Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Universality of Fraud

Vampire Squid wraps barbed tentacles around UK I mean, financial expert technocrat descends from on high to "shore up" the lazy spoiled British people's economy and save them from their lack of market discipline. Expect a 'generous bailout' the size of the GDP of Switzerland, demarcated in SDRs straight from the holy church of the ECB. All praise the Messiah! David Cameron, for one, welcomes your new high-frequency-looting Robot Overlords (because he's getting his own personal Golden Ark constructed down on the Thames before it's set on fire, permanently.) Never mind the fact that it's Cameron and his predecessor's government and its famous 'most progressive financial regulatory environment' -- AKA most absolutely lawless fraud-friendly cesspool on Earth -- that was the enabler of all the biggest financial frauds leading up to and continuing throughout the crisis(es). AIG? Went through the City of London. Bear Sterns? Tens of billions worth of fraud funneled through London, bought up by JP Morgan 2$ per share to expand its systemic threatitude. JP Morgan's price manipulation? All aboard the London financial terrorism express! Your train conductor, Blythe Masters, former CFO of JP Morgan Chase and current head of Global Commodities at JPM and the 'economist' the unholy brood mother and inventor of the credit default swap itself, will be taking you on a one way trip to global collapse! Yes, it's gold and silver price distorter extroardinaire, with her army of quants and algorithms over at JPM's London office whose precious-metal stomp can literally be measured on the financial Richter scale every morning when the London Stock Exchange opens at 9 AM Greenwich Time, and all their billions of paper naked contracts flood out into the market like so much unrefined toxic BP crude out into the Gulf of Mexico, and the silver spot takes an instantaneous nosedive. Which is why the 'ol Shibboleth Blythe had to come out of her spider cave and get up on CNBC with some creampuff-tossing banker concubine pretending to be a reporter, to laugh her clinking diamond chandelier laugh at pitiful braindead questions about whether or not JP Morgan was engaged in price manipulation of commodities including said argent metal. The reporter, of course, joins in the psychotic harpy chorus, proceeding to fellate Blythe's reputation with great gusto, hoping, perchance, for the opportunity to join her den of thieves as a trader for JPM, someday.

And what about the rest of Europe? Greece? Game-set-match. It's over. I suppose since the Cradle of Civilization is gone, done, finished, we should take that as a harbinger for the death of the progeny of the Rennaissance-Enlightenment, which the Hellenic peoples seeded. I'm giving Spain, oh... a month and a half till full-throttle Goldman invasion. Need to let the austerity broth simmer and stew to perfection -- add a tad more youth unemployment, another few billion in productivity losses, stoke the flames with a few more CDS coals -- before pouring and serving up to the Steve Forbes-George Soros-Warren Buffet tea party. I suggest you get your World Cup in quick, because, like the Greek school kids in PE class, the soccer teams won't be able to afford enough "toast sandwiches" to keep their quadriceps moving long enough for a match.

I'm giving Spain, oh... a month and a half till full-throttle Goldman invasion. Need to let the austerity broth simmer and stew to perfection -- add a tad more youth unemployment, another few billion in productivity losses, stoke the flames with a few more CDS coals -- before pouring and serving up to the Steve Forbes-George Soros-Warren Buffet tea party. I suggest you get your World Cup in quick, because, like the Greek school kids in PE class, the soccer teams won't be able to afford enough "toast sandwiches" to keep their quadriceps moving long enough for a match.

And this is all a page straight out of the George Soros playbook when he broke the Bank of England in the 90’s and made his fortune killing the pound. All the financial invasions of formerly sovereign nations since then -- Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain -- have been attempts to recreate that return-on-investment, with new technologies and "financial innovations". The US Unmentionables (AKA those people who are not Goldman Sachs partners) are all ultimately in the same boat as Europe, of course.

We’ve already decoupled the pedagogy taught in every mainstream economics department, that Faustian bargain between technology and market, that for every loom worker, every John Henry, every typist, assembly line worker displaced by the advent of some new technological machine, another job will open up somewhere else with some newly created technology. We've already seen manufacturing jobs plummeting despite productivity shooting up. We're getting the robots to do everything they can't more cheaply get the Chinese wage-slaves do. The robots are fighting our illegitimate wars of convenience for us (Predator Reapers eclipsing human troops), they're doing our high-frequency-looting on Wall Street (70% of all trading volume on Wall Street is algorithmic) they're starting to write our news articles for us, infiltrating every blue and white collar domain of human employability. The prison bots are already starting to roll off the presses. That's going to start displacing jobs in one of America's biggest industries: Gulagification, the US of course with highest per-capita incarcerations in private prisons (subsidized by government). So now we can have our own personal prison-based China full of unpaid prisoner workers, guarded by unpaid robots, who do whatever productive work is left that some little pimply-faced, oblivious Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg somewhere hasn't already programmed a robot to do.

That’s why we’ve got all this society of two hundred million bureaucrats, lawyers, marketers, "service industry" people (mostly retail marketing) and other paper pushers sloshing imaginary numbers around, opening and closing the designer glass doors of hushed-marble buildings, spilling coffee on their pressed white collars. We've got 1% of the population can farm enough through agro-technology to feed the other 99, and another percent required to make all our iPads, 100" plasma TVs and most the other tangible products of *real value*. So of course, all of that goes to the cheapest possible labor, which is in the most brutally authoritarian, human-rights-violating places on Earth (like Chinese factories). “Technological Progress” is itself a Ponzi Scheme, whose game is kept going by the usual suspects; the infinite free cash from, you guessed it, Big Ben Bernanke. We've already passed the 1-to-1 job destruction/creation of technology for several decades. What we've been doing since the 80's is not actually producing value, but rather the all-owning billionaire dynasties who own all the means of production like the Waltons, the Dimons, the Buffets, the Johnsons & Johnsons have been in a zero-sum game of trying to steal pieces of the wealth pie from one another. It's this arms-race of non-productivity that has 'created' the millions of jobs for shark lawyers who defend the riches of tyrants by excusing their atrocities and ensuring that every hostile takeover comes pennies on the dollar and every payout goes dollars on the penny. You can't take a child to a playground, serve a cup of coffee, cross the street without some lawyer siphoning out his cut for some horseshit law. We've got the RIAA, the MPAA, a million patent trolls everyone struggling back and forth over who owns what, and some tiny percentage of the work going to actually [i] creating something of value to own[/i], the artists lost somewhere at the bottom of a long Excel spreadsheet of contracts and legal fees. The elite have created the equally-zero-sum marketing industry, who also defend the fortunes of the abominably rich as they dedicate their lives to spinning up excuses for why you need this brand of smartphone or car or empty void-filling tchotchke, bathed in the blood of the Chinese underclass, versus the other. More money is now spent on the marketing for movies than for the actual filming and production of the movies themselves; which is why there are so many zero-critic movies where they hype them to the moon on social media for months and months, then everyone sees it on the Big Friday, and by the time you find out it's a piece of shit, have already run away with your 10.50 movie ticket and 15.75 popcorn and soda money. Um, Ponzi Scheme, much, Hollywood? Then, of course, we have the other third of that un-productive middle class doing the most recently infamous class of fake jobs: working in the financial sector, which we all now know is 90% parasitic, and today is just pure theft with people like Corzine caught red handed, openly admitting he took customer money straight out of segregated accounts, and with ZERO punishment. No, just a free invite to the next dinner party with President Obama. Marketing, legal work, finance, these are all infinitely scalable in terms of jobs, because if Apple blows ten million on marketing campaign X starring Taylor Swift, then Google will have to up it to 15 million to campaign y starring Bill Murray. If Sony brings a hundred lawyers to a case against Amazon, then Amazon must bring a hundred fifty. If Mitt Romney builds a five hundred million campaign warchest taking money from Wall Street, Hollywood, Pfizer, Monsanto, etc, then Obama must take a billion from those same corporations and billionaires, creating that many "jobs" for pundits, assistants, CNN, New York Times, Fox News, etc etc etc. Extortionist, parasitic demand, expands to meet fraudulent, stolen money supply. That's the economic model we've got here in the West. College itself -- an industry with massively distorted prices, in some cases worse than housing prices. Over a trillion in student loans now, over 50% of students unable to get jobs that can cover their costs, all of this propped up by zero-percent-interest loans to every stupid 18 year old who doesn't know jack shit about how that English PhD is going to get him a job other than being a professional egg-head. Professorial egghead jobs again propped up by the same false demand of "EVERY KID IN AMERICA GOES TO COLLEGE!" subprime FAFSA lending, hyped up by everyone and the president. Tech Industry? We're doing great giving the useless marketers, lawyers, professors, and their kids lots of time-wasters like Facebook, burn away billions of human hours tossing cartoon Angry Birds at buildings. We're having farmers who try to do the right thing with regards to animal cruelty and food quality being punished by big aggro for letting video cameras into chicken "condominiums", farmers who are now committing suicide by the thousand in India because Monsanto's terminator copyright-monopoly of nature itself means they can't even run their farms anymore. Instead, we're getting all of these former producers of REAL VALUE get on foodstamps, use Bernanke's free welfare money to buy iPads with which to play Farmville and plant virtual strawberries bought with virtual currencies, trading real, quality production for shuffling around more virtual holographic imaginary 'assets', like the rest of the parasitic, imaginary "workforce" in their 100th floor offices. And we're calling that "economic progress". But it's ok, cause we have Gallup coming out every week giving some fabricated good news about unemployment claims dropping so every presstitute and economist flunky of Wall Street can spin it into some story of "hope n change" and improvement, then hide the fact that if you count gas and food prices(Fed says these are "not important"), and average American's quality of life metrics, we're actually still in a depression spiraling down the tubes, and revise the numbers later when the population's 140 character attention spans have drifted off to the next Shiny soundbite.

Then, on the bottom 30% of the 'Greatest Nation On Earth', we've got the other hundred million poor Americans highlighting receipts at Costco or just being paid to maintain a pulse through gov handouts, sucking back Heinekins driving giant Suburbans on welfare, oblivious.

Capitalism, markets, technology, college education, 'progress', the entire Western World is one gigantic stinking fiat-hole of a ponzi scheme globe, artificially propped up on the shoulders of the Federal Reserve, and more generally the central banking system, and its zero percent interest rates. 80-90% of the world would be in Oliver Twist-world times the Hunger Games, jobless and starving to death if it wasn't for the free money and fake demand -- which would lead to global REAL revolt. Forget Occupy, Tahrir, if Americans suddenly had their T-Mobile, Netflix, and Foodstamp card deactivated, we're talking French Revolution-style shotguns and pitchforks and beheadings of every major criminal in New York and Washington. But of course the real revolt will never happen if you can survive with a somewhat comfortable lifestyle even on 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars a year, compared to everywhere else in the world where it's double or triple the price for basic food and energy. As John Locke said in 1690: "When the social contract is broken the people must revolt." In the US today it's about brinksmanship: bringing the unwashed masses right to the brink of impoverishment, bending the social contract right to the breaking point, giving American lard-asses just enough toxic grub and entertainment that they won't revolt, won't rock the boat for fear of jeopardizing their free handouts. And that's exactly the plan of the elite. The Jamie Dimons and Warren Buffets in the US are just staving off the day when the dollar finally pops, gas goes to $12 a gallon, milk skyrockets to $15 without the Fed’s subsidies, and Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, in the form of all those guns Americans have been buying up en masse (up 40% this year) descending on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Difference is we’ve got the Rumsfeldts, the Bushes, the hawks with their imperialism force-fed to the public as "national security" to score up our oil resources. We've also got the reserve currency to print infinity, subsidizing our BPs and Exxons to artificially depreciate the price of gas, and subsidizing the Frankenstein Agriculture industries and Monsantos to keep a boot on food prices (even though it's all calorie-free diabetes-juice corn syrup with 60% of calories consumed in the US coming from corn, so you've got to take two handfulls of supplements in the morning to keep the scurvy at bay). Then we've got the Hollywood Cartels buying their pay-per-law legislation forcing SOPA or ACTA or CISPA through to maintain copyright monopolies on the fastfood entertainment to keep all the unemployed, underemployed, and kids slogging around 200k in debt with Engineering PhDs living on welfare zonked out on American Idol and distracted by Trayvon Martin charades or whatever the "yellowcake" distraction is this moment. So with the US as the world's police officer and infinite ZIRP money, the elite can manage to keep the unwashed foodstamped masses sated on cheap food and cheap gas and cheaper whore-slapfight car-crash TV for another six months without fearing for their necks. As long as the Dollar McDoubles (Paid for by Bernanke’s fire hose, fenced through JP Morgan who runs the electronic food stamps and siphons off a foe from Uncle Sam through each transaction) keep on flowing and the Desperate Housewives keeps on streaming through the iPad, as long as Americans keep dying off of heart attacks. The quad-bypass surgeries, by the way, paid for by the same Federal Reserve printing presses throwing money at the uninsured who show up in the emergency rooms and cannot be denied, fenced through the heath care industries who WANT fat-assed unhealthy people because they siphon off their own percentage from every emergency room operation, in synergy with the aforementioned uberprocessed cornsyrup-lathered quad-bacon-burger fast food industry that jacks up the heart-disease rate.

That was Papandreau’s Achilles Heel. He was the same bank-colluding, extend-and-pretend bureaucrat like all the US politicians over the past thirty years, making a bargain with Goldman Sachs to help Shanghai Greece into the Euro by burying all of its toxic debt. Papandreau Obama, Bush, Clinton, all were in a deal with the devil to look the other way as long as the bank – the Fed in the US’ case, Goldman Sachs in Greece’s case – kept on providing low-interest free money coming to pay for their campaign promises, letting them give their citizens their social security cake and eat their medicare too. Difference is Greece just didn’t have the benefit of a reserve currency and the world's largest economy – so they were the first time bomb to blow up. Of course all the smart money and smart citizenry has been fleeing the US before that Judgement Day comes to pass. US embassy exit interviews are overflooded, citizenship renouncements up 200-300% from last year. Captain Ahabs of "Industry" are going on a suicide mission after the rich oily Moby Dick of Iran, harpooning the last remaining superpower, blowing its half-century built powerhouse economy and credibility up into pinata fiat paper and spculative ZIRP candy, and the crew with half a brain are abandoning ship. I’m more and more convinced every day that this whole “technology” push is not really about creating more jobs through 'technological innovation', creating the next wave of solar panels or building the next Apple company or creating some other business which will ultimately turn into another monopolistic anti-capitalist monster like Google, Apple, Pepsi, Coke, Exxon, et al. The Chinese will bottom-line the West with government-sponsored patent hackers and build all that new tech with dollar-a-day suicide factory workers in Shenzen. It’s really about preparing the next generation for defending themselves against the elites the globalists, the “technocrats” kleptocrats who will be trying to rip them off and stick them in indentured servitude. They need to understand the technologies of repression, the science of mind-control, the market-engineering principles, and the eldritch numerati’s mathematical schemes.
I hear Martian real estate over in Valles Marineris is in a lull market. I'm looking to crowd fund a little Crusoe-esque colony/commune up there on the Red Planet. I know some Moscow immigrants formerly triple PhDs that worked on the Soyuz rockets, showed up in America and could only get jobs as maids and janitors, they all hang out at the local Occupy chapter. "I love America, you have so much free food. Much hummus and toilet algae cake, but in Soviet Russia..." We get them to break us into a Russian launch pad, hijack a couple Soyuz rockets, outfit'em with a nice VASMR systems for intra-planetary travel. We've got the greenhouse and aquaponic technology down to a tight price point, and I'm fairly certain the Open Source Village crew will be up to partner and donate their self-repairing tractors and quasi-sentient lathes to build the alien-Adobe shelter we'd need for the harsher solar storms. Start an Occupy: Solar System! branch. I'm sure we'd be able to operate in familial tribal or false-kin empathetic groups for at least a good hundred years before numbers start swelling up to nation-state and corporation-supporting size. At that point we'll be back to square one, and we'll have to landgrab it out to Deimos or Venus or some shit before The Martian Central Bank starts flooding the economies with cheap extra-terrestrial paper, and JP Milkyway Bank begins algo-trading on the price of oxygen, ultimately leading to the Great Austerity Suffocation when 90% of the planet is asphyxiated, even more literally, by austerity and financial repression. And that's if Sir Richard Bronson's immortal-upload starts beaming up the Blue-Bloods' clones onto Olympus Mons, start their construction drones building fifty-mile-high glass-pyramid financial towers all over the apex. The sum total of human culture and art will consist of two songs: holographic Michael Jackson performing 'Charlie Bit My Finger' and 'Numa Numa' performed by holographic-Tupac Shakur. Immortal-George Soros will own eternal-copyrights to both of these songs and holograms, and will charge $500 per play. The financial towers will have no actual traders, quants, or even coffee-go-getters working in them -- people formerly employed at those jobs will all have been laid off and starved to death on a job-free, safety-net-free Earth where it's illegal to even accidentally drop sunflower seeds on the ground, let alone farm any food for yourself. The few IT nerds with jobs who program the robots that do all the nursing, firefighting, teaching, managing, and police-stating will soon after have choked to death on the 99% carbon dioxide atmosphere. The megalithic martian skyscrapers will be purely nostalgic, and used for Napoleon-complex arms races cast in architectural phalli.

There will be a single Fox-Face-Google source of Teh Information, jacked straight through an iBrain 7 straight into your nervous system, providing news, 'recommendations', and 'life direction', which will tell you everything from when to pee to what restaurant to eat at for lunch to what President to vote for (but providing you a false sense of choice by offering the same option under two different names and making it easier to untie a Gordian Knot than to opt out). There will be two candidates for Democrats and Republicans respectively: Holographic-JFK and Holographic-Reagan, both owned by immortal-Jamie Dimon. Watson Natural Language Processing AIs that presently write and read news reports and manipulate 70% of the stock market will be in charge of not only writing the New York Times articles and Fox News teleprompters for Holographic-Hannity and Holographic-Keith Olbermann, lifelike androids will also act out all of the blowhard infotainment antics, screaming one another off of each others' sets like meth-addled Jersey Shore divas. When they finally crack quantum computing and have the capacity to build a Hitch-hiker's Guide-style Universal Answering Machine, instead of asking 'the meaning of everything' or 'how the fuck do we get out of this downward spiral', Ben Bernanke, the head of the BRIC Bank, and the ECB will use up all that ineffable number-crunching power in a currency war arms race of devaluation/speculative takeover, printing up a Googol Plex of electronic fiat dollars, yuan, and special drawing rights, respectively. The US will ultimately hold the trump card in this World War 3 fought with electrons, having successfully tricked the Chinese, Indians, South Americans, and Arabs into holding the hotpotato of all their debt as they intentionally supernova the dollar, and will simultaneously have had Goldman Sachs complete its coup-de-tat of all of Europe's former democracies. (Plus they'd have stolen all of the EU's gold (60% of Germany's is already held in US vaults)). As the long global chain of debt dominoes finally falls, the universe goes bankrupt, with Europe and Asia in burning shambles, the US will suddenly again be holding the cards, in the lead position it once was just after World War II, with the opportunity to be the light on the hill for the world, instate the gold standard/realification of money, return the rule of law, disincentivize speculative debt feedback cycles. At this point, the devil in the form of Ayn Rand will crawl out of some dark, deep crypt and whisper into some mortgage officer or CEO or fed chairman's ear, "Go ahead, double those income numbers. Take that campaign contribution. Manipulate that commodity market. Print those extra dollars. Overlook that heinous financial crime. A little fraud never hurt anyone," descending the world right back into the seventh circle of financial-economic hell, a la Sisyphus. This time around, the astronomical fraud and theft will breach the speed of light, tear a hole in the money-time-continuum, and all of Earth will be swallowed by a financial paradox into a black hole, leaving nothing but the froth of quantum foam and unresolved credit default swap contracts.

At this point, the MF Global customer money magically pops back into our branch of the metaverse. All those gold ETFs and farmer's grain-futures and police pension fund money, floating out in our former orbit, like an epitaph for the human race.

So get the fuck off this hellhole before Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein start getting really close to the answer to the Fermi Paradox: civilizations never progress to interstellar travel because when humans achieve global networked information technology above 4 exabits and GDP above 30 trillion, they naturally immolate themselves in debty FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate). The ashes that remain then descend into dark-age feudalism for a few hundred years before the cycle wash-rinse-repeats. There's a reason the Our Father was originally, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." But there is no army of Christs, of Matt Taibbis, Max Keisers, and Guy Fawkeses, overturning money changer temples large enough to truly save us.

I'm long gun sales.

No comments:

Post a Comment