and it got me to thinking. What is the progressive plan for dealing with the Conservadems in Congress who’ve sold us out time and again since the Reagan years?
(crickets)
Yeah, that’s the problem. The debate always comes down to this: Vote Dem or let the Repugs rule. And that’s what happens. Dems lose their base in disgust and Repugs take over. I’m just as guilty. I’ve voted Nader every election until the chance to elect a black man president outweighed the knowledge that this guy was being foisted on us by the corporatocracy.
Instead of worrying about polls, or what the Dems should be doing or what Obama isn’t doing, we should be wholly focused on getting progressives past their primary challenges and replacing Conservadems on the ballot. But we aren’t.
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