Reality checking The Future since 2027.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Get On A Gold and Silver Ark NOW!
Gold is pulling back temporarily for a couple primary reasons, 1) because the paper traded funds are taking a hit, You’ve got the speculative players many of whom are driven by technicals and momentum, rather than fundamentals, who have been selling gold cause they flipped out over the MF scare. The people who don’t look beyond the 140 character event horizon of last moments trending stock symbol. Ultimately paper, all paper, including the dollar is going down the toilet bowl, just at different speeds. Gold ETFs are just going first because that was what MF Global was entangled with. Thousands of clients who owned 6, 7 figures in paper gold in the form of futures contracts at MF called up their brokers getting the response that they’ve received a “margin call” and that the money is “with a trustee”. The CME group, the supposed “guarantors” had only question dodging. Essentially, this and gold *paper* was all stolen, and there is an honest broker’s chance at Goldman of the clients ever seeing their physical assets. This is leading to massive bailouts of the paper gold market, and a switch to owning physical, as I’ve been saying is the course of action you MUST take. The only assets you own are those you actually *have* that are not some promise on a certificate by a counterparty. All paper is going boom, just with different length fuses.
The second reason is because dollars are needed in the brief term because banks need liquidity. There is a massive global run on banks, which is being spotlit in Europe (i.e. Greece where an unprecedented 6.8 billion Euros was withdrawn in a month) but is really occurring everywhere. Banks need the dollars to stay afloat. They would much prefer to hold on to the gold – this is why the ECB was demanding Germany put up it’s gold as collateral, same for Italy, and why all the central banks have all flipped to net buyers of precious metals – but because the banks need the cash right now to remedy the liquidity crisis, they are forced to sell the gold.
None of the gold bulls / doomsayers who have a solid understanding of the totality of things and don't just look at a descending red line on a chart while listening to a news report are holding their breath. The fundamentals on the ground for gold have not changed, despite wild swings in perception. The key is the continued excess of paper money relative to gold and the potential loss of confidence in fiat paper money that’s going to hit from over-printing. The ECB will print at the first sign of deflation. Bernanke will print to kick the can, and if the dollar gains in strength because the Fed needs the dollar to be weaker. There’s a currency war afoot and you don’t want to be caught out in the trans-continental crossfire. And now it seems the US is opening up a credit line to the IMF to help bail out Europe as well. Given that the US will be payed back not in dollars but in SDRs, it is implied that the [i]US Treasury itself[/i], which signs the dollar bills, is in fact SHORT the dollar.
If anything, the dip is a Christmas gift, an opportunity for everyone to buy up more gold and silver at a bargain price, and great news as paper gold has been fucking and warping the gold markets for a long time. As people switch to physical the artificial price depression of fabricated supply (through “closed pools”, derivatives, and rehypothecation) will decrease and the true supply of gold will be better reflected, thus pushing gold higher, and speeding the bullion explosion day when people figure out the above ground supply of PMS (especially silver) is not there to meet demand. If you take a ten year outlook on gold and silver you’re seeing returns on the order of 500%, outdoing every hedge fund, mutual fund, you name it, despite their constant labeling of taking physical delivery on PMs as “nutso Alex Jones shit”. But that’s just broker’s defending their own scheme-security because they don’t get to wealth-strip you for a percentage if YOU are in control of the hard assets (nor do they get to steal them out from under you in a puff of MF Smoke.) And this trend is not abetting despite this technical blip. If you had left your money in cash, sure it would’ve been a little safer than having it elsewhere, getting maybe a 2% (now zero% CD), but that’s all moot since you’d’ve lost nearly half your savings to inflation, the real rate of which for 2011 is estimated to be as high as 11%. Bottom line, cash is just for liquidity and basic operating costs; gold and silver are king for investments. PHYSICAL gold and silver. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Which brings us to MF and its “rehypothecation”. Thanks to the Greatest Minds of Our Generation in the financial sector and all their brilliant “financial innovation” you can have your cake, eat it, eat your client’s cake, eat those cakes you’ve just eaten again, eat the cakes you’re eating whilst SIMULTANEOUSLY other firms are eating that cake, put the crumbs in a magic hat and pull out another cake, nanofax the same cake out of your butthole and eat it yet again.
In hypothecation, a borrower pledges collateral to secure a debt, retaining ownership of the collateral but is “hypothetically” controlled by the creditor who has the right to cease possession if the borrower defaults. Rehypothecation is when a bank or broker re-uses collateral posted by clients to back the broker’s own trades and borrowings. The practice of re-hypothecation runs into the trillions of dollars and is perfectly legal. It is justified by brokers on the basis that it is a “capital efficient way of financing their operations”. In the US, rehypothecation is limited to 140% of collateral. However in the good ‘ol U of K in London, through loopholes in their regulatory system, rehypothecation can go on essentially to infinity. It’s a perpetual collateral machine. Not surprisingly, this is precisely where MF Global was funneling their rehypothecation of sovereign debt through many many many times over. And MF Global is just the tip of the iceberg in this. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, all the usual suspects have hundreds of billions or trillions of exposure due to this same ad-infinitum fraud of rehypothecation.
The Master Sharks are all bullshitting out one end of their mouth on TV talking about shoring up financial system X or saving Euro Y while they are fighting a tug of war to steal gold from the oblivious unwashed masses and each other, whilst simultaneously keeping the axiomatic unit of currency (the dollar) propped up through mass printing and market manipulation, long enough so that they can get their own gold-plated silver-lined ark constructed and lined with enough loot to weather the coming financial shitstorm that will make Lehman and 2008 look like a salubrious stroll through the garden of Eden. The United states seems safe relative to other countries *for now*, but if you look at the US fiscal predicament it’s exactly the same as Europe. We just have the largest “bullshit blower” media, market-manipulating banks, and “punting ability” in terms of our ability to keep can kicked with the help of the Fed. We have the greatest illusion of stability. We’ve fixed zero of the problems we had in 2008, just pushed the REAL crisis downstream, and everything is ten times worse in terms of debt, fraud, TBTF, off balance sheet WMDs, all the issues that matter. It's not just a liquidity crisis, nor even a solvency crisis. Now it's become an actual *systemic* crisis where the underlying basis for markets are imploding. The Eurozone is being sandblasted through the news to distract the non-0.01%ers from the fact that the rest of the world – that’s Asia, US, the dollar, everybody – is just as toast as Europe. Distract long enough so they can hoard all the gold. Because not if, but *when* we end this fiat experiment/scam version 3 and revert back to a gold standard, as always, whoever is holding the most yellow metal at the end of the song wins.
In the case of a collapse, it’s of course the weakest links which reveal their rotten cores first. The shallow stones are first to be exposed as the tsunami water recedes. That is Greece and Ireland, and as the rolling crisis continues Portugal, Italy, Spain, and France. The UK, the Global Greater Attractor of fraud through which the Lehman, AIG, Bear Sterns, and MF Global heists were all facilitated by David Cameron’s doctrine of Looters First, is itself beating out Japan for deepest underwater sovereign with total outstanding debt of over 1000% of GDP. And this is why Cameron is thumbing his nose at the Euro under the guise of “I am Churchill II, defending Britain from the continental invaders!”, because rather than allow French and German regulators to come in and implode the city of London’s business model as the “Financial Terrorism Exchange”, he would rather the destruction of the global financial system and his own 99% Brits continue so he can keep his high paying whore job with his Goldman and Barclay’s pimps.
The second reason is because dollars are needed in the brief term because banks need liquidity. There is a massive global run on banks, which is being spotlit in Europe (i.e. Greece where an unprecedented 6.8 billion Euros was withdrawn in a month) but is really occurring everywhere. Banks need the dollars to stay afloat. They would much prefer to hold on to the gold – this is why the ECB was demanding Germany put up it’s gold as collateral, same for Italy, and why all the central banks have all flipped to net buyers of precious metals – but because the banks need the cash right now to remedy the liquidity crisis, they are forced to sell the gold.
None of the gold bulls / doomsayers who have a solid understanding of the totality of things and don't just look at a descending red line on a chart while listening to a news report are holding their breath. The fundamentals on the ground for gold have not changed, despite wild swings in perception. The key is the continued excess of paper money relative to gold and the potential loss of confidence in fiat paper money that’s going to hit from over-printing. The ECB will print at the first sign of deflation. Bernanke will print to kick the can, and if the dollar gains in strength because the Fed needs the dollar to be weaker. There’s a currency war afoot and you don’t want to be caught out in the trans-continental crossfire. And now it seems the US is opening up a credit line to the IMF to help bail out Europe as well. Given that the US will be payed back not in dollars but in SDRs, it is implied that the [i]US Treasury itself[/i], which signs the dollar bills, is in fact SHORT the dollar.
If anything, the dip is a Christmas gift, an opportunity for everyone to buy up more gold and silver at a bargain price, and great news as paper gold has been fucking and warping the gold markets for a long time. As people switch to physical the artificial price depression of fabricated supply (through “closed pools”, derivatives, and rehypothecation) will decrease and the true supply of gold will be better reflected, thus pushing gold higher, and speeding the bullion explosion day when people figure out the above ground supply of PMS (especially silver) is not there to meet demand. If you take a ten year outlook on gold and silver you’re seeing returns on the order of 500%, outdoing every hedge fund, mutual fund, you name it, despite their constant labeling of taking physical delivery on PMs as “nutso Alex Jones shit”. But that’s just broker’s defending their own scheme-security because they don’t get to wealth-strip you for a percentage if YOU are in control of the hard assets (nor do they get to steal them out from under you in a puff of MF Smoke.) And this trend is not abetting despite this technical blip. If you had left your money in cash, sure it would’ve been a little safer than having it elsewhere, getting maybe a 2% (now zero% CD), but that’s all moot since you’d’ve lost nearly half your savings to inflation, the real rate of which for 2011 is estimated to be as high as 11%. Bottom line, cash is just for liquidity and basic operating costs; gold and silver are king for investments. PHYSICAL gold and silver. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Which brings us to MF and its “rehypothecation”. Thanks to the Greatest Minds of Our Generation in the financial sector and all their brilliant “financial innovation” you can have your cake, eat it, eat your client’s cake, eat those cakes you’ve just eaten again, eat the cakes you’re eating whilst SIMULTANEOUSLY other firms are eating that cake, put the crumbs in a magic hat and pull out another cake, nanofax the same cake out of your butthole and eat it yet again.
In hypothecation, a borrower pledges collateral to secure a debt, retaining ownership of the collateral but is “hypothetically” controlled by the creditor who has the right to cease possession if the borrower defaults. Rehypothecation is when a bank or broker re-uses collateral posted by clients to back the broker’s own trades and borrowings. The practice of re-hypothecation runs into the trillions of dollars and is perfectly legal. It is justified by brokers on the basis that it is a “capital efficient way of financing their operations”. In the US, rehypothecation is limited to 140% of collateral. However in the good ‘ol U of K in London, through loopholes in their regulatory system, rehypothecation can go on essentially to infinity. It’s a perpetual collateral machine. Not surprisingly, this is precisely where MF Global was funneling their rehypothecation of sovereign debt through many many many times over. And MF Global is just the tip of the iceberg in this. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, all the usual suspects have hundreds of billions or trillions of exposure due to this same ad-infinitum fraud of rehypothecation.
The Master Sharks are all bullshitting out one end of their mouth on TV talking about shoring up financial system X or saving Euro Y while they are fighting a tug of war to steal gold from the oblivious unwashed masses and each other, whilst simultaneously keeping the axiomatic unit of currency (the dollar) propped up through mass printing and market manipulation, long enough so that they can get their own gold-plated silver-lined ark constructed and lined with enough loot to weather the coming financial shitstorm that will make Lehman and 2008 look like a salubrious stroll through the garden of Eden. The United states seems safe relative to other countries *for now*, but if you look at the US fiscal predicament it’s exactly the same as Europe. We just have the largest “bullshit blower” media, market-manipulating banks, and “punting ability” in terms of our ability to keep can kicked with the help of the Fed. We have the greatest illusion of stability. We’ve fixed zero of the problems we had in 2008, just pushed the REAL crisis downstream, and everything is ten times worse in terms of debt, fraud, TBTF, off balance sheet WMDs, all the issues that matter. It's not just a liquidity crisis, nor even a solvency crisis. Now it's become an actual *systemic* crisis where the underlying basis for markets are imploding. The Eurozone is being sandblasted through the news to distract the non-0.01%ers from the fact that the rest of the world – that’s Asia, US, the dollar, everybody – is just as toast as Europe. Distract long enough so they can hoard all the gold. Because not if, but *when* we end this fiat experiment/scam version 3 and revert back to a gold standard, as always, whoever is holding the most yellow metal at the end of the song wins.
In the case of a collapse, it’s of course the weakest links which reveal their rotten cores first. The shallow stones are first to be exposed as the tsunami water recedes. That is Greece and Ireland, and as the rolling crisis continues Portugal, Italy, Spain, and France. The UK, the Global Greater Attractor of fraud through which the Lehman, AIG, Bear Sterns, and MF Global heists were all facilitated by David Cameron’s doctrine of Looters First, is itself beating out Japan for deepest underwater sovereign with total outstanding debt of over 1000% of GDP. And this is why Cameron is thumbing his nose at the Euro under the guise of “I am Churchill II, defending Britain from the continental invaders!”, because rather than allow French and German regulators to come in and implode the city of London’s business model as the “Financial Terrorism Exchange”, he would rather the destruction of the global financial system and his own 99% Brits continue so he can keep his high paying whore job with his Goldman and Barclay’s pimps.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
BitCoin
Perhaps you've by now heard of BitCoin, the first functioning peer-to-peer currency.
Some detractors describe BitCoin variously as a Ponzi Scheme, or "A libertarian pipe dream traded via a program designed for Magic: The Gathering cards."
They said the same thing a few millenia ago about those new fangled toga-wearing hipsters with their "open source government" startup down at the Acropolis. That "Democracy" thing. Those DnD playing "philosophers" would never get any traction. "The Greek joke" a certain British monarch called it. The RIAA, MPAA and the rest of Media Mafia snubbed their coke-powdered noses at the notion of musical CDs being "ripped" and beamed at the speed of light to anywhere on the planet. That 'net thing's just a bunch of nerds reading too much William Gibson, fiddling with their vacuum tubes and peewee whistles between LARP sessions. Attempting to create "MUDS", collaborative Tolkien rehashes from the safety of their own mother's basements and university rooms. Book publishers, newspapers joined in the fun with the recording music industry. The CNN Empires, the Citizen Kanes of the 21st century continue to hide behind crumbling fortresses of Industrial Rev barriers-to-entry, continue to grasp at the strands of finely printed incantation that once held The Networks together as they're blown adrift on a tempest of off-message, infringing, and user dreams.
But I'm sure massively overgrown, apocalyptically destructive, completely obsolete institutions whose purpose is to hold a number in a database* for you and charge you 40% of your GDP to do it have nothing but sunny upside, smooth sailing for the next century.
*And they can't even manage THAT as proven by MF Global's vanished 1.6 billion in supposedly 'untouchable' client accounts, JP Morgan's MIA 16 billion, the CME and NYMEX trader's "ninja funds" which vanish into the ETF ether, along with the fact that the smart money is scheming up ways to bail out of the dollar. As Marc Faber (bravely) said on Bloomberg the other day when asked for investment advice, "I have a very special stock tip for you. The symbol is "G-O-L-D".
Other arguments against BitCoin: "the value of currency is largely set by the ability of the market to predict policy and supply, as well as the ability of ratings agencies to determine the value of bonds backed by the currency. Without those options a currency like Bit coin is essentially worthless except to individuals that place a value in it because it is NOT valued."
While this is may be true of traditional fiat currency, it does not hold for BitCoin. This is thinking in 20th century, bank-funded economics establishment paradigms. Firstly, governments, and ratings agencies have both proven to be completely bankrupt, untrustworthy, kowtowing flunkies to their monetarchy masters. Markets and rating agencies do not “predict policy and supply”. Beyond the restaurant/Craigslist level, there is no market. The “Market” is the Scottish Joke. Rather, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, David Cameron, Ben Bernanke, Mario Monti, and the rest of the gang sit down in the President Wilson suit (or teleconference on Fuckerbook, whatever) and figure out what value currency X should be that will best maintain their CEO and government positions and fortunes, then execute their plan. The dollar losing its value? Ok JP Morgan, you’re on point. Go counterfeit another two times global GDP worth in CDS and short the fuck out of gold and silver to manipulate the price of Benjamins back up so we can keep the shell game going. Guys, MF Global is set to blow this week, so make sure you triple-short it and do all your insider shadow trades before the opening bell. How’s Italy looking, Monti? Great, we’re shoving through another godzillion dollars in austerity, they’re on the fast track to the Greek wasteland. Heroin use up 20%, that’s a great sign.
And these ratings agencies are the same agencies that rated the 90% fraudulent, guaranteed-to-blow-up NINJA and LIARS loans, pressed through a salad shooter and formed like chicken McNuggets into CDOs, as “AAA” gold-plated zero-risk investments. YEARS after the FBI and other studies had reported incidents of fraud made up almost the entirety of the packages. The “governments” we have right now are just oligarchal wolves in democracy clothing, who will demand ten years in the slammer for starving black kids who jack a bottle of milk in Oakland or London, but who look the other way when former treasury secretary / ex Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson tips off his cadre of white shoe boys (mostly former Goldman employees-cum-hedge fund managers) about what Fannie or Freddie or Lehman or AIG or other monstrosity is going to fail this week, allowing massive wealth-ripping insider trading, and destroying the concept of a “market” in which individuals participate equally. It’s a two-tier system, financial Apartheid: if you’re a Made Man in the inner bankster circle, like an Obama or a Paulson or a Corzine or a CEO of an oil company, then you get all the “first shot” warnings to bail at the peak before the star destroyer blows up, you get first-in-line precedence over the long line of “second-class citizens”. But when MF Global goes down, if you're one of the 99% "undesirables", you discover Corzine has shifted all your physical gold out to some small secret atoll a dozen miles off the Caymans. If you’re in the Washington-Wall Street Mafia, then you get a) the early-warning before Bank of America goes Lehman and thus the opportunity to bail and short b) to be at the front of the line of derivative counterparties of BoA who get first shot at that 21 cents to 60 cents on the dollar, and at the very end of the line is FDIC insured bank depositors. The 99% “black people” who get to sit at the back of the bus as it sinks below the waves of bankruptcy. And, again, this is not an “if” but a “when” question. BoA was already insolvent if you count all the skeletons in their closet being hidden through peekaboo accounting fraud, and that’s before its Merril acquisition which merely made it three times Bigger To Fail and ten times Guaranteed To Fail, with their 78 trillion in toxic derivatives, which the FDIC (funded by Joe taxpayer) is on the hook for – yes, we’re on the hook for 6 times the ENTIRE US GDP, just vis-a-vis BoA. After the Made Men are finished stripping down the carcass of the Too Big To Exist bank, what would you think is left over for the Uncle Joes, the 99% with their life savings tied up in CDs paying .23%, which they were perfectly willing to accept in exchange for the safety and protection of the US government and the FDIC?
In the case of fiat money, federal reserve notes which are fabricated and “backed” by a government, the value of a currency does depend to a degree on how much faith people have in the government which is doing the printing. But in the case of hard currencies, which are zero-counterparty currencies, such as precious metals like gold and silver, and now BitCoin, the value is simply intrinsic, as there is a [b]limited supply[/b] of these items and they are non-fabricatable. A federal reserve note, like that $1 bill, was originally simply the “promise” that some bank will pay you one dollar – a measurement of silver bullion. These made it easier for security purposes (outsourced to a large central bank vault protected by armed guards), and for convenience (instead of lugging around the heavy metal up and down the Silk Road, just carry light notes). But ultimately these pieces of holograph-etched green paper are simply “promises” that they can be redeemed for items of actual value: like a gallon of milk or Toyota Prii or a 10,000 square foot house. And unlike the hard currencies, there is an [b]unlimited supply[/b] potentially for fiat currencies, which can be printed willy-nilly by governments who want to cover up the termite-eaten unsustainable carcass of the economy for another election year. Which is why gold and silver have outperformed every pension fund, hedge fund and money market over the past decade.
The exchange is where the value is. And BitCoin can and is exchanged all the time. Just like US dollars are exchanged for WoW dollars which are exchanged for enchanted flaming swords of fire, or Facebook bucks are exchanged back and forth between Farmville turnips and yen. And more and more people are using BitCoin as a means of exchange, thus it is going up in value. Why? Because of the countless advantages BitCoin has on traditional government-issued currency.
BitCoins are encrypted files stored on your computer or any personal digital storage device like a flash drive. The money is in a cryptographic signature that is recognized by the bitcoin network, which means any given signature can only be transacted a single time from buyer to seller. This means you can copy paste the file as many times as you want, but unlike paper money, you cannot simply print more (this applies to both small-time crook counterfeiting operation, or big time banker-baron multi-trillion wealth-destroying Federal Reserves).
Say you want to send your friend in Australia half a coin, about the price of a burger (or the net value of Goldman Sachs if you marked all their off-balance sheet “assets” to market). You open up your BitCoin account (which looks very similar to a bank statement), choose your friend from the address book, click “Send Coins”. Your friend gets the money [i]instantly[/i], and the money is deducted from your balance. That’s it.
So what are the advantages of this over the US dollar or other currency?
- Nobody logged on to a bank of any kind.
- No bank page for complicated foreign transactions was loaded into any browser.
- No expensive foreign transfer fees were applied. In fact, no transfer fees were applied at all.
- No banks were holding on to the money for a couple of days. Your friend had the money instantly.
- No bank holidays were relevant. You did this on a Sunday.
- No governmental economic blacklist was consulted. He could be a criminal under Australian law for all you care, but what matters to you is that he is your friend.
- Nobody got the chance to seize the money before your friend in Australia got it. Or afterwards.
- An alternative to a bank transfer would have been to use Visa or MasterCard. They did not get a cut, either.
The BitCoin currency increased in value one-thousandfold against the US dollar in fourteen months. Yes, that is no typo: a dollar’s worth of BitCoin cost *one thousand times* more than it did in a little over a year. There is currently no indication for market saturation, quite the opposite. Who’s the idiot who didn’t get in on that investment? If you moved your life savings out of Bank of America, JP Morgan, MF Global, your 401k, mutual fund, any “AAA” gold plated “money management” fund and into BitCoin, you would’ve not only saved your money from being stolen out the back end through a London-based rehypothecation loophole to cover the bad bets tossed at European sovereign debt by banksters, or from being converted into Jamie Dimon’s next fleet of yachts, you would’ve MULTIPLIED YOUR NET WORTH BY ONE THOUSAND. Please tell me you didn’t not put any money in BitCoin. Bummer, dude.
BitCoin has seen it's ups and downs, and has presently stabilized after the "inflated expectations" stage of the Hype Cycle peak earlier in the year. If BitCoin can remain stable and mature, then we haven’t even seen the 1949 “Gold Rush” event from the Wall Street investors, who are looking into their accounts and discovering even their meager 2% yearly returns vanishing before their very eyes. They jump at the sign of even a 25% year ROI. But these numbers are in the three-to-four digit percentile. It is therefore very likely that larger amounts of money will start pumping into BitCoin just to ensure that they get in on the lowest floor of that boom that they can.
BitCoin is virtualized hard currency, it’s what Blade is to vampires and humans: all the advantages of precious metals (no counterparty), without their weaknesses (lugging kilo bullion bars around in your pocket is inconvenient, difficult to make payments on Ebay). It has the boons of paper money (easy to move around) without the drawbacks (does away with all bureaucracy, all transaction fees, and perhaps foremost, all transaction delays and gatekeepers in the financial system.) No wealth extraction via inflation or hyperinflation, no stealing money through hidden fees, no blowing of malicious speculation bubbles via zero interest rates. This is why the bank-government Crime Lords hate even the idea of BitCoin so much, because it is the invention of the h-bomb in the financial war on the side of the 99%; it is a legitimate threat to their continued reign of terror.
Still, it is not a perfect risk-free system. It is still in its early rag-tag stages, as all startups must begin, and thus is more volatile than a solid, mature market like gold and silver. If you lose your encrypted BitCoin files to a hard drive failure or just loose them out of your pocket, then you've lost them. But that's why you make multiple backups. And the same happens if you lose a ten dollar bill. But there is no such thing as a risk-free asset; even the 1%'s money in the safest vaults in the world are being looted by the 1% of the 1% (0.01%) banksters as Gerald Celente painfully discovered when he called his agent about his 600k in gold and received a big question mark. Holding dollars even in your local bank is a risk as the money presses continue to run making us ever-more resemble Weimar Germany and the market manipulation schemes propping up the dollar continue to grow weaker and falter. It's just a matter of looking at the fundamentals and assessing whether the benefits of having some money in BitCoins etc. outweigh the risks.
There are some things you can’t yet buy with the coins, however the BitCoin “Craigslist”s are growing and you can get even cutlery, solar panels and gold/silver bullion with BitCoins last I checked. If nothing else, you can always buy that hotdog on the corner if you just convert BitCoins into another currency by selling them. I could see some blend of BitCoin or a similar virtualized hard currency utilized for making long-distance purchases and paying the electricity bill operating in tandem with silver/gold rounds for more local exchanges at the grocery for the laundry soap and such. A hybrid physical/virtual hard currency system. Like a non-fucked up, non-wealth-stripping, non-real economy-nuking version of paper dollars and credit cards – silver dollars and BitCoins.
Is it a perfect system? No. But I think the fundamentals for BitCoin are looking pretty good. Especially in comparison to the other options. To paraphrase Churchill’s aphorism on democracy and the best form of government: “hard currency (like BitCoin) is the worst form of money, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Some detractors describe BitCoin variously as a Ponzi Scheme, or "A libertarian pipe dream traded via a program designed for Magic: The Gathering cards."
They said the same thing a few millenia ago about those new fangled toga-wearing hipsters with their "open source government" startup down at the Acropolis. That "Democracy" thing. Those DnD playing "philosophers" would never get any traction. "The Greek joke" a certain British monarch called it. The RIAA, MPAA and the rest of Media Mafia snubbed their coke-powdered noses at the notion of musical CDs being "ripped" and beamed at the speed of light to anywhere on the planet. That 'net thing's just a bunch of nerds reading too much William Gibson, fiddling with their vacuum tubes and peewee whistles between LARP sessions. Attempting to create "MUDS", collaborative Tolkien rehashes from the safety of their own mother's basements and university rooms. Book publishers, newspapers joined in the fun with the recording music industry. The CNN Empires, the Citizen Kanes of the 21st century continue to hide behind crumbling fortresses of Industrial Rev barriers-to-entry, continue to grasp at the strands of finely printed incantation that once held The Networks together as they're blown adrift on a tempest of off-message, infringing, and user dreams.
But I'm sure massively overgrown, apocalyptically destructive, completely obsolete institutions whose purpose is to hold a number in a database* for you and charge you 40% of your GDP to do it have nothing but sunny upside, smooth sailing for the next century.
*And they can't even manage THAT as proven by MF Global's vanished 1.6 billion in supposedly 'untouchable' client accounts, JP Morgan's MIA 16 billion, the CME and NYMEX trader's "ninja funds" which vanish into the ETF ether, along with the fact that the smart money is scheming up ways to bail out of the dollar. As Marc Faber (bravely) said on Bloomberg the other day when asked for investment advice, "I have a very special stock tip for you. The symbol is "G-O-L-D".
Other arguments against BitCoin: "the value of currency is largely set by the ability of the market to predict policy and supply, as well as the ability of ratings agencies to determine the value of bonds backed by the currency. Without those options a currency like Bit coin is essentially worthless except to individuals that place a value in it because it is NOT valued."
While this is may be true of traditional fiat currency, it does not hold for BitCoin. This is thinking in 20th century, bank-funded economics establishment paradigms. Firstly, governments, and ratings agencies have both proven to be completely bankrupt, untrustworthy, kowtowing flunkies to their monetarchy masters. Markets and rating agencies do not “predict policy and supply”. Beyond the restaurant/Craigslist level, there is no market. The “Market” is the Scottish Joke. Rather, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, David Cameron, Ben Bernanke, Mario Monti, and the rest of the gang sit down in the President Wilson suit (or teleconference on Fuckerbook, whatever) and figure out what value currency X should be that will best maintain their CEO and government positions and fortunes, then execute their plan. The dollar losing its value? Ok JP Morgan, you’re on point. Go counterfeit another two times global GDP worth in CDS and short the fuck out of gold and silver to manipulate the price of Benjamins back up so we can keep the shell game going. Guys, MF Global is set to blow this week, so make sure you triple-short it and do all your insider shadow trades before the opening bell. How’s Italy looking, Monti? Great, we’re shoving through another godzillion dollars in austerity, they’re on the fast track to the Greek wasteland. Heroin use up 20%, that’s a great sign.
And these ratings agencies are the same agencies that rated the 90% fraudulent, guaranteed-to-blow-up NINJA and LIARS loans, pressed through a salad shooter and formed like chicken McNuggets into CDOs, as “AAA” gold-plated zero-risk investments. YEARS after the FBI and other studies had reported incidents of fraud made up almost the entirety of the packages. The “governments” we have right now are just oligarchal wolves in democracy clothing, who will demand ten years in the slammer for starving black kids who jack a bottle of milk in Oakland or London, but who look the other way when former treasury secretary / ex Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson tips off his cadre of white shoe boys (mostly former Goldman employees-cum-hedge fund managers) about what Fannie or Freddie or Lehman or AIG or other monstrosity is going to fail this week, allowing massive wealth-ripping insider trading, and destroying the concept of a “market” in which individuals participate equally. It’s a two-tier system, financial Apartheid: if you’re a Made Man in the inner bankster circle, like an Obama or a Paulson or a Corzine or a CEO of an oil company, then you get all the “first shot” warnings to bail at the peak before the star destroyer blows up, you get first-in-line precedence over the long line of “second-class citizens”. But when MF Global goes down, if you're one of the 99% "undesirables", you discover Corzine has shifted all your physical gold out to some small secret atoll a dozen miles off the Caymans. If you’re in the Washington-Wall Street Mafia, then you get a) the early-warning before Bank of America goes Lehman and thus the opportunity to bail and short b) to be at the front of the line of derivative counterparties of BoA who get first shot at that 21 cents to 60 cents on the dollar, and at the very end of the line is FDIC insured bank depositors. The 99% “black people” who get to sit at the back of the bus as it sinks below the waves of bankruptcy. And, again, this is not an “if” but a “when” question. BoA was already insolvent if you count all the skeletons in their closet being hidden through peekaboo accounting fraud, and that’s before its Merril acquisition which merely made it three times Bigger To Fail and ten times Guaranteed To Fail, with their 78 trillion in toxic derivatives, which the FDIC (funded by Joe taxpayer) is on the hook for – yes, we’re on the hook for 6 times the ENTIRE US GDP, just vis-a-vis BoA. After the Made Men are finished stripping down the carcass of the Too Big To Exist bank, what would you think is left over for the Uncle Joes, the 99% with their life savings tied up in CDs paying .23%, which they were perfectly willing to accept in exchange for the safety and protection of the US government and the FDIC?
In the case of fiat money, federal reserve notes which are fabricated and “backed” by a government, the value of a currency does depend to a degree on how much faith people have in the government which is doing the printing. But in the case of hard currencies, which are zero-counterparty currencies, such as precious metals like gold and silver, and now BitCoin, the value is simply intrinsic, as there is a [b]limited supply[/b] of these items and they are non-fabricatable. A federal reserve note, like that $1 bill, was originally simply the “promise” that some bank will pay you one dollar – a measurement of silver bullion. These made it easier for security purposes (outsourced to a large central bank vault protected by armed guards), and for convenience (instead of lugging around the heavy metal up and down the Silk Road, just carry light notes). But ultimately these pieces of holograph-etched green paper are simply “promises” that they can be redeemed for items of actual value: like a gallon of milk or Toyota Prii or a 10,000 square foot house. And unlike the hard currencies, there is an [b]unlimited supply[/b] potentially for fiat currencies, which can be printed willy-nilly by governments who want to cover up the termite-eaten unsustainable carcass of the economy for another election year. Which is why gold and silver have outperformed every pension fund, hedge fund and money market over the past decade.
The exchange is where the value is. And BitCoin can and is exchanged all the time. Just like US dollars are exchanged for WoW dollars which are exchanged for enchanted flaming swords of fire, or Facebook bucks are exchanged back and forth between Farmville turnips and yen. And more and more people are using BitCoin as a means of exchange, thus it is going up in value. Why? Because of the countless advantages BitCoin has on traditional government-issued currency.
BitCoins are encrypted files stored on your computer or any personal digital storage device like a flash drive. The money is in a cryptographic signature that is recognized by the bitcoin network, which means any given signature can only be transacted a single time from buyer to seller. This means you can copy paste the file as many times as you want, but unlike paper money, you cannot simply print more (this applies to both small-time crook counterfeiting operation, or big time banker-baron multi-trillion wealth-destroying Federal Reserves).
Say you want to send your friend in Australia half a coin, about the price of a burger (or the net value of Goldman Sachs if you marked all their off-balance sheet “assets” to market). You open up your BitCoin account (which looks very similar to a bank statement), choose your friend from the address book, click “Send Coins”. Your friend gets the money [i]instantly[/i], and the money is deducted from your balance. That’s it.
So what are the advantages of this over the US dollar or other currency?
- Nobody logged on to a bank of any kind.
- No bank page for complicated foreign transactions was loaded into any browser.
- No expensive foreign transfer fees were applied. In fact, no transfer fees were applied at all.
- No banks were holding on to the money for a couple of days. Your friend had the money instantly.
- No bank holidays were relevant. You did this on a Sunday.
- No governmental economic blacklist was consulted. He could be a criminal under Australian law for all you care, but what matters to you is that he is your friend.
- Nobody got the chance to seize the money before your friend in Australia got it. Or afterwards.
- An alternative to a bank transfer would have been to use Visa or MasterCard. They did not get a cut, either.
The BitCoin currency increased in value one-thousandfold against the US dollar in fourteen months. Yes, that is no typo: a dollar’s worth of BitCoin cost *one thousand times* more than it did in a little over a year. There is currently no indication for market saturation, quite the opposite. Who’s the idiot who didn’t get in on that investment? If you moved your life savings out of Bank of America, JP Morgan, MF Global, your 401k, mutual fund, any “AAA” gold plated “money management” fund and into BitCoin, you would’ve not only saved your money from being stolen out the back end through a London-based rehypothecation loophole to cover the bad bets tossed at European sovereign debt by banksters, or from being converted into Jamie Dimon’s next fleet of yachts, you would’ve MULTIPLIED YOUR NET WORTH BY ONE THOUSAND. Please tell me you didn’t not put any money in BitCoin. Bummer, dude.
BitCoin has seen it's ups and downs, and has presently stabilized after the "inflated expectations" stage of the Hype Cycle peak earlier in the year. If BitCoin can remain stable and mature, then we haven’t even seen the 1949 “Gold Rush” event from the Wall Street investors, who are looking into their accounts and discovering even their meager 2% yearly returns vanishing before their very eyes. They jump at the sign of even a 25% year ROI. But these numbers are in the three-to-four digit percentile. It is therefore very likely that larger amounts of money will start pumping into BitCoin just to ensure that they get in on the lowest floor of that boom that they can.
BitCoin is virtualized hard currency, it’s what Blade is to vampires and humans: all the advantages of precious metals (no counterparty), without their weaknesses (lugging kilo bullion bars around in your pocket is inconvenient, difficult to make payments on Ebay). It has the boons of paper money (easy to move around) without the drawbacks (does away with all bureaucracy, all transaction fees, and perhaps foremost, all transaction delays and gatekeepers in the financial system.) No wealth extraction via inflation or hyperinflation, no stealing money through hidden fees, no blowing of malicious speculation bubbles via zero interest rates. This is why the bank-government Crime Lords hate even the idea of BitCoin so much, because it is the invention of the h-bomb in the financial war on the side of the 99%; it is a legitimate threat to their continued reign of terror.
Still, it is not a perfect risk-free system. It is still in its early rag-tag stages, as all startups must begin, and thus is more volatile than a solid, mature market like gold and silver. If you lose your encrypted BitCoin files to a hard drive failure or just loose them out of your pocket, then you've lost them. But that's why you make multiple backups. And the same happens if you lose a ten dollar bill. But there is no such thing as a risk-free asset; even the 1%'s money in the safest vaults in the world are being looted by the 1% of the 1% (0.01%) banksters as Gerald Celente painfully discovered when he called his agent about his 600k in gold and received a big question mark. Holding dollars even in your local bank is a risk as the money presses continue to run making us ever-more resemble Weimar Germany and the market manipulation schemes propping up the dollar continue to grow weaker and falter. It's just a matter of looking at the fundamentals and assessing whether the benefits of having some money in BitCoins etc. outweigh the risks.
There are some things you can’t yet buy with the coins, however the BitCoin “Craigslist”s are growing and you can get even cutlery, solar panels and gold/silver bullion with BitCoins last I checked. If nothing else, you can always buy that hotdog on the corner if you just convert BitCoins into another currency by selling them. I could see some blend of BitCoin or a similar virtualized hard currency utilized for making long-distance purchases and paying the electricity bill operating in tandem with silver/gold rounds for more local exchanges at the grocery for the laundry soap and such. A hybrid physical/virtual hard currency system. Like a non-fucked up, non-wealth-stripping, non-real economy-nuking version of paper dollars and credit cards – silver dollars and BitCoins.
Is it a perfect system? No. But I think the fundamentals for BitCoin are looking pretty good. Especially in comparison to the other options. To paraphrase Churchill’s aphorism on democracy and the best form of government: “hard currency (like BitCoin) is the worst form of money, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Zombie Banks, Vampire Bankers, Silver Bullets
Wall Street (metonym, not the physical tourist attraction / financial ground zero) is fundamentally a set for Dawn of the Dead. These are zombie banks – irrevocably bankrupt banks being reanimated with trodes of taxpayer credit lines jammed into their heads, eating the population left and right, turning every sovereign they bite with their toxic fraud teeth into another undead shambling Greece or Italy. If their actual stocks were ever marked-to-market, they would all instantly go under. They could easily be broken up into hundreds of smaller banks and credit unions who could do the actual work of providing capital to productive businesses (what banks are supposed to do) many times more efficiently and without the systemic risk or the looting or economic genocide etc.. The big banks and corporations have absolutely massive net negative effect on the underlying economy, The Global Well Being Index (estimated in the tens of trillions if you count all the bailouts, lost productivity due to hyperinflated fraud bubbles, etc). Each and every American is now over $300,000 in debt thanks to them, and all the money we've given in bailouts to the banks, instead of lending it to people they blow it on food and energy speculation resulting in impoverishment, use it to buy out of other failed banks becoming bigger to fail, and shower the rest on themselves. So why are they still around? Because the people in power positions to destroy them are all sucking the zombie teats. The sole purpose of their continued existence is to allow the CEOs like Jamie Dimon, like Lloyd Blankfein to continue to pay themselves the hundreds of millions of undeserved, criminally stolen bonuses that they have leeched themselves upon for over a decade. Giant zombie banks are fundamentally looting-machines, and nothing more. They could be gone tomorrow. It's a matter of how much of our economic and physical body (in the case of deadly austerity and artificial food shortage) they're going to get away with eating before we finally decide to double tap them.
This is essentially like if you or I threw on a doctor uniform, forged up some hospital ID material, waltzed into the ER and started pretending to perform quadruple bypasses and brain surgery. Of course we’d botch most of the surgeries with absolutely no training or experience, killing hundreds of people (pension/bank account looting, bailouts, inflation, austerity, Greece, Italy, famine) but as long as we can hold up the veneer and get paid six figures, who cares, right? The nurses and hospital staff (politicians, economists, media) applaud our valiant efforts, our attempts to “save the economy”. But as the patients keep dying, we blame it on them: the government forced us poor megabanks to give poor people and minorities subprime NINJA loans! These unhealthy Greeks and Americans didn't take our prescribed dosage of Austerity medicine! The blood is on the hands of the poor and the public sector. We need to be paid more money, given more freedom and more powerful bonesaws in order to do our job properly. The patient will surely die without more bailout and fiat currency IVs. 700 billion ccs, stat! Oh darn, Lehmans gone, another one bites the dust. This is a sad day for all of us surgeons. Let’s make sure this never happens again, by giving us more money.
Getting rid of these homicidal psychopaths masquerading as surgeons is an absolute no-brainer, like the equivalent of curing cancer. The same goes for all the biggest names on Wall Street. It's a matter of how many people, savings, and economies we'd like to see murdered before we've had enough.
Virtually all of the major banks are bankrupt. The Lehman, Bear Sterns, the Madoffs, the MF Globals, these are just the tip of the iceberg, the tiny fraction of visible matter in the Fraudiverse that got blown up cause they tripped up or crossed the bigger mob bosses while there remains hundreds or thousands more firms and corporations still sneaking around through shadow banking and shadow accounting. Not only all the usual suspects, the JP Morgans, the Goldman Sachs and other major investment banks, but General Electric, IBM, Warren Buffet all regularly engage in this kind of accounting fraud. When regulators come in to record your end of the quarter liabilities, you move it off of your balance sheet for a few days with the complicity of another corrupt hedge fund or broker or a banker or corporation. They’re all based on accounting fraud. MF Global just happened to botch their peek-a-boo accounting the past quarter, or failed to pay off some regulator at the SEC, and so they were toasted. But you could pull the tail on almost any of the big banks and their stock all goes to zero.
Despite the “officially” reported 160 billion JP Morgan is supposedly “worth”, it is absolutely a dead firm walking if you priced in all the ‘off-balance-sheet’ toxic waste refuse dredged through the debt megabubble that they’re still lugging around. All the 78 trillion in illusory horse feces derivatives – equivalent to you or I writing on a cocktail napkin an insurance certificate for a trillion dollars and then declaring that as “assets. If you put a hundred million troy ounce silver bullet through the heart of the werewolf, shove the basilisk tooth of capital depletion and risk-unveilment through the Dark Financial Lords’ own Holcruxes keeping it alive indefinitely, JP Morgan and many other firms would evaporate into flecks of ash, blown away in a colony on a breeze, like a waning bad dream. It really will not take a lot, given the extremely thin ice they are already on in terms of capital, liquidity, popular image, and the fact that their Ponzi games running out of suckers to con, real economy to drain, as people are waking up to what’s really going on. JPM is in extremely deep shit as they had significant counterparty risk tied up with MF Global, and is most recently having to buy up MF’s 4.7% stake in the London Metal Exchange. And why do they need to do this? Because they need to defend their massive but slipping stranglehold on the physical silver market. Then let's raise that a 2.1 billion dollar lawsuit for *gasp* fraud in their mortgage backed securities . Of course, the first substantial legal action against a major firm has to come from a pissed off German counterparty, rather than the US regulators or the DoJ. Then add to that litany of red ink the fact that it has come out now that JPM engaged in client fund co-mingling to the tune of $16 billion; a massive blow. Sunlight on the hidden risk, burning this financial vampire alive.
Capital can flow, but it is a two-way-stream. There are major players out there, activist hedge funds, good and honest investment managers who see the malignancy, unsustainability, and outright abomination that is the current iteration of our fraud-debt-fiat based financial system. These entities and individuals are actively flash flooding their capital in a contraforce against these predatory Ponzi institutions. Already Anonymous Analytics has fought fire with fire, outing hidden risk and toxicity, then applying reverse-capitalism to blow up the fraudsters with their own weapon of choice: shorting. They've already taken down Chaoda, one of the Hong Kong Exchanges' largest and longest running frauds as a proof of concept. We’ve just seen what happens to so called “foreclosure mills” when their true nature and practices are exposed. Goldman Sachs has already laid off tens of thousands of employees, and many of Lloyd Blankfein’s bankers won’t even be seeing any of their cherished bonuses this year. This is due at least in part to the negative attention and scrutiny raised by individuals and groups about Goldman's practices and situation, in turn leading to the unwinding of their "machine"ations and pyramid schemes exacerbated as the debt can continues to fill with cement. Even the Occupy-supported “Bank Transfer Day” and similar actions have a big knock on effect, especially as the larger clients, the 1%ers, the owners of hotel chains with kids getting maced at UC Davis, the Gerald Celente marquee-name investors getting stuck with “margin calls” are being moved to follow the trend: which you can bet has the big firms shaking in their sealskin boots. Because they are all Ponzi schemes, and like any Ponzi scheme, once enough people start pounding on the door demanding "Show Me The Money!" and start pulling it out, the scheme unravels.
Then there’s Silver Vigilante #1, CEO Eric Sprott of Canada-based Eric Sprott Asset Management, announcing his purchase of 1.5 BILLION dollars worth of silver bullion. Given that the previous megapurchase from Sprott last year of $580 million sent silver soaring 177%, and the fact that this purchase is nearly *three times* that size, this will be like a bombardment of Jericho missiles on JP Morgan’s gold and silver price manipulation edifice. If the proportionate upswing is even half of the boom last year, it will almost certainly be the silver steak through the heart of JP Morgan, with immense knock-on effects repercussing throughout financial Mordor. Not to mention Chinese and Indian purchases of the precious metals which are up several hundred percent in the past month alone, and the increased purchasing at the grass roots level AKA the Silver Liberation Army. The thing with this strategy is that the vampire cannot simply turn into a bat, squirt some black derivative ink and perform a “capital shift” or reduction of exposure to a precious metal bull market. Firstly, because letting go of the silver short will take the lid off the precious metal Pandora's Box leading to a sinking of the dollar and JPM destruction, yet if they hold the short, they are forced to take tens, hundreds of billions in short losses ALSO leading to JPM destruction: they're caught between a bullion rock and a short hard place. Secondly, the toxic funds they have are massively illiquid – because who the hell is going to buy a swimming pool of nuclear waste? That was the plotline of the 2008 credit crunch -- and the only ones they can effectively offload them to are the (formerly) sovereign governments, the 99% taxpayers, like Greece, like Ireland, like Spain, like Italy, like the US whose whore politicians collude with bankers to allow the continued economic Hiroshimas (AKA ‘bailouts’) in exchange for a cut of the blood money. Or as in Greece and Italy, outright coup-ed out by "technocrats" (coughbankers). But even these “atrocity sinks” are dwindling and the gangsters holding the timebombs cannot shift their risk at a rate fast enough to counteract the rate at which it is being exposed, and the rate at which gold and silver vigilantes are tearing down their dark fortresses and Dracula coffins made of fiat, derivative, and other nightmare hallucinations. The bad capital flow, the malignant ectoplasm wraith is being cornered between the crossed ghostbuster streams of the risk-raking vampire banker hunters, the silver-bulleted financial activists, the pissed off half-vampire Blades in the 1% who are being robbed blind by the Frosts, and the result?
Wall Street announces massive *structural* layoffs of more than 200,000. Bonuses decimated, the fifty million end-of-year goes the way of the Dodo. One economist guesses that Wall Street won't regain jobs "until about 2023." Now we’ll see who cries for those who laughed haughtily, waved diamond champagne flutes, sprinkled McDonald’s applications on the seas of the homeless, jobless, and futureless “Plebians” Occupying the sidewalks around the lofty Two Towers of CME and NYMEX. The Wall Street in-fighting fiascos bleeding into the news cycle are the final shuffling of the deck chairs, the ship rats scrambling tooth and nail for the last morsel of food before the vessel sinks. No doubt fervent prayers are being recited to shrines of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and the rest of the pantheon in the Presidential Suite of the Plaza Hotel tonight.
CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe. Just as I said a page ago. The potential gains of moving your funds virtually anywhere in the market are now outweighed by the risks of losing it all to some Corzine or Jamie Dimon or other fundsucking parasite who can drain you with impunity. We’re at the start of a global liquidity run. There will be rallies. Finance clowns like Kramer or CNN anchors will waddle onto TV, inform you of the impending bull market in Goldman Sachs shares and What You Can Do To Help Save The Dollar! But ultimately, capital will begin “flowing” in tsunamis away from Wall Street and big banks and into gold and silver. This will create a feedback loop in which the dollar see-saws in the opposite direction, in turn drying up the dark pools exposing more zombie banks, creating more incentive to dive towards the stratospheric hard currencies. And no matter how hard Bernanke cranks up his monetary firehose, even if he gets his Weimar on and blows a Googleplex dollars our of his ass sending the price of a gallon of milk to a billion dollars; an ounce of silver will simply be worth 15 trillion dollars, gold at 150 trillion. Fiat will be tossed back into the recycle bin of history, just like it did centuries ago after the French iteration of our plight when their government buried the Francais in paper assignats from Pigalle to Marsaille, after which their 99% started beheading kleptaristocrats left and right with the guillotine. (not that we’ll see literal decapitations, but *decapitalization* of the Louis XIV and Marie Antoinettes has already begun). Whether it’s two weeks, three months, or a year, the end-game has begun, and now it’s only a matter of time.
Sure, the MSM, themselves debtslaved to the bankers, underwater to their eyeballs and reliant on Wall Street's blessing for their next episode will scream Apocalypse, Now! Will call it the end of the world, just like Hank Paulson threatened congress in 2008, just like the EFSF threatened Greece in 2011, just like we’re told hundreds of thousands of times by almost every news report and pundit, in the post-modern version of Orwell’s truthification machine. THE SKY WILL FALL IF WE DON’T SAVE THIS TUMOR! The truth is, this will be the collapse of the bankrupt and decrepit Gormenghast, the implosion of the financial castle Wolfenstein, and the rebirth of the global economy as decades of debt, deceit and general malignancy are cleared from the system. Will some rats escape the sinking ship? Probably a few stragglers will, just like a few 1%ers and IBM and Coke moguls managed to Shanghai some of their Third Reich blood money out of collapsing Nazi Germany, set up a pina colada stand in Argentina. But the greater swath of the cancer will be excised; the core engine of the Death Star which allows it to function and wreak havok – the edifice of debt, fraud, and fiat – will be destroyed. Whether we learn from the mistakes – break up the too big to fails, return sane leverage limits, separate corporation and government, get ACTUAL COPS on the financial beat, etc – is up to us as a nation and as a world.
Capitalism may be predicated on crisis, but until we’re magically transported to Marxian Utopia, the death and devastation of crisis can and should be shifted away from the innocent villagers and onto the barons who instigate the crises. The other option is to sit there, the looters in chief make bank, as your home sinks below the waves, your pension ablaze, your job crumbling beneath a wage arbitrage contagion, and complain that crises happen. As the heart of Occupy has always been: you cannot rely on governments, corporations, nor “experts” to solve your problems, because they are all the problem. You have to do it yourself. Just as a democracy in which people check out to Dancing with the Stars and remain unengaged results in no democracy, so a financial-economic system in which people just check out, let the default suit-n-tie manage their money, and remain oblivious results in a broken and exploitative financial-economic system. That AND no democracy as a hostile takeover is performed resulting in monetarchy: rule by the biggest money. That means investing in yourself, in your own financial education before you check a box on your job app or W-2 and start dropping savings into a fund managed by “experts” whose goal is not to make you money but to inflate their own wealth by giving you the *illusion* that they're making you money, often at the expense of your pension, 401k, or other fund, as everyone including the white-shoe crowd are painfully discovering.
And if you haven't already, it's time to start getting yourself out of paper. If you can that is: if you've still got your money digitized in the numerati's supercomputers somewhere in any kind of managed fund, it's highly probably that your money is already gone, vanished into monetary Never-Never Land (probably was used to build some banker's gold-sided corporate tower). Madoff was just the tip of the iceberg: the entire system is Madoff, through and through, as MF Global and JP Morgan clients and all therein subsumed owners of small businesses, 401ks, pensions, fireman and nurse bank accounts that woke up to find their life savings disappeared are only now realizing. It is highly likely that the monthly statements you get in the mail from any large firm are lies; the family jewels have been replaced with plastic replicas by the thieves but you don't know it yet. Get the hell out of all paper, digital and otherwise: that's not just stocks, but IRAs, 401ks, and yes, even those green "Federal Reserve Notes" wadded up in your wallet. Yes, not even the money in your bank account is safe. Once the Euro is finished toasting to ash, the dollar is next in line, and bet that the printing that allows the tables to be run till the house of cards collapses will only accelerate as it did in Germany half a century ago, in France three centuries ago, at the end of every fiat scam, ending always with a return to hard money. The only currency that will be worth anything, the only protagonist that will survive this zombie horror movie, the massacre that is the Day of the Dead Global Financial and Monetary System are the assets without any counter-party risk, and those are gold and silver.*
There's your Zombie Bank Survival Guide. Don't say you weren't warned.
EDIT: some recent and vindicating news:
CNBC in a cash crunch . Looks like the bankers' Goebbelian price propaganda arm and sucker-maker is flailing as the body goes into critical condition. Looks like Goldman Sachs has run out of scraps to toss to their ponzi-fluffing court jester, Jim Cramer. Coincidence that this is occurring immediately after major bonus cuts and 200,000+ firings on Wall Street? I think not.
Groupon scam strips billions from dupes
Don't say I didn't warn you.
[QUOTE] originally posted by TwiliteMinotaur, November 14, 2011:
I suppose you're going to start taking stock pointers from Jim Cramer and shift your nestegg into Groupon.[/QUOTE]
Uhh, that's good.
(*And that's PHYSICAL gold and silver: the actual precious metal that ETFs and paper gold/silver are supposed to point to have already been ripped off by the pirates, and the booty has been buried in their own treasure islands. Just ask Gerald Celente how that paper bullion strategy worked out.)
This is essentially like if you or I threw on a doctor uniform, forged up some hospital ID material, waltzed into the ER and started pretending to perform quadruple bypasses and brain surgery. Of course we’d botch most of the surgeries with absolutely no training or experience, killing hundreds of people (pension/bank account looting, bailouts, inflation, austerity, Greece, Italy, famine) but as long as we can hold up the veneer and get paid six figures, who cares, right? The nurses and hospital staff (politicians, economists, media) applaud our valiant efforts, our attempts to “save the economy”. But as the patients keep dying, we blame it on them: the government forced us poor megabanks to give poor people and minorities subprime NINJA loans! These unhealthy Greeks and Americans didn't take our prescribed dosage of Austerity medicine! The blood is on the hands of the poor and the public sector. We need to be paid more money, given more freedom and more powerful bonesaws in order to do our job properly. The patient will surely die without more bailout and fiat currency IVs. 700 billion ccs, stat! Oh darn, Lehmans gone, another one bites the dust. This is a sad day for all of us surgeons. Let’s make sure this never happens again, by giving us more money.
Getting rid of these homicidal psychopaths masquerading as surgeons is an absolute no-brainer, like the equivalent of curing cancer. The same goes for all the biggest names on Wall Street. It's a matter of how many people, savings, and economies we'd like to see murdered before we've had enough.
Virtually all of the major banks are bankrupt. The Lehman, Bear Sterns, the Madoffs, the MF Globals, these are just the tip of the iceberg, the tiny fraction of visible matter in the Fraudiverse that got blown up cause they tripped up or crossed the bigger mob bosses while there remains hundreds or thousands more firms and corporations still sneaking around through shadow banking and shadow accounting. Not only all the usual suspects, the JP Morgans, the Goldman Sachs and other major investment banks, but General Electric, IBM, Warren Buffet all regularly engage in this kind of accounting fraud. When regulators come in to record your end of the quarter liabilities, you move it off of your balance sheet for a few days with the complicity of another corrupt hedge fund or broker or a banker or corporation. They’re all based on accounting fraud. MF Global just happened to botch their peek-a-boo accounting the past quarter, or failed to pay off some regulator at the SEC, and so they were toasted. But you could pull the tail on almost any of the big banks and their stock all goes to zero.
Despite the “officially” reported 160 billion JP Morgan is supposedly “worth”, it is absolutely a dead firm walking if you priced in all the ‘off-balance-sheet’ toxic waste refuse dredged through the debt megabubble that they’re still lugging around. All the 78 trillion in illusory horse feces derivatives – equivalent to you or I writing on a cocktail napkin an insurance certificate for a trillion dollars and then declaring that as “assets. If you put a hundred million troy ounce silver bullet through the heart of the werewolf, shove the basilisk tooth of capital depletion and risk-unveilment through the Dark Financial Lords’ own Holcruxes keeping it alive indefinitely, JP Morgan and many other firms would evaporate into flecks of ash, blown away in a colony on a breeze, like a waning bad dream. It really will not take a lot, given the extremely thin ice they are already on in terms of capital, liquidity, popular image, and the fact that their Ponzi games running out of suckers to con, real economy to drain, as people are waking up to what’s really going on. JPM is in extremely deep shit as they had significant counterparty risk tied up with MF Global, and is most recently having to buy up MF’s 4.7% stake in the London Metal Exchange. And why do they need to do this? Because they need to defend their massive but slipping stranglehold on the physical silver market. Then let's raise that a 2.1 billion dollar lawsuit for *gasp* fraud in their mortgage backed securities . Of course, the first substantial legal action against a major firm has to come from a pissed off German counterparty, rather than the US regulators or the DoJ. Then add to that litany of red ink the fact that it has come out now that JPM engaged in client fund co-mingling to the tune of $16 billion; a massive blow. Sunlight on the hidden risk, burning this financial vampire alive.
Capital can flow, but it is a two-way-stream. There are major players out there, activist hedge funds, good and honest investment managers who see the malignancy, unsustainability, and outright abomination that is the current iteration of our fraud-debt-fiat based financial system. These entities and individuals are actively flash flooding their capital in a contraforce against these predatory Ponzi institutions. Already Anonymous Analytics has fought fire with fire, outing hidden risk and toxicity, then applying reverse-capitalism to blow up the fraudsters with their own weapon of choice: shorting. They've already taken down Chaoda, one of the Hong Kong Exchanges' largest and longest running frauds as a proof of concept. We’ve just seen what happens to so called “foreclosure mills” when their true nature and practices are exposed. Goldman Sachs has already laid off tens of thousands of employees, and many of Lloyd Blankfein’s bankers won’t even be seeing any of their cherished bonuses this year. This is due at least in part to the negative attention and scrutiny raised by individuals and groups about Goldman's practices and situation, in turn leading to the unwinding of their "machine"ations and pyramid schemes exacerbated as the debt can continues to fill with cement. Even the Occupy-supported “Bank Transfer Day” and similar actions have a big knock on effect, especially as the larger clients, the 1%ers, the owners of hotel chains with kids getting maced at UC Davis, the Gerald Celente marquee-name investors getting stuck with “margin calls” are being moved to follow the trend: which you can bet has the big firms shaking in their sealskin boots. Because they are all Ponzi schemes, and like any Ponzi scheme, once enough people start pounding on the door demanding "Show Me The Money!" and start pulling it out, the scheme unravels.
Then there’s Silver Vigilante #1, CEO Eric Sprott of Canada-based Eric Sprott Asset Management, announcing his purchase of 1.5 BILLION dollars worth of silver bullion. Given that the previous megapurchase from Sprott last year of $580 million sent silver soaring 177%, and the fact that this purchase is nearly *three times* that size, this will be like a bombardment of Jericho missiles on JP Morgan’s gold and silver price manipulation edifice. If the proportionate upswing is even half of the boom last year, it will almost certainly be the silver steak through the heart of JP Morgan, with immense knock-on effects repercussing throughout financial Mordor. Not to mention Chinese and Indian purchases of the precious metals which are up several hundred percent in the past month alone, and the increased purchasing at the grass roots level AKA the Silver Liberation Army. The thing with this strategy is that the vampire cannot simply turn into a bat, squirt some black derivative ink and perform a “capital shift” or reduction of exposure to a precious metal bull market. Firstly, because letting go of the silver short will take the lid off the precious metal Pandora's Box leading to a sinking of the dollar and JPM destruction, yet if they hold the short, they are forced to take tens, hundreds of billions in short losses ALSO leading to JPM destruction: they're caught between a bullion rock and a short hard place. Secondly, the toxic funds they have are massively illiquid – because who the hell is going to buy a swimming pool of nuclear waste? That was the plotline of the 2008 credit crunch -- and the only ones they can effectively offload them to are the (formerly) sovereign governments, the 99% taxpayers, like Greece, like Ireland, like Spain, like Italy, like the US whose whore politicians collude with bankers to allow the continued economic Hiroshimas (AKA ‘bailouts’) in exchange for a cut of the blood money. Or as in Greece and Italy, outright coup-ed out by "technocrats" (coughbankers). But even these “atrocity sinks” are dwindling and the gangsters holding the timebombs cannot shift their risk at a rate fast enough to counteract the rate at which it is being exposed, and the rate at which gold and silver vigilantes are tearing down their dark fortresses and Dracula coffins made of fiat, derivative, and other nightmare hallucinations. The bad capital flow, the malignant ectoplasm wraith is being cornered between the crossed ghostbuster streams of the risk-raking vampire banker hunters, the silver-bulleted financial activists, the pissed off half-vampire Blades in the 1% who are being robbed blind by the Frosts, and the result?
Wall Street announces massive *structural* layoffs of more than 200,000. Bonuses decimated, the fifty million end-of-year goes the way of the Dodo. One economist guesses that Wall Street won't regain jobs "until about 2023." Now we’ll see who cries for those who laughed haughtily, waved diamond champagne flutes, sprinkled McDonald’s applications on the seas of the homeless, jobless, and futureless “Plebians” Occupying the sidewalks around the lofty Two Towers of CME and NYMEX. The Wall Street in-fighting fiascos bleeding into the news cycle are the final shuffling of the deck chairs, the ship rats scrambling tooth and nail for the last morsel of food before the vessel sinks. No doubt fervent prayers are being recited to shrines of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and the rest of the pantheon in the Presidential Suite of the Plaza Hotel tonight.
CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe. Just as I said a page ago. The potential gains of moving your funds virtually anywhere in the market are now outweighed by the risks of losing it all to some Corzine or Jamie Dimon or other fundsucking parasite who can drain you with impunity. We’re at the start of a global liquidity run. There will be rallies. Finance clowns like Kramer or CNN anchors will waddle onto TV, inform you of the impending bull market in Goldman Sachs shares and What You Can Do To Help Save The Dollar! But ultimately, capital will begin “flowing” in tsunamis away from Wall Street and big banks and into gold and silver. This will create a feedback loop in which the dollar see-saws in the opposite direction, in turn drying up the dark pools exposing more zombie banks, creating more incentive to dive towards the stratospheric hard currencies. And no matter how hard Bernanke cranks up his monetary firehose, even if he gets his Weimar on and blows a Googleplex dollars our of his ass sending the price of a gallon of milk to a billion dollars; an ounce of silver will simply be worth 15 trillion dollars, gold at 150 trillion. Fiat will be tossed back into the recycle bin of history, just like it did centuries ago after the French iteration of our plight when their government buried the Francais in paper assignats from Pigalle to Marsaille, after which their 99% started beheading kleptaristocrats left and right with the guillotine. (not that we’ll see literal decapitations, but *decapitalization* of the Louis XIV and Marie Antoinettes has already begun). Whether it’s two weeks, three months, or a year, the end-game has begun, and now it’s only a matter of time.
Sure, the MSM, themselves debtslaved to the bankers, underwater to their eyeballs and reliant on Wall Street's blessing for their next episode will scream Apocalypse, Now! Will call it the end of the world, just like Hank Paulson threatened congress in 2008, just like the EFSF threatened Greece in 2011, just like we’re told hundreds of thousands of times by almost every news report and pundit, in the post-modern version of Orwell’s truthification machine. THE SKY WILL FALL IF WE DON’T SAVE THIS TUMOR! The truth is, this will be the collapse of the bankrupt and decrepit Gormenghast, the implosion of the financial castle Wolfenstein, and the rebirth of the global economy as decades of debt, deceit and general malignancy are cleared from the system. Will some rats escape the sinking ship? Probably a few stragglers will, just like a few 1%ers and IBM and Coke moguls managed to Shanghai some of their Third Reich blood money out of collapsing Nazi Germany, set up a pina colada stand in Argentina. But the greater swath of the cancer will be excised; the core engine of the Death Star which allows it to function and wreak havok – the edifice of debt, fraud, and fiat – will be destroyed. Whether we learn from the mistakes – break up the too big to fails, return sane leverage limits, separate corporation and government, get ACTUAL COPS on the financial beat, etc – is up to us as a nation and as a world.
Capitalism may be predicated on crisis, but until we’re magically transported to Marxian Utopia, the death and devastation of crisis can and should be shifted away from the innocent villagers and onto the barons who instigate the crises. The other option is to sit there, the looters in chief make bank, as your home sinks below the waves, your pension ablaze, your job crumbling beneath a wage arbitrage contagion, and complain that crises happen. As the heart of Occupy has always been: you cannot rely on governments, corporations, nor “experts” to solve your problems, because they are all the problem. You have to do it yourself. Just as a democracy in which people check out to Dancing with the Stars and remain unengaged results in no democracy, so a financial-economic system in which people just check out, let the default suit-n-tie manage their money, and remain oblivious results in a broken and exploitative financial-economic system. That AND no democracy as a hostile takeover is performed resulting in monetarchy: rule by the biggest money. That means investing in yourself, in your own financial education before you check a box on your job app or W-2 and start dropping savings into a fund managed by “experts” whose goal is not to make you money but to inflate their own wealth by giving you the *illusion* that they're making you money, often at the expense of your pension, 401k, or other fund, as everyone including the white-shoe crowd are painfully discovering.
And if you haven't already, it's time to start getting yourself out of paper. If you can that is: if you've still got your money digitized in the numerati's supercomputers somewhere in any kind of managed fund, it's highly probably that your money is already gone, vanished into monetary Never-Never Land (probably was used to build some banker's gold-sided corporate tower). Madoff was just the tip of the iceberg: the entire system is Madoff, through and through, as MF Global and JP Morgan clients and all therein subsumed owners of small businesses, 401ks, pensions, fireman and nurse bank accounts that woke up to find their life savings disappeared are only now realizing. It is highly likely that the monthly statements you get in the mail from any large firm are lies; the family jewels have been replaced with plastic replicas by the thieves but you don't know it yet. Get the hell out of all paper, digital and otherwise: that's not just stocks, but IRAs, 401ks, and yes, even those green "Federal Reserve Notes" wadded up in your wallet. Yes, not even the money in your bank account is safe. Once the Euro is finished toasting to ash, the dollar is next in line, and bet that the printing that allows the tables to be run till the house of cards collapses will only accelerate as it did in Germany half a century ago, in France three centuries ago, at the end of every fiat scam, ending always with a return to hard money. The only currency that will be worth anything, the only protagonist that will survive this zombie horror movie, the massacre that is the Day of the Dead Global Financial and Monetary System are the assets without any counter-party risk, and those are gold and silver.*
There's your Zombie Bank Survival Guide. Don't say you weren't warned.
EDIT: some recent and vindicating news:
CNBC in a cash crunch . Looks like the bankers' Goebbelian price propaganda arm and sucker-maker is flailing as the body goes into critical condition. Looks like Goldman Sachs has run out of scraps to toss to their ponzi-fluffing court jester, Jim Cramer. Coincidence that this is occurring immediately after major bonus cuts and 200,000+ firings on Wall Street? I think not.
Groupon scam strips billions from dupes
Don't say I didn't warn you.
[QUOTE] originally posted by TwiliteMinotaur, November 14, 2011:
I suppose you're going to start taking stock pointers from Jim Cramer and shift your nestegg into Groupon.[/QUOTE]
Uhh, that's good.
(*And that's PHYSICAL gold and silver: the actual precious metal that ETFs and paper gold/silver are supposed to point to have already been ripped off by the pirates, and the booty has been buried in their own treasure islands. Just ask Gerald Celente how that paper bullion strategy worked out.)
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Peak Humanity Now Turning The Corner
Other day I was discussing prognoses including long term US outlooks from economists like *Nouriel Roubini, who is bullish long term on the US.
Basically these guys are suggesting we're going to see a return in "some manufacturing" thanks to wage deflation and mass flocking to the fallout shelter of the dollar (which is itself distorted with a quadrillion CDS short on the PM mirror image, and the biggest megabubble of all yet to blow). What are these awesome new jobs going to pay, exactly? If you simply shift an iPad suicide pit back to the US and stock it with illegals who currently do all our manual labor for couch change, or fill the jobs with Gulag or debt slaves instead of the Chinese ones, that may boost the GDP price propaganda ticker and provide economists with an employment number talking point, but it is a zero or negative-sum gain in terms of Gross National Happiness, which is the only metric that matters. The social contract built by the labor movement and securities act protections upon which the American middle class powerhouse was founded are being systematically rolled back, with JP Morgan's insider magazine stating (within their own banker chambers) that "US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP". Without the changes championed by the Occupy Movement, i.e. separation of corporation and state, they and their whores on capitol hill will continue the rolling back to late-19th century/Chinese levels of labor exploitation with destruction of bargaining rights, replacement of jobs with wetbacks and Big Prison slavery in turn driving down the bottom line, debt and inflationary wealth-stripping, and outright austerity bloodletting. Any of this anticipated growth will be negated if not strangled by these effects, just like GDP actually decreased in the noughties if you remove the debt portion falsely inflating the numbers. Roubini’s forecast also relies on the US congress and administration somehow turning around and magically “ending the kicking of the can”; something we’re promised on a near continual basis with no results.
As if our "representative" Obama -- whose campaign was bought and paid for by one of the all-time-largest contributions from the "Too Big To Fail" investment banks -- is actually involved in any of the decision making rather than being a speechifying celebutante, a piece of marketing bait to reel in Joe Hope-n-Change. Obama is the blue equivalent of George W Bush, ball gagged in the closet while Tim Geitner, Paul Rubin, the Clintons, and Bernanke go over with Dimon and Blankfein the “game plan”, including a) how they’re going to spin Wachovia’s 400 billion dollar money laundering of the mass-murdering Zeta drug cartel in the next news cycle b) Whether they should keep the Fed interest rate at 0% for the next 50 or 100 years in order to ensure that malignant speculation/looting has enough fuel to continue to suck the lifeblood out of the economy and debt serfs of the US lower 99% via that financial Apartheid c) Whether they should install Lucas Papademos, vice president of the European Central Bank, formerly of the Federal Reserve of Boston, as new Greek prime minister, to ensure that the Greek holocaust/bailout of their criminal bondholders goes as planned. D) Whether they should replace Berlusconi with Mario Monti, big wig executive at Goldman Sachs and “prestigious member” of the notorious MotU frat house - The Bilderberg Group, to make sure that coup-de-tat goes as planned and that they successfully plunder Italy's 3k tons of gold bullion. Yes, a literal coup, as neither of these banker-plants, of course, are elected heads of state. And as it stands there is absolutely nothing preventing the debt and fraud-based Ponzi from continuing its rampage as the "vampire squid" on the face of the 99% here in the US going forward, nothing to prevent the 2008 megabubble 2.0 from blowing again. Once again: zero major criminals indicted now taking even bigger risks, zombie investment banks even bigger to fail, continued money printing trending toward Weimarization, six hundred trillion outstanding dark pool derivatives weaponized by JP Morgan still distorting the gold and silver price to prop up the zombie dollar, regulators in bed with the regulated = no regulation, firms like MF Global headed by former Goldman Sachs exec just outright stealing billions of people's money with impunity, lawlessness and chaos prevails, wash rinse repeat. No amount of iPad 3s and penis pills are going to put a dent in that.
Yes, banksters. Close knit group of criminals operating beyond the law, who happen to be bankers. Financial mafia. Let's call a spade a spade, stop being schmucks, and not delude ourselves into believing these people are anything but lawbreaking barons who deserve to be dumped in a prison cell for life, or worse. Unless you get off on being the abused girlfriend who keeps crawling back in codependence to her beater with her misshapen cheekbones, telling yourself it's, "All my own fault," that, "He really means he's sorry this time." Like the Greek economists with Stockholm syndrome, trying to convince their population that the EFSF is their messiah who is trying to save them from their (fraudulently induced by Goldman Sachs in collusion with Papandreou) debt problems by beating them over the head with more debt, literally killing them with hospitals staffed by five nurses, suicide and drug use up 40%. Oh, but it's not people being photogenically mowed down with panzers, so it doesn't count. My bad. CNN, pack up your cameras, nothing to see here. I said pack them the fuck up. Cut to that airbrushed close up of Sarkozy or Merkel or some random CME trader staring up at stock tickers, holding his forehead concernedly. Headline: "Europe struggles to save Greece and Italy".
[QUOTE]Everybody saw the housing crash coming but nobody could do anything about it.[/QUOTE]
Or, nobody could do anything about it without getting their meal ticket pulled, because they're all bitches of the financial mobs.
[QUOTE]Retail vacancies are down but for needs based items, not luxury items, which points to a resurgence in capital flow but not wages. [/QUOTE]
Awesome, so Jamie Dimon, Jon Corzine, and all the insider-trading revolving door Democrats and Republicans are buying 50% more Valentino suits, Maseratis, and Kim Kardashian-sized diamond rings. That's great news. That is the light at the end of the tunnel right there.
[QUOTE]Although the US ALMOST defaulted on its debt this year that was due parliamentary BS, not an inability to pay.[/QUOTE]
This is besides the point that this debt is not sustainable, which is besides the point that we *are* "paying" at all for the toxic debt -- paying for the TREASONOUS illegally bestowed criminality of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Wachovia, Citi Bank, Bank of America, and more with the continued support of the Obama administration -- and we are continuing to pay with this:
#1 The financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb, has submitted a proposal to close half of all the schools in the city. His plan envisions class sizes of up to 62 students in the remaining schools.
#2 Detroit Mayor Dave Bing wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.
#3 Things are so tight in California that Governor Jerry Brown is requiring approximately 48,000 state workers to turn in their government-paid cell phones by June 1st.
#4 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to completely eliminate 20 percent of state agencies.
#5 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has closed 20 fire departments at night and is proposing layoffs in every single city agency.
#6 In the state of Illinois, lawmakers recently pushed through a 66 percent increase in the personal income tax rate.
#7 The town of Prichard, Alabama came up with a unique way to battle their budget woes recently. They simply stopped sending out pension checks to retired workers. Of course this is a violation of state law, but town officials insist that they just do not have the money.
#8 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently purposely skipped a scheduled 3.1 billion dollar payment to that state's pension system.
#9 The state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.
#10 Due to a very serious budget shortfall, the city of Newark, New Jersey recently made very significant cuts to the police force. Subsequently, there has been a very substantial spike in the crime rate.
#11 The city of Camden, New Jersey is "the second most dangerous city in America", but because of a huge budget shortfall they recently felt forced to lay off half of the city police force.
#12 Philadelphia, Baltimore and Sacramento have all instituted "rolling brownouts" during which various city fire stations are shut down on a rotating basis.
#13 In Georgia, the county of Clayton recently eliminated its entire public bus system in order to save 8 million dollars.
#14 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer. The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.
#15 In Connecticut, the governor is asking state legislators to approve the biggest tax increase that the state has seen in two decades.
#16 All across the United States, conditions at many state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at best. Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a billion dollars long. The following is a quote from a recent MSNBC article about these project backlogs....
[QUOTE] More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York's are at least $1 billion. Hawaii officials called park conditions "deplorable" in a December report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.[/QUOTE]
#17 The state of Arizona recently announced that it has decided to stop paying for many types of organ transplants for people enrolled in its Medicaid program.
#18 Not only that, but Arizona is so desperate for money that they have even sold off the state capitol building, the state supreme court building and the legislative chambers.
#19 All over the nation, asphalt roads are actually being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.
#20 The state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe. According to 60 Minutes, the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments. 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded....
[QUOTE]"It's fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state."[/QUOTE]
Forget the elephant in the room that all these economic gurus hand-wave away: breakthroughs in robotic automation and artificial intelligence are replacing human manufacturing and even highly-skilled jobs en-masse. US electronics manufacturers are almost entirely automated with human workers filling in as a scant few troubleshooters who tweak a solder algo by a micron or tweak a buggy snaggle of code occasionally. Just look at videos of IBM circuit printing factories. Who is going to hire human workers who need wages, who get sick, who require sleep, who have kids, who are generally unreliable? Manufacturing output in the US may continue to increase but will definitely continue to decouple from job and wage growth. The "inshoring" is going to come back but it's Watson and Wall-E and Hal that are going to be seeing all that "prosperity", performing routine diagnoses, checking out your groceries as autoclerks, replacing vast swaths of the ‘white collar’ office jobs with brute-force data-modelling AI and evolutionary algorithm-based intelligence that can now automatically generate sports commentary and even formulate scientific theories. It's the 1% owners of the non-human means of production that are going to be reeling in all the fruits of the new US Golden Age in the form of increased profit margins, while the rest of the population are out getting bloodied by specuflation, non-regulation, worker oppression and austerity that’s eviscerated the safety nets when they most need it, eaten alive by zombie banks.
The usual “Jobs will come from somewhere” counterargument assumes that there is a “where” sizable enough within the mental and physical capabilities of the human species to replace the obsolesced sector of jobs. While there may be an unending litany of new products to come out (next season’s iPhone, a better electric car, some other as yet uninvented tech), there is not an unending litany of new human physical and mental abilities being pumped out every season by Darwinian evolution of our neocortices. What we’ve got is what we’ve got; the human body and mind are a finite resource and we are rapidly approaching peak humanity. The Luddites who were yanked during the Industrial Revolution by the loom (and not without violent and vehement protest) and the assembly line workers who were supplanted by the first semi-autonomous machines were both engaged in jobs on the very lowest tier of human capability — that is, simple, repetitive, mechanical tasks. These are the very easiest of automatable tasks in the design space of machines; they are essentially a three line algorithm: “push, screw, repeat”. All these traditional examples often mentioned by economists – looms, farming equipment, information technology -- have been replacement by machines of small slices of human potential. Physical manipulation of car parts replaced by servos and actuators, memory and numerical calculation replaced by bytes and Turing machines -- these have all been absorbable as new “oil wells” of human potential were there to be tapped into and utilized. Rote mechanical and mental work was replaced by slightly higher service industry and knowledge work skills, but the difference in the coming AI/robotics revolution is that we’re going to run out of “wells” of potential to tap. And even the automation thus far has proven to have massive destabilizing effects on society as a whole.
As computer automation of the mid-skill and knowledge work begins to really set in, more and more people are going to be squeezed out of the workforce, with limited human-employability pie. The for-profit college loan ponzi-scheme scams are a symptom of this: you need a four year degree to even start competing for jobs that pay anything livable, and yet even with these degrees, almost half of the new college graduates leave school without a job, and almost a quarter are unable to find any decent job at all, let alone in their field. Indeed that great wave of “economic growth” we’ve been riding for the past decades has been art dropout brand-pushing AKA marketing — a zero-sum non-wealth-creating tug of war over customers — and the best and brightest gold star kids going for that MBA to engage in plutocratic wealth-stealing schemes consisting of sandcastles of financial paper shuffling built on clouds of shadow mark-to-model systems. Culminating spectacularly in the recent global financial meltdown, and continued shambling of the undead financial system which still brutalizes the world. And this monstrosity, coincidentally, was in part enabled by automation of the stock market via algorithmic and high-freq trading, obsolescing another swath of the formerly human field of “systems analysts” the star children of the Astounding Economy of The Future born from the ugly post-Fordist nebula of Reagonomics in the 80′s and 90′s. Now even those hotshots are going the way of John Henry, leaving only the mogul-class. Here's a prognosis: fifty percent unemployment, constant and growing global mass protest, World Class Warfare turning hot, de-facto rule by existing wealth, white tuxedos perched in two hundred story bullet-proof glass pyramids guarded by autonomous Reaper drones and Terminators armed with sound cannons, who hire the spineless and the foolish to office to do their bidding. Cacastocracy: rule by the stupidest and least qualified.
What we're looking at, long term, is precisely the opposite of a positive outlook, but rather mass inequality, un/underemployment. Thus, more Occupy-like movement and growth of alternate economies, alternate societies, and alternate politics. Direct democracy. The shadow economy is already the fastest growing sector at nearly ten trillion. Barter, Craigslist, self-fabrication, the open source village, farmers markets and bazaars in parking lots, resilience communities. Self-starting communities that aren't waiting for governments to save them, for jobs created by the cartel to return (both are vanishingly improbable). And many people are straddling both worlds: working a declining, "precariat" job at a post office with hours shriveling while simultaneously patching the income with a home-fab or farm swapmeet biz. At the local Occupy, we've got nurses working *full time* yet are uninsured, who are directly providing medical assistance to one another. Already, studies are showing half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- are working in what's called System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash (and now silver and gold as the fiat fiasco winds down). In one sense, Occupy is simply the extension of the shadow economy: it is self-starting shadow-politics circumventing the formal mechanisms of power. Not revolution but exolution, exodus from the shackles of the broken republic turned corporation-state cabal. If it were a country, System D would be surpassed in GDP only by the US and China. I'm forecasting a bull market for gold, silver, and pitchforks. The decade for guillotines.
Obviously at present the Homo Sapiens overhead for the operation of an (at present) bleeding edge tech like a Reaper drone is substantial. Does that mean it always will be? At one time it took hundreds of technicians paid thick company salaries laboring over hundreds of miles of wire, vacuum tube and punch cards just to do a simple arithmetic calculation. All jobs which were created by the advent of the electronic computer. Now four year old South African kids fresh out of the !Kung hunter-gatherer dreamtime can do billions of such calculations a second on $10 cell phones 1/1000,000 the size of an IBM 701 with the push of a button. At least while they’re not being starved to death by the million as a byproduct of Goldman Sach’s manufactured commodity bubbles and distortions tripling the price of basic staple foods like corn and wheat. Collateralized debt conflagration. Incidentally, the artificial famines created by nanosecond speed algorithmatized trading is also wrought at the push of a few buttons which used to require 'scraper-filling hordes of traders and analysts, many of whom are actually out there in the Occupy Movement now .
*Ultimately I agree with the majority of Rounbini's analysis, but I think he's leaving some of the possible black or grey swans out of his equation.
Problem, which I already pointed out, and which you obviously have failed to grasp, is that the rate of technological job creation and technological job destruction are decoupling and the spread will only continue to get worse as the window of un-automatable human physical and cognitive capacity draws thinner. The number of “technicians” required is over the long outlook negative-sum, constantly decreasing, as in the electronics factories, which can match Shenzhen’s dollar-a-day slave labor by eliminating the majority of the factory’s manual chip soldering, etc. with robots. U.S. manufacturers have cut nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs (about 33%) since 2001 yet the value of manufactured goods rose 27 percent, and U.S. exports reached their highest level in 20 years. In fact it’s just come to light that global electronics manufacturer Foxconn “plans to replace many of its factory workers in China with a million new robots.” So much for that competitive advantage.
When tractors, crop-pickers and other farming machinery displaced half the country from agricultural jobs, the former farmers were able to find new jobs migrating to factories. But what happens to the hundreds of millions of white collar workers when artificial intelligence begins evicting them from their offices? Where do they go? Their situation is far worse than the factory workers or farmers a century ago because a) Software automation is magnitudes cheaper and easier to implement than a large roboticized factory with a huge infrastructure overhead. Software can be replicated nigh infinitely with minimal additional cost. b) White collar jobs are far more costly to employers than blue collar, all the more reason to “right-size” them away c) The automation of a knowledge worker job kills the “machine as tool” Luddite-fallacy argument because it no longer requires a human “operating” each individual instance of the intelligent machine. What happens when the capital itself becomes the labor?
Turbo Tax, for example, is a single software which eliminates millions of accounting gigs once enjoyed by people who spent years, in some cases decades, in higher education. But that’s old-hat. Document examination once done by armies of lawyers, can now be done by scanning technologies and smart algorithms that search case law, evaluate, and present summaries. They can do this at a fraction of the cost and with far greater thoroughness than their human counterparts. Where do the millions of displaced legal workers go? Um, uh, hm.
With Watson and similar mass-data modeling AI, the majority of office workers, management and even executive work of decision making, resource allocation etc. can be replaced, and with more efficient results. Wal-Mart already has the drop on this and have made bank, others are starting to follow suit. The latest in automated pattern-recognition technology can now perform the work of scanning tumor slides and other x-rays normally done by radiologists paid $300,000 a year after 13 years of school – at one hundredth the cost. Where are the millions of new jobs going to come from to replace these?
Then there are the self driving cars, which now have eaten over a hundred thousand miles of public road and are being slowly rolled out by Google among others. Just last week the world's second-largest iron ore miner Rio Tinto PLC said it would up its fleet of driverless trucks from 10 to 150 in order to boost profit margins in Australia. There are 3.2 million truck and driver/sales jobs in the US at present. Then you’ve got the millions of bus drivers, taxi drivers, mail carriers and more who will be down at the unemployment office (picked clean thanks to bailout-austerity) when that a-bomb of job destruction hits the market.
And these are all technologies already [i]in existence[/i], not counting those yet to be invented. Many jobs are safe from automation for now not because they are incredibly complex or mentally demanding, but because they require a high degree of dexterity, visual acuity, and coordination which have been traditionally difficult for machines. But I wouldn’t stay long that trend if I were you. Already ASIMO II is capable of navigating complex and changing environments, locating and manipulating objects with near-human haptic skill, recognizing faces, detecting speech from a single voice among multiple simultaneous speakers. It’s not such a big stretch to imagine a store fully automated by a central inventory/managerial AI directing ASSIMO shelf stockers and warehouse workers supplied by self-driving trucks. Sure, those hellfire missile-handlers have their hands full now, those sensor operators have their job security for the moment, but for how long? We’ve already got autonomously navigating military vehicles like the Squad Mission Support System . The idea that all the jobs enlisting human potential not emulatable by machines at present are somehow always going to be around or that obsolesced positions will always be replaced with new ones is simply myopic. Call it “logarithmic dross”.
Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession. How is this possible? Since the end of the recession, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat. At the same time, the S&P 500 companies are expected to report record breaking profits this year to the tune of about $930 billion. This is just the beginning of technological disemployment/employment dislocating.
And we’re actually already in a far deeper hole than we think, the true job losses are not yet priced in. Given that the financial sector composed 41% of GDP at the peak of the Global Ponzi crisis, most of that fraud-based paper shuffling, and that we’re still playing kick-the-can and reward-the-TBTF, many of those “technician” jobs created by the malignant and illusory portions of the financial sector have yet to have their Wile-E-Coyote moment when they go the way of the elevator operator. And we don't need the full automation of every job, even 25% unemployment would have catastrophic effects in our current system. Add the fact that we need to create a net of over a million jobs just to keep up with [i]population growth[/i] and I’m still not seeing the bright long term outlook for the US.
Of course, Einstein, because grabbing the AK and going full cowboy on a fucking 1st world government in 2011 is the smartest way to go about achieving positive change. Never mind the role of nonviolence in evicting the British from India or overthrowing the ruler of El Salvador in 1944, or even in ending Jim Crow in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa, in the popular removal of the ruler of the Philippines in 1986, in the largely nonviolent Iranian Revolution of 1979, in the dismantling of the Soviet Union in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, in the resistance to a stolen election in the Ukraine in 2004-2005, in Egypt 2011, and in hundreds of other examples from around the world. Nevermind the fact that the target of greatest leverage here that won't result in futile bloodshed is manufactured ignorance and agnotological disinformation propagated through the traditional media channels that has us mindfucked into believing that everything is cool, that there is a vibrant middle class, that a rising DOW lifts all boat, that the failure of banks would be “catastrophic”, that there’s nothing to be done but take it up the ass or armed insurrect. Never mind that the goal was to shift the frame of the conversation away from the scripted sideshows on to what really matters and unites the 99% against the 1%. A goal which has been accomplished and has become larger than Occupy; an unevictable mindshift. As Edit pointed out, we may disagree about specific tactics, but the overall direction is there. But, hey, fuck the storyline, let’s fast forward to the Modern Warfare 3!
a href=http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-favor-fading.html>We are the99% 33%.
Why? Because of violence.
I guess I should’ve expected a “smart bomb first, ask questions later” cave man solution. Trained to see in blindered "insurgent-friendly" dichotomies. In these trying economic times, we’ve all got to protect our job security, after all. But even after years of sometimes blowing up innocent civilians in endless wars of convenience to fund the various machines of wealth extraction and monopoly maintenance, ultimately they still just use troops like 12-year-old Thai whores, gut their retirements, dump their ashes into landfills like rusted out tools, or send their IED-eviscerated remains home in a Dell computer box to stink up their spouse’s front porch. Inflation getting out of control? Drop demand by killing off some poor saps in a war! Works every time. Perhaps I should start Tweeting “Fuck Occupy!”, “Eat Cake, sergeant Thomas!”, “Obama is my hero!” so maybe Echelon version Facebook.0 will file my dossier in the “benign irritant” subfolder. Next to the PTSD shellshocked Vietnam and Iraq vets that rot to death in the streets, left with only a cardboard sign for food and a purple heart to use as toilet paper, dry their tears on the colder nights when the bottle is empty and the forgetting is hard. Then when the few with limbs left show up, terminally jobless, pension/benefits slashed, at an Occupy chapter, they get a swift rubber bullet to the temple, followed by a flash-bang-to-the-ear chaser. Serves them right! Should've started an armed insurrection and opened fire on the riot cops. Yeah, fuck those stupid lazy-ass triple-tour marines! They’re so fuckin’ lazy. Here, have a McDonald’s application, you lazy fucks!
(Aside: We have a veterans workgroup, who are some of the most vehement about maintaining non-violence.)
Basically these guys are suggesting we're going to see a return in "some manufacturing" thanks to wage deflation and mass flocking to the fallout shelter of the dollar (which is itself distorted with a quadrillion CDS short on the PM mirror image, and the biggest megabubble of all yet to blow). What are these awesome new jobs going to pay, exactly? If you simply shift an iPad suicide pit back to the US and stock it with illegals who currently do all our manual labor for couch change, or fill the jobs with Gulag or debt slaves instead of the Chinese ones, that may boost the GDP price propaganda ticker and provide economists with an employment number talking point, but it is a zero or negative-sum gain in terms of Gross National Happiness, which is the only metric that matters. The social contract built by the labor movement and securities act protections upon which the American middle class powerhouse was founded are being systematically rolled back, with JP Morgan's insider magazine stating (within their own banker chambers) that "US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP". Without the changes championed by the Occupy Movement, i.e. separation of corporation and state, they and their whores on capitol hill will continue the rolling back to late-19th century/Chinese levels of labor exploitation with destruction of bargaining rights, replacement of jobs with wetbacks and Big Prison slavery in turn driving down the bottom line, debt and inflationary wealth-stripping, and outright austerity bloodletting. Any of this anticipated growth will be negated if not strangled by these effects, just like GDP actually decreased in the noughties if you remove the debt portion falsely inflating the numbers. Roubini’s forecast also relies on the US congress and administration somehow turning around and magically “ending the kicking of the can”; something we’re promised on a near continual basis with no results.
As if our "representative" Obama -- whose campaign was bought and paid for by one of the all-time-largest contributions from the "Too Big To Fail" investment banks -- is actually involved in any of the decision making rather than being a speechifying celebutante, a piece of marketing bait to reel in Joe Hope-n-Change. Obama is the blue equivalent of George W Bush, ball gagged in the closet while Tim Geitner, Paul Rubin, the Clintons, and Bernanke go over with Dimon and Blankfein the “game plan”, including a) how they’re going to spin Wachovia’s 400 billion dollar money laundering of the mass-murdering Zeta drug cartel in the next news cycle b) Whether they should keep the Fed interest rate at 0% for the next 50 or 100 years in order to ensure that malignant speculation/looting has enough fuel to continue to suck the lifeblood out of the economy and debt serfs of the US lower 99% via that financial Apartheid c) Whether they should install Lucas Papademos, vice president of the European Central Bank, formerly of the Federal Reserve of Boston, as new Greek prime minister, to ensure that the Greek holocaust/bailout of their criminal bondholders goes as planned. D) Whether they should replace Berlusconi with Mario Monti, big wig executive at Goldman Sachs and “prestigious member” of the notorious MotU frat house - The Bilderberg Group, to make sure that coup-de-tat goes as planned and that they successfully plunder Italy's 3k tons of gold bullion. Yes, a literal coup, as neither of these banker-plants, of course, are elected heads of state. And as it stands there is absolutely nothing preventing the debt and fraud-based Ponzi from continuing its rampage as the "vampire squid" on the face of the 99% here in the US going forward, nothing to prevent the 2008 megabubble 2.0 from blowing again. Once again: zero major criminals indicted now taking even bigger risks, zombie investment banks even bigger to fail, continued money printing trending toward Weimarization, six hundred trillion outstanding dark pool derivatives weaponized by JP Morgan still distorting the gold and silver price to prop up the zombie dollar, regulators in bed with the regulated = no regulation, firms like MF Global headed by former Goldman Sachs exec just outright stealing billions of people's money with impunity, lawlessness and chaos prevails, wash rinse repeat. No amount of iPad 3s and penis pills are going to put a dent in that.
Yes, banksters. Close knit group of criminals operating beyond the law, who happen to be bankers. Financial mafia. Let's call a spade a spade, stop being schmucks, and not delude ourselves into believing these people are anything but lawbreaking barons who deserve to be dumped in a prison cell for life, or worse. Unless you get off on being the abused girlfriend who keeps crawling back in codependence to her beater with her misshapen cheekbones, telling yourself it's, "All my own fault," that, "He really means he's sorry this time." Like the Greek economists with Stockholm syndrome, trying to convince their population that the EFSF is their messiah who is trying to save them from their (fraudulently induced by Goldman Sachs in collusion with Papandreou) debt problems by beating them over the head with more debt, literally killing them with hospitals staffed by five nurses, suicide and drug use up 40%. Oh, but it's not people being photogenically mowed down with panzers, so it doesn't count. My bad. CNN, pack up your cameras, nothing to see here. I said pack them the fuck up. Cut to that airbrushed close up of Sarkozy or Merkel or some random CME trader staring up at stock tickers, holding his forehead concernedly. Headline: "Europe struggles to save Greece and Italy".
[QUOTE]Everybody saw the housing crash coming but nobody could do anything about it.[/QUOTE]
Or, nobody could do anything about it without getting their meal ticket pulled, because they're all bitches of the financial mobs.
[QUOTE]Retail vacancies are down but for needs based items, not luxury items, which points to a resurgence in capital flow but not wages. [/QUOTE]
Awesome, so Jamie Dimon, Jon Corzine, and all the insider-trading revolving door Democrats and Republicans are buying 50% more Valentino suits, Maseratis, and Kim Kardashian-sized diamond rings. That's great news. That is the light at the end of the tunnel right there.
[QUOTE]Although the US ALMOST defaulted on its debt this year that was due parliamentary BS, not an inability to pay.[/QUOTE]
This is besides the point that this debt is not sustainable, which is besides the point that we *are* "paying" at all for the toxic debt -- paying for the TREASONOUS illegally bestowed criminality of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Wachovia, Citi Bank, Bank of America, and more with the continued support of the Obama administration -- and we are continuing to pay with this:
#1 The financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb, has submitted a proposal to close half of all the schools in the city. His plan envisions class sizes of up to 62 students in the remaining schools.
#2 Detroit Mayor Dave Bing wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.
#3 Things are so tight in California that Governor Jerry Brown is requiring approximately 48,000 state workers to turn in their government-paid cell phones by June 1st.
#4 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to completely eliminate 20 percent of state agencies.
#5 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has closed 20 fire departments at night and is proposing layoffs in every single city agency.
#6 In the state of Illinois, lawmakers recently pushed through a 66 percent increase in the personal income tax rate.
#7 The town of Prichard, Alabama came up with a unique way to battle their budget woes recently. They simply stopped sending out pension checks to retired workers. Of course this is a violation of state law, but town officials insist that they just do not have the money.
#8 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently purposely skipped a scheduled 3.1 billion dollar payment to that state's pension system.
#9 The state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.
#10 Due to a very serious budget shortfall, the city of Newark, New Jersey recently made very significant cuts to the police force. Subsequently, there has been a very substantial spike in the crime rate.
#11 The city of Camden, New Jersey is "the second most dangerous city in America", but because of a huge budget shortfall they recently felt forced to lay off half of the city police force.
#12 Philadelphia, Baltimore and Sacramento have all instituted "rolling brownouts" during which various city fire stations are shut down on a rotating basis.
#13 In Georgia, the county of Clayton recently eliminated its entire public bus system in order to save 8 million dollars.
#14 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer. The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.
#15 In Connecticut, the governor is asking state legislators to approve the biggest tax increase that the state has seen in two decades.
#16 All across the United States, conditions at many state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at best. Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a billion dollars long. The following is a quote from a recent MSNBC article about these project backlogs....
[QUOTE] More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York's are at least $1 billion. Hawaii officials called park conditions "deplorable" in a December report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.[/QUOTE]
#17 The state of Arizona recently announced that it has decided to stop paying for many types of organ transplants for people enrolled in its Medicaid program.
#18 Not only that, but Arizona is so desperate for money that they have even sold off the state capitol building, the state supreme court building and the legislative chambers.
#19 All over the nation, asphalt roads are actually being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.
#20 The state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe. According to 60 Minutes, the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments. 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded....
[QUOTE]"It's fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state."[/QUOTE]
Forget the elephant in the room that all these economic gurus hand-wave away: breakthroughs in robotic automation and artificial intelligence are replacing human manufacturing and even highly-skilled jobs en-masse. US electronics manufacturers are almost entirely automated with human workers filling in as a scant few troubleshooters who tweak a solder algo by a micron or tweak a buggy snaggle of code occasionally. Just look at videos of IBM circuit printing factories. Who is going to hire human workers who need wages, who get sick, who require sleep, who have kids, who are generally unreliable? Manufacturing output in the US may continue to increase but will definitely continue to decouple from job and wage growth. The "inshoring" is going to come back but it's Watson and Wall-E and Hal that are going to be seeing all that "prosperity", performing routine diagnoses, checking out your groceries as autoclerks, replacing vast swaths of the ‘white collar’ office jobs with brute-force data-modelling AI and evolutionary algorithm-based intelligence that can now automatically generate sports commentary and even formulate scientific theories. It's the 1% owners of the non-human means of production that are going to be reeling in all the fruits of the new US Golden Age in the form of increased profit margins, while the rest of the population are out getting bloodied by specuflation, non-regulation, worker oppression and austerity that’s eviscerated the safety nets when they most need it, eaten alive by zombie banks.
The usual “Jobs will come from somewhere” counterargument assumes that there is a “where” sizable enough within the mental and physical capabilities of the human species to replace the obsolesced sector of jobs. While there may be an unending litany of new products to come out (next season’s iPhone, a better electric car, some other as yet uninvented tech), there is not an unending litany of new human physical and mental abilities being pumped out every season by Darwinian evolution of our neocortices. What we’ve got is what we’ve got; the human body and mind are a finite resource and we are rapidly approaching peak humanity. The Luddites who were yanked during the Industrial Revolution by the loom (and not without violent and vehement protest) and the assembly line workers who were supplanted by the first semi-autonomous machines were both engaged in jobs on the very lowest tier of human capability — that is, simple, repetitive, mechanical tasks. These are the very easiest of automatable tasks in the design space of machines; they are essentially a three line algorithm: “push, screw, repeat”. All these traditional examples often mentioned by economists – looms, farming equipment, information technology -- have been replacement by machines of small slices of human potential. Physical manipulation of car parts replaced by servos and actuators, memory and numerical calculation replaced by bytes and Turing machines -- these have all been absorbable as new “oil wells” of human potential were there to be tapped into and utilized. Rote mechanical and mental work was replaced by slightly higher service industry and knowledge work skills, but the difference in the coming AI/robotics revolution is that we’re going to run out of “wells” of potential to tap. And even the automation thus far has proven to have massive destabilizing effects on society as a whole.
As computer automation of the mid-skill and knowledge work begins to really set in, more and more people are going to be squeezed out of the workforce, with limited human-employability pie. The for-profit college loan ponzi-scheme scams are a symptom of this: you need a four year degree to even start competing for jobs that pay anything livable, and yet even with these degrees, almost half of the new college graduates leave school without a job, and almost a quarter are unable to find any decent job at all, let alone in their field. Indeed that great wave of “economic growth” we’ve been riding for the past decades has been art dropout brand-pushing AKA marketing — a zero-sum non-wealth-creating tug of war over customers — and the best and brightest gold star kids going for that MBA to engage in plutocratic wealth-stealing schemes consisting of sandcastles of financial paper shuffling built on clouds of shadow mark-to-model systems. Culminating spectacularly in the recent global financial meltdown, and continued shambling of the undead financial system which still brutalizes the world. And this monstrosity, coincidentally, was in part enabled by automation of the stock market via algorithmic and high-freq trading, obsolescing another swath of the formerly human field of “systems analysts” the star children of the Astounding Economy of The Future born from the ugly post-Fordist nebula of Reagonomics in the 80′s and 90′s. Now even those hotshots are going the way of John Henry, leaving only the mogul-class. Here's a prognosis: fifty percent unemployment, constant and growing global mass protest, World Class Warfare turning hot, de-facto rule by existing wealth, white tuxedos perched in two hundred story bullet-proof glass pyramids guarded by autonomous Reaper drones and Terminators armed with sound cannons, who hire the spineless and the foolish to office to do their bidding. Cacastocracy: rule by the stupidest and least qualified.
What we're looking at, long term, is precisely the opposite of a positive outlook, but rather mass inequality, un/underemployment. Thus, more Occupy-like movement and growth of alternate economies, alternate societies, and alternate politics. Direct democracy. The shadow economy is already the fastest growing sector at nearly ten trillion. Barter, Craigslist, self-fabrication, the open source village, farmers markets and bazaars in parking lots, resilience communities. Self-starting communities that aren't waiting for governments to save them, for jobs created by the cartel to return (both are vanishingly improbable). And many people are straddling both worlds: working a declining, "precariat" job at a post office with hours shriveling while simultaneously patching the income with a home-fab or farm swapmeet biz. At the local Occupy, we've got nurses working *full time* yet are uninsured, who are directly providing medical assistance to one another. Already, studies are showing half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- are working in what's called System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash (and now silver and gold as the fiat fiasco winds down). In one sense, Occupy is simply the extension of the shadow economy: it is self-starting shadow-politics circumventing the formal mechanisms of power. Not revolution but exolution, exodus from the shackles of the broken republic turned corporation-state cabal. If it were a country, System D would be surpassed in GDP only by the US and China. I'm forecasting a bull market for gold, silver, and pitchforks. The decade for guillotines.
Obviously at present the Homo Sapiens overhead for the operation of an (at present) bleeding edge tech like a Reaper drone is substantial. Does that mean it always will be? At one time it took hundreds of technicians paid thick company salaries laboring over hundreds of miles of wire, vacuum tube and punch cards just to do a simple arithmetic calculation. All jobs which were created by the advent of the electronic computer. Now four year old South African kids fresh out of the !Kung hunter-gatherer dreamtime can do billions of such calculations a second on $10 cell phones 1/1000,000 the size of an IBM 701 with the push of a button. At least while they’re not being starved to death by the million as a byproduct of Goldman Sach’s manufactured commodity bubbles and distortions tripling the price of basic staple foods like corn and wheat. Collateralized debt conflagration. Incidentally, the artificial famines created by nanosecond speed algorithmatized trading is also wrought at the push of a few buttons which used to require 'scraper-filling hordes of traders and analysts, many of whom are actually out there in the Occupy Movement now .
*Ultimately I agree with the majority of Rounbini's analysis, but I think he's leaving some of the possible black or grey swans out of his equation.
Sure, an assembly line of robots can make cars now, but someone has to install the robots, and program them and configure them and all of that back end requires technicians.
Problem, which I already pointed out, and which you obviously have failed to grasp, is that the rate of technological job creation and technological job destruction are decoupling and the spread will only continue to get worse as the window of un-automatable human physical and cognitive capacity draws thinner. The number of “technicians” required is over the long outlook negative-sum, constantly decreasing, as in the electronics factories, which can match Shenzhen’s dollar-a-day slave labor by eliminating the majority of the factory’s manual chip soldering, etc. with robots. U.S. manufacturers have cut nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs (about 33%) since 2001 yet the value of manufactured goods rose 27 percent, and U.S. exports reached their highest level in 20 years. In fact it’s just come to light that global electronics manufacturer Foxconn “plans to replace many of its factory workers in China with a million new robots.” So much for that competitive advantage.
When tractors, crop-pickers and other farming machinery displaced half the country from agricultural jobs, the former farmers were able to find new jobs migrating to factories. But what happens to the hundreds of millions of white collar workers when artificial intelligence begins evicting them from their offices? Where do they go? Their situation is far worse than the factory workers or farmers a century ago because a) Software automation is magnitudes cheaper and easier to implement than a large roboticized factory with a huge infrastructure overhead. Software can be replicated nigh infinitely with minimal additional cost. b) White collar jobs are far more costly to employers than blue collar, all the more reason to “right-size” them away c) The automation of a knowledge worker job kills the “machine as tool” Luddite-fallacy argument because it no longer requires a human “operating” each individual instance of the intelligent machine. What happens when the capital itself becomes the labor?
Turbo Tax, for example, is a single software which eliminates millions of accounting gigs once enjoyed by people who spent years, in some cases decades, in higher education. But that’s old-hat. Document examination once done by armies of lawyers, can now be done by scanning technologies and smart algorithms that search case law, evaluate, and present summaries. They can do this at a fraction of the cost and with far greater thoroughness than their human counterparts. Where do the millions of displaced legal workers go? Um, uh, hm.
With Watson and similar mass-data modeling AI, the majority of office workers, management and even executive work of decision making, resource allocation etc. can be replaced, and with more efficient results. Wal-Mart already has the drop on this and have made bank, others are starting to follow suit. The latest in automated pattern-recognition technology can now perform the work of scanning tumor slides and other x-rays normally done by radiologists paid $300,000 a year after 13 years of school – at one hundredth the cost. Where are the millions of new jobs going to come from to replace these?
Then there are the self driving cars, which now have eaten over a hundred thousand miles of public road and are being slowly rolled out by Google among others. Just last week the world's second-largest iron ore miner Rio Tinto PLC said it would up its fleet of driverless trucks from 10 to 150 in order to boost profit margins in Australia. There are 3.2 million truck and driver/sales jobs in the US at present. Then you’ve got the millions of bus drivers, taxi drivers, mail carriers and more who will be down at the unemployment office (picked clean thanks to bailout-austerity) when that a-bomb of job destruction hits the market.
And these are all technologies already [i]in existence[/i], not counting those yet to be invented. Many jobs are safe from automation for now not because they are incredibly complex or mentally demanding, but because they require a high degree of dexterity, visual acuity, and coordination which have been traditionally difficult for machines. But I wouldn’t stay long that trend if I were you. Already ASIMO II is capable of navigating complex and changing environments, locating and manipulating objects with near-human haptic skill, recognizing faces, detecting speech from a single voice among multiple simultaneous speakers. It’s not such a big stretch to imagine a store fully automated by a central inventory/managerial AI directing ASSIMO shelf stockers and warehouse workers supplied by self-driving trucks. Sure, those hellfire missile-handlers have their hands full now, those sensor operators have their job security for the moment, but for how long? We’ve already got autonomously navigating military vehicles like the Squad Mission Support System . The idea that all the jobs enlisting human potential not emulatable by machines at present are somehow always going to be around or that obsolesced positions will always be replaced with new ones is simply myopic. Call it “logarithmic dross”.
Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession. How is this possible? Since the end of the recession, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat. At the same time, the S&P 500 companies are expected to report record breaking profits this year to the tune of about $930 billion. This is just the beginning of technological disemployment/employment dislocating.
And we’re actually already in a far deeper hole than we think, the true job losses are not yet priced in. Given that the financial sector composed 41% of GDP at the peak of the Global Ponzi crisis, most of that fraud-based paper shuffling, and that we’re still playing kick-the-can and reward-the-TBTF, many of those “technician” jobs created by the malignant and illusory portions of the financial sector have yet to have their Wile-E-Coyote moment when they go the way of the elevator operator. And we don't need the full automation of every job, even 25% unemployment would have catastrophic effects in our current system. Add the fact that we need to create a net of over a million jobs just to keep up with [i]population growth[/i] and I’m still not seeing the bright long term outlook for the US.
Well, all right then. Since this will be your first armed insurrection, let me give you a few pro tips.
Of course, Einstein, because grabbing the AK and going full cowboy on a fucking 1st world government in 2011 is the smartest way to go about achieving positive change. Never mind the role of nonviolence in evicting the British from India or overthrowing the ruler of El Salvador in 1944, or even in ending Jim Crow in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa, in the popular removal of the ruler of the Philippines in 1986, in the largely nonviolent Iranian Revolution of 1979, in the dismantling of the Soviet Union in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, in the resistance to a stolen election in the Ukraine in 2004-2005, in Egypt 2011, and in hundreds of other examples from around the world. Nevermind the fact that the target of greatest leverage here that won't result in futile bloodshed is manufactured ignorance and agnotological disinformation propagated through the traditional media channels that has us mindfucked into believing that everything is cool, that there is a vibrant middle class, that a rising DOW lifts all boat, that the failure of banks would be “catastrophic”, that there’s nothing to be done but take it up the ass or armed insurrect. Never mind that the goal was to shift the frame of the conversation away from the scripted sideshows on to what really matters and unites the 99% against the 1%. A goal which has been accomplished and has become larger than Occupy; an unevictable mindshift. As Edit pointed out, we may disagree about specific tactics, but the overall direction is there. But, hey, fuck the storyline, let’s fast forward to the Modern Warfare 3!
a href=http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-favor-fading.html>We are the
Why? Because of violence.
If there is any encouraging news from this, it's that the decline in Occupy Wall Street's image is probably more connected to the increasingly negative coverage of the clashes between protesters and police than it is to declining support for movement's message.
I guess I should’ve expected a “smart bomb first, ask questions later” cave man solution. Trained to see in blindered "insurgent-friendly" dichotomies. In these trying economic times, we’ve all got to protect our job security, after all. But even after years of sometimes blowing up innocent civilians in endless wars of convenience to fund the various machines of wealth extraction and monopoly maintenance, ultimately they still just use troops like 12-year-old Thai whores, gut their retirements, dump their ashes into landfills like rusted out tools, or send their IED-eviscerated remains home in a Dell computer box to stink up their spouse’s front porch. Inflation getting out of control? Drop demand by killing off some poor saps in a war! Works every time. Perhaps I should start Tweeting “Fuck Occupy!”, “Eat Cake, sergeant Thomas!”, “Obama is my hero!” so maybe Echelon version Facebook.0 will file my dossier in the “benign irritant” subfolder. Next to the PTSD shellshocked Vietnam and Iraq vets that rot to death in the streets, left with only a cardboard sign for food and a purple heart to use as toilet paper, dry their tears on the colder nights when the bottle is empty and the forgetting is hard. Then when the few with limbs left show up, terminally jobless, pension/benefits slashed, at an Occupy chapter, they get a swift rubber bullet to the temple, followed by a flash-bang-to-the-ear chaser. Serves them right! Should've started an armed insurrection and opened fire on the riot cops. Yeah, fuck those stupid lazy-ass triple-tour marines! They’re so fuckin’ lazy. Here, have a McDonald’s application, you lazy fucks!
(Aside: We have a veterans workgroup, who are some of the most vehement about maintaining non-violence.)
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Maps Consuming Territory and Why Greek Default Is The CURE For Bankster Contagion
Looks like Papandreou chose wisely here. More likely it’s the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Greek workers and students who joined the general strike to flood Athens, encircle the capital like a noose, turn themselves into monkey wrenches jamming the Goldman-Morgan-Euro coup de tat papered over as the EFSF “bailout”, that ultimately forced Papandreou into the referendum corner. I mean, ‘ol Papa’s political light-cone of potential soundbites was narrowed by the (justified) Greek revolt down to, “Let Them Eat The Rich (Foreign Banksters)” or “Let Them Eat Cake”. Fortuitously for this Greek prime minister, unlike Marie Antoinette, he chose the right marquee to drape from the Hellenic Parliament Building. Perhaps this gambit – which is making the New World Order look like the US taxpayer circa 10/2008 -- will spare him the fate of being hunted down by his own pitchfork wielding people somewhere in the Pyrenees, smartbombed with predator drones, dragged out of a cave in a bloody Hefty bag like some terrorist mastermind/tulpa or Arab Spring dictator.
THIS is what democracy looks like. as John Locke said in 1793: If the social contract is broken, the people must revolt. The representative democracy has obviously failed, not only in Greece but in the US, and that is why we are seeing the upwellings of direct democracy across the globe. Papandreou, Obama, Cameron, these asshole-licking puppets will never do anything but the bidding of the 1% unless they are literally forced to by the 99.
Time for your FTA (Fucking Truth Administration) recommended daily dose of mind unscrambling with today’s Anti-Price-Propaganda Report:
“A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial contagion”
TRANSLATION: “A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial vaccine against the fraud-debt ebola, ultimately preventing the financial Black Plague 2.0 that is the cancerous current global banking system from killing a third of Europe again in the form of starvation, hospital cuts, and heroin ODs. This is bad news for my purse string holders over at BNP Paribas!”
Truth is, a global banking collapse would not be the end of the world, but rather the beginning; not some brimstone-and-Marshall Law Apocalypse as Paulson used to extort TARP from congress in 2008, as IMF is browbeating Greece and any other PIIGS junta attempting to insurrect against the tyranny of EuroTARP, and as “I can’t say the ‘f’ word” Paul Krugman continues to flap his mouth about like the clueless economist he and Bernanke are hired to be. Not Mad Maxian chaotic dystopia but a more sane and human-centric Age of Aquarius. An enlightenment in a Dark Age of suicidal shadow finance, and a return to sunlight and the real (economy). A floor-by-floor demolition of the falsely and criminally inflated glass skyscrapers, those castles built on clouds of subprime fraud, girded with Ponzi rebar, faced with one-way mirrors of financial agnotology and media disinformation that has us mindfucked into believing that boomsticking the Global Ponzi System megalodon that is eating us alive would be “catastrophic”. And it’s a proven formula: tobacco companies managed to convince people for half a century that smoking prolonged life, made you superman and cured cancer with 1/1000th the capital gains made by Barclays. Sure, it would hurt at first, just like surgery to remove a brain tumor hurts at first. You might lose your house in default, lose your equity atm machine (fake virulent wealth to begin with) but without the bubble-inflation and fabrication of demand via debt, you could actually *afford* the house you live in as the prices un-distort. Commodity bubbles would deflate but that would mean affordable milk and eggs again. The financial system would shrink like a melanoma in recession, but all that "growth" was subtracting from your net wealth via siphoning schemes and fiat inflation anyway. Hell, we might actually have some competition again as banks that did and do the right thing survive for being the fittest! Global banking collapse would be a bust for the 1% royalty but a roaring boom for the rest of us!
Thanks to Ben “Great Moderation” Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy, the Dimons, Blankfeins, Buffets, and other blowers of financial chimeras have a debt gas tank of infinite size with which to inflate their speculative Stay-Puff Godzilla to the tune of 1.5 QUADRILLION. Which they use to wreak havoc, crash silver, start wars in sub-Saharan African nations over shortsale-manufactured water bubbles. Threaten countries like Greece, demanding a ransom paid in bloody austerity. Clearly What the Greek people, the Irish, the Spanish, Iceland, Oakland, and the apostles of the Occupy Movement are discovering is that the GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN! kracken waiting to swallow us is really just a blow-up doll, a bubble that needs to be popped if we’re to move on.
And honestly, it should be blatantly obvious that the solution proposed by our “Great Minds” is a joke to anyone who wasn’t in a coma during 8th grade math (huh what? Sorry I was too busy watching my sister’s cat’s demo for Dancing With The Stars under my desk). The “geniuses” Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, and their leash holders circlejerking at Geneva summits propose their solution to the problem of unsustainable debt loads: “jack (insert sovereign) up with more debt!”
I say bring on the tectonic cataclysm of the fraudulent, malignant maps that are consuming the territory – the hall of mirrors collateral debt obligations abstracted into CDOs of CDOs of CDOs, embedded into bilateral mark-to-model OTC holograms, themselves cloaked by phantasm derivatives. We have arrived at Baudrillard’s infinite regress of simulacra -- pointers pointing to symbols symbolizing references. It's obliteration of the concept of value illustrated poignantly by Andy Worhol's soup cans, where value in the art world is produced not through great work but through intentionally induced mass hysteria and fetishization of the mundane and the shitty. Where JP Morgan can take a shit into a duffle bag, take it to the Fed and get a hundred billion dollars (but if you or I do it, we get nothing but a tear gas grenade to the parietal lobe). Where Bank of America can package their magically-printed-billions into a Hooter's girl's Beverley Hill mansion mortgage and sell that steaming shit-filled soup can off as 24 karat diamond via fabricated housing bubble hysteria. It's The Diamond Age but we don't need nanotech to obliterate economics by allowing protean transmutation of feces into big macs and big macs into platinum: bankers turn toxic waste into AAA gold (and con it into pensions and sovereigns) everyday with simple mass-disinfo and market distortion! It's The Dupery Age! But, as always, the future rhymes rather than repeating the forecasts of futurists and philosophers. Rather than the post-modernists' end of meaning and history and replacement with a mere global semiotic-madhouse where Rembrandt and lolcats are indistinguishable, we have a weaponization of the symbolic madness by the “symbolic analysts”, who instead of “adding value”, suck value out in negative-sum games and classocide half the planet in a gas chamber of food commodity speculation. Instead of Buadrillard’s “hypermediation” we have “hyperfinancialization”, wielded in the form of zero-interest, infinite securitization and high frequency trading that is used to loot the masses out of house home health and future and generally do what big brained monkies in million+ social structures have always done: fuck each other over.
We have no future: we have only pattern misrecognition, risk-mismanagement, the spinning of the given moment’s manufactured scenarios -- JP Morgan's distortion of gold and silver via their 78 trillion blow-up-doll in order to produce the alternate reality where the dollar is worth the holographic cotton its printed on so their holocaust-for-bonuses game can continue. The churning of Goldman Sach's *supercomputer which singlehandedly generates thousand-point swings in the Dow via algorithmic sorcery and extort entire hemispheres (the REAL bazooka aimed at congress in 2008, and certainly at Merkel and Sarkozy today). We’re in end-game semiosis, we’ve got over-symbolized leukemia from smoking these Borgesian nightmares that ultimately signify nothing in reality, and we need HFT tax chemotherapy for these monstrosities whose sole purpose is the manipulation of markets and criminal extraction of blood and treasure from the poor, middle class, and white collar. White collars who are fading as we speak into the grey collar: the overeducated and terminally un/underemployed who curl up inside cardboard boxes to sleep in their once-starched interview suits, empty and valueless in the New World Plutonomy as their Weimar’d wads of dead president fiat paper, shredded and used as kindling to roast rat-kebobs. It’s time to kick the habit before the miasma devours us completely.
Though there's much to disagree with when it comes to Alex Jones, he's hitting the nail on the head with the "infowar". That's precisely what we've got, and the Occupy is an information H-Bomb on the side of the 99%. The fact that we're not still talking about "the left and right" but rather in class-based terms like "99%" and 1% is an astronomical victory, that's like a media Trafalgar right there. But I'd add it's also an "action war" in the sense that the 99% needs to get out there, not just physically but financially, economically, politically.
If you want some other concrete action: go out there, buy some silver and crash JP Morgan (massively short silver), and simultaneously ensure that your fiat currency stashed in your mattress doesn't turn into a wad of toilet paper when the dollar bubble finally pops and Bernanke turns us into Zimbabwe. Recommended above gold since it's hard to pay for oil changes and tomatoes in 0.1 gram flecks in the event of zombie bank apocalypse.
And if you must have a traditional campaign/vote-based solution:
Nader-Paul-Kucinich 2012.
(Prefer Bill Still to Ron Paul but either of these is preferable to the whores we have currently in place)
*Mass-murdering Banktators don't need a revisionist Soviet Ministry of Truth rewriting history books or a Nazi propaganda machine pumping out film and flyers to manipulate reality, no, the CEO of Goldman just doubletaps his iPad and sets his Hal 9000 blowing up stock commodity X or real estate Y. In the astounding world of the future, We've Got An App For That.
THIS is what democracy looks like. as John Locke said in 1793: If the social contract is broken, the people must revolt. The representative democracy has obviously failed, not only in Greece but in the US, and that is why we are seeing the upwellings of direct democracy across the globe. Papandreou, Obama, Cameron, these asshole-licking puppets will never do anything but the bidding of the 1% unless they are literally forced to by the 99.
Time for your FTA (Fucking Truth Administration) recommended daily dose of mind unscrambling with today’s Anti-Price-Propaganda Report:
“A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial contagion”
TRANSLATION: “A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial vaccine against the fraud-debt ebola, ultimately preventing the financial Black Plague 2.0 that is the cancerous current global banking system from killing a third of Europe again in the form of starvation, hospital cuts, and heroin ODs. This is bad news for my purse string holders over at BNP Paribas!”
Truth is, a global banking collapse would not be the end of the world, but rather the beginning; not some brimstone-and-Marshall Law Apocalypse as Paulson used to extort TARP from congress in 2008, as IMF is browbeating Greece and any other PIIGS junta attempting to insurrect against the tyranny of EuroTARP, and as “I can’t say the ‘f’ word” Paul Krugman continues to flap his mouth about like the clueless economist he and Bernanke are hired to be. Not Mad Maxian chaotic dystopia but a more sane and human-centric Age of Aquarius. An enlightenment in a Dark Age of suicidal shadow finance, and a return to sunlight and the real (economy). A floor-by-floor demolition of the falsely and criminally inflated glass skyscrapers, those castles built on clouds of subprime fraud, girded with Ponzi rebar, faced with one-way mirrors of financial agnotology and media disinformation that has us mindfucked into believing that boomsticking the Global Ponzi System megalodon that is eating us alive would be “catastrophic”. And it’s a proven formula: tobacco companies managed to convince people for half a century that smoking prolonged life, made you superman and cured cancer with 1/1000th the capital gains made by Barclays. Sure, it would hurt at first, just like surgery to remove a brain tumor hurts at first. You might lose your house in default, lose your equity atm machine (fake virulent wealth to begin with) but without the bubble-inflation and fabrication of demand via debt, you could actually *afford* the house you live in as the prices un-distort. Commodity bubbles would deflate but that would mean affordable milk and eggs again. The financial system would shrink like a melanoma in recession, but all that "growth" was subtracting from your net wealth via siphoning schemes and fiat inflation anyway. Hell, we might actually have some competition again as banks that did and do the right thing survive for being the fittest! Global banking collapse would be a bust for the 1% royalty but a roaring boom for the rest of us!
Thanks to Ben “Great Moderation” Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy, the Dimons, Blankfeins, Buffets, and other blowers of financial chimeras have a debt gas tank of infinite size with which to inflate their speculative Stay-Puff Godzilla to the tune of 1.5 QUADRILLION. Which they use to wreak havoc, crash silver, start wars in sub-Saharan African nations over shortsale-manufactured water bubbles. Threaten countries like Greece, demanding a ransom paid in bloody austerity. Clearly What the Greek people, the Irish, the Spanish, Iceland, Oakland, and the apostles of the Occupy Movement are discovering is that the GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN! kracken waiting to swallow us is really just a blow-up doll, a bubble that needs to be popped if we’re to move on.
And honestly, it should be blatantly obvious that the solution proposed by our “Great Minds” is a joke to anyone who wasn’t in a coma during 8th grade math (huh what? Sorry I was too busy watching my sister’s cat’s demo for Dancing With The Stars under my desk). The “geniuses” Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, and their leash holders circlejerking at Geneva summits propose their solution to the problem of unsustainable debt loads: “jack (insert sovereign) up with more debt!”
I say bring on the tectonic cataclysm of the fraudulent, malignant maps that are consuming the territory – the hall of mirrors collateral debt obligations abstracted into CDOs of CDOs of CDOs, embedded into bilateral mark-to-model OTC holograms, themselves cloaked by phantasm derivatives. We have arrived at Baudrillard’s infinite regress of simulacra -- pointers pointing to symbols symbolizing references. It's obliteration of the concept of value illustrated poignantly by Andy Worhol's soup cans, where value in the art world is produced not through great work but through intentionally induced mass hysteria and fetishization of the mundane and the shitty. Where JP Morgan can take a shit into a duffle bag, take it to the Fed and get a hundred billion dollars (but if you or I do it, we get nothing but a tear gas grenade to the parietal lobe). Where Bank of America can package their magically-printed-billions into a Hooter's girl's Beverley Hill mansion mortgage and sell that steaming shit-filled soup can off as 24 karat diamond via fabricated housing bubble hysteria. It's The Diamond Age but we don't need nanotech to obliterate economics by allowing protean transmutation of feces into big macs and big macs into platinum: bankers turn toxic waste into AAA gold (and con it into pensions and sovereigns) everyday with simple mass-disinfo and market distortion! It's The Dupery Age! But, as always, the future rhymes rather than repeating the forecasts of futurists and philosophers. Rather than the post-modernists' end of meaning and history and replacement with a mere global semiotic-madhouse where Rembrandt and lolcats are indistinguishable, we have a weaponization of the symbolic madness by the “symbolic analysts”, who instead of “adding value”, suck value out in negative-sum games and classocide half the planet in a gas chamber of food commodity speculation. Instead of Buadrillard’s “hypermediation” we have “hyperfinancialization”, wielded in the form of zero-interest, infinite securitization and high frequency trading that is used to loot the masses out of house home health and future and generally do what big brained monkies in million+ social structures have always done: fuck each other over.
We have no future: we have only pattern misrecognition, risk-mismanagement, the spinning of the given moment’s manufactured scenarios -- JP Morgan's distortion of gold and silver via their 78 trillion blow-up-doll in order to produce the alternate reality where the dollar is worth the holographic cotton its printed on so their holocaust-for-bonuses game can continue. The churning of Goldman Sach's *supercomputer which singlehandedly generates thousand-point swings in the Dow via algorithmic sorcery and extort entire hemispheres (the REAL bazooka aimed at congress in 2008, and certainly at Merkel and Sarkozy today). We’re in end-game semiosis, we’ve got over-symbolized leukemia from smoking these Borgesian nightmares that ultimately signify nothing in reality, and we need HFT tax chemotherapy for these monstrosities whose sole purpose is the manipulation of markets and criminal extraction of blood and treasure from the poor, middle class, and white collar. White collars who are fading as we speak into the grey collar: the overeducated and terminally un/underemployed who curl up inside cardboard boxes to sleep in their once-starched interview suits, empty and valueless in the New World Plutonomy as their Weimar’d wads of dead president fiat paper, shredded and used as kindling to roast rat-kebobs. It’s time to kick the habit before the miasma devours us completely.
Though there's much to disagree with when it comes to Alex Jones, he's hitting the nail on the head with the "infowar". That's precisely what we've got, and the Occupy is an information H-Bomb on the side of the 99%. The fact that we're not still talking about "the left and right" but rather in class-based terms like "99%" and 1% is an astronomical victory, that's like a media Trafalgar right there. But I'd add it's also an "action war" in the sense that the 99% needs to get out there, not just physically but financially, economically, politically.
If you want some other concrete action: go out there, buy some silver and crash JP Morgan (massively short silver), and simultaneously ensure that your fiat currency stashed in your mattress doesn't turn into a wad of toilet paper when the dollar bubble finally pops and Bernanke turns us into Zimbabwe. Recommended above gold since it's hard to pay for oil changes and tomatoes in 0.1 gram flecks in the event of zombie bank apocalypse.
And if you must have a traditional campaign/vote-based solution:
Nader-Paul-Kucinich 2012.
(Prefer Bill Still to Ron Paul but either of these is preferable to the whores we have currently in place)
*Mass-murdering Banktators don't need a revisionist Soviet Ministry of Truth rewriting history books or a Nazi propaganda machine pumping out film and flyers to manipulate reality, no, the CEO of Goldman just doubletaps his iPad and sets his Hal 9000 blowing up stock commodity X or real estate Y. In the astounding world of the future, We've Got An App For That.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
CEO Green is Made Out of People! It's People!
There have been suggestions that the Oakland protests in particular and the Occupy protest in general are similar to the Rodney King riots, that the riot police are responding reasonably, and that protests are misguided, misdirected, and pointless given that many are occurring at capitols and other government buildings.
Scott Olsen clip
Firstly, the video clearly identifies a police officer tossing an explosive device *directly at the disabled vet on the ground* as he bleeds out from his skull fracture, as people are attempting to assist him. The detonation happens mere inches from his body. None of the protesters are committing violence of any sort and are merely attempting to assist someone who has been shot [b]in the head[/b] with a rubber bullet. Bullets which have been clearly shown to be potentially lethal if they strike the skull area. According to eyewitness accounts he was standing perfectly still, provoking no one. Prosecutions are in order for these felonies (not that there will be any).
This is how the American "establishment" thanks its soldiers who risk their limbs, their lives, and their sanity fighting wars of covenience started for the sake of taxpayer plundering. As double-tour serving marine sergeant Shamar Thomas poignantly pointed out as he successfully called out Jamie Dimon'scops paid mercenaries protecting his 40 million dollar tower by skullcracking peaceful protesters, "There is no honor in this".
The Rodney King riot comparison is ridiculous. Widespread looting, assault, arson and murder occurred, and property damages topped roughly $1 billion, 53 killed. It was almost a cover story used by the Bloods and Crips and the Mexican cartels to have a gangbanging field day. Talk about misdirected?
And the anger is not just at "the government" or just "the banks", although that's certainly the simple-minded 20th-cen worldview that the Plutocracy would like for the public to accept as the narrative of the problem, and they actively propagate the lie through the Fox-vs-MSNBC Left-Right Republicrat saga, and through economist progranda. Of course the protesters know the bankers don't give a shit about their protests, at city hall, on Wall Street, at Capitol Hill, at bank lobbies, banker's homes, or anywhere. Just like the city officials, Obama and the rest of the banker-whore government doesn't give a shit about the protesters. Those protests are not for the 1%, they're for the rest of the 99. And government holds at least as much responsibility for the mess, and Criminal in Chief at the moment is The Speechinator president Obama, who continues to side with the top 0.1%, condoning criminality by refusing to enforce the law on his law breaking, mass-thieving mass-terrorizing mass-frauding banker pimps. And thus, making Obama -- a government official -- the MOST responsible single individual for the continued pillaging of those uninvited to the champagne toasts at the Cipriani 55 where they discuss which European country's 99% they will commit class-genocide on to pay for the 2,000,000,000 diamond China at the next champagne toast.
You want to talk about Rodney King and racial injustice against Mexicans in the justice system? Exhibit A: Wachovia, money laundering 400 [b]billion[/b] in Mexican drug money, gets $170 million (1/2 a percent) fine as a slap on the wrist, no indictments. CEO Robert K Steel and the big wigs at Wachovia make that in the time it takes them to short Italy and tie their tie made from the skin of Athenians. Athenians who are gas-chambered quietly by banks who gut Greek hospitals to the point that they can't afford asthma inhalers or pace makers. Yes, the bankster CRIMINALS are out there "doing God's work" with their druglord CRIMINAL buddies like El Chapo and The Zetas, dump truckloads of bodies in front of hotels and stone mayors to death in town square just to make a point. Forty thousand "Official" murders have been reported with possibly tens of thousands more "disappearances" due to drug-related violence in Mexico I think dwarfs even the incidences of police *brutality* against Latinos in the US.
1/3 of Mexican GDP in drug money was CRIMINALLY moved through Wachovia *alone*, essentially making the bankers mass-murderers of the Mexican people. We know who committed these acts, there is a clear paper trail, they're operating basically in the open. "Yeah, we fucking own the planet. We incinerate Mexicans, Greeks, Iraqis, two-tour Marines to fill our pockets. What the fuck you going to do about it?" The government -- Obama and congress and the rest of the bought-and-paid for public-sector arm of the global plutocratic mafia -- gives them a chump change fine, sends them on the way to commit more crimes against humanity with impunity. Obama received $1,268,970 in contributions from Wachovia and its employees. Obama's Presidency itself is a criminal act funded by blood money. His refusal to prosecute Wachovia is one of his MYRIAD impeachable offenses.
Then Obama gets on TV in his best young-Nelson Mandela impression, informs the future of America drowning in their debt that they can save “up to” 0.5% on their interest rate, when college costs are going exponential as just another wealth-siphoning Ponzi bubble, and already student loans have overtaken credit card debt. Cue applause! Hope n change! He's like Martin Luther King 2.0! Martin Luther King is vomiting in his grave.
1/2 a percent, an interesting number. Just like the 1/2 a percent token penance paid by Wachovia. Apparently Obama cares as little about the American youth as he cares about the Mexican people being kidnapped in the night and beheaded by Wachovia's thugs. 1/2 a percent.
One wonders what he does in between waiting for his next big show infront of the cameras of the Wall-Street propaganda machine that is CNN? Other than being facilitator-in-chief of mass-murdering banking fundlords. It sure as hell isn't being a president.
Theft, as in the looters stealing the bottle of milk in London, is relatively benign, when compared to fraud. With theft, you have an isolated incident in the society of wrong. It is bad, but the honest shopkeeper can defend against it with the help of the law. Fraud is far more malignant, in that it is wrong that creeps into the society, metastasizing as during the subprime and LIARS epidemic of the noughties, like the Kuang virus it gradually eats its way silently through every institution and aspect of the society until the very fabric of the society *consists* of wrong, as we currently have today with the largest wrongdoer bankers outright controlling the nation. The honest shopkeeper can recover from a thug in a hoodie, but fraud drives the good shopkeeper out of business. Rather than crime hindering business, crime itself becomes the business model, most notably the UK, who's fraud-based financial sector accounts for half the GDP and all the fake "GDP growth" reported in the price-propaganda. Through media control, the kleptocracy installs Stockholm Syndrome on the unwitting masses, convinces them that the loss of home, healthcare, livelihood, and destruction of their children's future is somehow their own fault. That they "did not work hard enough" (known in 19th century as Protestant work ethic). That they "are overpaid". But in their own private robber baron discussions, the super-rich readily acknowledge the systematic overwork, underpay and gulagification of the underclass as their wealth-extraction scheme, as in JP Morgan's Eye On The Market newsletter this July whe "Reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in profit margins… US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP." And not just the CNN MSM neo-Goebbels propaganda machine but even *Greek economists* are out blaming themselves, Jedi Mind tricked into believing it's the Greek people's fault for not "tightening their belt" when it's JP Morgan and friends dumping THEIR OWN insolvency by the hundred-billion on Greece that is causing the chasm-like deficit problem. They're led to believe that they actually deserve the austerity that turns them into a third world country to pay for bank bonuses, that they deserve to have their population lose hope and turn into drug addicts and die of ODs, which is the bankers and Papandreou plan, their solution to unemployment: kill off the population through austerity and war. In Fraud-topia, rape becomes accepted as a virtue, as long as it is a polite rape that comes on embossed paper, with a smile. Or smoothed over by a moving speech, as you're left bleeding out of every orifice, being told by the rapist that "it was your own fault! You were asking for it!"
Gaddafi's biggest mistake was not starting a bank. He would've been right at home amongst the thoughtlessly murdering, looting, enslaving criminals that run the 1st world, the supposed "crown jewels of the human experiment". If Gaddafi'd only taken Libya's 200 billion sovereign capital, bought a charcoal suit and a vermilion tie, sipped champagne from a gold-sided fluted-marble balcony next to the Trump Tower, and subcontracted the "wet work" to the next-in line in his administration, he would've been the star of the show in the US. He'd be at Davos, giving triple-ovation speeches about "liberalizing labor markets" in Libya. He'd be the golden boy on Forbes magazine covers, lauded as a "captain of industry" and a "cornerstone of the economy". He'd have libraries named after him in towns in Colorado. He'd be purchasing politicians left and right with his oil money. He'd be discussing with the CEOs of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs how they plan to move on from Greece and barbecue Italy then Spain with their toxic WMDs lit by their HFT market-engineering, followed by scorched-Earth austerity, and filleting up of the infrastructure at pesetas on the dollar. Gaddafi could then jack his 200 billion 30x and perform a leveraged buy-out of Dimon and Blankfein, thus completing world domination. If only Gaddafi had been a banker. But, alas, the Devil is in the details.
*side note: The Wachovia atrocity is an apotheosis of the true damage of 911. the majority of federal law enforcement was shifted away from the real big wig criminals and onto War on Terror red herring, when there was approximately *one* terrorist radicalized in the US in the past decade. Zero terrorism incidents prevented by law enforcement (shoe bomber and underwear both caught by civilians) despite hundreds of billions taxpayer $ and the majority of the FBI being diverted to spying on citizens via The Patriot Act, pointlessly reading the Koran. As noted by an FBI agent, the post-911 era is the "Golden Age of White Collar Crime, drug trafficking, and the mob". You have the full triumverate, there: The white collar criminals at Wachovia ganging up with Mexican druglords, protected by the mob that is the US government.
*** Bonus bloggism!! ***
In Time
Possibly the best and most truth-hitting sci-fi movie ever made.
Forget the inane, financially illiterate critics' nitpicking and the fact that it stars Justin Timberlake.
This movie nails the world. It practically IS reality.
It brings the only true war of our time, a deeply abstract war, out in to daylight-clarity, puts a human face to it. Most poignant is perhaps when the mother of the protagonist is literally killed by price manipulation. Greeks are suffering the same fate by the thousands as we speak.
"For the few to be immortal, many must die," goes the refrain of the time-bankers.
And it's just about America's turn in line to be incinerated as fuel in the immortal's engine.
Absolutely must see.
Ignore the Timberlake and the occasional stiltedness and plot issues and the "tough to swallow" premise and all the other petty distracting critic complaints like the MSM attacking Occupiers for a few bongo drums and tie dye to obscure the message. Watch this sci-fi movie that does exactly what it's supposed to do: illuminate the time in which it was created.
Then go out, buy some silver, and help crash some banks like the In Time Dick-n-Jane before Earth turns into an IMF-policed Planet Gulag.
Scott Olsen clip
Firstly, the video clearly identifies a police officer tossing an explosive device *directly at the disabled vet on the ground* as he bleeds out from his skull fracture, as people are attempting to assist him. The detonation happens mere inches from his body. None of the protesters are committing violence of any sort and are merely attempting to assist someone who has been shot [b]in the head[/b] with a rubber bullet. Bullets which have been clearly shown to be potentially lethal if they strike the skull area. According to eyewitness accounts he was standing perfectly still, provoking no one. Prosecutions are in order for these felonies (not that there will be any).
This is how the American "establishment" thanks its soldiers who risk their limbs, their lives, and their sanity fighting wars of covenience started for the sake of taxpayer plundering. As double-tour serving marine sergeant Shamar Thomas poignantly pointed out as he successfully called out Jamie Dimon's
The Rodney King riot comparison is ridiculous. Widespread looting, assault, arson and murder occurred, and property damages topped roughly $1 billion, 53 killed. It was almost a cover story used by the Bloods and Crips and the Mexican cartels to have a gangbanging field day. Talk about misdirected?
And the anger is not just at "the government" or just "the banks", although that's certainly the simple-minded 20th-cen worldview that the Plutocracy would like for the public to accept as the narrative of the problem, and they actively propagate the lie through the Fox-vs-MSNBC Left-Right Republicrat saga, and through economist progranda. Of course the protesters know the bankers don't give a shit about their protests, at city hall, on Wall Street, at Capitol Hill, at bank lobbies, banker's homes, or anywhere. Just like the city officials, Obama and the rest of the banker-whore government doesn't give a shit about the protesters. Those protests are not for the 1%, they're for the rest of the 99. And government holds at least as much responsibility for the mess, and Criminal in Chief at the moment is The Speechinator president Obama, who continues to side with the top 0.1%, condoning criminality by refusing to enforce the law on his law breaking, mass-thieving mass-terrorizing mass-frauding banker pimps. And thus, making Obama -- a government official -- the MOST responsible single individual for the continued pillaging of those uninvited to the champagne toasts at the Cipriani 55 where they discuss which European country's 99% they will commit class-genocide on to pay for the 2,000,000,000 diamond China at the next champagne toast.
You want to talk about Rodney King and racial injustice against Mexicans in the justice system? Exhibit A: Wachovia, money laundering 400 [b]billion[/b] in Mexican drug money, gets $170 million (1/2 a percent) fine as a slap on the wrist, no indictments. CEO Robert K Steel and the big wigs at Wachovia make that in the time it takes them to short Italy and tie their tie made from the skin of Athenians. Athenians who are gas-chambered quietly by banks who gut Greek hospitals to the point that they can't afford asthma inhalers or pace makers. Yes, the bankster CRIMINALS are out there "doing God's work" with their druglord CRIMINAL buddies like El Chapo and The Zetas, dump truckloads of bodies in front of hotels and stone mayors to death in town square just to make a point. Forty thousand "Official" murders have been reported with possibly tens of thousands more "disappearances" due to drug-related violence in Mexico I think dwarfs even the incidences of police *brutality* against Latinos in the US.
1/3 of Mexican GDP in drug money was CRIMINALLY moved through Wachovia *alone*, essentially making the bankers mass-murderers of the Mexican people. We know who committed these acts, there is a clear paper trail, they're operating basically in the open. "Yeah, we fucking own the planet. We incinerate Mexicans, Greeks, Iraqis, two-tour Marines to fill our pockets. What the fuck you going to do about it?" The government -- Obama and congress and the rest of the bought-and-paid for public-sector arm of the global plutocratic mafia -- gives them a chump change fine, sends them on the way to commit more crimes against humanity with impunity. Obama received $1,268,970 in contributions from Wachovia and its employees. Obama's Presidency itself is a criminal act funded by blood money. His refusal to prosecute Wachovia is one of his MYRIAD impeachable offenses.
Then Obama gets on TV in his best young-Nelson Mandela impression, informs the future of America drowning in their debt that they can save “up to” 0.5% on their interest rate, when college costs are going exponential as just another wealth-siphoning Ponzi bubble, and already student loans have overtaken credit card debt. Cue applause! Hope n change! He's like Martin Luther King 2.0! Martin Luther King is vomiting in his grave.
1/2 a percent, an interesting number. Just like the 1/2 a percent token penance paid by Wachovia. Apparently Obama cares as little about the American youth as he cares about the Mexican people being kidnapped in the night and beheaded by Wachovia's thugs. 1/2 a percent.
One wonders what he does in between waiting for his next big show infront of the cameras of the Wall-Street propaganda machine that is CNN? Other than being facilitator-in-chief of mass-murdering banking fundlords. It sure as hell isn't being a president.
Theft, as in the looters stealing the bottle of milk in London, is relatively benign, when compared to fraud. With theft, you have an isolated incident in the society of wrong. It is bad, but the honest shopkeeper can defend against it with the help of the law. Fraud is far more malignant, in that it is wrong that creeps into the society, metastasizing as during the subprime and LIARS epidemic of the noughties, like the Kuang virus it gradually eats its way silently through every institution and aspect of the society until the very fabric of the society *consists* of wrong, as we currently have today with the largest wrongdoer bankers outright controlling the nation. The honest shopkeeper can recover from a thug in a hoodie, but fraud drives the good shopkeeper out of business. Rather than crime hindering business, crime itself becomes the business model, most notably the UK, who's fraud-based financial sector accounts for half the GDP and all the fake "GDP growth" reported in the price-propaganda. Through media control, the kleptocracy installs Stockholm Syndrome on the unwitting masses, convinces them that the loss of home, healthcare, livelihood, and destruction of their children's future is somehow their own fault. That they "did not work hard enough" (known in 19th century as Protestant work ethic). That they "are overpaid". But in their own private robber baron discussions, the super-rich readily acknowledge the systematic overwork, underpay and gulagification of the underclass as their wealth-extraction scheme, as in JP Morgan's Eye On The Market newsletter this July whe "Reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in profit margins… US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP." And not just the CNN MSM neo-Goebbels propaganda machine but even *Greek economists* are out blaming themselves, Jedi Mind tricked into believing it's the Greek people's fault for not "tightening their belt" when it's JP Morgan and friends dumping THEIR OWN insolvency by the hundred-billion on Greece that is causing the chasm-like deficit problem. They're led to believe that they actually deserve the austerity that turns them into a third world country to pay for bank bonuses, that they deserve to have their population lose hope and turn into drug addicts and die of ODs, which is the bankers and Papandreou plan, their solution to unemployment: kill off the population through austerity and war. In Fraud-topia, rape becomes accepted as a virtue, as long as it is a polite rape that comes on embossed paper, with a smile. Or smoothed over by a moving speech, as you're left bleeding out of every orifice, being told by the rapist that "it was your own fault! You were asking for it!"
Gaddafi's biggest mistake was not starting a bank. He would've been right at home amongst the thoughtlessly murdering, looting, enslaving criminals that run the 1st world, the supposed "crown jewels of the human experiment". If Gaddafi'd only taken Libya's 200 billion sovereign capital, bought a charcoal suit and a vermilion tie, sipped champagne from a gold-sided fluted-marble balcony next to the Trump Tower, and subcontracted the "wet work" to the next-in line in his administration, he would've been the star of the show in the US. He'd be at Davos, giving triple-ovation speeches about "liberalizing labor markets" in Libya. He'd be the golden boy on Forbes magazine covers, lauded as a "captain of industry" and a "cornerstone of the economy". He'd have libraries named after him in towns in Colorado. He'd be purchasing politicians left and right with his oil money. He'd be discussing with the CEOs of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs how they plan to move on from Greece and barbecue Italy then Spain with their toxic WMDs lit by their HFT market-engineering, followed by scorched-Earth austerity, and filleting up of the infrastructure at pesetas on the dollar. Gaddafi could then jack his 200 billion 30x and perform a leveraged buy-out of Dimon and Blankfein, thus completing world domination. If only Gaddafi had been a banker. But, alas, the Devil is in the details.
*side note: The Wachovia atrocity is an apotheosis of the true damage of 911. the majority of federal law enforcement was shifted away from the real big wig criminals and onto War on Terror red herring, when there was approximately *one* terrorist radicalized in the US in the past decade. Zero terrorism incidents prevented by law enforcement (shoe bomber and underwear both caught by civilians) despite hundreds of billions taxpayer $ and the majority of the FBI being diverted to spying on citizens via The Patriot Act, pointlessly reading the Koran. As noted by an FBI agent, the post-911 era is the "Golden Age of White Collar Crime, drug trafficking, and the mob". You have the full triumverate, there: The white collar criminals at Wachovia ganging up with Mexican druglords, protected by the mob that is the US government.
*** Bonus bloggism!! ***
In Time
Possibly the best and most truth-hitting sci-fi movie ever made.
Forget the inane, financially illiterate critics' nitpicking and the fact that it stars Justin Timberlake.
This movie nails the world. It practically IS reality.
It brings the only true war of our time, a deeply abstract war, out in to daylight-clarity, puts a human face to it. Most poignant is perhaps when the mother of the protagonist is literally killed by price manipulation. Greeks are suffering the same fate by the thousands as we speak.
"For the few to be immortal, many must die," goes the refrain of the time-bankers.
And it's just about America's turn in line to be incinerated as fuel in the immortal's engine.
Absolutely must see.
Ignore the Timberlake and the occasional stiltedness and plot issues and the "tough to swallow" premise and all the other petty distracting critic complaints like the MSM attacking Occupiers for a few bongo drums and tie dye to obscure the message. Watch this sci-fi movie that does exactly what it's supposed to do: illuminate the time in which it was created.
Then go out, buy some silver, and help crash some banks like the In Time Dick-n-Jane before Earth turns into an IMF-policed Planet Gulag.
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