SILVERISMONEY

Wednesday Rant

2011-12-14T14:24:00.002-05:00

Today my cold/chest infection is worse than yesterday, and I feel as though I have been beaten with a sock full of nickels. My head is clogged up with a quart of snot and my chest feels like Mr. T is doing jumping jacks on it. I hate having a fucking cold when it is so beautiful outside, it just makes me even madder. As I scrolled angrily through the days financial and geopolitical news, I find myself becoming enraged at what I am reading. Any sense that there were actually people “in charge” that actually give a rats ass about me [read: the “little people”] has left my body. It has been replaced by a deepening fear that the people “in charge” have no soul, and wish to steal mine. To quote someone from another blog, “These bastards live on the blood of our future children”. Never before have words rung so true to me.

On to the MF Global scandal, which is no closer to resolution today than it was a week ago. Our glorious senators set up a nice, telegenic conference area and proceeded to question the scumbags in charge at MF when the SHTF, and were rewarded with several hours of lies, obfuscations and memory lapses. They asked the CEO, CFO and COO what they knew about the illegal activities outlined in several complaints and were told [very gently of course] to go pound fucking salt. Really…..they did. The comedy continues in the MSM full force, with not a single word from any of the newstainment outlets about who actually benefited from this collapse. To date, not a single arrest has been made, not a single charge has been levied by the government and none of the account holders who were robbed have been made whole. We are now living in a third world corporofascist kleptocracy, where there are no rules for the rich. Sure, if you get popped with a dime bag of blow you will spend a couple of years at the graybar hotel, but if you steal a few billion, you get to retire to the Caymans. Where is the outrage people? Why is this not on the tube 24/7? When a white chick in Florida killed her kid, the trial was all we saw, nationwide, for weeks, but when a billion two goes up in smoke, vanished like a fucking magic trick, and everyone claims someone else did it, we get nothing……..crickets. Unfuckingbelievable. When it becomes possible to become so rich or so connected that prosecuting you for a crime is not possible, the republic has already fallen.

Next up, Europe. Can this get any more stupid? Unless my abacus is wrong, piling another two trillion in debt on top of what is already so untenable these countries can no longer even pay the interest on it is quite possible the stupidest plan ever concocted in the history of the universe. Who is the fucking genius that came up with this idiotic idea? I what universe does a government demand extreme austerity, then proceed to borrow more money to simply pay the interest on what they already owe? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not seeing something here that explains how this is supposed to make it all better somehow? For the love of God, someone please point it out to me, because from here in the cheap seats, this looks like nothing more than a giant bailout of anyone on the planet holding European sovereign debt, most notably, banks. Sweet! We’re going to get fucked again, I was wondering how long it was going to take before they finished us off.

Next on the docket of fury is our Congress. These rat bastards just passed legislation which includes a provision for the indefinite detention of any American citizen accused of terrorism, and that they can be taken anywhere in the world. To put this in perspec5tive, the DHS has distributed materials similar to the FBI which describes potential terrorists as anyone who dares to speak out about the government, anyone who has more than a few days food in their home, anyone who dares to support the first, second and fourth amendments and anyone who dares to be pro-life. That’s it folks, it’s all over but the tears. Since I pretty much fit all of the above, I’ll be waiting for the inevitable knock on my door, because I’m sure I’m on a list somewhere as vocal as I am about the continued abuses of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. These son of a bitches treat the constitution like an advisory letter which they can choose to abide or ignore. They need to be reminded that this nation was formed under the pain of revolution and that there are over a hundred million of us out here who believe in the second amendment, and they need to be reminded in this election.

The sheep have been asleep far too long, and if they do not wake up soon all that remains of their liberty will have been quietly stripped away. We are being subsumed within something dark and evil, something that is trying to suck every last nickel of our money out of our pockets, and when it is finished with what we have, it will come after future earnings. Europeans are already setting themselves up to be perpetual debt slaves to the very banks that wrought this havoc, and the USA is next.

Time to put on those big boy pants and buckle up, this is going to be a rough and scary ride.

Children of The Corn

2011-11-15T16:52:00.000-05:00

I took my daughter and a friend of hers to our local fair this weekend, and was witness to the largest bunch of kids acting out of control I have ever seen. They were rambling around in medium sized packs of between five and fifteen kids, and each pack was louder and more obnoxious than the rest. The girls all seemed to be involved in a contest to see who could look the most like a low rent hooker, because I saw more skin than I was comfortable with on most of them, and more tattoos that I believe to be legal, given the age demographics. All of these feral children were completely without adult supervision, and most of them were smoking cigarettes and swearing openly. They called each other ‘bitch, ‘ho, ‘nigga, and worse. Their complete disdain for the people around them was what struck me the most. When walking in a group, they simply ignore those in their path, forcing them to go around. The black kids were the worst offenders by far, and were also the most menacing. It was a control thing, plain and simple. They clearly enjoyed making white people nervous. Needless to say, we left after about 45 minutes of this shit, and I took the girls someplace to eat sufficiently expensive so as to preclude the possibility of having to eat near these animals.

It reminded me of a scene in Children of the Corn, where the girl is trapped in the car, as her husband runs in to the church to get help, and her car is surrounded by the Corn Children who ultimately kill her. I see this behavior more and more these days. When the local high school lets out at 3:30, God help you if you want to drive down that street, as the “kids” are all walking in the street, ignoring the cars and daring you to do something about it.

Is this it people? Have we let our kids turn in to the animals portrayed on TV crime shows? Is it all about thuggery? What the fuck happened to manners and civility? How about respect? These thugs think they are automatically entitled to respect by virtue of simply existing, and anyone who does not offer it up immediately is treated like a punk. I see it in stores, I see it at sporting events here locally and I see it on the streets. It is pervasive and spreading.

I think we are witnessing not one but two lost generations of kids, all of them poisoned by the garbage portrayed as entertainment on TV. Until there is a general recognition of what has happened to our children through the rampant and rapid rise of media-raised children, and put a stop to it, I think these kids are mostly lost. They will work meaningless low-wage jobs, they will achieve nothing in life and most of the kids I see these days will never reach a station in life higher than that of restaurant manager.

How pathetic is that?

Moral Bankruptcy and Societal Breakdown Rant

2011-11-12T13:22:00.000-05:00

As I sit here reading the indictment on Jerry Sandusky, a previously highly respected football coach/defensive coordinator for Penn State, I find myself infuriated by the collusion among the “Old Boy Network”, which was clearly complicit in what is fast becoming a disgusting, sordid story of serial child rape and a widespread cover-up of what is being labeled an open secret. The reduction of children to the status of a sexual toy by this animal is enraging under its own weight, but the ensuing cover-up is beyond infuriating. As far as I am concerned what has occurred is nothing short of a conspiracy involving the highest placed people at Penn State and local law enforcement officials who declined to prosecute [even though they had an eye witness], and those involved are just as guilty of rape as Jerry Sandusky. I’m not sure how someone is able to justify these actions to themselves for nearly two decades, and how his spouse could possibly have not known about his deviant and perverted lust for prepubescent little boys.

The disturbing picture this paints is painful to acknowledge, because to do so will validate what I have feared for a long, long time; our moral code and ethical standards have been erased, and they have been replaced with selfish desire, lust for power and greed. Watching these sickening acts come in to greater focus and intense scrutiny in the press, I am reminded of an infamous child care scandal that erupted many years ago involving a family of “caregivers” who owned a [family run] day-care center[s] who were found to have abused a large number of their toddler charges, and to have compiled a library of kiddie porn using the kids as their stars. What strikes me as familiar is the blatant abuse of power by an adult over a child and the intense denials. Just as the [guilty] family members back then did, Jerry Sandusky is sticking to his story and is being supported [for now anyway] by his loyal wife, who is either stupid as well as blind, or simply shell-shocked and unable to process what is happening.

In the end, there will be a grueling trial, many more victims will testify to deviant sexual assaults, and a deal will be cut. Will justice be served? I doubt it. Jerry Sandusky will be vigorously defended by some hot shot law firm, and every accusation will be denied. The defense will try and place blame on the boys and will go to every length to discredit them. When it is all over, he will get thirty years or so in a cup-cake prison somewhere where he will grow in to an incontinent old man, but where he will not be punished at the level justified by the acts. The level of justice required for the terrible things this disturbed pervert deserves is death. Short of that, as far as I am concerned, he’s getting off easy.

This scandal will come to illustrate the precipitous decline in our moral fabric and the absence of ethics in those who we trust to instill these very things in our impressionable children. It will further illustrate that the bottom line here was and is, money. That’s right; money. The fallout is already starting, as sponsors flee the wreckage coming at them. I foresee an exodus of donations from alumni as the disgusting conspiracy of silence is broken open and the complicit parties are exposed. What they all tried so hard to ignore and cover-up will unravel a football powerhouse and destroy the reputation of one of the most respected state colleges in the country. I say fuck ‘em, they deserve it. Shame on these bastards and their lust for power, money and fame. Shame on the administrators for not crushing Sandyskys nuts a decade ago. Shame on all of them for their depraved indifference for the welfare of these vulnerable little boys. And finally, shame on society for placing such an incredible importance on wealth and fame, as cheering the avarice that breeds this immorality.

It's all done but the crying

2011-10-28T09:09:00.002-04:00

Up is down and down is up. At least that’s the way I’ve been watching things happen lately. I look at the clusterfuck that Europe has become, and have to look inward, toward my own country, because I see that we’re headed down the same road; debt serfdom. The European leaders have decided after much deliberation and wringing of hands, that creating imaginary money [leverage] and giving it to deeply indebted nations is the solution for all that ails them. They have also unilaterally declared that all those who hold Greek sovereign debt have “volunteered” to take a 50% ass beating in order to “participate” in the Greek rescue. Sound like bullshit to you? I thought so.

So now, every single entity that bought these supposedly “safe” investments, will instantaneously be 50% poorer as a result of these actions. There is to be no debt for equity, no extension of payback period. Just a straight up ass beating. Let’s think about this for a minute, because Greece is only the tip of a mighty iceberg, and the ramifications of this going feral in the EU periphery are tremendous and frightening. Greek banks, already fundamentally insolvent, hold a great deal of this debt. This means they must raise an equivalent sum in new capital to replace the lost cash. From what I can gather, Greek banks alone hold over 73 billion dollars of this toxic waste. There are some estimates that go much higher than that, but I used the mid-line number I found on The Economist. The Greek public sector pension fund holds another 25 billion dollars worth, meaning the taxpayers will be on the hook for promised pension payments coming from this [now 12.5 bbn] fund. All in all, it is a very grim picture.

All of the ugliness we’re witnessing over the Greek situation is about to be repeated in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. When those folks see Greece walk away from their obligations with few repercussions, expect everyone else to demand the same treatment under threat of default and Eurozone exit. In other words, we are about to see the disintegration of the European Union.

Now, look at our own country, the massive debts we have amassed, and tell me how exactly we’re going to pay off 16 trillion in acknowledged debt with so few workers actually paying in to the tax revenue stream. Answer: we won’t. Just like Greece, we’re going to default on this mountain of debt because no elected official has the balls to make the hard choices. The Brotherhood of Darkness is working overtime to suck whatever remains of the wealth held by American Citizens out and in to their own pockets, and so far, it’s working out pretty well for them.

I look at the cost of maintaining our empire and cringe at the thoughts popping up in my head. I look at the behemoth that is DHS and wonder just how in the hell we permitted them to morph in to the single most invasive, constitution ignoring organization in the nation. I look at the subsidized housing giants [black holes would likely be a better description] and wonder how we allowed these behemoths to be subsumed within the sprawling government complex with their debts now guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the taxpaying public.

All of this shit costs money. War costs money. “Security” costs money……even if we never asked for it. When I read about the cuts being debated by the unconstitutional Super Committee, I only see cuts to Medicare, cuts to education, cuts to food stamps and other safety net items. Where are the cuts to the military industrial complex? Where are the withdraw timetables for the two unconstitutional wars, two undeclared wars and one “kinetic military action”?? The military and DHS suck up an incredible amount of total tax receipts yet provide zero tangible benefits. I am not saying we do not need an army, and I am not saying we do not need to do some due diligence at our airports and seaports. What I am saying is that our time as the sole superpower is at an end, and if we do not withdraw from the 750 or so foreign bases we currently support and remove ourselves from the MINA, there is absolutely no hope we can survive as a nation, let alone a superpower.

Those who think change will be achieved peacefully are disillusioned. Our police state will align itself with the government and put down any movement with force. Our police have become a tactically trained and equipped army within the State and will do as they are told.

I believe it will take the complete economic collapse of the United States to effect any real change. I further believe that until it becomes impossible to concentrate incredible wealth among just a few people, we will never have justice, because it currently only goes to the highest bidder with the deepest pockets. Just ask any of the millions of folks languishing in prison because they were found with a lid of pot and a couple of Quaaludes.

I am sad today. I thought Europe was smart enough to kick Greece to the curb and let her default. It is not to be. I am sad because the once mighty U.S.A. is going down the same road, led to her demise by the same Keynseian fucktards as Europe.

I weep for my daughter and the dystopian future I fear she has in store for her.

Air Travel Exploding Skull Rant

2011-10-14T16:21:00.000-04:00

As most folks know, I do a fair bit of traveling for my business and for pleasure. When traveling alone, I have it down to an exact science. I joined Clear Traveler, which permits me to fast-lane through security at OIA, much to the chagrin of people waiting four hundred deep in line after a weekend of visiting the “Mouse”, and never spend more than a few minutes going from curb to gate. For thirty five years, I have had the traveling thing ‘down like Charlie Brown’.

A few weeks back, my buddy called me and said his sister was arranging a surprise birthday party for their mother who will be turning 75 years old, and that I was to be invited because I am a family friend for two decades and they wanted me to be there. I was asked to bring the wife and daughter as well. Having completed the madness of bidding hundreds of projects as the government finished up the federal fourth fiscal quarter money dump, and having completed required submittals for all of the near term projects, I felt the time was perfect for a four day weekend with the family and some close friends in Plymouth Mass and Cape Cod. Lobster, scallops on the beach and good local beer, it just doesn’t get any better than that. Well, I guess if you had lobster, scallops and beer while simultaneously having mad sex on the beach, that would be better, but since there will be children with us……..never mind.

I had my admin set me up with four tickets, one each for myself, The Boss and my daughter, and one for her little friend Dawn. My daughter came to me in tears a few nights ago and said that Dawn could not go now because her grades were poor and her dad was very angry. The kids were both extremely disappointed, so I told my daughter she could ask another friend and I would simply change the ticket. Easy……right?

I get on the phone and call Orbitz®, who I have used for travel in my office forever, and with whom I have a great relationship [having been helped out of a few squeakers by them on more than one occasion for no fee]. After waiting out the usual “Press one for English, Press three if you want to cancel a flight, etc. etc., I got to an “associate” who was not American but spoke perfect English with perfect manners. I explained my problem and was greeted with a moment of silence before she stated that “There are only two airlines that will allow you to change a name on a ticket, and none of your flights are with them”. OK I said, so what do we do from here? She explained that not only could I not change the name on a ticket that I purchased with my credit card, but that the credit for it could only be used by the person named on the ticket and a 150$ fee for changing it would be levied and a 25$ booking fee would have to be paid. So, for a 365 dollar ticket, Dawn would have to pay 175 dollars to utilize the credit leaving a value of only 190. She said “That is correct, except this airline requires you to pay the 175 dollars first, and they will not simply deduct it from the flight credit.

I was starting to get angry now, however, because the “associate” was so nice and apologetic, I maintained my cool and asked what my options were. She explained that I would have to book a new flight, but because of the proximity to my departure date, it would be best to leave the original itinerary alone and simply buy a new ticket for Helen. I agreed. After listening to the clatter of her keyboard for a minute she came on and said she needed name, date of birth and so on. When I gave her the birth date she said, “That’s going to be a problem, because Continental will not allow her to book a ticket for a minor under twelve [Helen will be twelve in 33 days]. She further explained that she would have to book directly with Continental and explain the whole thing to them because I am not a custodial parent. So, I scanned and e-mailed the letter [notarized permitting Helen to travel with us and she said she would call me back in ten minutes.

By the time I was through, I had spent $561 dollars and two hours dealing with a simple name change on a fucking airline ticket. The most frustrating part was that no one seems to know what the damn rules are and no one seems to give a shit about how difficult it has been made to go on what should be a simple trip. I cannot fault the Orbitz girl, rather, I give her praise for handling this for me because I am certain that at some point I would have exploded in outrage over the phone. I am angry at the airlines, for advertising one thing and then charging ala carte for every single thing besides the actual plane ride. The baggage fees, the drink fee, a fee for a window seat, a fee for a snack, etc. etc. It’s beyond stupid and it infuriates me. I am also furious at our government for making little girls out to be terrorists by forcing me to essentially eat a perfectly good ticket because they don’t want airlines to allow name changes on a ticket. What the fuck is that? How exactly does that make us safer? It’s not like I am changing the name from Dawn to Achmed Mohammed Al Talibani, I want to change it to Helen, another little freakin’ girl.

Can anyone here remember the last time a white, middle class little girl tried to smuggle a bomb or a gun on a plane? In fact, when was the last time any middle class full-on, natural born third generation or better American Citizen even tried to hijack an airplane? The last one I remember was D.B. Cooper, and he jumped out of the fucker at fifteen thousand feet or some shit like that. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

The same goes for putting me through a full body search which includes the forced and involuntary act of requiring the homosexual fondling of my genitals, and the same perversion on my daughter, simply to go on vacation. Let’s not forget the multiple doses of radiation we are required to endure as well. On this particular trip, I can expect up to four doses of radiation to rip apart my DNA. Thanks TSA, you bunch of ass lickers. Political correctness has gone waaaaay too far in this country and has become a greater danger to our security and freedoms than any single other thing. Our freedoms have been curtailed in a lot of cases and eliminated in others. And what’s with the assholes on the way to the gate and at the gate who do random re-screenings? What the fuck is up with that? Are they afraid their high school drop-out loser pedophile dick feelers missed something? Do they just need another dose of genital sweat to achieve a proper orgasm in the employee bathroom while masturbating to mental images of my under-age daughter? It makes me so mad I want to crack open a skull. I am presumed to be a murderous criminal simply by virtue of purchasing a plane ticket. All of the freedom hating crybabies out there who are so afraid of their own shadow that they sympathize with this outrageous practice can go fuck themselves; I have no feeling whatsoever for you outside of blind hatred. Want to live in a country that controls your every move? Go live in Burma [Myanmar]. They are probably suitably paranoid enough for you. You’ll probably like it there.

My day actually started out pretty damn good. I was notified that we were chosen as subcontractor on a rather large project, and that our share was 750K. This allowed me to call back a dozen workers who desperately need a paycheck, and it made me feel pretty damn happy to be able to do. Later in the morning we were notified that we won the water/waste water upgrade project as the remedial action contractor and that our share would be a healthy 377K spread our over 18 months or so. It was all going well until I had to deal with some of the most ridiculous, government designed roadblocks ever conceived. Who the hell is in charge of this clusterfuck anyway? Who do I write to explain my valid and ever present frustrations to? Would it even accomplish anything besides getting my name in bold print on a no-fly list?

I think I am going to talk to some friends of mine and see if they are interested in forming a new company. We will call it the No Bullshit Airlines. Seriously, it will be fantastic. When we sell you a ticket, it will include everything, without exception. When you get to our airport, there will be a minor screening only. You will be asked to show that you are who you say you are with a drivers license or something similar. You will have a luggage screening and will be asked if you are carrying a weapon. If you are or appear to be of Middle East/North Africa/Indonesia/Malasian descent, or have a middle eastern name like Achmed Mohammed, you will be subject to intense screening, and I mean Israeli style. You will then board your plane, be served free beverages and a snack on longer duration hops. That is it. No luggage or other garbage fees; everything is included in the price. Wife can’t go and you want to take your buddy instead? OK, the ticket is as good as cash for one year, we don’t give a shit who uses it, just as long as they have a bit of ID so we can change the name, even up to an hour before flight so the flight manifest is correct.

If you don’t feel safe flying my airline, then fuck off asshole and fly Nazi Airlines. Take your luggage and your pathetic lickspittle life and walk for all we care. Perhaps Freedom Airlines would be a better name. We will fly out of Freedom Airport.

May God have mercy on the souls of the Globalists if I ever become President of this Nation.

Wednesday presidential rant

2011-10-05T18:05:00.000-04:00

Sooooo……..where to start? I think I will start with the First Lady today. Her Majesty, as it turns out, managed to blow through $432,132.00 in taxpayer money while on her South Africa junket a while back. Naturally, that is just the cost of the transportation, and would not include [I shit you not] her personal chef and make-up artist]. Her two brats were actually listed on the flight manifest as “senior administrators”. Pissed yet? I am! This trip, ostensibly for purposes of furthering relations between the U.S.A. and South African countries, was a quiet cover for the safari she took her family on using the Uncle Stosh credit card. While this is really no surprise, I find the lack of outrage astounding. The silence over this is deafening in light of the fact that this trip created no jobs, fostered no new good will, generated no new agreements or trust; it was a vacation junket, pure and simple. Like the Portugese adventure before it, Lady Obama shrugged off those of us who are back here in the States, struggling with pay cuts, higher food bills etc. etc., ad nauseum. The hypocrisy of this entire family, and the arrogance that permits it, enrages me.

Our venerable POTUS comes on the television and fumbles through another meaningless speech full of hollow promises, attempting to persuade us that his way is the way of the light, yet only succeeds in alienating even more of the lemmings who fell for his slick, Chicago Playbook and promises of Hope and Change. Really? I’ll tell you here and now, I hope we change this administration, and I hope we do it soon [for the sake of my wallet].

I want to know when this guy gets down to the business of governing. For most of this summer, Obama has flown from one fund raiser to another, all on our dime mind you, and from one vacation to the next. He has played more rounds of golf than I can count and stood for innumerable photo-ops, yet none of our troubles have faded and none have been solved. This endless campaign is wearing on the country; breaking the people down in slow motion, as the unemployment benefits run out and the inability of congress to actually agree on a budget weighs on sentiment. I am physically and mentally tired. The fight to survive is made no easier with the presence of an arrogant tyrant in the White House openly declaring that he has to “Work under the radar” to further his agenda[s]. I have yet to hear anything substantive and bi-partisan from this Manchurian Candidate, and I doubt I ever will. With campaigning nearing full speed ahead, his focus will be firmly on the rhetoric of the moment, never really working to reach consensus, never pushing anything that has a real possibility of implementation, just more meaningless posturing and blaming everyone on the planet besides his own party and his own failed policy of gigantic government art any cost and socialization of everything else.

The republicans aren’t much better.

I listen to friends and co-workers as the conversation begins to grow around politics and the issues. It is profoundly amazing just how blind so many Americans really are when it comes to the country they live in and the principles of government it was founded on. I read a blog post earlier titled, “Could you pass a U.S. citizenship test”? Well, I took that test, and while I did not finish with a hundred percent, I sure as hell finished in the top .5 percentile of those who took that test across the country. Having thought about it throughout the day, I decided to do a totally unscientific poll of my own. I asked five people I know three questions each to see how literate they were about the constitution, the bill of rights, and amendments 11 through 27.

#1 Does the constitution of the U.S. guarantee us social security benefits?

#2 Does the constitution give the president authority to declare war if the U.S. is attacked by a foreign force?

#3 And for the kicker, a trick question, Is this quote in the constitution, bill of rights or amendments? “By our form of government the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed on the same equal footing."

The answers I received were shocking. No one got all three right, and no one at all got the last one right. I will not elucidate much on this because I don’t want to make my friend Kat cry, but strangely enough, the only person to get two correct was the man from Suriname who emigrated here and runs the convenience store in my little neighborhood.

I was disgusted and shocked at the same time. On one level I wanted to blame the “dumbing” down of our countries public schools, but the other part of me knows that three of the individuals are professionals with no less than three years of higher education and one has eight. What the fuck happened? When did it become unimportant to understand what our founding fathers held so dear that they risked it all to gain freedom? I’ll tell you what happened, television happened, rock and roll happened, computers happened, big box stores happened and fiat money happened. Endless growth, that’s the ticket! We became so engrossed with all of the new distractions and desire to “get ahead of the neighbors” that we forgot what we really need and focused on what we really want. We decided that more money was more important than staying at home and raising our kids. We decided that a 5,000 square foot home with granite counters made us rich so we jumped in the pool with the rest of the lemmings. Meanwhile, our rights were slowly stripped away. Meanwhile, our government doubled in size. Meanwhile, we became a police state and surveillance state. Meanwhile, our president was given tacit approval by a reticent congress to unilaterally declare war on a country that never touched our citizens. He was an asshole to be sure, but he did not attack us.

I think it’s all over but the tears folks. With the worlds banks teetering on the edge, and a congress that is hopelessly gridlocked in partisan bickering and half the countries in Europe bankrupt, the fires should start to burn any day now.

I hope you folks are prepared because something doesn’t feel right. People are distracted by the electioneering just enough to be blind to the incredibly important problems festering in the world and the absence of any tru leadership. I believe that folks are angry enough and desperate enough that they will vote for whoever steps up to the microphone and says what they want to hear; I’m going to save you all. We will not get a president who believes in this country, our constitution or anything else fundamental, we will get the guy who can raise the most money by pandering to the big money. Period.

Sorry about the rant.

Kat tip to Silver Bear Cafe for the pic. I stole it fair and square.

Sunday Rant

2011-09-25T11:37:00.000-04:00

Sunday Morning Rant

Well, I woke up to the lovely sounds of my mouth breathing, white trash neighbors this morning. As usual, they exhibit no knowledge of the existence of anything beyond themselves, and their little self-absorbed redneck universe of four wheelers, beer, and extended unemployment benefits. Having been snapped out of what was to be a much needed, extended period of staring at the inside of my eyelids, I was very nearly consumed with my anger, yet found myself hesitating at the front door. My desire to jump the fence and go all spider monkey on his stupid ass was overwhelmed by a sudden, vivid epiphany. With my hand trembling on the doorknob from the adrenaline rush, I realized that to dip down to their primal level, would be conceding to their way of life and value set. It was truly an awakening for me. I seldom back down from a confrontation when I know in my heart I am right, and rest assured, this boy very sorely needs a proper ass beating, but I suddenly had an overpowering feeling that I just need to suck it up and stay on the high road. As much as I want to burn that house down so these neck tattooed fucktards have to move away, I won’t do it. Not yet anyway. Now fully awake, knowing that sleep would be impossible, I decided to troll the channels on the ‘ol idiot box to see what the MSM had to say.

Needless to say, there was zero mention of the conflagration spreading across the European continent. No mention of the up-coming Greek default, which will most assuredly set off a tidal wave of attempts to redeem credit default swaps, most of which will not be paid. After repeated denials out of France regarding the precarious state of their bank capitalization, I think it’s safe to assume they are at the edge of the precipice, soon to topple in. All they need is a nudge, which I believe we shall see in the upcoming week or so. I was not informed about any of the most pressing and important issues confronting the world today, but the media did treat me to a fifteen minute bit about an A&E show called “Storage Wars”. Without realizing it, they illustrated in full Technicolor, exactly what ails America today. The corporations in our country have colluded together and produced an entire generation of “consumers”. That’s right, we’re no longer Americans; we’ve been reduced to the status of ‘consumer’. There are millions of people out there who have consumed so much useless shit that they actually need to rent permanent space somewhere to store it all. They actually place their “stuff” in boxes, label them then toss them in a storage locker, most likely never to see the light of day again. Exactly when this paradigm shift occurred I cannot be certain, but shift we did. How pathetic is that?

While I’m still in the mood to bitch and complain, what the hell is with the TELEPOTUS? Is this guy for real? How many more set asides can we take? Obama wants to set aside even more of the federal pie for yet another in an alphabet soup of existing set-asides for special interests. How many more slices of pie will be set aside for some favored group or another? These fuckers are going to destroy my business, and there’s nothing I can do about it. As most of you who happen to read this already know, my firm works nearly exclusively for federal government agencies around the country, but our work load is hell and gone from being assured. We have to scrabble and scratch just to peel off enough to survive in the atmosphere of set asides and contract bundling. Unfortunately, My mother made the mistake of giving birth to a white male, which shuts me out of most of the available federal contracting opportunities. In the world of federal contracting, most Americans are blissfully unaware of just how many federal dollars are packaged in to bundles and handed to small groups of large contractors. Here is a partial list:

SATOC, Simplified Acquisition Task Order Contract. This vehicle allows thirty or forty million dollars to be bundled up and bid to a group of four or five contractors under a seed project, simplifying the bidding process and reducing total engineering costs for the FedGov.

MATOC, Multiple Award Task Order Contract, IBID.

MAC, Multiple Award Contract, See above. This vehicle can also come in different forms, such as Minor MAC, Mini MAC and Major MAC. Each designation describes the total pool of money available and maximum size of potential acquisition.

SABER, Simplified Acquisition Base Engineering Requirements, see also above.

8A, This group actually gets to straight up negotiate work with no competition. I have zero respect for this program. This is a set aside program for black owned firms. For eight years, they get to dip the pot with no competition. After 8 years, they can find a new 8A guy and do a mentor – protégé program, essentially becoming 49% of a joint venture [JV] with a guy who gets to negotiate for eight more years. This is a great gig if you can get it. Virtually free money and a guaranteed, bottomless bowl of gravy.

These vehicles are all aimed at large to very large companies, and the requirements set forth in the original Request for Proposal [RFP] nearly always excludes small businesses such as mine because of the technical requirements and NAICS codes [North American Industry Classification System], which usually include the giant environmental firms like LVI, Balfour Beatty and others.

But wait, there’s more! Now that half of the pie has been given away, you would naturally assume that the rest is evenly divided. You would be wrong. After the big boys get theirs, the special interests start forming their line. I have outlined the special interests below who are mandated by Federal Acquisition Regulations [AKA the FAR clauses] to get a predefined percentage of all federal work.

SDVOSB, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business. Nearly ALL of the work at the VA goes to these firms. I do not begrudge this group one nickel. Go for it guys.

WOSB, Woman owned Small Business, this one explains itself. It was needed at one time, but I think we’re past the point where it is useful or truly needed. I work with myriad woman owned firms that are quite successful, and don’t need a leg-up.

SDB, Small Disadvantaged Business. Again, self-explanatory, but includes, I shit you not, foreigners who start a business in America, namely Indians [from India].

HUB Zone, Historically Underutilized Business Zone. WTF? Really? This one is basically a set up for businesses to front a company in the ghetto, and slide in on a shitload of set-aside work. I have also worked with HUB Zone firms, and every single one of them simply paid a face to sign papers while running the business themselves.

NAOSB, Native American Owned Small Business, No comment needed.

Folks, these lists are only a partial accounting, as there simply isn’t enough room here to post them all. Do you get it now? Do you understand what happens to our country when minority groups and special interests are given first dibs on the pie? That’s right; the 65% of small business that are owned by white males are squeezed out. It is reverse racism at its finest and most subtle, and it is doing so in the name of fairness and diversity. Rather than allow firms to compete on the basis of experience and quality of performance, we are forced to either sub-contract work from these companies or fight for the remaining scraps which have not been set-aside. How fucked up is that? Without regard to race, creed or color……..? Bullshit. Each and every one of these programs reduces competition and either sets up the big guys who cannot be touched by a pipsqueak firm like mine, or they set-aside money for a group specifically because of race, gender or nationality. Sometimes, I want to strangle someone and other times I want to give up and retire early, because the stress this game puts on you is overwhelming at times.

As for Europe, it’s going to get ugly over there, but I’m just going to watch it burn to the ground from my living room, because there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it, and I fear there isn’t anything the Brotherhood of Darkness can do either. They let it get out of hand and can’t regain control so the ship is going to crash and crash big. They fucked it up good this time, and they did so in the name of the almighty dollar. I wonder how that’s working out for them now.

With all we are facing in the world, I suppose I shouldn’t complain, given that I am blessed with a loving family, a great job, nearly zero debt and serious savings backstop, but I do anyway because it is a needed catharsis.

Sorry about the rant.

Saturday Doom Rant

2011-09-10T11:23:00.000-04:00

It’s early Saturday and I am not at work. This is a good thing. With the end of the federal fiscal year, we have been furiously bidding all the year-end projects being proffered up by NASA, the USACE, Navy, USAF et. al. We will not know what, if anything we will add to our backlog for a week or three, leaving the office in a sort of limbostatic funk. We’re zombied out at this point, having merely spun our wheels the entire year, neither making nor losing money. The challenges in the market are monumental, with pricing so low we have been even more selective about what we bid than ever before. Projects which at one point would have seen only three or four local bidders, are now attracting thirty, forty and even fifty firms, all seeking the same thing; a profitable venture. The fear in the air has become like a permanent buzz in my head, never abating, just a continuous echo reminding me of my mortality.

A very powerful group of elites in Euroland will gather once again this weekend to attempt forestalling the complete collapse of the European monetary union. Failure to calm the people this weekend may well be the end for Europe. And, as we all know by now, if Europe falls, we fall. It will be a failure of biblical proportions, erasing our very way of life and plunging the entire world in to a depression so deep we may not see a recovery in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, Chaz Bono is to be featured on Dancing With the Stars. Apparently, in a celebration of transgender mainstreaming, the media has decided that my child will be subjected to something I am vociferously opposed to, an alternative lifestyle that should by rights, be kept behind closed doors, just as anyone else’s sex life should be. Instead, those who watch this ridiculous farce, will be brainwashed in to accepting it as normal, when it is anything but. Once again, I have been distracted just in time by the magical idiot box. Thank you MSM, I simply do not know what I would do without you. God forbid we have a national discussion about what ails our country and figure out how to change it. God forbid we dismantle the monopolistic corporations who are slowly bleeding the remnants of our manufacturing base to third world hellholes in the name of profit. No, we can’t do that, we’re too busy with our agenda. We’re too busy mainstreaming the fringe elements of society and pandering to special interests, all in the name of fairness and diversity.

TELEPOTUS addressed the nation the other night, ostensibly, to allay our fears and to attempt appearing somehow “presidential” and in charge. It didn’t work. The markets responded by plunging three hundred points in the States, and falling in to a black, deep hole in Europe. This shit is getting real and the Powers That Be don’t seem to have a plan or even a consensus. This is beyond frightening; it is a catastrophe that if not attended to in time, will be unstoppable. I have watched Societe General lose an enormous chunk of value in the last few weeks [10% in yesterday’s session alone], just as Bank of America gave back the Buffet Bounce in a mere week. Now sporting [just barely] stock prices of just seven measly dollars a share, BAC decided it was a good time to scare the hell out of her investors by announcing 40,000 layoffs. What the fuck are they thinking here? Is anyone in charge anymore, or has the conductor fallen asleep at the wheel? American banks, just as Europe’s banks are fundamentally insolvent, yet rather than allow bondholders to take the losses for the risk they took, TPTB are stealing future earnings from you, me, my child and her future children, in a vain attempt to keep those “investors” whole. Instead of slowly breaking these banks down to a more manageable size they have been permitted to double down on leverage, and they have increased, that’s right increased their credit default swaps and other fuzzy, unregulated bets.

What the hell happened to “risk”? Where in the prospectus does it say those who buy and hold private, corporate debt [bonds] are to be made whole no matter what happens, and to be made so with taxpayer money? You have been slowly and quietly subsumed in to the corporocratic, sociofascist collective; you weren’t consulted and you weren’t notified, they just did it.

When I am forced to buy something at Wally World the problem we have allowed to be created comes in to sharp focus. I see the entitled walmartians shuffling around the parking lagoon in a deep daze, seemingly unaware of their prisoner status, dutifully worshiping the great and powerful Walton Empire, blindly paying the alms they have been led to believe they owe. There now, that’s a good consumer! Will that be cash or credit? I feel the aura of their sense of entitlement and it frightens me. When I listen to the words of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Maxine waters it is even more frightening than the walmartians for whom they demand ever more from those stupid enough to actually produce anything for themselves. These people want to enlarge the ranks of the entitled, not give them the education they need to shrug off the shackles of mediocrity.

I am quite beyond anger here, I am now truly afraid. I am not a coward by any definition of the word and never have been. I accept all challenges and do so willingly, but I have a deep and foreboding fear in my soul that something cataclysmic is about to occur, and there is no plan in place for the aftermath. This year’s riots in England and the previous year’s riots in France will look like a birthday party compared to what the entitled class will unleash on America. The cities will burn and the stores will be cleaned out, all of it will be done by those who have been taught that I owe them something.

A huge percentage of Americans are woefully unprepared for anything outside of status quo, and many will not only be unable to process what has happened, they have been wrongfully hypnotized in to believing FEMA or some other federal agency will come to the rescue; they will be wrong. Having missed the warning signs, or simply ignored them, they will likely starve. I will posit that none of those who read this have ever truly starved. I don’t mean missed a few meals; I mean true starvation. It is a gruesome way to die. Think about how fragile our distribution systems are, couple that with what in a complete collapse of credit, will be the absence of petroleum, and you have what we will experience. When credit [translation: Trust] collapses, everything stops, period. The production of food, medicine, motor fuels……….everything……stops and stops cold. Think food lines, think rolling blackouts, think rationing on a scale beyond what was seen during WWII.

The Brotherhood of Darkness has cocked it up good this time. They’ve lost control of the beast, or rather the beast has become sentient and refuses to be controlled, taking on a life of its own. With the metamorphosis now complete, and the beast unshackled, world financial systems may soon feel its wrath. Over this weekend, the power elites of Europe, and indeed the world, are likely huddled behind closed doors, scared shitless of what has happened and what will happen if they fail to dial this fucker down about five notches. We are literally less than 48 hours away from the start of something unthinkable. It’s time to put on a clean pair of big boy pants and buckle up.

Think it can’t happen here? Think the “government” has this on lockdown? If you do, then you will be among the first casualties. I have long held a pretty dystopian view of things in general. I have developed these feelings through both research and casual observations made during my daily activities. The elite, scumbag, greedy, selfish motherfuckers that brought us to this dark and scary place, ignored the hazards their actions would weave in to the fabric of the system. They ignored the pain that would come if the weaknesses they allowed to proliferate caused the system to break down. They are completely blind to the plight of the ‘common man’, and what it really takes to simply survive from day to day as a result of what they wrought in the name of money. It is not “us against them”, it is simply “them”. They do not even acknowledge us in any meaningful way. We are here to be milked for profits, nothing more and nothing less.

We are now facing the beast, and the beast is hungry. We had better pray

Sorry about the rant.

Sunday Rant

2011-08-21T12:03:00.000-04:00

I am sitting inside my home, wondering where it all went wrong. How did we manage to fuck it up so badly? Every day brings another revelation of some evil or wrongdoing, which should either never have happened, or at the very least, should have been seen well in advance. I remain unimpressed by the various and sundry government “agencies” charged with policing the various financial entities responsible for our current quagmire. Last week’s announcement by a whistle-blower [who I expect to die any day via an “accident”] that the SEC has been shredding tens of thousands of documents is just the latest in a string of events that made me realize the United States as we knew it is officially dead. The days are gone where one could expect wrong doings to be prosecuted and punished. Gone are the days when our legislators were actually doing the “People’s Work” in the criminally evil CONgress. I am rapidly drawing inward, a clear sign that hope is gone, and is slowly being replaced by reason and reality.

Who is left that truly has any faith in our government and her governors? Who remains faithful that this TELEPOTUS will deliver us from evil? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

We got a hell of a dose from the Euro Zone this week. From the near collapse of Italian banking giants, to the meltdown of all TBTF French and Spanish banks, the market is hanging on the razors edge. The highly publicized meetings between Merkel and Sarkozy, dubbed appropriately “Merkozy”, produced nothing but more fear, as was evidenced in the stock rout witnessed this week. Unfortunately, most Europeans already know what comes next. Break-up. The world knows that Germany cannot carry the entire Euro zone alone, and they also know Eurobonds will not fly. The productive German population will revolt if Germany eats any more shit sandwiches. We are about to enter a very dark time in history folks, one that will be marked by currency destruction, riots, and starvation on a scale not seen since the dark ages. It is no longer about oil, it is about the loss of faith in the credit of the largest issuers of fiat currency in the history of the world. When that loss of faith gathers steam, [and it will] the rout will be felt by every living human being on the planet. I do not look forward to 275 million adults reacting to complete devastation of their lifestyles.

My anger is fueled even more by the hapless mother fuckers disseminating propaganda on the MSM, delivering their pap with a smile and perfect hair, wearing nine hundred dollar suits. Those douche-bags deserve what is going to be coming their way, when the roving bands of starving ‘everyman’ come storming through places like Brentwood, the Hamptons and Tortoise Island, looking for a little payback and involuntary wealth redistribution. Every time I see this smiling bunch of ignorant fucktards I want to reach through the screen and bust out that mouthful of perfect white veneers. I cannot remember the last time that I saw honest real-time reporting of a story……any story…..that does not have some political slant or another.

I do not believe in this left-right construct, as neither side has the answers. My grandfather used to say that he never believed either side, because the truth was always somewhere in the middle. The current lot of politicians has so completely divided this nation it has become us versus them, right versus left, white versus black, night versus day. There is no more “we”, only us and them. While there is a distant possibility that we may see a recovery, it will not occur within this political construct, it will require a completely new paradigm, one in which different ideas are embraced, ideas that do not include a permanently entitled class of people who are dissuaded from free thinking and seeking to attain something better for themselves, by themselves.

Speaking of the entitled, I am reminded of the recent trend in the U.S. called ‘flash mobs’. I am not alone in my contempt for these “disenfranchised youths”, as they have been named by the politically correct press. Through the removal of all ability to administer any true punishment to our children, lest we be jailed for “abuse”, and the transfer of authority in our “schools” from the teachers to the students, we have effectively created a generation of kids who do not know empathy, do not have morals and are not being taught values. Their teachers are characters on television and in music videos. Their teachers are make-believe people who project the personality and values on our youth, who proceed to emulate their behavior. They have been completely desensitized to sex, violence and raw hatred. My 16 year old daughter can watch shows on cable TV that would have been given an X rating when I was her age. The Supreme Court, in apparent agreement with the movie and gaming industry, recently ruled in favor of a video game manufacturer/software firm that kids under 18 could indeed play violent video games depicting murder for points and rape for fun, because after all, it would violate the constitution to rule otherwise. While technically correct in their ruling, I have to ask myself a question; Do I want to live in a world like that, or do I want to change it in to something better; something cleaner?

We were treated to the spectacle of a wedding between one of the Kardashian sluts and some NBA player this weekend, and the MSM lapped it up. Keep in mind, Kim Kardashian is famous merely for being famous. Did you catch that? Famous for being famous. This is what our society has devolved to, sitting on our lazy asses living vicariously through someone who has no problem with spending incredible sums of money on a pair of Jimmy Chu’s, just because she can. Really? What the fuck? The MSM spent millions of dollars using their vast resources to cover what has been dubbed by ABC as “America’s royal wedding”. These resources could have been better spent having a group discussion among concerned Americans, talking over ways to extract ourselves from three overt wars and two covert ones in the Middle East and North Africa. Instead, they dispatched their helicopters and paid paparazzi to the scene to try and get the first picture of the lovely couple. All of this energy, time and money spent chasing a couple of selfish, egotistical, spoiled brats. I am pretty sure I will be able to measure the duration of this marriage with my handy egg timer. I’m sure glad I didn’t throw that thing out.

We were distracted again, just in time, last week with the important news that the husband of one of the New Housewives hung himself in a closet because he was to be ‘outed’ in the new season as a closet gay submissive. This was the husband of a loudmouthed broad who spent 60,000 dollars of his money on a birthday party for her six year old kid, who by the way, was fast asleep an hour after the soiree started. Sixty large is two years wages for the average schlump, yet this idiot decided it would be a good idea to blow it on a fucking party. People like this project their meaningless and directionless lives in to millions of homes each week, leaving a hell of a lot of gullible people believing that this is something to aspire to. I really have no feeling about the death of this selfish man. In fact, I kind of hope a video surfaces with George Soros, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates all dressed in leather and sporting whips and Crisco, getting all brokeback in a billionaire threesome, with Soros as the submissive sporting a ball gag and leather diaper. After all, things happen in three’s don’t they?

With all of the crazy shit happening in European financial markets, the U.S. markets and the massive political dislocation occurring in slow motion, the people are given nothing but distraction and puff. The press seems to think we can be snowed over with endless left-right themed panel discussions and endless analysis of our broken markets by Cramer and MSNBC saying BUY, BUY, BUY, “The bottom is in”, It’s different this time”.

You know what? It really is different this time. This time the collapse cannot be stopped. This time the dislocation will be so complete the world will be changed forever; no one will be spared. I’m seeing a change in the tone of conversation these days. Work associates who formerly rolled their eyes at me when I brought up discussion about my garden, canning and self sufficiency, are now asking questions about those very things. I can sense the fear as I walk through the stores and I can see it in the vacant, lost stares of the shell-shocked people trying to stretch their SNAP benefits to the end of the month.

Will it all come apart this week? Probably not, because the PTB still have a little bit of dry powder, but it will happen. It is inevitable, and you had better be prepared.

I've had about all I can take from tehm.

2011-06-24T16:23:00.000-04:00

It’s Friday again, and not a minute too soon. This week has been a weird one and I’m ready to forget the whole damn thing. My brain hurts from the continuing stream of bullshit emitting from the mainstream media, in their on-going quest to “inform the nation” about the important things, like some spoiled little bitch who murdered her own daughter in cold blood so she could continue to participate in wet T-shirt contests and bang the various and sundry slut magnets that she shared her bed with so freely. I’m not sure why the media is so enthralled by this flat-backer because after all, they didn’t give three minutes of coverage over the nut job who microwaved her kid to death to piss off the ‘baby daddy’. Could it be because she’s from the so-called “privileged white class”? That’s my assumption. Ever watch one of those crime shows like NCIS or Law and Order? Ever notice how the liberal media always chooses a white male or privileged white female for the heinous crimes, when the statistics on violent crime speak to a completely different demographic? I do. The modern media is run with people who have an incredibly liberal bias, and want to see all power taken from white men and women because of their belief that “white men and women have run things for long enough”. Now I am not a racist person, I am too analytical for that mindless bullshit, but I will call a spade a spade every single time. The American population has been so completely hypnotized and indoctrinated with this horseshit, they actually believe it. The average Joe sits down and watches an hour of “news”, cracks open another can of suds and smiles contentedly, because now he thinks he is “”informed”. Fucking pathetic. Let me ask a question: How many of you have started talking about something real, something with meaning and substance like the economic malaise, only to be completely shut down? I thought so.

Completely ignored by all of the corporate media giants, the historic 500 year flood inundating the Midwest threatens the operations of not one, but two nuclear reactors, one of which is a GE Mark I reactor, just like the ones in Fukushima. I seem to remember that bad things happen when they get flooded, but never mind, Lindsay Lohan didn’t have to go back to jail because the judge said her Parole Officer made a mistake. Wow! That was close! I also saw a lot of coverage of that pubescent little Justin Bieber prick, who got tackled by someone outside of some venue or another. Yup, six minutes on J.B. but not a whisper about the possibility [a very real one by the way] of an American nuclear disaster in the nations breadbasket, which would poison the primary water source for the entire middle of the country. I think my fucking skull is going to explode. Think about this for a minute, these two plants are waaaay up at the top of the Mississippi feeder basin, which means that any radiation would be deposited over a tremendously huge area. Think in terms of an area the size of Ohio, then you get the picture. ’Breadbasket for the world’? If we actually do dodge this potential bullet, who among us actually believes that anything will be done to mitigate future disasters?

No one? I thought so. Finally, a consensus.

There has been plenty of smack talk surrounding the debt ceiling negotiations lately, most of it leftist horseshit about the absolute need to jack out taxes in the face of this depression. What a genius idea! I should have thought up that one myself. But I didn’t, because I am too pissed off about the fiscal morass we’ve sunken in to and the lack of congressional will to do anything substantive about it until they crater the entire system with their petulant squabbling and endless finger pointing. How do these fuckers live with themselves? Oh that’s right, when you get to congress there’s a little bronze plaque at the door and it says: “All ye who enter here abandon hope and leave your conscience and reason in the basket by the door”. The whole thing has become nothing more than political theater. Our government is now spending money from the federal pension fund because our congress is horn-locked about the debt. The snake has begun eating it’s own tail. How poetic.

Remember the “kinetic military action”? I do. Remember hearing something about “Weeks not months” I do. So, here we are nearly four months later, and we’ve done little more than bomb the living shit out of Libya’s infrastructure and killed thousands of people that the American People had no argument with and had done nothing to provoke us. Sweet!! Can someone explain top me just where in the constitution or war powers act it gives the POTUS carte blanche to start a fucking war? We are spending something like a hundred million dollars a day bombing the hell out of all the things that makes that nation productive in the first place, ostensibly to depose a dictator of a brutal regime and allow the “people” to self determine. What a complete canard. So here we are, with a nutless bunch of pussies in Congress finally standing up to a man who is rapidly converting the presidency in to a dictatorship.

While I am at it, how about the economy? I keep reading the pontifications coming from the corporate captured economists who spew forth their “predictions” about the “recovery” and statistics about job growth. Of course when you can manufacture “new small business’s being born” at the rate of two hundred thousand jobs a month, you can make ice ream out of horse shit every Thursday when the jobs report comes in. Same with the CPI. Need to make it look like inflation is under control? Easy peezy, japaneezy. Just substitute filet mignon and champagne with cat-food and Carling Black Label. See how easy this shit is? The most frustrating part of this is how many sheeple actually believe it. Every week I want to kick someone in the fucking balls when these useless statistics are made public with great fanfare, as if they were actually based in reality, and then watch the market totter one way or another as the robots run their algorithms based on the information disseminated, irrespective of veracity. Again, what the fuck? Nothing would make me feel better than being put in a room with one of these assholes for half an hour, and let me beat the living shit out of the next jackass who uses the term “nascent recovery”.

Euroland is falling apart. The People of Greece are demanding that their government not accept any more austerity; in fact they shut the country down for two days again to protest the measures. Did their elected officials listen? No, of course not. In fact, G-Pap shuffled around his cabinet and installed lackeys who would vote affirmative, and make the Greeks debt slaves to the very banks who provided the heroin the junkie so desperately needed. Had Greece had any political will, they would have never borrowed a nickel. They would have lived within their means and suffered a little bit at a time, instead of having major surgery with just an aspirin for anaesthesia. But they couldn’t do it. The Greeks looked around and saw how the rest of Europe was living, and they wanted a taste of the good life. With the core economies of Europe having to foot the bill for their southern third-world neighbors [who should never been given entrance to the union in the first place] and their citizens are also shouting no, no, no. But they press head anyway. Why? Because the douche-bag, banker automatons who got them there in the first place have promised to pull the switch on the global economy if they do not. I am sure they were warned about the sixty trillion in Credit Default Swaps that would trigger economic Armageddon if the don’t force this shit sandwich on the bankrupt Greeks. These cold and calculating cock suckers will get away with it too. They will never stop. Not until they have every last nickel. The fear they purvey is not imaginary, it is real, yet they created the situation.

Now for my economy. In Anconaland, things are stable for the moment, but the dearth of work right now is extremely frustrating, and shows no signs of changing any time soon. My family has made great strides in the personal finance and preparation arenas, and continues to do so at an ever accelerating pace. I fear what is coming will radically change the face of our nation, and give the government an easy excuse to destroy our remaining liberties. How about a few domestic false-flags, then use it as a pretext for gun confiscation? I feel it coming and it is increasing in speed, that light at the end of the tunnel is not what you think it is, it’s the headlights on the train folks, and it’s coming at us.

Folks, the time for preparations is drawing to a close. When it comes there will be no warning, it will just materialize. In this age of light speed communication, we are able to witness in real-time, events occurring on the other side of the planet, so when the collapse comes, expect it to happen nearly instantaneously. I’m talking days, not weeks this time. The ultra leveraged banking entities and hedge funds out there are playing with dynamite and the fuse has been lit. When the trillions in swaps are triggered, do not expect anything less than complete paroxysms in the banking sector and a near complete shutdown of the “electronic monetary system”. This means bank cards, debit cards, credit cards, stock accounts, credit lines etcetera. They will simply vanish. You should have a chunk of cash stashed away sufficient for every day needs for at least six months. That is in addition to the preps you have done [to include guns, better and beans].

I no longer let this shit keep me down. I have vowed to continue to be angry about it, but not to let it eat a hole in my soul any more, because it’s just not worth it. I have prepared for my self, my wife and my daughter everything we need to ride out about two or two and a half years of crazy shit, and even put up a little for a few very close friends whom I feel will make themselves very useful even though they have not prepared for anything close to what I see coming. I’m such a nice guy! I will ride this fucker all the way down, and rise up with the phoenix. If I don’t live through it, then the Boss and my daughter will still be heavily armed against the ‘Golden Horde’, and have the wherewithal to get back on their feet without me.
No one knows when it will blow, but it will, and when it does it will be biblical.

Friday Rant

2011-06-10T09:55:00.000-04:00

Well, here I am again, with a troubled soul and no one to unload on. I watch as endless streams of useless information are force fed in to my brain, struggling to make sense of anything the MSM spouts out, as each days news cycle churns. I have become numb to all but the most horrific of it all, and even then, only shake my head and shrug as I listen to the gruesome details emerge out of the Casey Anthony trial. This trial, two years in the making, illustrates exactly what I fear the most about the American way of life. That a mother of a beautiful and innocent child could callously take away her life so that she could continue to party down like she did before creating a child, suggests to me the end of empire as we know it.

I want to thank Anthony Weiner this week. No…..I really do. I want to thank him for diverting my attention from the real problems we are facing with his arrogant and psychopathic behavior. Your lack of self respect and sexual dysfunction has distracted me just in time. I don’t know how the fuck twitter works and will most likely never learn, but I want to thank them as well, because without them, we would have never had the opportunity to view Anthony Weiner’s erect penis, and neither would the random woman he sent the picture to. This guy must have some demonic subconscious desire to self destruct, because by God that’s what is going to happen to him. To send a picture of your junk across the country and think nothing of doing so makes this guy the winner of the self absorbed, egomaniacal scumbag of the year award, and this year, I’m adding oak leaf clusters to it. I accidentally clicked on a link and saw the fucking picture. Thanks dickhead, you just gave me a world class enema chill that took a half an hour to shake off. How about his wife? Stand by your man babe. I won’t hold my breath waiting to see how long before the ink dries on the divorce papers. It’s a shame she has a bun-in-the-oven, because that poor bastard will have to live with this his or her entire pathetic life. Why is it that guys with hot wives do this kind of fucked up shit anyway? It’s the puzzle of our lifetimes people.

Our leaders have become like the Roman Senate at the end of their empire, our congressmen and women engaging openly in reprehensible behavior then justifying their acts so that hey may continue to cling to the power they have become drunken on. I read that Hillary Clinton has been tapped to head the World Bank when the director steps down next year. What exactly the hell this woman has done that qualifies her to head that organization I must have missed, because unless I am incorrect about my history, the only thing she has ever done is go to law school and be married to a philandering president.

We have been denied the truth about the nuclear disaster in Japan, and only now are we finding out that not one, but three reactors not only melted down, but through the pressure vessel of the reactor core and are now laying in a molten pile of active nuclear lava on the floor of the secondary containment, slowly burning their way through to the water table. These unholy and evil mother fuckers will not be satisfied until they have irradiated the entire world and killed us all.

Next up is Project Gun walker. In case you haven’t been following the story, our government, the ATF, thought it would be a good idea to allow known criminals make bulk purchases of semi-automatic rifles and smuggle them in to Mexico. I swear to God, you just can’t make this shit up. These fucking geniuses somehow thought it would be OK to let known criminals buy as many guns as they wanted so they could supply them to eh drug cartels plaguing Mexico. On what planet does this make sense? Where the hell is Eric Holder on this one? I want some fucking heads on a plate! Of course we won’t get anything close. Maybe, four or five years after the “investigations” have been completed, and a few key witnesses have ‘committed suicide’, there will be a show trial for some unlucky dumbass who was in the wrong place at the wrong time [and probably innocent as well], and he will go to some white collar prison like Saufley Field in Pensacola for a few years of backgammon, handball and the occasional recreational prison rape.

I see also that the Brotherhood of Darkness is still hard at work destroying the last vestiges of our economy. It makes me shake my head in disbelief when I hear these jackasses on the TV say things like, “Today’s housing number was a real shock, and we can’t understand why the numbers just won’t come back up”. Really?? Let me help you out here sport. Now don’t quote me on this anywhere, because I didn’t go to MIT or anything, but I’m pretty sure that to buy a house you have to have income first. I could be wrong, but in my world, income implies that you have a fucking job, and from what I hear through the grapevine, there are zero jobs to be had right now unless you want to become a Wal-Mart ‘associate’ or flip burgers at McDonalds. Either way, those poor bastards don’t even make enough money to live in their fucking cars, so next time you come on TV and act all surprised about the slump in home sales, car sales or sales or anything for that matter, I promise to reach through the television and smack your fucking head.

Since we don’t have enough shit on our plate with the three wars we have going on in Middle East/North Africa, now we have decided to toss Yemen in to the party, you know, just to mix it up a little bit. It seems the Masters of The Universe think it’s a good idea to set the entire Middle East on fucking fire because after all, we can’t have democracy unless we kill every single one of the fuckers now can we? Four wars and not a single consultation with Congress. So much for the War Powers Act.

Well, at least it’s Friday, and I only have to work for a few more hours. I will have two whole days to do little more than drink beer, contemplate my belly button and maybe surf a little porn.

What the fuck?!?!

2011-05-29T16:53:00.002-04:00

Fuck it......I've had enough, and I can't stand it any longer. I swear I want to take a baseball bat and start breaking kneecaps right about now.
I am sitting in front of this computer screen, tapping out my anger on a keyboard, because the ears that need to hear my anger and frustration have become deaf to the ‘common man’. This is a tragedy beyond the ability of Joe Six Pack to understand, as a result of slowly being conditioned by the MSM and our government to shut up and take what they give. Being satisfied with his ability to pay the cable and grocery bills each month, Joe sits idly by as our once great nation is turned in to a fascist corporate state, where only the very, very few are heard by the government.
Has anyone but me noticed that the media has completely stopped discussing the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan? What the fuck is that?? The most terrible nuclear holocaust since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is underway and it is completely ignored. We now know that within two days, three of the reactor cores not only melted completely down, but Tepco has advised that two of them have melted through the bottom of the reactor core and are currently [albeit slowly] melting their way through a sixteen to eighteen foot thick slab of concrete in the drywell. Not only the U.S. but the Japanese government are doing their best to obfuscate the truth and disseminate only the little bit of information that they believe can safely be given to the people without causing “trouble” for those in power. I watched the chairman of Tepco bow to the group of reporters and convey that he was “sincerely sorry for the inconvenience his company had brought to those who live in Fukushima”. I’m sorry????? Fuck that! How about some good old fashioned contrition douche-bag? How about falling gracefully on your sword in the center of Fukushima prefecture? Meanwhile, radiation continues to spew from all four affected reactors, as it will continue to do for the foreseeable future. Our “trusted congressmen” are behind this cover-up folks, I’ll guarantee that. They will not let anything stand in the way of nuclear energy, even if it means a few hundred thousand slow and agonizing deaths by cancer.
Nothing more to see here folks, move along and be sure to buy some more spinach.
Pissed yet? Wait for it, ‘cause it’s-a-‘coming

Next up is the jackass liberal fucktard Supreme Court judge in Indiana who has just eviscerated the fourth amendment. That’s right folks; you no longer have the right to be secure in your home or person from unreasonable search and seizure. It will no longer be necessarily required for a cop to get a warrant to kick down your door and brutalize you. Along the same vein, the TSA [Touching and Squeezing Ass squad] informed Texas that if they passed the anti-groping bill, Texan airspace would be declared a no-fly zone. That’s right folks, we are now officially a fascist police state, and Texas just bent over and took it up the ass because some bureaucrat sent a menacing letter that was not only unenforceable, but illegal. What a bunch of pussies. I thought Texans had more balls than that.
Remember the ‘war on drugs’? The war that is being waged on Americans for possession of a fucking joint? Well, we’ve won that war. That’s right, we won it. How’s that you ask? I’ll tell you. This was never about stopping the influx of drugs, and the dissemination of same to Americans, it was about filling up privately owned prisons, it is as simple as that. As prisons are privatized, they become profit centers, and those who own them do not want to see their “customers” released. That is why we have the most draconian drug and criminal laws in the world folks, because the elite must have their profits. Have you ever thought about how ridiculous it is to charge someone with a felony for possession of a lid of grass? Have you ever thought about how insane it is to give someone five to fifteen years in prison for simple possession, because it was the third conviction? How about ‘three strikes’ laws? Really? Someone fucks up when they are eighteen and goes down for a three year stretch because they were stupid. The same idiot goes out and does it again, only this time he learns his lesson and stays out of trouble for twenty five years. Unfortunately, the poor bastard gets pulled over after just finishing a big fat joint, and the arresting cop finds a half ounce of weed in the car. Guess what? 25 to life Johnny, this is your third strike. How fucking stupid is that? This poor bastard is from Florida and I have been following this travesty for a while now. Common sense just does not prevail in this country any more. The icing on this cake is that you and I get to pay for it all. Yes folks, we get to pay more in state and federal taxes to take care of these “criminals” [at no small expense mind you] because the prison lobby has bought and paid for laws that make silly shit a crime punishable by imprisonment.
I’m so mad I could just spit. Every time I read or hear about some new law that is supposed to ‘protect me’ I get even madder.
I just read an article describing police going door to door in Joplin after the tornado and collecting all privately owned weapons. What a crock of shit! In what universe does the government have any right to force law abiding citizens to turn over weapons? How exactly in the hell does this make them safer? I’ll tell you how; it doesn’t. Period. Now, the only element in Joplin who will have guns is criminals, who have been given a green light to rape and pillage because the citizens can no longer protect themselves.
I swear I think my skull is going to explode.
Have a nice weekend.

Tuesday Rant

2011-05-03T10:47:00.000-04:00

As I watch the political theater from the cheap seats, I can’t help but wonder if I am not a part of the problem. In America, we have the responsibility to choose our senators and representatives, using the electoral system put in place by our founding fathers, and to base our choices on sound governance, good moral character and honesty. Today, we are given choices that are far from this mark. We are faced with candidates whose only qualifying traits are connections within the system and extreme wealth. This wealth, whether ill gained or honestly earned, is often used to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in a desperate effort to enter the “Club”. Having spent huge sums of money these candidates are voted in to a job which has a yearly salary of just $174,000 dollars.

Why in God’s name would anyone be so stupid as to make such a lopsided decision?

Money.

It really is just that simple. The process has become a well publicized joke, as with the recent campaign of Meg Whitman, who spent the unholy sum of one hundred and seventy eight million dollars, of which one hundred and forty four million were from her own savings. To understand why this woman was willing to spend one million dollars of her own money for every thousand she would receive in salary, we have only to look at the congressional lobby, the executive rolls at the biggest banks and board rooms of major corporations around the world. Our government has been completely co-opted by corporations, having become little more than a training program for trainees to the elites. Anyone who doubts this can simply look up the names of past governors, senators and representatives on Wikipedia to follow their illustrious careers.

Many in government enter the fray with the best of intentions, they really do. However, once on the hill, they get “Foggy Bottom Fever” as the lobbyists charm them with expensive meals, off the books trips to Fiji and very probably large cash bribes [witness William Jefferson, who was caught red handed with a huge sum of cash hidden in a freezer]. They say power corrupts, and I believe it to be axiomatic, but with the addition of money and the promise of an easy job on some board of directors, with millions in compensation, most of our elected officials forget all about why they came to Washington and fall in to line with the established program.

I sit here wishing that there was something that I could do to change it all, and find myself without a clue as to how. Sure, we could organize and demand change, but more often than not the many organized groups are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of money required just to have a senators ear. Some will say that all you have to do is make an appointment at your senators office and eventually he/she will meet with you. Then what? My senator will probably indulge me a short audience, agree that something must be done and return to Washington having completely forgotten or simply ignored me.

I believe we are at the bread-and-circus phase of collapse in America. We have crossed the Rubicon and cannot turn back. This has been by far, the most disastrous presidency since Jimmy Carter, and it keeps getting worse. The corruption has become palpable, but it is completely ignored by the bought and paid for mainstream media. BP wiped out the Gulf of Mexico with millions and millions of gallons of oil and Corexit, but no one has been put in jail. Four trillion dollars of wealth was wiped form Americas balance sheet in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, and no one has been arrested. In fact, the banks are now far more leveraged with derivatives than they were before the collapse, having used their massive influence to gut the very bill that was meant to stop their insanity.

Our venerable Nobel Peace Prize winner of a president, the one who said he would immediately end the war in Iraq has yet to live up to his promise. Sure, he pulled out a shitload of soldiers, but they were promptly replaced with mercenaries. We are still in Afghanistan, a country that has never been conquered, which will probably bankrupt the U.S., just like Russia. We are also fighting an undeclared war in Libya. This war, ostensibly to remove a tyrant dictator, will likely drag on for years, and end with Ghadafi being replaced with an Islamic government. The military industrial complex will allow nothing more than perpetual war, because without it they cease to exist, and we can’t have that now can we?

I have watched as food prices climb inexorably higher, beyond the reach of Americas poor, and soon, what remains of the middle class. Gasoline is now at four dollars, promising to go even higher in the summer, as the three wars rage on in the Middle East and North Africa. I feel the pain as I hand over eighty dollars for a partial tank of gas in my truck, wondering if I can make it last through the week. Florida Power and Light now costs me exactly fifty percent more than I paid just six years ago which is the same increase I am paying for propane. Without accompanying raises in my salary, I am finding that we are unable to save more than a token amount of money each month. For the 44.2 million people receiving food stamps, the future is looking quite grim.

As our once proud nation is slowly subsumed by the corporations I can’t help but feel as though we could have stopped the process earlier, and returned sanity to our government. If only we had spoken out sooner. If only we had realized what they were doing, maybe we could have stopped them. Unfortunately, the plan was set and we fell for it hook line and sinker. They made us feel richer by going deeper in to debt. The way they explained it at the time made complete sense so many of us simply signed on the dotted line, believing that real estate can only ever go up.

Now we’re paying the piper.

America is in for a paradigm shift of epic proportions, in which our way of life will become the mirror opposite of what we have become accustomed to. I am sad for my daughter, who will have to grow up in a much different world. She will live in a police state where your every movement can be tracked by your cell phone and debit card transactions. She will be subjected to warrantless searches of her person if she has the temerity to try and fly somewhere. She will be considered a criminal terrorist who is to be presumed guilty until a thorough search determines she is in fact just an innocent little girl. My little girl will live in a shell of a country, one who broke her own back so that a very few could live a life that she can only see in movies or read in books. My daughter will be governed from above by a federal government what has set forth 134,723 pages of federal regulations filling 201 volumes. It will be explained to her that ignorance of the law is no excuse. She will pay taxes as set forth in the U.S. tax code, the rules of which are available to all in 71,684 pages of easy to read text. At 2,074 pages long, the health care bill signed in to law by Obama is merely the framework for a myriad of agencies which will write the rules to govern what kind of health care my little girl will receive.

I fear that the only way out is complete collapse. By complete, I mean total collapse of our currency and dismantlement of our government. There will be a protracted period of chaos and pain, out of which will rise a new America. Without a lot of pain and suffering, America will not change.

Sunday Rant

2011-03-20T14:37:00.000-04:00

As I sit in my living room on this fine Sunday morning, I am overwhelmed by the events that continue to unfold before, me and helpless to stop them. In the wake of the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami which hit Japan just over a week ago, we are confronted with horrific images of death and destruction, usually wrought only through intense warfare. This destruction occurred in a little over an hour’s time, was biblical in proportion, and affected tens of millions of unaware Japanese citizens. The scope of this disaster has been compounded by several orders of magnitude as a direct result of severe damage done to a number of active and inactive nuclear reactors.

Beyond the shores of Japan, we are now engaging in a third war in the Middle East/North Africa theatre. The purpose of this war is [ostensibly] to remove a harsh dictatorial regime with a democratic one. A noble gesture this, but severely destabilizing at such a time of increased unrest in the entire region. I wonder how long before some of these people we are “helping” turn the guns on us?

Moving west, there is word of another massive oil spill, some twenty or so miles from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Conveniently, there are far too many greater distractions, at the moment, for this little pearl of information to actually get any air time. Adding fuel to these emergencies, wars and disasters is the near total information blackout from Japan. While we were all entertained by the tears of contrition cried out by the Big Kahuna over at TEPCO, we are no longer amused at the incompetence of a government which willingly placed not one, but five, nuclear reactors on a known fault line and adjacent to the sea [without the protection of a flood wall no less]. Remember, the Japanese invented the word Tsunami, and know all too well what the potential for occurrence is.

Further aggravating the situation is the fact that emergency pumps and generators were installed at the lowest point within the facility: the basement. While these facts alone should award the designers of these abominations the Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award, the best is saved for last. These genius nuclear engineers decided that it would be prudent to place the spent fuel rods, some of them containing plutonium oxide, on top of the reactor itself. This means that if the reactor actually blows up, a-la Chernobyl, the spent fuel will be blasted in to tiny particles and ejected across the landscape, rendering everything it touches unusable pretty much forever. The comedy doesn’t end here however, there’s more!

Given the inept designs, poor planning for earthquakes and tsunamis, one would think there couldn’t possibly be anything else going on here. They would be wrong. As it turns out, nuclear reactors need a constant supply of clean water, actually, demineralized water works the best, to keep them cool and moderate the reaction in the chambers. One would think that in light of this bit of knowledge that provisions would have been made in advance, and that great tanks of water would be available, and they would be full of millions and millions of gallons of this critical element, in order to insure that the reactors could never run out. You would be wrong again.

As it turns out, there is actually no back up water on-site. NONE. As each of the details of this unprecedented disaster slowly leak out, I find myself completely dumbfounded. The incompetence is on a level that I never thought possible in an industry with more risks than any other industry in the history of mankind. This is a watershed moment, one in which we have to decide whether or not to sacrifice the planet for our own greed, or live much simpler lives, foregoing a bit of the luxury that a few more megawatts of power provide. I am beyond angry here: I am truly afraid for our lives and the future of the planet. It seems that we have not learned a single thing from Chernobyl, and the thousands of lives snuffed out by cancer and leukemia. It seems that money has indeed become more important than every thing else, humanity be damned.

As I watch the various newstainment outlets, trying to get a clearer picture of my future, I see the spin doctors winding up to promote this disaster as a one-off event, and insure us that nuclear power is the safest form of power on earth. They will point to coal mine disasters and thousands of dead miners in China as the metric for industrial safety. They are singing the praises of the industry even as our own creaking infrastructure falls apart around us.

Had we embarked on a different path forty years ago, and spent the hundreds of billions of dollars on an infrastructure of wind, hydro, geothermal and solar power, we would have still found ourselves looking at a massive disaster in Japan, but we would be responding to something that could actually be fixed. These reactors will never provide another watt of electricity, and over the next decade, during which they will have to be permanently entombed in concrete, it will actually cost Japan and indeed the world, many billions more.

The genie is out of the bottle in Fukushima Dai-Ichi, and will never be put back in. The knock on effects of this tragedy will be felt forever.

Our venerable POTUS has been noticeably absent from all of these tragedies. On Saturday last, less than 24 hours after the Japanese disaster, he was on the links, catching a quick 18 holes. While saying nearly nothing about the Libyan situation, he jetted off to Rio with the wife and kids for a much needed vacation. As of Sunday afternoon, around 1:00, he is still MIA in the media. I guess he has written off Libya for oil and needs to suck up to Brazil to insure our oil supplies. It seems that kissing ass for oil has become his newest forte. To top off our AWOL President, our congress still has not been able to agree on a budget. We are now six months in to the federal fiscal year, and have no budget.

Rome is truly burning, and Nero is fiddling. Our financial centers are being held together with rule changes that would get you or I jail time if we tried to invoke them ourselves, and tons of synthetic paper. This is certainly a recipe for complete disaster. When this house of cards falls, and it will, the entire system built upon it will come crashing down at the speed of light, and all of those pixels they call Dollars, Francs and Euros will vanish in to thin air, taking with them any hope of maintaining the illusion.

May God help us all.

2011-02-21T13:12:00.002-05:00

So here we are, in the middle of February, and our venerable Congress still has not approved a freaking budget. These incompetent jackasses have had plenty of time to perform this annual ablution and PLAN our expenditures for the next four quarters, yet they decided to politicize the task and squabble like children rather than man up and make the necessary cuts to our bloated budget. This places us in a class with countries like Argentina, Greece and Portugal. No one wants to accept the responsibility for having cut a program, or God forbid, rein in the military to more tenable levels. Our even more clueless POTUS sits idly by, making veiled threats about a veto of the bill once it has been through both houses, because certain of his pet provisions aren’t there and certain of his pet programs have been cut. What a complete load of bullshit. The rest of the world laughs, while watching us devolve in to a tyrannical third world banana republic, and they are laughing out loud. We are now enveloped in a debt death spiral from which there is no escape.

Meanwhile, the farcical regulators in charge of our banks and stock markets whistle past the graveyard of what used to be the most powerful, and richest financial system this world has ever seen. I hear a deafening silence about the financial crimes perpetrated on the People of the United States, and it is getting louder every day. Where are the prosecutions? The fact remains that if everyone who committed a financial crime during the real estate rodeo were prosecuted, it would take a thousand years to get them all through the courts. There are just too many to prosecute, so there will only be a few, high profile sacrificial lambs thrown to the wolves. Move along now comrade, nothing to see here.

The smoldering remnants of our currency are now being challenged by the likes of communist China and the Soviet Union. Nice! I watch in utter disbelief each day as the “magic hand” steps in to the market and dumps a pile of cash on ‘green’ to keep the stock market at or near 12K, in some vain hope that the mere appearance that things are back to normal will motivate those who got screwed in the banking/stock market conflagration to lose their fear, and return their cash to the casino for one more roll of the dice.
It seems that the only people in the world that are not aware the United States is bankrupt reside in Washington D.C.

The price of all food products is soaring. This is an indisputable fact, yet it is being ignored. Recent articles tell of a coming explosion in the price of fresh vegetables as a result of an unseasonable freeze in parts of south Texas and North Mexico that haven’t seen a February freeze in a hundred or more years. Are we hearing about this in the “mainstream media”? Of course not! We have heard however, that Justin Beiber is upset about our medical system in the U.S., and that Lindsey Lohan will be charged with theft after all. Whew! I was really worried about that!

Free Money

2011-01-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

I sit here on this fine Thursday afternoon, contemplating what will become of our country when the music stops, and foreign nations decide to cut off the United States. We are now engaged in a great war, one which involves no tanks, no bombs and no bullets. The soldiers in this war are employed by the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, four or five of the largest U.S. banks and a number of out-sized hedge funds. Their weapons are a printing press, dynamic discussions full of double-speak, innuendo, false promises and statistics. In addition to these weapons, they now have control over the price we pay for our food and who can grow it. In the end, the dumbed down population of docile sheep are convinced that the men in the expensive suits have their best interests at heart, and if it weren’t for them, we would all be in a soup line.
The truth of it is that we have started a two front war; one with our creditors and one with our Citizens. On the first front, we are using the Federal Reserve to flood the earth with so many dollars that our massive and unsustainable debts will never have to be paid in full, and will likely expire worthless. On the second front, they are slowly enslaving the Citizens with ridiculous laws and cumbersome requirements making movement within the country as difficult and uncomfortable as possible, going so far as to treat every single traveler like a felon during a police stop. At the same time, the financial elite have turned the agricultural commodities markets in to a part of their casino, and in doing so, they are literally starving people to death in the name of scratching another buck off of the top for themselves.
Now we are facing a world-wide increase in food prices that has begun to topple governments. Is this what we face in our futures? What does America look like with tens of millions of people unable to afford even the most basic of necessities? Is this when the FEMA camps are activated and those who are without get herded behind fences “for their own safety”?
I do not like the way things are looking, and I dislike the inaction of our congress and POTUS even more. I do not need more platitudes and cheerleading, I need to see fiscal responsibility and a congress that puts aside the petty bullshit and partisan bickering long enough to effect real change. I want to see the rules for purchasing food commodities revert to the rules we had in place before deregulation put them in to the casino and made them fair game for greedy elitists. I want to see real and meaningful change. The change we were promised in the presidential election has not materialized, and never will. The change I seek is fundamental in nature and can only be brought about by popular revolt.
I do not advocate for violent revolution, rather, I look for a movement within society to abandon the old paradigm and demand something better. If enough of us raise our voices and publish our objections to ‘business as usual’, our we will be heard. Until then, expect nothing more than the same old story; free money for the bankers and elites, and nothing for you and I except higher taxes to pay for it all.

2011-01-10T15:35:00.001-05:00

With the horrific events of the weekend slowly unfolding as each day passes, I see the typical reactionary congress debating the elimination of more of our rights, all in response to a tragedy perpetrated by a single disturbed individual. They are actually contemplating a law which would make it illegal to disagree with a congressman. The text of the article reads as follows [verbatim] “Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.) reportedly plans to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a federal official or member of Congress.”

“That could be perceived”?? What the hell does that mean? Who makes this determination, and how do you interpret a word or a symbol? Incite? I can incite my daughter with a chocolate bar for ‘crying out loud.

Next up on deck are all of the idiots who came flying out of the box, on national television no less, screaming about “He was a Tea Partier”, and I have yet to see a single retraction, even with the knowledge that he was on the hard left politically. It has been a long, long time since I have seen this many politicos on the idiot box inside of 24 hours, and they are doing nothing but skewering one another. Never mind the tragic deaths of those good people, never mind the sensibilities of their families, go for the throat.

When do we stop? When do we look at our nation as Americans instead of Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party or whatever? I am so sick and tired of this partisan bullshit I could scream. Instead of looking for solutions to the massive problems we face, we get hours and hours of meaningless rhetoric and obfuscation. We get partisan bickering over the minutest details of a bill, stalling it in endless committees and endless debate. It is way past time to put party affiliation aside and do what this country so desperately needs. It has become apparent to me that without quick action and a bi-partisan partnership, these congressmen and women will allow this once proud and great nation devolve in to a fascist corporatist police state. Welfare will become the norm, and millions will never know what it is like to have “enough” of everything. When the music stops, and it will, millions will be left without a chair.

The back and forth that we see over a congressperson getting shot, as terrible an event that it is, brings our primary problem in to sharp focus. Congress is afraid to act in any other than the interests of their campaign donors. God forbid we actually pass a bill on its merits alone. God forbid the congress act in the interests of the people who elected them. No, we can’t have that now, can we?

There are no easy solutions to our economic malaise, and no way out that does not include some pain, but there is a way out. It is up to the Citizens of the United States to stand up and let their congressperson know where they stand. It is up to the individual to actively poll your neighbors and friends; to educate them. So many people walk around in a TV and hopium induced daze that they have no solid idea what is really going on behind the curtain. When television shows about over privileged obnoxious cat fighting housewives overtakes the national discussion, we have a serious problem.

This can be our collective wake-up call. We can take this tragedy and try to turn it in to the discussion our congress is so terrified of having. We are sliding into the chasm and soon, the slide will be irrecoverable. Too big to fail, the endless printing of “money” and the absence of true leadership has to change in to something better. As a people, we can recover our republic by initiating conversation about our real problems, and refuse to continue the conversations that are created to distract us from the real threats. The next time someone tries to talk to you about a television program, turn it around, wake them up. Refuse to be involved in the circus and soon, those who surround you may just begin to wake up to reality.

Sorry about the rant.

We've Been Swindled, A Peripatetic post on inflation

2010-12-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

A Rambling Inflation Primer, From My Twisted Perspective

We talk about inflation as though we all know what it means. Some believe it is simply rising prices, and others believe it to be too many dollars chasing too few goods. There are still others that think inflation is a result of our currency being or growing stronger than the currency of our trade partners; neither of these are correct.
Once upon a time, back before the advent of the internet and before the existence of instantaneous communication, we used rare and precious metals for money. Because they were rare, durable and difficult to mine and process in to beautiful coins and jewelry, they were highly prized. In fact, they were so highly prized that they became a medium of exchange between folks wishing to acquire goods and services. They were so much easier to carry around than your excess chickens and goats that they became accepted as the universal standard of trade around the world, even taking on the characteristic of universal value. That is to say that an ounce of gold in the US would buy approximately the same quantity of goods at home as it would abroad. This system worked quite well for over three thousand years.
Enter the scumbag bankers. Back in the day, a bank was a staid and stoic institution that had the ability to store your excess gold, then loan it out to individuals for their individual business and personal needs. For this privilege, the banker would pay you some percentage of interest, typically somewhat lower than they charged the borrower, thereby making a small profit on the transaction. This system worked quite well for many, many years.
One day, a group of powerful bankers and corrupt politicians got together and decided that if a group of private bankers could operate as an intermediary between the U.S. Government and her People, they could shave a vig off the top of every transaction along the way and become fabulously wealthy. Simply put, this is what happened on Jekyll Island.
Flash forward.
In a nation that must have gold to pay for goods and services, she may only spend that money which is backed by gold; she may not print more. In the early part of the 1970’s America hit a crossroad. We were no longer able to sustain our war in Viet Nam, pay for Johnson’s Great Society and run our government on the money we had coming in from productive citizens paying taxes, meanwhile the rest of the world was demanding that we pay our bills from our ever diminishing gold stockpiles. This was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back. President Nixon pulled us off of the gold standard and declared the dollar to be a dollar by virtue of fiat, and no longer convertible to gold. Well that was that. We had a decade of blazing inflation, an escalation of the cold war and we managed to piss of the Arabs so much that they shut off the oil spigot.
Wait a minute……did I just say inflation?
When we decided that our money would no longer be backed by a hard asset, this meant that our trading partners had to have faith that we would still accept back at value those dollars we used to buy goods from them, and not print so many dollars that their value was diluted. The money supply in the U.S. grows constantly. We are forever printing new dollars to replace worn currency and to add dollars in to circulation. Ostensibly, the practice of adding additional dollars is meant to offset new consumers being born, coming of age and needing dollars for their purchases. What really happens is that our government finally figured out that they were only responsible for the expansion of the money supply for as long as they are in the Congress, and that while there, they could curry favor within their congressional districts by adding sweetheart projects and perks for their constituencies by adding amendments to bills that absolutely had to pass. When we spend what we do not have, then print more dollars to offset the additional spending, we have to make a promise to someone that if they give us those dollars today, we will pay them back in the future with interest. This is why bonds exist. They exist to pay for wars, social programs and general operating expenses that outstrip the money collected by regular taxation.
So now we have a monstrous federal debt, the interest on which now consumes a third of our tax receipts and is headed much, much higher. In order to pay this maturing debt, and to fund our run-away government, the treasury can simply print dollars if they choose to. This is what is happening now with quantitative easing. Our government is printing dollars to buy the bonds they have just printed. In other words, they are inflating the money supply, thereby making every dollar you hold in your pocket a little less valuable. At some point, we will have printed so much money that foreign nations will no longer accept them as a medium of exchange, and we will have successfully bankrupted our nation through inflation of our currency.
All in all, this is a very fucked up system. When we were on a gold standard, the value of gold never changed. Prices rose and fell purely as a result of supply and demand. To expand the money supply, we had no choice but to mine more gold, silver and copper. The accumulation of wealth was safe and simple. There was no way for the government to tax a man by stealth through the artificial inflation of the money supply. When we found out that empire can only get just so big when it has to be paid for up-front, we changed to a system of “faith”. The faith that this bit of paper in my pocket will still buy the same loaf of bread tomorrow.
We were swindled.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-03T15:12:00.000-05:00

It’s been a while since my last rant, so I’m chock full of outrage, built up over the last two or three month. Having been sidelined by work and end-of-year financial stuff, there just was not enough time to put pen to paper [so to speak]. Where to start……..

Watching the television, one would hardly realize that businesses are closing left and right as a result of the greed of a few, and more and more folks are at the end of their ropes as unemployment benefits and extensions run out……right in time for Christmas. I have personally had to lay off over a hundred employees, and will have to lay off the next batch of around 30 on December 21st. As the economy sputters, our venerable POTUS seems ever distant from the reality of the common man, offering nothing more than platitudes and promises, along with his assurances that things will soon get better. Our equally distant Congress is a dysfunctional as ever and will probably accomplish exactly nothing during the lame-duck session as the petty bickering and partisan bullshit continue as before. All of the promises made during the historic election sweep seem to have faded from the memories of our elected ones as the PAC money and lobbyist cash blind them once again.

America seems to be asleep at the wheel as the holidays approach, more worried about being first in line at Target than they are about their government and her irresponsible fiscal policies, which threaten our nations very existence. We are being made the financial slaves of those we used to refer to as third wo4rld nations, as we borrow ever more money from them. That money which cannot be borrowed is simply created out of thin air, making our existing dollars worth that much less. Unfortunately, the MSM casually ignores this little inconvenient fact, believing that our hegemony will never be challenged. It is clear to me however, that at some point these debts will be called in, and when they are they cannot be paid.

I watched in abject amazement as the TSA began their unconstitutional full body “enhanced pat downs” of screaming four year old little girls and old women in wheelchairs at our nations airports recently. It seems that we are all now to be considered criminal terrorists until proven innocent with a virtual strip search, pseudo sexual fully clothed genital rubbing [or both] before getting on our regional carrier for a trip to Disney World. Naturally, the five hundred and thirty five criminals in our Congressional houses will not be subjected to these indignities because as we all know, they are quite above the experience and can be trusted. After all, we trust them with our government…..don’t we? When confronted with the question of constitutionality, Janet Napolitano is quoted as saying “This isn’t about the constitution, it’s about traveler safety”. What? Who the hell is this broad? When did we give up our constitutional right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure? Was she given a blanket search warrant by her good buddy Eric Holder? This fucking madness has to stop. Now we’re subjecting menstruating women to a full genital grope because the TSA cannot see the naked outlines of her genitals. As a nation, I believe we have finally surrendered to Islam.

On to the European Union. It seems that the idea of a monetary union between multiple states with differing ideas about social services, entitlements, labor ethic etc. was a bad idea after all. It is beginning to look like Germany and her citizens will get to foot the lions share of the bill for bailing out Ireland, who didn’t have the balls to tell the private bankers and their cabal of cronies to go pound salt. Rather than permit a set of private enterprises to go belly up and let the buyers of their bonds take the losses they deserve on their investments, it seems the Irish PM has decided to heap even more misery on his citizenry and make them foot the bill for rescuing them. What the fuck? When is someone going to stand up and demand to know who took the risks that put these banks in over their heads in the first place? Why is it that the debts incurred by private enterprise are being foisted upon those who can least afford to pay for the destruction caused by excessive risk taking, outright fraud and public deception? When did the people of the world [including the USA] vote on this? As I recall, 70 percent of Americans were against the bailouts. Did they listen? No. The Fed simply did what they wanted and the taxpayer be damned. As we all suspected, the big four were at the top of the bailout list, right along with half the banks in Europe. I guess while I was sleeping, they added a codicil to the Code of Federal Regulations that permits our central bank to give taxpayer dollars to foreign entities. We are so completely and irretrievably screwed.

As I ponder the coming year, and the possibilities unfolding around the world, I cannot help but think we may actually see a total monetary collapse, as nation after nation is revealed to be bankrupt as a result of bailing out the top one percent of the top one percent. When preserving the wealth of the ultra wealthy takes precedent over preserving our nation, all is lost.

Which one do you want to be?

2010-09-24T17:46:00.001-04:00

During a recent trip to Wally World, AKA Walters Mercantile, I was forced again to witness disturbing trends, continuing to evolve in this once proud nation. I needed to purchase some Ball® jars for a soil sampling series I had to perform, and Walters Mercantile was the closest place to acquire them, so it was ordained that I drive over to what has lately become the epicenter of consumption for much of the lower middle class, and struggling poor in our district. The parking lagoon was about two thirds full, which is unusual for the time of day, and time of month, given that food stamps and WIC is distributed at the very end of the month and we are still a week away. Nevertheless I strode in to the store, hoping to get in and out without any hassles, and quickly enough to make it to the Cape on time.

Wally World is one of those places where they constantly change the location of goods. This is done purposefully, to keep you barraged with images of shiny plastic shit you likely do not need, but many will purchase anyway while on their quest to buy what they came in for. When I got to the aisle where I found the jars last, it was apparent that Uncle Wally had moved them yet again. As I wandered through the store, asking one zombied out “associate” after another where I could find them, I came across a raggedy looking creature of about sixty years, with a long, tobacco stained beard who was eating a frozen [I shit you not] burrito while pushing his cart full of crap down the aisle. When I looked a second time, I realized he was the man who used to repair broken lawn mowers at a shop on the island, and wondered what the hell happened to him. Now curious, I said hi, and asked how the lawn mower business was going.

Looking up from his frozen burrito, he gave me a kind of weird look and said, “The shop closed down man, where have you been living?” I replied that I was sorry, then made the mistake of asking him how he was doing. “How am I doing? I’ll tell you how I’m doing, I’m out of work, out of money and as of six months ago, out of my house. The fucking bastards at the bank threw me out and boarded up my house, so now I live in my broken down car at the back of this parking lot, that’s how I’m fucking doing.” I repeated that I was sorry and tried to make a break for it when he turned and said, “It’s mother fuckers like you who did this to me, you and your throw away, hundred dollar Wal-Mart piece of shit, China made lawnmowers. Happy now?” “I have to come in here, pretend to shop and steal my food, by loading some groceries in the wagon and pushing it around while I unwrap stuff and eat it. When they catch me and throw me in jail, I’ll finally get a shower and a good nights sleep.” With that I rolled down the aisle and disappeared up the row of kitchen stuff that I hoped to find my jars in.

I grabbed a package of 12 Ball jars and headed over to the cash corrals at the front of the store. Naturally, there were only four out of about twenty five registers open, so I stood in line behind about ten people with carts full of mostly useless crap and waited my turn. As is customary, there were several kids ranging in age from 2 years to 10 years, and all of them were in some state of whiny despair over not being allowed to have the candy so cleverly placed all along each side of the corral, at exactly the eye level of young children. After enduring fifteen minutes of the whining and howling of children without any discipline whatsoever, I finally made my purchase and went for the door.

Just outside the door were three women, each with a kid in tow. Nearly simultaneously, they each asked if I could “help them out with a few dollars”. Familiar with this racket, I declined and headed for my truck. Looking at the demographics, the people were fairly neatly divided by race and age. What struck me most was the looks on their faces. I did not see one joyful expression the whole time in the store. Even the cash register lady was down in the jowls. In the Parking lagoon, many of the cars were in various states of decrepitude, but were nice brands and expensive names. That is to say, there were [among others] Escalades, Hummers [1,2,3] Toyotas etc., yet all of them were at least six or seven years old, and had been clearly run hard and put away wet.

I thought about this on my way to the Cape, wondering how many of these people used to be one of the bread-winners in their household and how many of them were on unemployment insurance or food stamps. Once at the project site, talk was equally gloomy, centering on the massive lay-offs coming at the Space Center and what a travesty it would be to lose all of those jobs and how many support personnel [like myself] would suffer as a result.

Back at the office, I couldn’t concentrate on my work, so I made an excuse and left about an hour early to go home and try to get my mind on something positive. I picked up my daughter from her friends house and began to turn on to the secondary road towards our house when my daughter says, “Hey Dad, did you know Shannon’s dad just got fired or something?” I asked her to repeat what she said and give me more details. My daughter proceeded to tell me that her friends father, who is a computer logistician [whatever the hell that is] was working for a prominent consulting firm down in Melbourne [Florida] and just got replaced with the intern he had been training for 18 months. Just like that, a man with 16+ years as a loyal, honest and hard working employee gets the sack so the company can save 15K a year by letting some young buck have his job.

Folks, that’s how quick it can happen. Luckily, I am the Vice President of our firm, and am not facing any imminent joblessness that I can discern, but for many of my long time friends and acquaintances, it is becoming the norm, rather than the exception. I am not talking about a bunch of twenty something’s losing their jobs, at 47 years old, most of my friends and acquaintances are between 35 and 60, so we’re talking some major talent. They are simply being put out to pasture and it’s occurring with greater frequency, sometimes with zero notice and zero severance.

Look at your blessings, store some food, silver, ammo and high speed lead delivery devices my friends, because what I have seen and continue to witness, portends something bad. We are facing a deeper and more protracted period of contraction than we are being told. The markets are being inflated with free money and the will of the government. Nothing more, nothing less. When it blows, the collateral damage will be extreme and far reaching. Anyone who thinks the rest of the world is not intertied with the U.S.A. is delusional at best. If our currency flounders, and treasury sales halt, the entire worlkd will feel the wrath.

When [or possibly if] silver drops again, be prepared to load up. There are going to be lots of casualties in this fray, and many of our relatives will be affected. Those of us who have been prudent and prepared wil weather the coming storm from the comfort of their bunkers, eating the fruits of their labors in the form of stored food, protected with the weapons and ammo stored during better times. Thos who are counting on the government will be in the streets protesting and rioting.

Which do you want to be?

Monday Sucks

2010-09-13T17:14:00.000-04:00

Despite being Monday, everything was going pretty smoothly until we started driving back to the office after a nice lunch in the village. We got in the truck and pulled out into traffic, going about a block and a half to the first light, which happens to be the last light before the causeway over to the island. As luck would have it, someone crashed in to the concrete railing system on Sunday, and the police had traffic bottled down to one lane, forcing three lanes of lunch-time traffic to merge in to one, two hundred feet ahead of our position. Naturally, there was a car broken down in the only flow lane, and motorists had taken it upon themselves to push the guy off to the left [next to the gaping hole fifty feet above the bay] and create a narrow passage. This process left thousands of angry motorists fuming and beeping their horns in abject frustration in the 92 degree heat. Unfortunately for us, we were at the mercy of five consecutive light changes, where east bound drivers simply ignored the “keep the fuck out of the intersection” rule and sat right through light changes.

We decided to go kamikaze and pull out in front of moving traffic, essentially blocking our way across. I shit you not, it took two light sequences to force our way across, and four or five extremely irate drivers, who were incensed that we had the temerity to assert our right to cross the fucking intersection.

When we finally made it back to the office, I had a nasty-gram in my in box, sent to me from a contractor who has been sucking the life out of me, my superintendent and my crew, on a shitty little job that we were very thin on to begin with. This prick is now demanding that we perform two hours of overtime each weekday and eight hours overtime on Saturday, to make up for their fucked up schedule and their failure to kick off the project on-time. Mind you, this project is at the Space Center and my lowest paid lackey gets $22.97 an hour, whether he is worth it or not, and I can assure you that none of them are worth it.

I shot an e-mail back to him, essentially telling him to go pound salt, which only started the old back and forth, you know, fuck you, no fuck YOU. After about an hour of this, I called the guy up and asked him to roll by my office so we could resolve this and get on with our afternoon. Naturally, he said no, and by the way, I’ll be talking to my lawyers about this and I’m sending your firm a notice to cure. For those of you not familiar with a notice to cure, it is the last resort in contracting when a sub-contractor is “not performing”. Upon calling MY lawyer, and sending him the contract documents, I was assured [for a $250 “consulting fee”] that we were in the right and this guy could indeed go pound salt.

Feeling rather annoyed and quite irritated at the whole thing, I returned to my computer to try and salvage my afternoon.

At around 4:00 this afternoon, I was faxed a bid tabulation sheet from a job that we really needed to win, and was astounded to see that yet again, we were to be the bridesmaid. Not only did we come in second, the winner had left 31% on the table. Our number was $787,000, and this jiblonie was at$ 542,000. The third and fourth place bidders were at 794,500 and 802,770 respectively, with four and five somewhere in outer space. Really? 31%? What the fuck? There is no way to compete with desperation, none. In this environment, the only way for us to compete is to cheat. With the unwieldy regulatory apparatus wrapped around our industry like a python around our necks, the only way to defeat these guys with their whore prices is to do the same thing they do. Unfortunately, that would mean paying guys under-the-table, paying them official federal wage rates, then requiring them to “cash their checks through us” and peeling back half of it. This actually goes on down here, and is becoming the norm at some locations. The Government seems to be looking the other way, because their budgets are going about 60% farther now than they were in 2005, leaving us in a moral and ethical vacuum, which we do not want to enter.

No matter what we do, we are fucked. We either compromise our long standing code of ethics, and walk away from our morals and values, or we shrink down to a size that will only accommodate about four of us in the office, necessitating a drastic round of devastating layoffs. Neither one of these is a realistic solution, leaving us in a very bad position. We can try to get enough information to rat these guys out, potentially risking a war with them, or we could sit back and hope the “regulators” catch them in the act, either way it isn’t going to be a fun fall season.

Mondays suck.

The Day After Yesterday Rant

2010-09-07T19:23:00.000-04:00

Well, I survived the holiday weekend, albeit a rainy and dismal one, none the worse for the wear. All of the locals who made their Labor Day pilgrimage to the beach got washed out by massive gully washers in the late morning, and could be heard grouching and bitching at our local watering hole. My family spent the weekend quietly, sort of ruminating on what lies ahead, and what to do about it.

My wife has accepted that Obama cannot enforce prosperity through presidential decree, and that things are not nearly as rosy as the MSM paints each night on the newstainment hour, but is still resisting the idea that we must follow the Mormon philosophy of maintaining a large supply of necessities for the hard times to come. She just cannot be made to understand what is coming, and refuses to believe that our way of life is not some inalienable right, granted to us by virtue of our diminishing hegemony as a world superpower. That said, she reminded me that it is my job to worry about how to bring home the bacon, and that she had enough to worry about without thinking about the economy, so that task is now officially mine.

As I read the information proffered on my favorite websites, and filter out the noise, I can only come to one conclusion; we’re fucked. That’s the most honest assessment I can make, given the information used for my analysis. I pay particular attention to a few of the older folks who post on GSC, zero Hedge and other sites because they tend to be the most prescient and have experience beyond my 47 years, giving them the advantage of having experienced a level of economic equality and prosperity [in relative terms] than I have. Those who lived in the fifties and sixties were able to purchase items with silver coin, and do so at prices which would not buy even a fragment of the same item today for the same “dime”.

Looking beyond today and past the November congressional rodeo, I see a lot of pain. Our government has decided to foist yet another stimulus on the backs of the taxpayers, in an effort to keep the economy moving. Looking back at the trillions spent in the last two years, I can only see this failing. Rather than cut out the cancer, they will continue to spend sums of money so large, they can be measured in terms of how many times you can circle the earth with hundred dollar bills. This of course, is to be placed directly on the backs of the folks least able to afford the debt; what remains of the middle class, our children and our grandchildren.

The tragedy of these continuing failures by our administration is that they cannot be undone. That is to say that the money cannot be un-spent, and the Chinese will eventually demand repayment of the money they so generously lent us to buy their crappy, shoddily constructed plastic shit. What to do?

The solution is simple. Austerity, then some more austerity. The answer has been there the whole time, and is still there today. Contracts will have to be abrogated, and folks will have to suffer. That is the truth of it. I see it in my own community and understand what it means for us, but it must come and come soon. Without fixing the core problem, we will end up a fractured nation, mired in long term depression as a result of federal fiddling and inaction.

The next administration needs very desperately to do a short list of things to get us back on the path.

1. Break up the TBTF banks in to hundreds of local banks, then write legislation forbidding any one bank to amass more than one half of one percent of total deposits in the U.S.

2. Use the Sherman Act to break up Wal-Mart, the worst scourge to afflict our country since polio. Then, they must enact legislation to prohibit any one retailer from controlling any more than one quarter of a percent of any one market, be it food, clothing etc. etc.

3. Cut back on entitlement programs.

4. Eliminate all foreign “donations”, Israel included, because we’re borrowing money just to give it away. If we don’t have it to spend, we shouldn’t spend it.

5. Shut down every military base in every foreign country today. Use the troops to defend our own border. We can no longer afford to be the police force for the rest of the world. Let them defend themselves for a while as we rebuild the tattered remnants of our own economy.

6. Bring our manufacturing back home. We need to worry about ourselves first. Place tariffs on every single import equal to the delta in price for a domestic item of similar type and quality. Fuck China.

7. Eliminate high speed trading immediately. All trades must be made by a human being, and will be subject to a thirty second hold.

8. Eliminate all speculation in strategic commodities. This would include nearly every commodity. If you buy a future contract for anything, it must be a legitimate hedge, and you must take delivery of the commodity when the future matures. For instance, in order to buy wheat futures, you must be a wheat farmer or wheat broker. Period.

9. Remove the corporations right to “free speech”. Corporations have no business involving their opinions in political campaigns. That is a right for the citizens.

10. Eliminate birthright citizenship.

11. Break apart the agribusiness operations immediately. An enormous percentage of our food production is controlled by just three corporations. This is beyond dangerous. No one company may be permitted to control more than one percent of total food production in any one area, i.e. wheat, corn, beef etc. etc.

12. Sovereign oil reserves do not belong to foreign corporations, they belong to American Citizens. Enough said.

13. Eliminate paid lobbying. Period.

14. Eliminate lifetime politicians.

15. No member of Congress should be given anything that is not available to the average American. Period.

16. Cut federal government pay down to no more than an equivalent private sector position.

These are a few items that could be easily addressed, but probably will not. As a result, I am preparing for what I see coming, and it is not pretty. I believe a fairly dark and dystopian future is in store for America, and that will not go over well with the entitled class out there. I foresee a very ugly future if nothing is done to change the status quo. Many around me do not agree with me, and still have faith that our government has a handle on things, but that is just not my vision. I hope I am wrong, I sincerely do, but do not believe I am.

We have a chance in November to change the face of our congress, vote out all incumbents and give some new blood a chance. Do the right thing folks.

Sorry about the rant.

It’s broken and the bastards in charge won’t fix it!

2010-08-19T16:49:00.000-04:00

Hat tip to Silver Bear Cafe, Where
I stole the graphic Fair and square.
Thanks Johnny Silver Bear!

When I watch the idiot box each evening, trying to glean what little bit of truth is disseminated on the government sanctioned newstainment outlets, I feel sad for what our nation has been transformed in to. We have gone from being a nation of Americans, to little groups of special interests and hyphenated racial groups, each vying for their “fair share” of my paycheck. Open and honest conversation has been re-branded as hate speech to quell any dissent.

Let’s start with Muslims, shall we? We have a group of imams in New York who are fighting furiously to build a mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Aside from being the single most callous move these men could make, they are using the “peaceful religion” card and the race card to beat down any opposition. It doesn’t seem to matter to the president that 70 percent of Americans do NOT want this abomination to be built in the shadow of the buildings brought down by Muslims practicing their peaceful religion, in fact he has taken the side of Islam over the U.S.A. Is anyone else besides me more than a little bit pissed off about this? How about that jackass Bloomberg who bought the mayors office in New York City? Who the hell is he trying to impress, Osama Bin Laden? Are these people on the same planet as me? Why in God’s name would anyone openly state that this mosque at ground zero is a good idea?

Where is the outrage? Where is the media coverage? When Lindsay Lohan got locked up in L.A. for ignoring some court order, they were on the case 24/7, but there is no substantive conversation that I can see about this spit-in-the face by a radical imam who refuses to declare his funding sources for a one hundred million dollar building that will be used to train good little Muslims in the ways of Allah, sharia law and most likely jihad. This imam, by the way, is on record as saying that America not only deserved 9/11 but we brought it on ourselves. I am sick and tired of our government and their lack of balls to do or say anything that might “offend” these militant assholes. Rather than stand up for America, our Usurper in Chief does the exact opposite and stands beside these terrorists. What a piece of crap this guy is!

Let’s move on to everyone’s favorite subject, the economy. Everything’s rosy, right? That’s what the Idiots on the bubble box want us to believe, with daily proclamations about growth in this and growth in that. The Dow is up right? Sure, it seems to be holding it’s ground for now, but anyone with a brain and the skill to read, knows that without high frequency “traders” [read: robots or computers] floating tens of thousand of bids a minute, not only would there be zero volume, but the bottom would fall directly out of the entire market. Fannie and Freddie are back in business propping up the housing market, and handing out mortgage money to folks having less than 4% down payment and less than stellar credit. Housing crash 2.0 anyone? How about the TBTF banks? Congress just passed legislation to take care of that right? Didn’t it include language that would bring the 1 quadrillion dollar derivatives market out in the open so the American Taxpayer doesn’t have to take it up the ass again if they flounder......right? Not a fucking chance Charlie, not a fucking chance!

The financial reform agenda was not about doing the right thing, like breaking the super giant banks in to five hundred smaller local banks, nor did it address derivatives with any meaningful provisions. This idiotic bill was shot full of loopholes by the bank lobby and their millions of dollars, packed in plain white envelopes, that were likely shoved into the thousands of greedy hands in Washington. No folks, GovCo is still hard at work, stealing the last vestiges of our paychecks and eviscerating the remnants of our middle class. The latest and greatest is one that will raise our SSI contributions by 50% to cover the “shortfall” in the SSI “lockbox”. What this means is, we will have to replace all of the money previous and present administrations have pilfered out to pay for their unlawful wars and idiotic entitlement programs. Nice huh?

When I listen to the bubbleheads on the nightly “news”, I am bombarded with idiotic sound bites that have little or no real news value, and the pontifications of various and sundry pundits declaring to be bearers of the absolute truth on any number of given subjects. These pundits by the way, are usually given the only and final word on many subjects that we as a nation should be talking about in a national discussion, yet the networks permit these self proclaimed experts to declare that they alone are right and insulting anyone who dares to challenge their position. Many times I have watched as a guest commentator cuts any opposition off at the knees by bullying and belittling any oppositional viewpoints.

On to the border. Our President does not think we should be arresting and deporting illegal aliens, and has nearly said so out loud. In California, one government official now refers to wetbacks as “displaced travelers”. I swear to God! We have sanctuary cities, where the mere discussion of arresting illegals will get you censured or fired. What the fuck is going on here? Did I wake up in bizarre backward world this week? What the hell is so difficult about controlling our border? Every other country in the world has some sort of check point and entry requirement except us. Here in the good old U.S.A., we simply make it illegal for U.S. citizens to access the routes used by Mexicans when crossing the border and maintain water barrels for the m to get water on the long walk to Phoenix. When they do get in, we load them up with subsidized housing, food stamps, WIC benefits, Medicaid and world class schooling in their native language. Again, what the fuck?

So, now that we have established that our president does not care about the sensibilities of Americans, and our congress is deep in to the pockets of lobbyists, who also do not have our interests at heart and the compliant media is outright lying to the public either by omission or straight up deception, what do we do about it?

Revolution would be nice, but the President would just call up the Army and have us rounded up and interred in a “FEMA Camp”. Ok, no revolution, how about a military coup, backed by senior Generals and Admirals? Nope, that won’t work either because those guys are just as compliant as the rest of the sheep on the hill. So what does that leave us with?

How about the ballot box? What do you say about voting every single incumbent out of office and directly on their collective[ist] asses? How about voting in people who have sound ideas like securing the border, rescinding automatic citizenship for anchor babies born to illegals and making it 10 years retroactive, outlawing paid lobbying, repealing the law making corporations people, breaking up the TBTF banks, invoking the Sherman Antitrust Act on Wal-Mart, Withdrawing our troops from around the world and tasking them to rounding up illegal aliens for transport back home, and last but not least returning the U.S.A. back in to the republic we were designed to be.

Sometimes....the sun shines a little bit brighter than usual...

2010-06-28T17:25:00.003-04:00

Well.....its Monday again and the weather on the east coast of Florida is not being cooperative today. Watching the radar, I can see nothing but blue sky in Central Florida.....all except for the coast, where I am trying to finish up some jobs. C’est la vie. I thought I would share something interesting that happened this weekend.

While over at a friends house Saturday night, for an evening of comparing guns and drinking up some beers, I had occasion to eavesdrop on a valuable lesson imparted by my friend to his relatively spoiled 15 year old son.

It started with the boy stating that he was “bored” and could he have five bucks to go and play with his buddies at the video arcade. Mike [not his real name] thought about it for two seconds and said no. He turned back to the boys and reached for his beer, and the son spoke out and said [in a bit of a whine] but why?? His pop looked each of us in the eye and said, hold on fellas’, this won’t take a minute.

Mike turned to the boy and said “What”? The boy repeated his whined question. Mike would ordinarily say, “Because I said so damn it, that’s why!!” Instead, he told the boy to come around to the other side of the table and sit down. The kid rolls his eyes and complies. Walking around the table mumbling, he sat down with a slump and slouched in the chair. “Look at me when I talk to you boy, and listen to what I have to say, ‘cause I‘m only going to do this once!” The boy looks up and sort of cocks his head, then looks from side to side to see who is watching the goings on.

Mike started off by asking the boy, “How much money have you earned this summer”? “None” was the answer. How many times have you been offered some work and said no”? “I dunno”. Well I’ll tell you.....Every single day of the week, I ask you if you want to go to work with me and learn how to finish concrete, and I offer you minimum wage for the pleasure....that’s how many times!!”

What came next was better than all the lectures my old man ever gave me rolled in to one fine tapestry of Dad-Knowledge. “Son, do you see these men sitting here?”. “Yes”. “Well, every one of them works more than 55 or 60 hours a week, do you know why”? “Because they have to”? “Correct, they have to”. They have to work, or their families starve to death in a homeless camp.” “Do you know where your clothes come from”? “I dunno.....the store”. “No smart ass, they come as a result of my getting up at 5am every single morning, rain or shine, 6 days a week and going to work so I can bring home a paycheck and take care of my family”. “In addition, the food you eat, the toothpaste in the bathroom and the ass paper on that roll all come from the same place.” “Not a minute goes by that I do not worry about whether or not we will have enough money for food, clothes, electricity, and all the other things around here that you so conveniently forget exist solely as a result of my efforts.” “What does that have to do with five lousy dollars”? Mike paused a second, looked down at the table and said, “Son, you know what, I’m going to give you the five bucks.....here”. At that, Mike reached in to his pocket, pulled a fin out and handed it over....to my complete astonishment I might add.

The boy smiled, grabbed the fiver and got up. Before he could make his escape, Mike slid his chair in the aisle and blocked his exit. He said, “Boy, it’s my fault that you don’t appreciate what that five dollars represents, and it’s my fault that you are turning in to a needy, whiney little brat, and I take full responsibility for my actions, so I’m going to make it right”. The boy just looked at him with a blank sort of glazed over stare, completely unaware of what was to come.

“Son, from now on, I will be in charge of teaching you a few things that your school, our preacher, your mother and myself have been too busy to even think about. Starting tomorrow, you will learn the true value of that five dollars, because it is an advance on your pay”. “You’re going to pay me”? The kid stood there kind of amazed, and a little bit confused staring at the five dollar bill in his hands.

Mike stood up, put his hand on the kids shoulder and said, “You’re hired”.

I could see the boy had no idea what this meant, because he stuffed the five in his pocket and started for the kitchen door when Mike called out and said “Wait a minute, you don’t have time for video games tonight.” “Why not” says the kid, even more confused than ever. “Because you will be getting up with me every morning for the rest of the summer and going to work”. “We will work from 6 in the morning until four thirty in the afternoon......six days a week. This way, I will be able to support my family and teach you the lessons about the value of money, the value of hard work, how to manage the money you do earn and what it feels like to go to bed because you are bone tired....not because you’re bored”.

The kid was shell-shocked. He stood there for a minute, his eyes watering up a little bit as if he was about to cry and said....”What if I give back the five dollars?. The old man just smiled and shook his head and said, ”Son, tomorrow you find out what the future holds. It’s going to wake you up out of that video game induced haze you’ve been walking around in. You will finally learn where that shirt you’re wearing comes from. Now, I think it’s time for you to go to sleep, because tomorrow is going to be a very big day”!

When the boy had left the room, and we heard the door to his bedroom slam shut, we broke out into spontaneous applause. After that, there was no discussion and we went right back to our evening of guns and beer.

The following morning, I woke up to the sound of Mike loading up some form boards on the ladder rack and firing up the old Dodge. True to his word, Mike was taking the boy to school.

Is there any hope??

2010-06-28T15:51:00.001-04:00

Well I am revved up again. This time however, I am more than just a little pissed…..I am absolutely and irretrievably pixilated. With each passing day, the last vestiges of my sanity crumble away just a little bit more, as I watch the insanity occurring around me become the “new normal”, and read or hear about one more idiotic thing our government has done/is doing to make us all a bit poorer and a bit less free.

Over two months in to the Gulf of Mexico tragedy, and there are still no guarantees. As all life in the GOM gradually succumbs to either the oil itself or to the anaerobic conditions created by trillions of microbes eating the methane and petroleum, all our PPOTUS can seem to do is create Czars and pontificate about the need for more regulations. Meanwhile, BP is doing everything in its power to skirt liability for their own actions, and lie about what is really happening a mile under the sea. As we watch dead and dying sea creatures wash up on our shores, BP is now reportedly burning animals alive in their “fire rings”, created when two skimming vessels drag a burn boom into a circle and light the oil. The tragedy just keeps on growing, right along with reports of oil-laced rain and dying crops all the way up to the Tennessee valley. Instead of getting better, this thing is turning in to a nine monkey football fuck with no end in sight.

Our government has not said one official word about the private security thugs hired by BP to terrorize reporters who are trying to document the damage done to our shorelines, and prevent wildlife conservationists from conducting surveys in the marshes and on the beaches to determine the extent of kill-off done by the spill. Did someone cede our sovereignty to a foreign company while I was asleep?? Unless I woke up in Nazi Germany this morning, any law abiding citizen could walk down nearly any shoreline in the nation. What are they trying to hide? If they spent as much money on stopping the oil from shooting out of the ground as they have on their private army of armed mercenaries and advertising campaigns, they might be closer to the finish line than they currently are. The magnitude of this thing cannot be covered up any longer, and it is time for the Neo-Marxists currently occupying our nations capitol to come clean.

At what point does the government call in the experts from around the world and seek their advice? When do we lift the restrictions of the Jones Act and permit the foreign flagged skimmers and boom vessels [that have been offered for free] access to our waters to help?? Why did we appoint a commission of far left environmental zealots to try and solve this puzzle instead of the world’s most preeminent geologists and oil experts?? Why have we not mobilized every single environmental contractor currently available to work in the country to stay on top of this? Speaking for my own firm, we are willing and ready to drop out of the sky on this with as many workers as are required to begin remediation of oils from any coastal area of their choosing.

While our President is on the links this weekend, enjoying 18 holes with his good Chicago buddies, I hope to God he comes up with some better ideas because if we do not change the path we’re on we may just be completely fucking doomed.

On top of the oilcano, we have the tottering giants Fannie and Freddie. Recently delisted from the NYSE, they are trading for mere pennies; just a dirty shadow of their former selves. Some very well respected economists have openly stated that not only will these behemoths not be saved, but they must be subjected to an “orderly dissolution”. What the fuck?? Are these the very same institutions who Bawney Fwank said were the “cornerstone of our housing industry” and “solid as a rock” just 18 months ago?? Word on the Street is that it will take in excess of half a trillion dollars and as much as one trillion two hundred billion to resolve them both. Nice!! I sure am glad we’re paying the CEO’s of these shit boxes in excess of a million a year. Nice job boys! I wonder how much of their craptastic stock is wadded up in pension funds around the globe?

Let’s see……..is there any more shit we can pile on to the plate? Oh yeah...Word is being leaked that Obama may sign a presidential decree that would legalize the 20,000,000 illegal aliens already in the country, opening the door for ten million more to storm the frontier to get in on some of that Obamacare and some regular welfare checks for their eleven kids. This is little more than a stiff-wrist bitch slap on the face of every single hard working, tax paying legal citizen. The chaos that will reign when these millions and millions of criminals come out of the shadows to get their freshly printed green cards will be absolutely epic. Suddenly, twenty million people who used to actually have to work for a living and feed their own kids will be eligible for a plethora of free handouts, courtesy of the Marxist-in-Chief. Most of the illegals here in-country are not only illiterate in their own language, but cannot speak a single word of English. On top of this, they are bringing diseases back into the U.S. that were long ago eradicated here, such as cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, polio and whooping cough.

To top off this dark and dystopian nightmare, the economic situation in the rest of the world has nearly reached the point of collapse. Rather than accept the reality of a little austerity to cure the economic ills of their respective countries, the people are rebelling. Workers go on strike, further crippling their already fragile economic situations, and demand that their “benefits” be restored to fantasy levels, threatening to “shut the country down” [Greece] if their benefits are reduced. Eastern European bond auctions are failing with regularity now, virtually insuring their eventual collapse, yet the Keynesians continue to insist that we must spend our way out of trouble, rather than take our well deserved medicine.

I am not a fortune teller, soothsayer, or magician, nor am I omniscient, but I can see with great clarity the events unfolding before me each day and can say with a high degree of confidence that we are in very deep trouble, and all of the happy talk in the world will not get us out of it. As a resident of Florida [for now anyway], the pictures of devastation being wrought upon our state nearly bring me to tears, yet there is painfully little I can do about it. Our government is crippled by partisan bickering and in-fighting and has become very nearly neutered through their own actions and specific inactions. I expect nothing meaningful to come out of the White House to affect the enormous ills afflicting our once great nation, rather, I see quite a lot of the same petty arguing and throwing one another under the bus at every opportunity.

There is little to be happy about these days, as each morning brings something else along to suck out any joy I may have in my life. I pray to my God each night to let some of the answers be discovered and to keep my family and friends safe.

Here We Go Again

2010-05-28T15:06:00.003-04:00

I see the bots are hard at work today, crunching algorithms to steal pennies out of widows and orphans pockets. The Dow is up 220 pts right now as I sit at my desk cleverly simulating work, while watching the “top-kill” video stream. The MSM is reporting that everything is just hunky dory because China will continue to hold her Euro denominated bonds…..or some other fantasy horse-shit, and the BP mud injections seem to be working. The trouble with this is that it’s all just wild conjecture made by the mentally paralyzed idiots in their various editing shops, working for the government lick-spittle press outlets. These people no more have a handle on the economy than my 14 year old daughter does. Regarding the oil gusher in the Gulf, from where I sit, it appears that the mud has replaced the oil once gushing out of the well, but for how long? I would think that under enough pressure the well would just continue pushing the mud right back out of the well. I’ll wait and see a few days from now on that one. Once again, the bubble-heads on the MSM have all miraculously become geologists and hydraulic engineers over the last few days and are declaring an early victory.

While the rest of us prepare to honor our fallen veterans of war on Monday, our POTUS will be pressing flesh and pounding Heineken's in Chi-town, probably throwing in a five thousand dollar a plate dinner for some big shot candidate or another for good measure. This will be the first president to miss the ceremony for the fallen in D.C. since the inception of the holiday. What a piece of crap this guy is.

With the greatest environmental disaster that most of the living can remember still unfolding in the richest waters this side of the date line, and the up-coming day of remembrance for our fallen soldiers, the Manchurian Candidate chooses instead to party with the home-boys. Nice! Anyone besides me think that is just a little bit fucked up?

I Want the Truth!

2010-05-25T19:03:00.001-04:00

Jesus Herman Christ on a bicycle man!!

Every time I turn on the idiot box, some douche-bag sits there with a bright smile and perfect Rembrandt® veneers feeding me a line of bullshit so completely transparent as to boggle the mind of anyone with an IQ higher than 26. These lying bastards have absolutely zero clue about what is happening in real-time on this planet, and they could care less about the veracity of what they are spewing to the public. The only thing that seems to matter to these “newstainment” outlets is their ratings and advertising revenue. Just about everything I saw on the “news” this morning was so completely distorted from the truth that I could clearly see they [the editors perhaps?] had done only the absolute minimum of fact checking to verify their “facts”. I’m beginning to believe I have a repressed desire to push myself in to a massive coronary by watching these morons [but that is an altogether separate issue].

I am so hungry for the truth I can taste it on the tip of my tongue.

With each passing day, I see with great clarity what is occurring around me in my own microcosm of life and within the greater community at large, yet there is never an honest voice to be heard to represent that truth and supply a proper illustration to those who believe the “news” to be the end-all-be-all for information. Far too many of my colleagues are swept up in the mass media delusions prepared for us thrice daily, and pooh-pooh any notion that the information they receive has been in any way sanitized to minimize any negative effects on our economy or government. The Ministry of Truth seems to be working overtime to bathe us in happiness, white ponies and hot fudge sundaes, perhaps fearing that if we knew what was coming our way, we might actually do something to mitigate its effects on ourselves and families.

The oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect example of a newsworthy event that has become nearly invisible on the television, given the magnitude of the problem, the extreme difficulty in controlling the situation and the potential destruction of so much life. There are those who would minimize this event, pointing to aerial photographs which only show the oil on the surface of the Gulf and saying “See, it’s not really that bad”. Then there are folks like myself, who seek out more information and find out that there are absolutely enormous areas of oil up to three hundred feet thick and ten miles in length drifting around the Gulf, killing everything living that comes in to contact with it. Rather than give us the truth about this unmitigated disaster, their mission seems to be to cover the asses of the government officials involved in what appears to be the typical cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated.

Another instance that comes right to mind would be the financial crisis overwhelming Europe and the members of its monetary union. In a stroke of Keynesian genius, the ECB has decided to throw a trillion dollars at the failures that are her socialist members. Greece, Italy and Portugal are in very deep shit and Spain is not far behind. Their collectivist solution to the “crisis” is to backstop bankrupt nations with enough money to back the wolf packs off long enough to impose jaw dropping austerity measures. These measures by the way, would never have been needed if the governments of these countries had not allowed themselves to be bent over the table and ass-fucked during union negotiations, and instead privatized the many services being held hostage to an entitled class of national welfare junkies that are so hooked on government benefits that any threat of reducing them brings out rioters to set the cities on fire and kill the odd passer-by.

Have we been given the truth about this situation? Hardly. We are given the opinion of various pundits who proclaim to be the all knowing and all seeing; straight up softball. The MSM seems to believe that Americans can’t handle the truth, however painful it may be. They seem to think we are better off listening to a ten minute segment about Brittney Spears lost passport than an in-depth discussion about the state of the world economy and what average citizens can do to protect their wealth and protect themselves from what will certainly be bands of starving unemployed folks, out in masses looking for some food to eat. Anyone besides me want to know what the long term ramifications of a cubic mile of oil, that has gushed in to the nursery for the entire Atlantic Ocean over the last five weeks will be?

I read a number of web-logs and websites with regularity, focusing on two or three for up-to-date information and truthful commentary on the state of the world. When juxtaposed against my choice of information outlet[s], mainstream news media cannot hold a candle to the broad array of websites available to disseminate the truth and discuss the potentialities of the information they offer. The tragedy is that most people choose to blindly trust their local media bubblehead rather than question them and seek another opinion.

I am absolutely pixilated when confronted by the MSM and their continuous stream of prevaricous bullshit. What exactly is so harmful about the truth? Why can’t we have an honest and open discussion about things that actually mean something, instead of ten weeks of discussion over “wardrobe malfunctions”? Was Janet Jackson’s nipple really that important? Are Lindsay Lohan’s travel plans so critical to the national consciousness that without this information we shall all wither up and die? Can we not live without in-depth examination of Jesse James and his infidelity to Sandra Bullock?

What the fuck happened to Americans? Are we so completely numb as to be so completely entranced by unimportant minutia that we have become a nation of fat-body Dorito® crunching idiots, totally out of touch with those things that affect [or will eventually directly affect] our lives?

We need to wake up America……..and we need to wake up our neighbors while we’re at it. Something dark and ugly is on the horizon, and try as they might, the governments of the world can do nothing substantive to stop it. We are on the precipice of a great abyss, one that could prove to be game-changing to the entire civilized world [such that it really is anyway]. If we are permitted to go over the edge, and I think we will be pushed by this administration, the outcome is uncertain at best. Either way, we are facing the greatest period of austerity this country has ever witnessed. America is slated to become a mere shadow of her former self. Barrack Hussein Obama and his communist minions have set the Cloward-Pivens train in motion, and are on track to completely destroy any remaining vestiges of our once proud society. They have nearly succeeded in turning America into a welfare entitled nation of needy crybabies and union sycophantic pussy communists, unable to make decisions on our own behalf because the government has legislated away our right to decide anything for ourselves.

I say its time to take the controls back. We have a chance in November to elect officials who are dedicated to the preservation of our constitutional rights and willing to buck the status quo. We need to elect people with the will to stand up to the K street whores and Goldman Sachs. We need a hero.

I do not believe the Libertarians and Tea Partiers have all the answers, but at least they have some of them. We need a regime change folks, and we need it now. Use your power at the voting booth and do the right thing. If these weasels maintain control of the Congress for two more years, your children will most likely live their lives our in abject poverty, begging the government for a little more fiat to fill their empty bellies.

Do the right thing.

Another day another [trillion] dollars

2010-04-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

Watching the goldilocks news hour on Bloomberg this fine Florida morning, I couldn’t help but shake my head at the balls some of these hedge funds and financial firms exhibit when the cameras and lights are on them. Their propensity for bullshit is unparalleled in this universe, and their penchant for self aggrandizement is without equal. In a brief five minute sound bite, one manager exclaimed that we are entering a new financial paradigm, one in which all Americans will be able to reap great financial rewards and continue to live like it’s still 2004.

The premise behind this pronouncement was that the world needs the U.S. as its financial anchor, and so will continue to fund our largesse for as long as it takes to heal our economy and return to some form of balanced budget. He breathlessly declared that the Obamacare legislation would create “upwards of 3 million jobs” and all of the money spent on health care would trickle back to consumers in many forms.

When I look at the looming entitlement disaster, I cannot help but be reminded that each of the sovereigns who are lending us this money will also feel entitled to receive their money back when the bonds mature. Knowing this will not happen, because each successive iteration of government will simply “kick the can down the road” and roll the bonds over, I wonder what the hell we think we are doing? How can we stare bankruptcy in the face and not feel some measure of fear and dread? Instead, the government comes up with yet another grand plan to “take care” of the People.

There is talk of a national sales tax, one that will “bring the U.S. in line with Europe” as regards government funding. This is the worst idea I have heard to date. Even worse than a carbon tax, this will cost the poor and middle classes dearly. To add another eight or ten percent tax on the already over-taxed is criminal. Put in to proper perspective, a value added tax is but another scheme to bleed the little guy of every excess nickel to fund even more special interest crusades and foreign wars. A VAT is the perfect tax vehicle because it can start out quite small, perhaps as little as a penny on the dollar. Speeches will be made propounding on the benefits it will provide and the good it will do. After all, it’s only a penny…..right? Then, when they find out that a penny is not enough [it never was to begin with] they will raise it a half cent. After all, it’s only a half a penny right? You won’t even miss it. This goes on and on until we’re at 15%, right in line with socialist Europe.

It perplexes me that we cannot agree to regulate the banks who brought us the great collapse, but we can ram through a trillion dollar health care bill without so much as a proper debate. Congress talks about a national sales tax, at the very time Americans are losing their jobs, homes and life savings [thanks TBTF banks!]. Taxes are not the answer; reigning entitlements in is.

I say we bite the bullet sooner rather than later, and institute means testing for social security, Medicare and every other entitlement program currently bleeding this nation dry. Although I am furious that our government squandered the money they were supposed to put away for my retirement, it is too late for tears, and time to fess up to reality. While the bobble heads will have you believe we are on the road to recovery, and everything will be just peachy in a few months, we all know the hard truth to be exactly opposite.

The solution is clear and if we vote the right folks in to office in November, there is still a chance for us to survive what is coming at us. If we remain complacent……we had better be ready because it’s coming and it is coming fast.

The world as I see it

2010-04-09T08:14:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since my last rant……so I’m wound up pretty tight these days, and nothing seems to be looking particularly good at the moment. Our Congress [such as it is] has been pandering to the various K street whores supporting their re-election campaigns, and lining the pockets of various industries with sweetheart legislation, designed to further crush the middle class and make them permanent debt slaves. Each story I read in the “news” winds me up even tighter.

[Hat tip to Alternet for the graphic]

As we ramp up the sale of our bonds this summer, I can’t help but wonder where the breaking point is and what will trigger the Black Swan. It is clear [to me anyway] that the path down the road of “trillion dollar deficits for years to come” is unsustainable, leading me to conclude that it must all come tumbling down on us some day, and that my friends is going to be a day not soon forgotten. The Powers That Be seem to think us invincible; that the rest of the world will continue to respect our hegemony, and buy our debts no matter how large they become, because we are after all, America. We cannot continue to issue assignats as though we somehow will be able to redeem them in the future, as the best that we can hope for is to manage the interest for a little while longer.

This notion that China is locked in a death embrace with us, and any attempt at escape will result in catastrophic losses for them needs to be reexamined. While China has indeed entered puberty, the people are agonizingly poor, and will suffer less than the fat arrogant Americans, who have for several generations, lived a lifestyle three quarters of the balance of humanity can only dream about. The Big Red Machine has made it clear that they are losing confidence in our system and they have taken solid steps to begin the process of withdraw from the dollar and diversification of their wealth. When the crash comes, and it must, the pain will be global, but the worst pain will be felt in the G-7 nations, with Americans suffering the worst. Unaccustomed to austerity, a spoiled and entitled nation of service workers will not go down quietly. I suspect that we will endure our own type of “regime change” when the shit hits the fan.

The medicine for our illness is widely discussed, then dismissed out of hand as each successful bond offering is snapped up by unsuspecting rubes who think when the music stops, they will still have a chair. Rather than invoke the austerity we so desperately need and teach our entitled class how to fish, instead of opening up more fish distribution stations, we pile on even more entitlements and assure Americans that we will actually save money by giving free health care to illegal immigrants. Rather than close our southern border and protect the sovereignty, we allow mass illegal immigration to continue unimpeded, so that ageing and disillusioned Democratic voters can be replaced with new ones. These new voters will be registered by Acorn so that even though they are not U.S. Citizens, their votes will be counted. Yes, instead of austerity we got Cloward-Pivens and Saul Alinsky.

Our corporatist masters and their boards of directors have decided to bring the third world here, because our spoiled citizens demand to earn a wage that can actually sustain them, but backward Mexican farm-boys will work under the table for whatever they can get and be happy with it. Illegal aliens won’t report substandard conditions in factories or meat packing plants because they don’t want to rock the boat and be deported from the “land of the big PX”. These are the same corporate executives by the way, who spent the last three or four iterations of presidencies working in various cabinet positions or performing as an unconstitutional Czar.

This revolving door between our regulatory community and the executive boardrooms across this land must be closed and locked. The incestuous relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury/Federal Reserve and the White House Presidential Cabinet must end. When we see regulators soft-balling bank executives in broad daylight, then entering in to vice presidencies immediately following their tenure at some regulator or another, the obvious conclusion becomes evident. We have to look at the structure of these regulatory agencies and determine if the needs of the American People indeed outweigh the needs and wants of the corporations in this country, because society as we knew it cannot exist under a corporatist/fascist system of governance.

Our government is on a destructive course of action that will ultimately determine whether or not our constitutional republic will survive. I believe that within of one or two years, not decades, we will be witness to a massive and painful paradigm shift in the U.S., one brought about by these “Masters of the Universe”, these elites who hold us hostage with their too big to fail black holes called banks. Our economy doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is a cultural and social construct, dependent upon the moral compass of America as a whole for its lifeblood. When this social fabric is torn, the effects will ripple around the world and shake the foundations of not only the global economy, but global systems of governance. We seem to have replaced values and morality with greed, avarice and envy. Buying a bigger McMansion and a new hummer became more important than planning for our children’s futures and holding on to our moral base. “They” told us all we had to do was keep buying bigger houses, because we all know houses only ever go up in value. In fact, there are many who quit work and devoted all of their time flipping houses, often selling a home for twenty and thirty percent profit before closing on the original deal.

We are now at a crossroad. We must choose between the ultra rich elites and their financial construct and our own survival.

Perhaps it is their ultimate goal, this annihilation and financial destruction; from the smoldering ash and ruins of which will rise the phoenix of their New World Order. I for one, do not wish to live in their new world order, and my vote in November will be a reflection of my wishes. The power [for now anyway] is still ours, and we are running out of time to effect change. The two-party system is broken, and the time for Libertarians is now.

Make it happen in November folks, or suffer the consequences.

Curioser and Curioser

2010-01-30T15:44:00.000-05:00

As a layman in the world of high finance, I count upon the learned writings proffered by a variety of intelligent and insightful economic theorists, to untangle the web of disinformation disseminated by our government for general consumption by the huddled masses. These individuals come from varied backgrounds and all four corners of the financial industry, to include a couple of noted economists. Each week brings new revelations about some conspiracy or another, with individuals taking up positions on either side of the fence, offering their own commentary and breakdown of their positions. With my lack of sophistication in this arena, and a clearly defined disdain for algorithms and calculus computations, I leave it to the experts to guide me through what can best be defined as the disinformation highway.

Recent announcement by our POTUS that he intends to back strong banking reform and break up the big banks is nothing more than hyperbole and grandstanding. This man can no more institute regulation on the banks than congress can. With an army of millionaire lobbyists, they have squashed all efforts at reform and forced the American People to swallow whatever they throw at them. Remember “bankruptcy reform”? That piece of crap was written by the credit card companies in an effort to make Joe Consumer a debt slave for the rest of his life, if their bought and paid for judges declared that he has the means to pay them off. Gone are the days when a man could get out from under unsecured debt through the legal system. Gone are the days when we paid reasonable interest rates and had an honest accounting of our debts provided by these same companies. The new paradigm has shifted from honest business to profit at any cost.

Getting back to banking reform, I am reminded of the recent decision by the Supreme[ly stupid] Court that corporations both foreign and domestic were to be permitted to exercise their right to “free speech” and donate just as much money as they like to political campaigns. What an outright load of complete and utter shit! Welcome to 2010 folks, the year that freedom died. This next election should prove to be quite interesting indeed. I can’t wait to see who the corporations buy in to the congress, and what ridiculous fucking legislation is to follow. As far as the banks are concerned, we have a “moral obligation” to pay our mortgages, irrespective of any fraud that was committed when selling a homeowner on a loan package. Never mind that these are the same bankers who brought us liar loans, pick-a-pay and sub-prime. Their pet project will involve repeal of current bankruptcy laws and institution of a new law that makes you their debt slave forever. Wait for it folks, ‘cause it’s a ‘comin.

I have watched all week as the criminals at HSBC and J.P. Morgan scrambled to cover their naked shorts in silver and gold, most likely in anticipation of new SEC regulations regarding concentration limits. One has to presume that the retards at the SEC gave an inside warning to Da Boyz well in advance of any decisions to be handed down in the near future, so as not to piss off their future employers. I will be extremely surprised if the SEC does not grant an exception to the big banks on position limits, reserving those for the merely mortal among us who have the nerve to actually put our money in a market that is so obviously rigged as to blow the mind.

The newest financial engineering will most likely come from our own government. Short on cash, they are drooling over the fifteen trillion dollars wasting away in 401K retirement plans with great envy. The ideas on the board include possibly forcing conversion of these dollars into treasuries, to be meted out at the discretion of the government, most likely after one reaches 63 ½ years, far older than the current 59 ½ years. Even more insidious, upon your death, 50% of the remaining funds will become property of the government: forced default. You cannot will this money to your children or spend it before you die. Strong argument for NOT having a 401K huh? Other ideas being floated in conjunction with this massive theft include forcing ALL U.S. Citizens to pay 5% of their gross salaries into one of these asinine plans throughout their entire working lives.

Welcome to the new paradigm folks, before long, they will lay claim to your entire paycheck, meting out to you what they “think” you should have.

Fascism is here folks, and most of the people in the U.S. never saw it coming.

Another in a series of rants....

2010-01-08T17:28:00.002-05:00

Are you mad enough yet?!? I sure as hell am! All of the campaign promises, all of the assurances and all of the promised transparency, guarantees of bi-partisanship……went right out the fucking window the minute this Manchurian Candidate hit the White House. Surrounded by all of his good Chicago buddies, Goldman Alums and union thugs, Obama has shut the curtain on any and all activities within this administration, effectively shutting the American Public out of the debate on some of the most important issues confronting our Nation since World War II.

Rather than have open and transparent debate about health care [we were promised televised debate 7 or 8 times by Obama] we are given a useless one hour sound bite of in-party quibbling over some minutia or another.

Rather than research whether or not someone is a convicted felon or an illegal alien, the party in power is trying to ram through legislation mandating universal voter registration. This insidious bit of Cloward-Pivens action promises to register anyone on the welfare rolls, driver license rolls, Medicaid rolls to vote in any election with nothing more than the individuals word that they are in fact eligible to vote. With ACORN and the SEIU on their side as hatchet men, they might just succeed. If they do, then many people will automatically be double counted and many ineligible voters will be able to help them keep the power they are currently abusing.

This administration, with the backing of our Puppet-In-Chief, has embarked on a tirade of social engineering that would make Marx blush with embarrassment. They are working diligently at forcing health care reform through the Congress that has no hope of reforming anything. The bill is nothing more than class warfare; the rich will be heavily penalized for being rich and the middle class will be reduced to a level just above the poverty that being in the middle class was meant to reduce. All the while, their elite buddies in the system will reap the rewards of legislated purchasing of private services. Penalties will have to be paid by those who resist or refuse and the top one percent of the top one percent will get even richer.

Much of the “stimulus” money has been showered disproportionately upon democratic Congressional Districts [like we expected anything less after the auto dealer affair]. Dozens and dozens of projects are white elephants that will produce nothing long term except the cost of maintenance. Parks are being built in neighborhoods that have little or no hope of remaining anything more than new places for drug dealers and hookers to ply their trades, and roads that do not need re-paving are being re-paved.

The Puppet-In-Chief has installed radical leftists and socialists in many powerful positions. Janet Napolitano, as chief of Homeland Security made her splash not by saying tough words about terrorism, but by sending a scathing letter all over America warning law enforcement about the conservative right in the country, even going so far as to warn about American Veterans returning from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, she warned against were "groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration." Who the hell IS this broad???

Remember Eric Holder? This man has a racial agenda and doesn’t care who knows it. He set free the terroristic Black Panthers who attacked and threatened voters and re-assigned the attorney who was initially assigned the case to a remote office, to make it difficult to have him deposed when questions arose about his [Holder] decision not to pursue a case.

I could rant on and on about the people who have been implanted in the government by this administration, but it would not change things one iota. Instead, I am going to ask that each and every one of you do the right thing and vote these people out of office this term. If we stack the Congress with people who believe in our Republic and create a majority, we can effectively neuter these monkeys and stop the insanity.

Will America grow a fucking brain and do the right thing, or will this administration manage to stack the deck against us by forcing through universal voter registration?? This is one to watch folks, because we won’t hear one single whisper about it in the mainstream media.

Health care, wealth redistribution and government entropy: A christmas Story

2009-12-22T17:05:00.002-05:00

I read another ridiculous story about the climate talks in Copenhagen last night, and continue to be amazed that these talks are even happening. There seems to be a complete refusal to examine the possibility that these numbers have been so heavily massaged as to be fraudulent. There is no real accountability for these “scientists” who by the way, peer review their own work.

Rather than discuss meaningful ways to neutralize the effects of man on the environment, it seems to be exclusively about money, my money to be quite exact about it. There is talk of carbon taxes, carbon police and trading the right to pollute for money. We read about demands from the third world that the U.S. and other “rich” nations pay them a huge “carbon debt” reparation payment. Our great world leaders discussed the formation of an international body with the power to usurp our constitution in favor of reducing carbon output in the world.

Sound a little New World Order? Well it is. Plainly put, Copenhagen was about money and power, nothing more and nothing less. The socialists will not stop until the middle class has been eviscerated and the poor have been uplifted from their poverty. What the elites are missing is where all of the money will come from when the middle class of Europe and the U.S. is gone. They are also forgetting about history folks. When a people are pushed against the wall, they fight back. America has more guns per capita than any other group of nations combined, and they will not give them up without a long and protracted fight.

Just as with global warming, the health care debacle is unfolding before us to be the single largest boondoggle in the history of planet Earth. This program promises to actually force people to buy what will amount to a very expensive insurance policy that covers nothing until deductibles are met, increase taxes to unsustainable levels and reduce many American businesses to rubble in very short order. Not only is this unconstitutional, it is treasonous. Someone needs to articulate to me exactly where in the Constitution we are guaranteed the right to health insurance. The last time I checked it wasn’t there. Our President is nothing more than a slick con-man who is being manipulated by the men behind the curtains.

Barrack Obama is an eloquent public speaker and a socialist ideologue who managed to get into the highest office in the country without so much as showing a birth certificate to prove his citizenship. Never mind his close and continuing associations with people like Rahm Emanuel, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorn, Let’s look at who he has chosen for placement in un-audited positions in our government [Czars]

Green Jobs Czar Van Jones is an avowed socialist and staunch critic of capitalism. This man once belonged to a group called STORM, who worked towards their goal of a multi racial socialist utopia. Nice huh?

Next up to bat is Kevin Jennings, our Safe Schools Czar. “A former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.” [http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2347136/posts] In addition, he promoted teaching junior high school students “safe fisting”. For those of you unfamiliar with fisting as a sexual activity, look it up yourselves, it is too disgusting to print here. This animal has no business being within a mile of a child.

Our Science Czar John Holdren, has an interesting background to say the least. This man co-authored a book that advocated forced abortion and eugenics. Although he now repudiates that view, I do not believe him.
Energy Czar Carol Browner was listed as one of the 14 leaders of the Socialist International. This group advocates global governance, international taxes, and a slew of other items so corrupt and evil that there is no room to print them all.
Folks, it doesn’t take a genius to see that Obama is pushing the United States down the road to socialism and perpetual serfdom. We need to stop this man and stop him soon. The concentration of power in the executive branch by this administration makes Bush look like an amateur. Remember, none of these people have to face the Congress for confirmation, nor do they have to report to them. These people report directly to Obama.
The entropy in our government is palpable. There seems to be absolutely no direction in the houses of Congress, just bitter partisanship and midnight legislating. The lobbyists have been permitted to hijack our system and the Executive branch is ignoring our Constitution.

It’s all going to the highest bidder folks, and just to be clear, you and I get to pay the price.

2009 Is Over [Thank God!]

2009-12-19T15:10:00.000-05:00

So it’s Christmas again. It seems as though the year blew by without so much as a how-do-you-do. As I contemplate the significance of living through what proved to be an extraordinary year, I can’t help but wonder what is in store for 2010. If past is prologue, the up-coming new year may well prove to be even more exciting than the last two have been.

Let’s recap shall we? In the past twelve months, our Congress has [mis]appropriated over three trillion of our yet-to-be-earned tax dollars for what they deem systemically important banks, insurance agencies, hedge funds and pensions. We have offered to back Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae with the full faith and strength of the U.S. government (read: taxpayer), and chased away every self respecting sovereign nation on the planet from our long bonds. The powers that be have made sure that yet another bubble was blown in equities and that the fat cat banksters have enough cash to dole out all time world record bonuses this holiday season. Joe Taxpayer is now the indirect owner of two of our three major auto manufacturers and the world’s largest insurance firm, and it was all done by our government without the consent of the People, who vehemently opposed these moves.

We have all watched with interest as Eastern European nations caught our malaise and stumbled down the very same Keynesian path that we did, hoping for a different outcome. As I write this Greece, Spain, Ireland and Great Britain are facing the very real possibility of sovereign default and the accompanying austerity that it would certainly bring. The once mighty United States has spent herself into a bottomless pit of debt from which there is no possibility of return. Our obligations only get larger with each vote in the Congress, as our legislators seem to think that spending even more money that we do not have will somehow fix all of the problems with our system.

The greatest crimes in all of history unfolded before us yet no one was indicted. Trillions of dollars evaporated into nothingness and no one went to jail. Our compliant news services dutifully repeated over and over the mantra of our government, hoping to keep the sheep in the pen for a while longer. Green shoots of recovery, and end to the recession and less worse job numbers are paraded by us in thirty second sound bites, after the follow up story on the Octo-Mom and Tiger Woods failed marriage.

Sometimes I feel quite alone in the world, surrounded by people who walk around in a dream state and believe everything they hear on TV as though it were the gospel truth. It seems that there are only a very few people in our country who really understand what is going on and what the ramifications of our actions today will mean for our future generations. Our children are being taught revisionist history in the government school system, and indoctrinated into believing that homosexuality and deviant sexual behavior is the norm; that it is ‘OK’ to be a cross dresser. Anyone who dares to challenge this perverted mindset is labeled a “hater” or worse. We are no longer permitted to teach our young morality and ethics unless it is the morality of the atheistic ultra-liberal educational left wing.

We are witnessing the fall of Rome my friends, and only too soon the fires will begin to burn.

2010 is only a few days away, and I fear that something dark is coming. There are too many markers and too many signals that tell us to prepare for hard times to pretend that all is well.

A letter to the editor

2009-12-06T10:53:00.003-05:00

I wrote a letter to the editor of our local left wing rag, after reading a leftist story about the poor Mexicans in the border towns along the Texas Mexico border who were being "terrorized" by Mexican drug gangs. The story tried to place the blame on Americans, because we buy their marijuana, and so we should be responsible for the problems it creates on the Mexican side of the border. I became so enraged that I couldn't write for several hours after. When I regained some of my sensibilities, I wrote the following missive:

Dear Editor,
After reading your article about the possibility of sending National Guard troops to the border, and the potential for "insulting" Mexico with this gesture, I am incensed. Mexico's failure to reign in drug lords, who are particularly brutal and extreme in their vengeance should not be our problem. We read stories in our media about the rapidly increasing murder rates and the brutal nature of the same. Exactly when did it become the responsibility of the United States to deal with these criminals?

Every time something is discussed which references the border or border security, Mexico/Mexicans cry xenophobia, or hate, or impaired relations in a bid to keep the porous border just the way it is.

We have attempted to build a wall, because Mexico has absolutely zero interest in keeping their disaffected citizens in country, and therefore unemployed and on the dole. It is to their benefit that they stream unimpeded across the border to the U.S., so they can work in the labor underground and send home remittances [over 50 billion in 2008] to support their families there.

Their largest oil field, the Cantarell field, is in serious and irreversible decline. This alone will account for a significant deficit this year, and increasing government deficits for years to come.

Mexico relies on their oil income to pay for massive social programs for the poor and education. Without the revenue from Cantarell, we may see double or triple the number of border jumpers in the near future.

Either we are a sovereign nation or we are not. It really is that simple. We have laws. Laws that are broken on a daily basis by those who choose to ignore them and cross the border illegally.

I say it is way past time to put a stop to not only illegal immigration, but the automatic citizenship for "anchor babies". If there is no hope for automatic citizenship, and the accompanying free medical care, WIC benefits and welfare, then there will be a reduced draw for Mexicans to come here illegally.

Shut the border down. I say send ten thousand troops to guard our border and step up deportation of lawless criminals who chose to break the law as their first act by crossing the border illegally.

It's all over but the crying

2009-12-05T13:34:00.000-05:00

Remember that dream you had as a kid, where you were falling…..but in slow motion? Remember feeling as if you had time to do something before you hit……but you keep falling anyway? That is exactly what I feel when I look at our current economic situation. We’re in a weird sort of dream state, making all kinds of rush decisions [Congress] about the financial health of our nation, but nothing is working, yet they keep on doing things expecting a different result. We are funding the death throes of our empire with the dreams of our grandchildren, yet the problems persist; even worsen.

There is talk of a jobs summit and the hope that the consumer can be put back to work. Industry giants and political insiders will gather at the White House to eat a five star lunch with the President, bloviate about his amazing insight and bask in the warm glow of his aura. They will make hollow promises they do not intend to keep, offering assurances of increased employment and rosy first quarter industry forecasts. In he end we will be exactly where we are now, trying to put a square peg into a round hole [only THIS time we will use a bigger hammer!].

The geniuses behind the wheel have apparently decided to inflate away our obligations to the world through unfettered use of the printing presses. Unfortunately, unless this money gets in the hands of the People, they can print all the money they want to and it will have absolutely zero effect on the dollar. The net effect of trillions of dollars being dumped into the banking system has been to jack up equity prices and artificially inflate stocks to unreal valuations, because the bankers would rather gamble in the market than loan money to small business. Companies are rolling over dead by the thousands as a result of the evaporation of credit and reduction in bank lending. This is exactly the opposite of what the government intended when they provided the life support the banking industry so desperately lobbied for so many months ago.

With two trillion dollars of short term debt to roll over in the coming year, and an additional trillion and a half of our deficit to fund, I wonder how the powers that be imagine they are going to get it done? China is an a damned-if-we-do and damned-if-we-don’t situation here, which may force them to choose between funding the U.S. so we keep importing their second rate merchandise, or risk an all out revolution at home by cutting off the purse strings and letting their trillion dollars of U.S. reserves to disintegrate. As it is, we are selling primarily short term debts abroad. To put some light on this [to the best of my limited ability to do so] we have been selling short maturity debt to foreign governments because they no longer have the faith that we will be able to pay off on a twenty year bond as promised. This means that every few months, we have to roll over huge amounts of debt, and that is on top of any new debt that needs to be sold to cover day to day operations. Remember the housing crisis? I sure do. Instead of recognizing that not everyone is capable of making a house payment every month, the federal government has decided to continue making loans to anyone with a heartbeat at ridiculous rates with only 3% down. This will end badly as well, as the economy falls further in to the abyss and millions upon millions more folks lose their jobs.

As the buyer of last resort, the federal government is doing little more than enabling people who should be renting to buy a house they cannot afford. By offering an 8 thousand dollar tax credit for first time buyers, they are stealing future demand to make the statistics look a little better this month, just like they did with cash-for-clunkers. Genius huh? By the way, these loan bundles used to be sold to overseas and domestic buyers with the tacit promise of government backing. Now, these GSE’s ARE owned by the government and continuing the reckless practices that got us here in the first place. The taxpayer is being handed the bill for every dollar lost on these “investments” without so much as a vote.

We will soon reach a tipping point in our country, one that promises to tear the very fabric of our nation and wipe out the middle class entirely. Those who survive will be witness to the devolution of the United States into a banana republic. The days of running to the seven-eleven to pick up another six pack and some beef jerky will be over. We will become a subsistence society, modeled after Central America in the sixties and seventies. Folks will have gardens and chicken coops in their yards instead of Donzi ski boats and Hummers. We will turn the power completely off at night because we can no longer afford the luxury of leaving a light on at night. Community services will be pared back to the absolute minimum, with the deepest cuts being made to social services, parks, public boat ramps and roadside grass cutting. Next will be the libraries and community centers, followed by road maintenance and street lights. These will become less important as fewer and fewer folks can actually afford to drive.

At the end of this slow motion collapse, I believe a ray of light exists. Not a searchlight mind you, but a ray of light. The possibility exists that Americans will finally step up to the plate and demand change at the ballot box, and not the type of change we got with the Anointed one. When we have endured enough pain, we will vote for people who promise to govern by and for the people. We will demand term limits to end the practice of lifetime tenure in the House and Senate. We will require that the People’s voices be heard and their business be done, instead of the perpetual election campaigning and entertaining of lobbyists that occurs now. I think the following changes would get us where we need to be:

1. Corporations are no longer to be considered “a person”.
2. Corporations may no longer donate money to any political party, or any group directly affiliated to political party [i.e. Acorn].
3. Lobbyists may not accept money. If you believe in what you are doing and want to effect change, do it because it is right, not because you are getting paid.
4. Lawyers may not participate in the lawmaking process on any level.
5. Term limits for Congress, two and you’re through.
6. All candidates for political office on any level must publish a copy of a certified birth certificate prior to running for office.
7. No candidate for Congress may accept donation from anyone outside the district for which they are running for office.
8. No candidate for office may spend an amount of their own money greater than thirty thousand dollars during any campaign for office.
9. Any remaining campaign funds after any election cycle must be sent to a charity organization within that candidate’s district.
10. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Citi and HSBC are to be broken in to pieces and sold. No recognizable part shall remain intact.
11. Any Alumni from any of the above companies currently working for the government will be immediately replaced with individuals outside of the system.
12. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae are to be broken in to pieces and sold off. No recognizable pieces shall remain. It is not the providence of the government to insure that people get a mortgage at 3%.
13. The United States is to return to a real money standard that includes gold, silver and copper.
14. Anyone who does not pay taxes cannot vote in any Federal, State or municipal election.
15. The practice of eminent domain shall be made illegal.
16. Marijuana is to be made legal. This will eliminate a third of our judicial and prison expenses.
17. Welfare as we know it si to be abolished. In it’s place we will have work-fare. Unless you are completely physically handicapped, there is no reason to give money to able bodied persons and expect nothing in return. In addition, anyone applying for public assistance is to be drug tested. My employees have to do it, so should welfare recipients.
18. Our imperial army is to be withdrawn from the four corners of the globe. The rest of the world will have to figure out how to secure their own borders. The returning soldiers will be re-deployed along our own borders.
19. All illegal aliens are to be found and deported.
20. Retroactive 10 years, all anchor babies born to illegal aliens are to have their citizenship rescinded and will be returned to their parents native countries.

I see that there is absolutely no hope to effect change within the current system of governance without the elimination of the practices that got us here. With a few changes, we could guarantee ourselves a brighter future for our children. It is a foregone conclusion that the U.S. is to default on her debts, so I hold no illusion of a balanced budget and sensible governing. The best that we can hope for is for a quick and dirty collapse and rapid systemic change to follow. With the changes I have outlined above, we can quickly regain our footing and most likely the respect of other nations. The U.S. is sick and needs time to get healthy again. If we continue with our excesses, we will deserve what we get.

I'm Back

2009-12-05T13:33:00.001-05:00

I have been on a little sabbatical to take care of my daughter while my wife is recovering from double bacterial pneumonia. I'm sorry I have been gone so long, but we all have to do what we have to do.

I won the job

2009-10-31T10:33:00.001-04:00

Well it’s Saturday again, and I am in the office as usual [simulating work] preparing for what may prove to be another exasperating week here in Sunny Florida. I have been working very hard on a technical proposal for a request for proposal here in Central Florida, putting in 12 hour days to complete it in time for the bid opening at 2:00 p.m. the 29th. This bid was for a three year term contract to provide environmental remediation and demolition for a huge metropolitan area that had been awarded a Federal grant to abate nuisance and abandoned properties of asbestos and lead then demolish them. It was an aggravating project because I felt we were not going to win, and therefore all of this work was to be for naught, so my heart was not in it.

Many of the municipalities here require minority subcontractors to be included as part of any sub-contracting plan when writing specifications for larger projects, and inflict penalties on your firm if you do not. We were required to advertise to local “registered” women and minority business enterprises [W/MBE] for two weeks prior to the bid opening and solicit pricing for some portion of the work, in this case 25%. The problem with this program is that these minorities know the requirement is there and take advantage by charging substantially more for work that we can self perform for much less.

We got lucky this time, because the County used a sliding scale for participation. If we did our due diligence, and were the low bid for the project but did not have any responsive W/MBE bids, we had to be 2% lower than the next responsive bid who achieved minority participation on projects over $2,000,000. The trouble is that we have exclusive pricing agreements with several sub contractors and vendors to provide low pricing in exchange for our continued loyalty. This means that not only did I not advertise to, or solicit prices from W/MBE’s, I made no attempt to solicit pricing from them. Until recently, this would have been unacceptable. My how times have changed.

Faced with revenue shortages the likes of which caught every municipality in the State off guard, the rules are being slowly changed to reflect the real world as we live in it today. I wrote a letter to the County explaining our arrangement, and how I expected our bid to be the low price as a result of engaging in true competition rather than trying to subsidize one group over another. I went on to say that I thought the entire program to be a huge waste of resources during this time of limited cash flow and falling tax receipts. I explained in detail that if this contract was awarded to a company for a substantially higher price that the only thing they will have accomplished would be to have taken money out of the pockets of hard working citizens and placed it in the hands of a group of people who need [now more than ever] to learn how to compete in the real world, rather than line up at the government trough for more.

I closed the letter by saying “We can never achieve equality in a world where some people are made more equal than others by simple virtue of race or gender”.

We won the bid.

Wednesday Banking Rant

2009-10-14T16:11:00.001-04:00

I just finished reading an article on the banking industry, and how much money they have put aside for retention bonuses and pay packages. Just when I thought I had seen and heard it all, they slap me upside the head with a newer and more ridiculous one.

Never mind that the American public are enraged about these “too big to fail” behemoths, and the absence of any real reform or prosecutions. Never mind that the Congress is in bed with these bastards and never mind that the average Joe and small business owner cannot get a loan. Let’s focus for a moment on the sheer size of this compensation. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg both posted articles stating that the “Big Five” were set to pay out record amounts of money, just a year after the near total collapse of our entire economy. These are by the way, the same blood sucking parasites that threatened the Congress through their sycophantic succubus Hank Paulson, with complete chaos and pandemonium if they did not get their bailout. If that isn’t bad enough, most of the people hired on to oversee the division of bank bailout money are Goldman Alums.

The article in Bloomberg can be quoted as saying that “ J.P. Morgan has set aside8.79 billion dollars for compensation and benefits……..enough to pay each employee [from janitor up to CEO $353,834”. Are you pissed yet?? The article goes on to say that “J.P. Morgan said today on it’s website that the amount per employee is less than the $386,429 that Goldman is setting aside for their employees”. Does that somehow justify the egregious sums being paid to the very people who were responsible in large part for the pre-packaged poison in the form of collateralized debt obligations and structured investment vehicles?

Am I alone here, or are there others out there who think it is time to take up some torches and pitchforks to run these fuckers out of town? Enough is enough people, we cannot stand idly by and watch these criminals take money from the government and profit off of the back of the American taxpayer. These bastards would have you believe that the fifty or so billion they got from TARP is the only money they owe the government [read: you and me]. The fact is that the Federal Government has taken hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities on her books and traded them [loaned] for treasuries that are as good as cash. That part of the equation is all too often left out of conversations.

The time has come to hold these pricks to account for their actions. The time has come to break up these institutions into little bitty pieces of their former selves. We need a breakup of the top 100 largest financial institutions, the top 100 insurance companies and the top 100 health insurers. There is absolutely no reason for the government to ignore the Sherman Anti Trust laws any further. When one banking giant can control over 17% of a nations savings, it is just to big to exist. In fact, it is my opinion that no one bank should be permitted to control more than one quarter of one percent of total deposits nationwide. This removes the possibility of any institution becoming a systemic risk, and protects the American public from the out and out predation that goes on at the mega-banks. They do it because they are so big they can lobby for laws to be written permitting them to get away with it. Remember the bankruptcy reform act? That little gem brought to us courtesy of the banking lobby.

Until we see something on the order of five or six thousand bankers sitting in the federal penitentiary, the American public has every right to continue to do everything in their power to fuck these guys over. Mortgage payment too high? Fuck them, just walk away. Credit cards a pain in the ass? Default on them. Until the People are treated to some trials and punishment of the guilty, it is my opinion that the rules are to be tossed out the window, and the banking industry can go pound sand.

Obama Wins Nobel Prize ?!?

2009-10-09T13:25:00.002-04:00

I was saddened and dismayed this morning to learn that Barrack Hussein Obama had been awarded the once prestigious “Nobel Peace Prize”. Although it lost most of it’s luster when Jimmy Carter successfully lobbied [for 16 years] to get one, I could not help but ask this simple question; “Why”? Are there really no other candidates for what is supposed to be the single most prestigious prize for the pursuit of peace in the world? Do they sincerely believe that Obama is truly deserving of this recognition? What a farce.

The compliant government poodle press will have us believe he was awarded this prize for his stance on nuclear disarmament, his “Devotion to the Palestinian peace process” and the hope he brings to the world. Are these people serious?!? There are many other worthy candidates for this prize who have actually performed selflessly in the pursuit of peace and promotion of brotherhood all over the world, yet the Nobel committee decided to roll the dice and throw Obama a bone instead.

It absolutely infuriates me that this man is being fawned over like he is some kind of savior to the world, when he has accomplished exactly nothing in his entire career, to include his presidency. We have watched as his Democratic controlled Congress bickered over every single piece of legislation presented to them this session, and refused to reach across the aisle to republicans [in any real or meaningful way], bringing the peoples work to a crawl. These people cannot even agree amongst themselves, much less achieve a consensus on any of the important pieces of legislation currently before them for consideration.

Here is a man with close ties to radical people who are documented socialists, reformed communists and felons. He openly associates with domestic terrorists who have declared their intentions to destroy this Republic and does not apologize. Obama is a selfish narcissistic man who is dangerously power hungry. Every speech he gives is full of “I this” or “I that”, we never hear him say “We” or “Us” which tells me he has nothing true in his heart for the American People. He has appointed countless Czars to cabinet level positions, given them power to control everything from executive pay to what type of light bulbs we must use, and they are not accountable to the congress. This man is ruling by decree within the shadow government he is creating outside the bounds of both the Constitution and the Congress.

He promised to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, close Guantanamo Bay and put an end to extraordinary rendition and torture. To date, I do not believe he has accomplished any of these goals. Many promises have been made yet the only one he has fulfilled is the one where he promised us multi trillion dollar deficits for years to come. His health care scam will punish every American through taxation and his Cap and Trade will destroy whatever is left of the capitalist system by taxing small business into non-existence.

In total, Obama is responsible for doing nothing more than reading very well written speeches off of a teleprompter. In my opinion, the only thing this qualifies him for is Game Show Host.

How much longer?!?

2009-10-02T13:44:00.000-04:00

Those of us who watch economic data and follow market conditions have all wondered aloud “How much longer can this go on”? How much longer can the Fed keep the balls in the air? How much longer are accounting rules going to be ignored in favor of hiding the rot in the banking system? Why is Angelo Mozillo still a free man? With construction in freefall, how is it that 80,000 new construction jobs were “born” last month? These are all fair questions and deserve honest answers. It is confounding to me that the Mainstream Media refuse to report anything but the Pollyanna nonsense spoon-fed to them by the Powers That Be. Those few who risk their jobs in order to speak the truth are quickly shot down as ‘right-wing nut jobs’ or ‘extremists’, because they refuse to believe these government mendacities and toe the socialist party line.

I read an article today about Ken Lewis, the illustrious [ex] leader of Bank of America, who stepped down amid much controversy and possible criminal investigations over the Merrill deal among other things. This pathetic felon will walk away with a 50 million dollar ‘pension’ and many millions more in options and deferred compensation. It is astounding to me that the American People have not risen up in fury over the complete absence of any real changes since the collapse of Lehman uncovered the systemic cancer in our financial system. Not only have there been zero arrests, our administration has hired on even more Goldman alums and placed them in positions of great power and influence.

Are there really so few of us here that understand that we are on a nearly irreversible course to immolation? Does our government truly believe that two and a half trillion dollar budget deficits will continue to be financed by China? We have become dependent upon the largesse of foreigners to fund our credit habit, and I fear the spigot is being slowly turned off. Recent calls to audit the Fed were met with refusal and threats to the Congress of higher interest rates and failure of confidence of the dollar. The truth of it is simple, the Fed knows that if the systemic rot is exposed for what it is, there would be world-wide panic and a stampede out of anything and everything connected with the United States.

The system is broken and no quantity of band aids will fix it. The whole world is watching as our government becomes the largest buyer of treasury debt instruments and the only buyer of agency debt [read: mortgage debt], setting the stage for complete failure. No return to sanity here, as mortgages are still being underwritten by our government with 3% down. Our friends in the “Caribbean Banking Centers” seem all too eager to snap up our treasury debt, making me wonder how they can afford to buy bonds in quantities that dwarf the entire GDP of the Caribbean basin. Anyone who believes this is not the U.S. buying her own paper, needs to look at some waterfront property I have for sale in the Sonoran Desert. The Federal Reserve has amassed a gigantic pile of garbage on the books totaling 1.057 trillion dollars. This is the most illiquid of our holdings and includes agency debt, MBS, Maiden Lane, TALF loans and commercial paper. This is largely toxic waste that will never be paid dollar for dollar, if indeed it is paid back at all.

There are some here who think my writings are dark and dystopian, leaning towards apocalyptic at times. Those folks would be reading me right. While I am not a gloom and doomer, I am certainly a realist. I refuse to sit back and watch the value of everything I have worked so hard to save turn into sawdust. Reality only sucks if you have been living in fantasyland, pretending that you can get rich by taking out a HELOC and buying his and hers hummers.

I see a lot of people walking around without the beginning of a clue, who are going to be utterly destroyed when the walls come tumbling down. I believe we will experience something on the order of an ‘Argentina light’ crash, with the accompanying civil unrest and martial law. We will be participants in the new way of life that the banking elites have forced upon us with their greed and avarice, and it won’t include limitless prosperity. Many will give up and simply become wards of the welfare state, subsisting on whatever hand-outs the government can muster, but many more will adapt and overcome. We will sit in our rocking chairs on the porch twenty years from now, speaking wistfully to our grandchildren of the days when we worked a forty hour week and grocery shelves full of every consumable delight one could imagine.

For those who prepared and set themselves up for austerity and a valueless dollar, the future is not so bleak, but for those who are wandering around thinking the Anointed One will save them and pay for their lot in life, the future is terrifying.

I am of the opinion that the many intelligent and well prepared individuals amongst us will not only survive but they will prosper. Most of our group has prepared themselves for an austere future which includes gardens for our vegetables, raising small fowl for meat and using silver and gold to perform monetary transactions. These forums provide us with a window into the minds of others, offering information of great value and the wealth of each others experiences. Without this group, I would not be nearly as prepared and informed as I have become.

I will close this rant with a thank you to all of the folks who write and offer their experience and advice; asking nothing in return.

We're actually quite lucky

2009-09-14T06:31:00.001-04:00

Every once in a while, I find it necessary to remind myself that no matter how bad it gets, I am the luckiest person I know. Those of you who read my infrequent rants will know that my writing is not the Pollyanna bullshit spewed out by the compliant Government Press. It is the opposite, more like the stuff from a dystopian nightmare. I have a very hard time swallowing what is going on around me, and what our government is doing to her People. Most of the opinions I have about our crisis are not just negative; they are downright apocalyptic.

That said, I do not want my friends to think that I sit in a darkened room all day, ranting about the government and plotting ways to get even. Quite the opposite actually. I am the Vice President of an environmental firm on the Space Coast, and my day is filled with engineers, geologists, logistics and project management, each one and each element providing the insight and information that I require to run my business profitably. It is during the lulls each day where I find the time to read up on our current condition and comment on the fate of our Nation.

Even though the economy is in the tank, and unemployment is rampaging across the country like a meth head snorting down a pound of dope, I have a great job and have the opportunity to earn a ridiculously large salary. My child is thriving in a private Christian school, which affords me the opportunity to offer input into the lesson plans and schedule.All of us here have special things that make our lives tolerable; even pleasurable. I have my family and friends. This gives me a distinct advantage over those who would choose to be evil, or do us harm. My neighbors stand ready to help my family in any situation that may arise, and do so without hesitation. My compatriots at work are of the same mind; help first, ask questions later. We are in the same boat folks, like it or not. The failing economy is not something over which we have any measure of direct control, however it is something for which we can prepare for directly.

All of us here are “awake”. This means that we have been studying the effects of government intervention in our lives, we have discussed it at great lengths and decided to take matters into out own hands. By preparing for a calamity that non of us wishes to come to pass, we have taken control of our own destiny, that is to say we are in control. There is nothing our “government” can do to stop this movement.

I want to say that I am grateful for the support and friendship I have received from family, friends and associates as pertains to my entire life, and all endeavors towards self sufficiency. There are many here who have contributed to my preparations, either directly with information, or indirectly through ancillary advice or comments. To those folks, I say Thank You. Main has given us this forum to discuss, vent and rant without demand for recompense, for that, I thank Main.We have the opportunity to become a real community again, we should not waste it.

My life is prefaced upon four things: Life, Family, Friends and Health. All other things are secondary. I have been blessed with all four, and cherish all of them. All things being equal, I would not trade my current existence for any other.

Are you being stimulated by our government?

2009-09-10T16:24:00.000-04:00

According to the President, the stimulus has “created one million jobs”. These by the way, are jobs that will go away when the stimulus projects are finished. I know this to be fact, because I am in the industry, and know what happens at the terminus of a project. First, the loose leaves blow away. This includes day laborers, sub-contractors and vendors. Then first tier folks finish up O&M documents and close out packages for submittal. Once all documentation is complete and submitted, there is a small ceremony or a buffet lunch and the facility is turned over to the end user and other stake holders for utilization. That’s it folks. Someone needs to explain to me in plain English, how exactly these one shot projects are going to have any sort of a lasting impact on our beleaguered economy?

At the very best, this dribble of government cocaine will stimulate very specific areas of industry for a defined period of time. This includes the design phase, survey and site work phase then actual construction of the facility, utility or roadway. The only thing that sustains this model, is a continuous stream of projects, initiated by various governmental and private entities who are properly funded.

Local and State governments around the country are struggling to make ends meet and pay off their existing municipal debt loads. With Americans embracing frugality and increasing their savings, tax revenues are falling across the board. A number of states are facing default on bond debt and have multi billion dollar holes in their budgets, this as a direct effect of consumer withdraw. My home state is facing a huge deficit in our unemployment insurance fund, placing future workers at extreme risk of being without benefits when they lose their jobs. Raising taxes will only accelerate business failures, as many companies are walking the edge right now and cannot stomach more tax burden.

Our nation needs to cease all of this talk of health care reform, stimulus spending, wars and external conflict until such time as we have our own fiscal house in order. We cannot sustain military bases in 700 locations world-wide, maintain the largest standing army in the history of planet earth and pay un-told hundreds of billions more on a health care scheme that has no hope of being “self funded”.

We must clean the slate by eliminating a huge portion of our military budget, return responsibility for maintenance of roads and administration of our schools to the states, and live within the means provided by annual tax receipts. If we do not have it, we should not spend it. It really is just that simple. All of this social engineering can not possibly help our nation. Johnson’s Great Society did little more than teach five generations of poor Americans that is far easier to suck the government teat than it is to actually go out into the workplace and compete.

Borrow and spend has never worked before and it will fail now as well. When our debts become due and we cannot pay, that will be the true genesis of our demise as a world power. Increasing the number of people who become wholly dependent upon government is the core of the problem, not the solution

Wednesday Rant

2009-09-09T18:25:00.000-04:00

I have been on a little hiatus for a couple of weeks, dealing with some seasonal business stuff, but now I am back!

Here we go again! The MSM is spouting about the “jobless recovery” and how well the stimulus is working. All this time, I thought the folks in front of the soup kitchen were actually hungry, jobless and without hope. The BLS [Bureau of Lying Bullshitters] reports that “only” a quarter of a million or so folks lost their jobs, yet they create a half a million jobs out of thin air to offset whatever information comes to them through their surveys. The idiots on Bloomberg are telling us that the stock market has returned to a “bull market phase” yet most of the volume is accounted for by just a few stocks, notably CIT group, Citi, AIG, Freddy, Fannie and Bank of America. Hmmmmmmmmm, this gets curioser and curioser every day. Just as the Congress is being asked to raise the debt ceiling to somewhere north of thirteen trillion dollars, our POTUS is pushing to provide universal health care to everyone in the U.S., including illegal aliens. They keep telling us that this will be revenue neutral, despite all facts to the contrary.

We are in the fucking twilight zone here folks.

Everything I see points to a collapse. Locally, commercial real estate is absolutely in the ditch, with no real hope of a rebound in sight. Everywhere in Central Florida strip malls, large commercial centers and even office buildings are closing down. Driving to work each day, I see hundreds of ‘for sale’ signs along the roads, in front of houses that people bought with money that flowed like water, but has since frozen solid like a Minnesota lake in winter. Local businesses are closing at a rate I once thought unthinkable, and dozens of people a week are calling my office to see if we are hiring.

The government isn’t fooling anyone here. The only folks that are cheering on the universal health care debacle are the ones who will contribute little or nothing to it’s existence. The stock market? It appears to even the untrained eye that someone behind the curtains is buying up blocks of stocks in the five or six companies that are least likely to ever pay back the federal bailouts or turn a profit [ever again]. Bankruptcies are exploding at a pace not seen since the thirties and will only continue to crescendo in the future. When I see the well timed take-downs in precious metals [always simultaneous] at the same time each day, I cannot help but wonder what the rest of the world thinks about our blatant interference in what has been [for a looooong time now] touted as a “free market”. China has openly declared that they have had it, and will be issuing bonds in their own currency while divesting themselves of our worthless paper.

When China speaks, the world has begun to listen, and the sleeping dragon has been awakened. We are about to bear witness to some historic events people, make no mistake about it. Those of you who have not already invested most [if not all] of your “money” in gold or silver will miss the boat if you wait for much longer.

As desperate as the situation appears, I believe it will result in Americans waking up to the facts of financial life. We can no longer continue our profligacy without the international support that we so flagrantly wasted. We will be forced to return to sanity, discovering along the way a certain satisfaction when we actually pay for something in whole, rather than pile it on top of our already unsustainable stack of ‘minimum payments’. People will return to growing vegetable gardens and talking to their neighbors, because they have no other choice. We will se a resurgence of sustainable living as the credit lock-down continues to remove the ability of people to buy on credit. I further believe that the government will have no choice but to shrink itself [along with the military] down to a size that can be sustained through the collection of tax revenue.

It’s not too late folks. We have a chance in 2010 to vote these knuckle-heads out of Congress, and replace them with Congressmen who actually give a shit about the desires of their constituencies.

Adventures In Dentistry

2009-08-21T15:49:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was quite the adventure in dentistry for me, as I am battling an abscessed tooth, a tooth by the way that had a root canal performed on it in 2007. My wife called and made an appointment with my sado…..er…..dentist, who scheduled me for the following afternoon. Upon arrival, I signed in and quietly sat in the waiting room to be seen. Exactly forty minutes past my appointed time, I was ushered into a high tech looking room and seated in the torture chair. A spit bib was chained around my neck and the lights were dimmed. The only sounds was the screech of a drill, penetrating some poor bastards rotten molar, and the suction pipe gobbling up excess spit. About thirty minutes later, one hour and ten minutes total elapsed time since arrival ten minutes prior to my appointment, Bobbie Jean Bubblehead rolls in to the room to inform me that I needed to pay for “today’s visit” in advance, because I do not have insurance. I am used to this since I am a cash patient without insurance, so I simply said “OK, do you want cash, check or a credit card?”. After indicating that a credit card would be just fine, she exited quietly and left me there to listen to the root canal being performed in the next room. About fifteen minutes later she returned with what appeared to be a wireless, hand-held credit card terminal and a sheet of paper for me to read and sign.

I sat up and started reading the paper she gave me, when I saw the bottom line…….$550.00 for “today’s visit”. I stopped reading, looked at her and asked what exactly was I being charged for, as I had not even spoken to a dentist yet. She replies, “Well, we need to get x-rays of ALL of your teeth today, then write a prescription for some antibiotics. She continued on with, “We never treat a patient in pain immediately, because it MIGHT be an infection.” I proceeded to explain that I had been taking an antibiotic for three days now; pills that were left over from periodontal surgery and that were still “in date”. Sorry, we have to write you a different prescription, and we’ll see you in a week. I reply, “So…..let me see if I understand correctly, I have one tooth bothering me, but you require an x-ray of ALL my teeth, then there is the other two hundred dollars, what is that for?” She replied, “For seeing you today”.

Now I am furious. Not only am I not going to even be seen by a qualified dentist, but I am to be fleeced for five hundred and fifty bucks for unnecessary x-rays and a non-visit with a dentist. I was so fucking mad I got up, walked out and got in my truck. As I was pulling out, I turned left instead of directly on to U.S.-1 because it is an easier turn one block down. As I pulled past the back of the building, I see a 30 foot power boat in the lot. The name on the back? “Incisor”.

I have been battling an abscessed tooth for three days now, and my dentist [Dr. Torquemada] decided that he would not treat me until I have been taking antibiotics for at least five days. I started taking them on Thursday, along with Percodan for the incredibly exquisite pain. By 11 o'clock last night, I was unable to detect anything on the planet besides my tooth. It became the center of the universe with all things revolving around it. I obeyed my tooth's command to take another Percodan and go to bed with a sack of ice on my face for good measure.

I woke up at three o'clock, laying in a sloshy pillow full of the water which had drained out of my ice bag, and a little man drilling a hole through the side of my head with a dull drill bit. I got up and staggered into the bathroom to pour some more Anbesol on the offending tooth, determined not to lose the fight. After a half an hour of tossing around in the bed with an atomic mushroom cloud pressurizing my skull ,I returned to the bathroom and took another Percodan and two Tylenol PM [for good measure mind you] then returned to bed.

I woke up at nine o'clock feeling as if I had been out drinking cheap scotch for a week, and proceeded with my usual morning ablution. After I got out of the shower, my skull began to pulse again, as if on schedule. I reached for the Anbesol bottle to find it nearly empty. In a panic, I threw on some clothes and ran over to Walgreen’s to buy some more. Once in the store, I headed over to the tooth remedy section to make a jumbo purchase of gels, creams and drops, all aimed at numbing my screaming tooth.

Now I am set to be seen by a “poor man’s dentist” in the next community to the south of me. By all accounts, this guy ONLY accepts cash, treats you on the spot and actually has empathy for the working man. Next time, I’ll do my homework a little better so I don’t get conned in to making some rich bastards boat payment.

The usual lies from the usual people

2009-08-11T15:49:00.000-04:00

I sit in my office, surrounded by people of various backgrounds, who have achieved stations in life. Some are content with their position and do not seek to elevate themselves beyond their current status, while others are on the ladder with a vengeance. Even though we are all in a different place economically, we share many common threads in our lives that bind us together. One significant example would be the current economy and the nearly assured possibility that all of our lifestyles will take an austere turn in the near future. We discuss the micro economic environment in our households and the macro economy that surrounds us all. Each and every conversation brings us to the same conclusion; Congress is making decisions about our economic future that will have very detrimental and long lasting effects for every individual in this nation.

Against all popular opinion, trillions of our dollars have been given to the very institutions responsible for the economic condition we’re experiencing. This money is being used to pump up the stock market to unsustainable levels, against all common wisdom. Equities, manufacturers, Aig, Fannie and Freddie are all enjoying a fat rebound in their prices, even though we all know it was accounting trickery and one-time gains that brought about this false prosperity. Citigroup will return to the good ‘ole days of mega bonuses, irrespective of the fact they “borrowed” hundreds of billions of dollars in treasury bonds against many truckloads of toxic mortgage time bombs. Aig is claiming to be healthy at the moment, yet they are holding default swaps and derivative contracts against the commercial real estate time bomb, which has just begun to explode. Remember Alt-A and Option ARM’s? Well those are scheduled to blow up around January of next year [6 months from now], just as the economic stimulus is purported to be providing much of the growth advertised by Bernanke, Greenspan and our POTUS.

I am not buying for one minute that these ailing giants have returned to health in the 11 months since the collapse of Lehman, and doubt very seriously if they will ever be able to completely come out from under the blanket provided by the U.S. taxpayer.

When do they plan to tell us the truth of it all? Does our government actually take us for the rubes we’re being played as? Do they really expect us to swallow the fact that throwing trillions of dollars down a rat hole will increase our national growth?

What about this “jobless recovery” the talking heads spew about each night? How exactly in the hell can we recover with 12 to 15% of our workforce unemployed? The only recovery I can see from here is the rich getting richer and the elites gaining more control. They have recovered the millions they lost last September, and they have done so using taxpayer money. My firm is pretty damn far from recovery, with only a third of the staff we had last summer, and only around 40% of the work backlog. The work we do have is going so cheap that we have pulled out of bidding several large projects as a result of low-ballers and “construction whores” coming from as far away as Michigan looking for work.

As for the businesses in our area, I would say that at least 15% have closed up shop, with several malls in our area at less than 50% occupancy. 11 auto dealerships have folded in the last 30 weeks, forcing even more folks into an already bleak jobs market and forcing wages down as a result. With a dearth of jobs, and no real recovery in sight, I would like to have someone explain to me all of these rosy numbers and predictions.

Until then, they can feed their Pollyanna bullshit somewhere else ‘cause I’m not buying.

Personal Responsibility Rant

2009-07-30T16:17:00.001-04:00

Where has personal responsibility gone? We had a heated discussion over lunch today [myself and a liberal co-worker] about the trillion dollar deficits and our administration’s plans to continue them in the name of governmental altruism. We were talking about the various requirements that have been placed into the health care bill which would severely impact our small business, but soon segued into an argument over welfare and welfare reform.

It is my colleagues opinion that we all “owe” it to the “poor, sick and disenfranchised [??]” to help them out and everyone should be willing to give more of their paycheck for social services and “entitlements”. He stated that it was our responsibility to feed, clothe, provide health care for and house all of the aforementioned classes, simply because we make a good living. When I asked him to give me a better definition of disenfranchised he said, “Well, there are lots of people who didn’t graduate high school, and they’re stuck in crappy low paying jobs, there’s also a lot of people who have too many kids and can’t work because they can’t afford day care for them”.

This statement was kind of the straw that broke the camels back for me. When I asked him how many additional kids a person who absolutely depends on welfare should be allowed to have, he replied, “As many as they want”. There are actually people in this country who ignore the fact that welfare payments, food stamps and the like come out of our taxes, and the more we give out, the more we have to pay to cover these “entitlements”. It is Bob’s opinion that just because someone decided to smoke dope and drop out we should be responsible for subsidizing his rent, food and health care. He further opined that it is a woman’s right to bear as many children as she wants without regard to ability to either care for them, house them or feed them. This is what welfare is for according to Bob.

When do we require personal responsibility of our citizenry? When have they taken enough money out of my pocket? It is my opinion that anyone who receives government welfare or government subsidies should be responsible and hold off having even more babies until they are financially able to care for them and feed them with their own money. I support a kind of means test before doling out tax money to a lot of the people who currently receive it. For instance, I perform drug testing on my employees before they can work at our firm, and then test them randomly throughout their employment. If someone pops for drugs or alcohol, they are fired. Why can’t we drug and alcohol test recipients of our tax money? How many people would fall off the welfare rolls if this were instituted?

As for the “disenfranchised”, those who chose their lot in life should have to live with it. I am far less than sympathetic to someone who has money for cigarettes and beer, but cries about his financial condition. The desire to work has to be there for one to lift themselves out of poverty. I have several employees who always have enough scratch to buy smokes, beer and lottery tickets, but complain about their rent and electric bills, and blaming their lot in life on others.

While I am somewhat ambivalent about the whole welfare thing, I believe there must be a reverse means test for those who want the taxpayer to foot their bills and it should include a personal responsibility profile and drug test.

My Karma Ate My Dogma

2009-07-21T17:32:00.001-04:00

We go through our lives on this planet, using the gift of speech to convey thoughts and desires, hopefully getting the point across each time we speak. This week, several clever but axiomatic sayings came to mind while I was performing another pro-bono service for my daughter’s 4-H group. To give a little background, their group was given carte blanche use of a 5 acre parcel of land in semi rural Cocoa Florida to use for their horse barn and 4-H activities. All of the work that went in to making this place habitable and suitable for raising horses was donated by good folks with the best of intentions. The land was cleared of deleterious material and invasive Brazilian Pepper trees, and a six stall pole barn was erected. Everything was donated. It was our assumption [I know, I know] that land zoned as residential agricultural did not require a permit to construct a pole barn. We were wrong. Our southern neighbor, who was upset that we cleared the pepper trees along the fence row has started a proxy war with us through the local code enforcement folks. Four times in three weeks, this man has called to complain about some insignificant thing or another, and each time we have been cited for some money gathering infraction, requiring payment of fees, penalties and re-inspection fees on top of the other fees.

Flash forward four weeks. When my 14 year old daughter came home in tears, telling my wife and me that “We have to tear down the barn and get rid of the horses” I decided to get involved and try to mend the fence with the neighbor and make the situation right with the County officials. Day one, I walked to the property next door to meet this man in person and find out what exactly we were doing that was so bothersome as to require multiple phone calls to the authorities, complaining about nickel and dime infractions. His answer was, “I don’t want a bunch of kids making noise all the time, get off my property before I call the Sheriff”. Hmmmmmmmm…………………I thought…Karma will eventually catch up with this guy, he is just plain mean hearted.

I went home and discussed the situation with the wife, and we resolved to fix the situation for the sake of the kids. These children are engaged in the noble pursuit of working with animals and learning to be good stewards of our planet, which I believe far better than the typical activities [nowadays anyway] pursued by children, wasting his/her time watching video games and smoking dope. Additionally, I was pretty pissed that the neighbors had decided to try and run us off because they wanted to have the whole area all to themselves, irrespective of the activities going on next door, and the good that happens in our community as a direct result of the kids in 4-H. War had been declared on our children by a selfish old man, who was unwilling to discuss our position or explore any solutions to his selfish desire to keep the land next to his vacant.

The County gave us two weeks to have blueprints drawn up and stamped by a licensed engineer, have a complete survey performed including; survey of the boundary, FEMA flood zone information, elevation of buildings on all adjacent properties [watershed rules], location of all culverts on, along or within 500’ of the property, location and elevations of all structures on the property [our humble little pole barn] and have it certified by the County. Along with this, we had to pay an exorbitant fine of $750.00, pay double fees for not getting a permit in the first place [another $925.00] and pay inspection fees of $75.00 per inspection. By the time we finished tallying up all of the damage, and what it would all cost [engineer, architect, surveyor etc.] I was so fucking mad I couldn’t see straight, and the group leaders, two dedicated and caring women from our community were in tears. I told everyone to just calm down, and that I would straighten the whole thing out, I just need a week or so to round up some help.

Back a the office, I made some calls and called in a lot of favors, and got some favors that I didn’t even ask for. Simply telling the story to some of my colleagues was enough to elicit an offer of help. Within four days, I had commitments from an architect, engineer, and land surveyor to donate their services to the cause. My workers have also pitched in and volunteered to perform all of the up-grading we will need to perform to bring the stables up to the 140 MPH wind load requirements and paint the barn. We will have an Amish style “barn raising” next Sunday if all goes well on Monday at the County and we are issued a permit. We will pre-stage all of the equipment and materials we need, set up a bar-b-que grill for feeding the troops and the kids will be helpers. My entire professional community and blue collar community is stepping up and volunteering some service or another, all in the name of helping our kids and community.

Here’s where the Karma part kicks in. As part of the survey the County requires, we are to locate all of the property boundaries, septic systems on adjacent properties [well restrictions regarding proximity], elevations of finished floors of all adjoining properties and set-back measurements of structures on our properties and adjacent properties. Well as it turns out, Mister Chapped Ass next door never pulled a permit for his septic tank, which is located too close to both his well and our well, never got a permit to place his double wide trailer on the property, located his trailer twenty feet too close to our fence line, built his own barn without a permit and twenty feet too close to our fence line and illegally enlarged his pond [a BIG NO NO here in Florida].

When the surveyor came to the property and gave us the sealed copy we need to submit for approval, he informed us of these deficiencies that our neighbor has, and told us he is required by the State of Florida to report this to the County for disposition. It seems that had our neighbor decided to be a good person instead of a prick, he would be sitting in his Barcalounger with a cold beer watching the tube tonight. Instead, he has to demolish his barn and move it 20 feet south, move his trailer, dig up his septic tank and field and apply for multiple permits because he decided to be an asshole rather than work out a dispute with a neighbor. This will cost him upwards of twenty five thousand dollars in fines and fees, and I am quite certain he doesn’t have the money. On our side of the fence, we have over twenty people who care about one another and the community enough to help a group of kids become better citizens.

Karma, you ‘gotta love it!

Thursday Health Care Rant

2009-07-16T19:21:00.001-04:00

I have been busy at work and unable to find time to post, so sorry about the unexplained absence....

Today was another hot and steamy Florida day, and so I worked indoors at the computer rather than begin our annual inventory, which would have forced me to work in oppressive heat and get chapped ass cheeks from the sweat. I handed off the inventory to a junior manager and began preparing our work plan for demolition of the Vertical Processing Facility [Space Shuttle Program]. This will most likely prove to be the most interesting dismantlement we have ever performed. The day was proceeding well and I was getting a lot of work accomplished……right up until lunch time.

At lunch today, Bob, Mike and I got in to another discussion about health care, with Bob taking his usual socialistic supportive position that “No one person should be permitted to earn more than 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars a year, and so it is absolutely fair to “tax them into oblivion” to pay for health care fro folks who either cannot afford insurance or find it is more important to buy cigarettes, beer and new games for their X-box than purchase a health care plan. As usual, the conversation became quite heated and I had to walk away from the table because I wanted to slap the shit out of my associate right there at the table.

Since when did it become MY responsibility to take care of other people? When did it become the right of the government to remove money from my pocket just because I happen to be more productive than other people, to fund a program or to give relief? Why do people think that personal responsibility is no longer a requirement of Americans? According to Bob, the government was founded [I swear he said this] “To take care of all Americans”. I asked him where in the Constitution it says that the government has the right to take my money and do with it as they please, and he replied, “The government can do whatever they want, because if people need something then it is the responsibility of the government and every American to help”. I repeated my question, and got the following response, “Everyone has the right to health care, and if they can’t afford it, then we should have a tax to pay for it”. Again, I asked him where this was written, and he went off into a speech about how the greedy elitists have all the money because of this and because of that….never answering my question.

Bob is a prime example of a person who was raised in a liberal democratic household in Massachusetts, and worked a union job for 17 years before joining our firm [his eldest brother is my partner and the majority owner]. His viewpoints are wrapped around a Ted Kennedy mentality of take from those who produce and give to those who do not, because that is the right thing to do. His opinion is that if someone works a job and makes four hundred thousand dollars a year, they should expect to pay at least half of that back in taxes, because “they don’t need to have that much money”. These are quotes from a 45 year old college educated man.

The political parties think that since there is a hell of a lot more poor people than there are rich people, they can take from one rich man, give the money to ten poor people or illegal aliens and those people will repay them with reelection. I believe it to be that simple. Both Democrats and Republicans have the same MO. Screw the common man, because there is absolutely nothing they can do. If you raise your objections, you are ignored, called a crackpot, terrorist or bombarded with lawsuits that you cannot afford to win. Defeat by dollars.

While I can’t say that I feel very sorry for the über rich, those making tens of millions of dollars a year, I can say that those who work hard, pay for a good education and produce something with their life deserve to keep what they earn. Who are we to say how much is too much? Is a million dollars a year too much? Half a million? Who would set these subjective guidelines? We are a small business by the SBA definition, and will be devastated with this new requirement to provide health care to our employees. As it is, we are paying a broom pushing laborer over $22 an hour at the Space Center because of the Davis Bacon Wage Rate Act, and it is absolutely unconscionable that I would be subjected to adding another layer of perks on top of what is a ridiculous wage standard for common labor, often performed by folks who decided not to finish school.

In the United States, we are guaranteed “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, not three hots and a cot, with cable television and on-call doctors. When people remove all requirement for individuals to exercise personal responsibility and place the onus on government to provide for people, we become slaves. When the government becomes the decision maker in our lives about something as personal and private as medical treatment, and the requirements that have been written into this insidious bit of legislation, all is lost. When our government gets the power over our very health, we will then be subject to the whim of the administration when it comes to getting a lung transplant, cancer treatment, a hip replacement or any other of a million procedures now performed in the medic al profession. We will become a number, a subject of the government. Without the right to freely choose who will provide our care, we lose a piece of our identity.

The health care problem is something that has been brewing for a long, long time and it cannot be undone overnight, but it can be undone. I believe that fixing a few medical related issues and instituting tort reforms will go a long way in reducing the overall cost of receiving medical treatment in the U.S.

Malpractice lawsuits have become so absolutely ridiculous as to boggle the mind. By reducing maximum payouts, and forbidding “ambulance chasing” [i.e. TV or other advertising] to fish for clients, we would automatically reduce the number of lawsuits. By forbidding automatic out of court settlements the incentive for lawyers would be significantly reduced. If lawyers were forced to present cases before a jury, many cases would not be taken on in the first place.
Institute a large fine for filing frivolous lawsuits. By ending the “lawsuit lottery” we will reduce the burden on insurers. By getting in the pockets of attorneys who file endless frivolous lawsuits because the insurance companies know it is cheaper to settle for twenty or thirty grand than it is to fight, more lawyers will think longer about filing in the first place.
Make penalties for insurance fraud extreme. I mean hard time in the penitentiary. This will reduce costs as well. Companies who fraudulently bill insurance companies should be closed down, and the owners jailed. No exceptions. Reduce the reward for crime, and you reduce the incidence of that crime.
Eliminate the health care giants and return competition to the industry. Kaiser Permanente, Blue cross etc. have way too much control over the industry, which has become exclusively about profits, at the expense of individual health. Competition sparks lower prices.
Outlaw the practice of “profit denial” of coverage. It should be illegal to deny coverage to or drop coverage on a person because they come down with a particular illness.
Eliminate the laws prohibiting interstate coverage. If insurers want to sell plans from Florida to a man in Texas, then so be it.
Permit any demographic area to form a group, sort of like the “credit Union Model”, so that rates can be reduced to manageable levels. Even better, require insurers to price insurance the same way to individuals as they do to groups.

A few simple changes to the existing rules and laws on the books would make insurance affordable to all. We do not need additional promises by our government that we cannot afford to pay for. In my opinion, the Single Payer System is flawed beyond repair and will do nothing but reduce the level of care we receive and eliminate choice.

Sorry about the rant.

Wednesday Rant

2009-07-08T19:23:00.001-04:00

It’s Wednesday, and the rain is coming down in buckets here in “Sunny Florida”. I’m sitting in my office penning this weeks missive, and getting ready to crack open a frosty cold beer.

The markets have been pretty neurotic this week, with the PPT taking their usual aggressive action between 2:30 and 3:30 this afternoon. Gold and silver are getting a thrashing in the U.S. markets after moving up overseas. This is the pattern; up overseas in overnight trading, and then put to death in the U.S. and London markets. They don’t even try to conceal what they are doing anymore, they just do it. That the CFTC turns a blind eye to the action is testimony to the fact that they do not care one whit about the individual investor, just their banking masters [with whom they dream of eventual employment]. Along with the manipulation we have the upper 1% of corporate insiders dumping stock as fast as they can. Telling us something maybe?

We were told a few days ago that an ex-Goldman employee had disseminated a critical trading code that could be used to “gain an unfair advantage” in the market. Hmmmmmmm. This is interesting because it paints the picture of evil that the world has been talking about for some time now. The Goldman Empire has been subverting the market for their own gain for a long time, and now they have all but admitted to manipulating the markets with this insidious set of algorithms. Rather than subpoena the algorithms to study how they work [and see if the patterns are illegal], they have arrested the individual in question and stolen his freedom; on an accusation. This man is being held in a jail, and his computers have been seized, purportedly to see if he sent this code to others or posted it on any websites. It seems to me that the party to be investigated is Goldman……but that’s just my opinion.

On another note, there is a lot of blather about a second stimulus brewing on the Hill. This is just what we do not need. The world is tiring of our arrogance and is making it clear through reduced purchases of long dated treasuries that our money printing will not be tolerated for long. The Chinese have said outright that they are looking for an alternative to the dollar and have begun a program of trading in Remnimbi rather than dollars. This is important because China is our largest trading partner and we are their largest market. With “consumer” [I hate that title] spending falling off the proverbial cliff, the future is dire for us and our “prisoner partners” who hold enormous reserves of our currency. When the deleveraging out of dollars begins in earnest, and all of those dollars are repatriated, we will see that inflation the Fed so desperately wants. The trouble is that it will be an event so profoundly huge that the foundations of our economy will be split in two, with most of our savings wiped out in a very short time. Think weeks, not months.

One should be looking to maintain cash on hand of around five or six grand, food reserves for a year and a pile of silver or gold to fall back on. The dollar is in deep trouble and the government is asleep at the wheel [as usual]. We get platitudes and promises instead of reform and spending cuts. Rather than give Afghanistan back to the Afghani’s, we are throwing another hundred billion dollars at a war in a country that has never been conquered in modern times. Men on horseback have defeated the mighty Russian army and will do the same to America. In Iraq, the corruption at every level removes all possibility of the different Muslim sects living in peace together, so unless we intend to stay there indefinitely, committing unlimited resources to keeping the peace and brokering endless agreements between the various factions, we may as well turn the reins over to the indigenous population and let them duke it out amongst themselves. The Afghani’s and Iraqi’s both hate us with every fiber of their being and wish us nothing but harm, therefore I believe the world will be best served by our immediate departure.

Instead of informing the People of the U.S. about the demonic legislation being foisted upon the American People, legislation that will likely double our energy costs over the next few years, the media is intensely focused on the circus that Michael Jackson’s funeral has become. Rather than disseminate to us the insidious items hidden in the two pieces of legislation wending their way through the houses of Congress, we are fed three minute sound bites of minutia and ‘newstainment’ spouted by the likes of Nancy Grace. We see the world famous race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson declare that “Michael was killed by greedy doctors and greedy promoters”. In fine fashion, we are informed about the collision of two trams at Disney world and the guest list at the Jackson circus, but not a word about the groundbreaking story of the stolen algorithm that Goldman uses to steal nickels out of our pockets one at a time using program trading.

We have become a sound bite nation, accustomed to getting the “facts” from smiling newstainment announcers, presuming that they would never lie to us.

Personally, I am very distressed about the track we have embarked upon in this nation and fear that the end game is in play for the economy. We are in a depression that will assume historic proportions and affect the entire world. When the U.S. stops consuming, the balance of the world starves. Witness the riots in western China, and the reasons given for sparking them. Work. It is simple and tragic. The Chinese are joined at the hip with us whether they like it or not and there is precious little that they can do about it. At my firm, we often worry about having too many eggs in one basket, preferring to sub-contract environmental work through multiple firms, rather than set ourselves up with a single, large “sugar daddy”. We do this for exactly the reasons that China wants to diversify out of her holdings a the present. If your benefactor runs in to trouble, you are ultimately in the same trouble. Just like Madame Clinton said, “Whither goes America, so goes China”. *I expect to see a hell of a lot more unrest this summer, and not just in China. Everywhere raw materials are produced to supply the Big Red Machine, there will be suffering. Without the U.S. “consumer” to kick around, there will be less money across the board for the entire world.

Get ready boys and girls, it is about to get very interesting out there.

Get and hold silver, gold and food……you’re going to need them all.

Absolutely Pathetic

2009-06-30T09:37:00.001-04:00

Our nation has become a pathetic shadow of it's former self. We have become paralyzed by the opiate that is television, unable to move from in front of it. We are drunk on the news of Michael Jackson and Hannah Montana, unable to concentrate of the real ills of our nation.Our economy is in tatters, yet we are told by talking heads with big gleaming smiles not to worry. It will all be better in a few months they say, we're on the right track we hear. Rather than focus on real issues such as a complete moral failure and the near outlawing of religion, we focus on the idiotic. My wife recently watched a show on the idiot box called ‘Bridezillas’. This show is dedicated to filming spoiled rotten selfish bitches throughout the process of spending unholy sums of money on their weddings. That show is the anthem for America now. It illustrates with great clarity the selfish, arrogant fat bastards we have become, and just how much we take for granted all of the liberties we have [left].I cannot for the life of me understand why there is no honest and open debate over this socialized medicine debacle currently under consideration by the houses of Congress. This bill promises to up-end health care in this country, yet all we get is five minute sound bites. A bill for cap and trade is also before the houses for consideration. This bill will do absolutely nothing for Americans except vault the price of just about everything to new highs and strip the middle class of a little more wealth. Instead of debating the merits of these pieces of legislation, we stare at the TV and take in the images, as if somehow we can live vicariously through the caricatures portrayed there. Without any serious debate, these bills will be foisted upon us as law, and we will have our choices stripped away. The POTUS does not believe the citizens of the U.S. are intelligent enough to make their own choices, so he has decided to make them for us. We have become numbed by the barrage of spending by this administration, we haven’t bothered to consider the consequences. Our prime benefactor, China, is quietly and efficiently divesting herself of dollars, because they know we can no longer sustain our profligate ways. This nation needs to wake the hell up and smell the coffee. We are on a path to self immolation and the Government is throwing on the gasoline. Cap and Trade along with socialized medicine will be the match that ignites the fire. Unless the Congress votes this legislation down, we can expect to become wards of the state, every one of us. Our medical information will be available to any doctor who requests it, and our privacy forever lost to a government agency. Cap and Trade will end up as another regressive tax that effects those who can least afford it. Along with the taxes, it will chase even more industry to third world backwater countries who will allow them to emit all the Co2 they want, and ignore all of the environmental protections in place in the U.S. If we the People do not act, the out of control government will.

Michael Jackson: My Opinion

2009-06-26T14:49:00.003-04:00

I was never a fan of the Jackson 5 or of Michael Jackson growing up. As an adult, I did not grow to like the music they produced, leaning towards classical and blues instead. Either way, I have read a number of tributes and testimonials on quite a few news networks and websites extolling the virtue, talent and tragedy that was Michael Jackson.

I don’t get it folks……I really don’t. When all is said and done, M.J. did nothing more than any other rock group; he made and sold records. That is the sum of it. He did not produce a new medicine, he did not invent a better solar cell, he did not develop a hardier strain of wheat; he sang songs.

Here is a strange caricature of a man, beset by a hatred for his own visage so powerful that he spent all of his adult life trying to transform himself from a black man into a white woman. Michael devoted his energies not toward the betterment of mankind, but to the construction of monuments to self. He lavished tens of millions on himself in well publicized shopping sprees, during which he purchased things of extraordinary cost not because he had any need for them, but simply because he could. His temple to himself, “Never Land”, stands as a testimonial to his self aggrandizement and his sustained fantasy of remaining a child forever. No one bothered to tell him that monkeys, giraffes, zebras and carnival rides cannot stop the ticking of the clock.

His seeming inability to reconcile with becoming an adult, led him to pursue children in a voracious and un-healthy manner. These pursuits led to multiple accusations of molestation, accusations which ultimately destroyed his career and drove him into exile in the Middle East. While in Bahrain, he made promises to a Sheikh to write his memoirs, do a movie and perform. These promises were broken when he returned to the United States, conveniently forgetting about the millions of dollars the Sheikh loaned him during his stay.

Whether he was unable or unwilling to produce children in the traditional manner I do not know. I do know that he paid women to bear children for him, stripped them of their parental rights using money and coercion and brought the children back to his ‘Temple to Self’, to be raised by a series of Nannies and Butlers. These children were forced to wear scarves over their heads, obscuring their faces from view. He was snapped while dangling one of them [as an infant] over a balcony rail at a hotel. They were given weird names, in true Michael Jackson tradition. Blanket and Prince Michael come to mind. How the hell do you go through life with the name Blanket?? His farcical marriage to the daughter of Elvis didn’t fool anyone. I believe it was an attempt to stave off rumors of homosexuality and/or paedophilia, but have no actual basis in fact.

In the end, he died.

After plowing through three quarters of a billion dollars he earned, and half a billion dollars he borrowed, he left this planet not better than he found it, but worse. The trail of lawsuits over the scraps will be legend. The children will suffer the most, because when you are as high profile as he was, the public will only remember the weird shit you did during your life, not the quirky songs that made him millions of dollars. The library of his music will most likely be granted to those who possess his debts, leaving his children to fend for themselves or to leech off of relatives. All of the faithful followers and nannies will disappear along with the money.

There will be an autopsy, accusations and recriminations. There will be lawsuits and investigations. What we will find out is what we already knew, that Michael Jackson died as a result of his own profligacy.

Why I Am Grateful

2009-06-24T15:25:00.002-04:00

As a kid, the Old Man would scold us for not finishing our supper with the usual admonition, “There are starving kids in Africa who would love to have those carrots for dinner, so stop whining and finish up”! Those words echoed in my ears the other day while having lunch with my partner at a local bistro. I watched as a group of ‘twenty something’s’ ordered their lunch and began chattering about all of the important things they were doing and the dragons that remained to be slain. Mike was the first to notice, when he said “There is no way they will be able to eat all of that food…..what a friggin waste”. I glanced over and saw a table full of plates, loaded with catch of the day, crudités, cheese whipped potatoes and other culinary delights. I agreed, then shrugged it off. What business is it of mine if they want to blow their hard earned cash on what will become dumpster fodder?

Mike and I talked shop while we waited for our orders, but I couldn’t help but glance over at the kiddies table from time to time, checking on their progress. After we received our orders and began to eat, the waitress brought the bill to the other table. True to his statement, about half of the food was abandoned in place, and the young people at the table simply walked away with full bellies, unaware of the starving kids in Africa.

I began to think about the wasted food, although I’m not sure why it bothered me so much, I was sure the catalyst was the Old Man’s words from so many years ago. I thought of my own family, and the rules we have for our own household. In Anconaland, we do not waste food capriciously; if we make it, we eat it. Most of our friends are the same way, waste not – want not, is the common mantra.

Throughout the afternoon, the image of all that food going to waste haunted my thoughts. When I got home, I called a buddy of mine about something unrelated and segued into the food thing. We both agreed that the wasteful attitude many Americans have directly affects global perception of our Citizens. It is widely believed in Europe and Asia that Americans are arrogant, wasteful and conceited. We are looked down upon in many regions as a result of this perception, whether it is deserved or not.

My friend then said something I didn’t quite expect; “I am grateful for what I have, and thank God Almighty every day that He permits me to continue to have the highest standard of living in the civilized world, and those who would waste the bounty that is placed under their noses for the taking, deserve what they get. In the end, what they get will be poverty, because those who are not grateful for the gifts they are given, will most likely lose those gifts.” I thought about it for a minute and realized what he said was absolutely true. So many folks take for granted the gift of relative wealth and feel entitled to waste whatever they want. I see neighbors watering their lawns with automatic sprinklers….in the rain. There are folks who go shopping just for the sake of spending money, and then they cry to Congress that their interest rate on credit cards is unfair.

I am grateful for what I have, and will continue to be so. I am grateful for the skill sets I have and will continue to work at mastering them, and to pass them on to my daughter. I am grateful for the excess bounty I have, which enables me to prepare for the hard times coming our way, and will continue to add to the preparations as long as we have that excess capacity to do so. I am grateful for my friends and the companionship, loyalty and community they give my family. Without friends, life is all but meaningless. The ability to share and fellowship is what makes us whole.

I refuse to join the masses who believe they are ‘entitled’ to anything from our government or society at large. I do not demand respect I earn it, and am grateful when I receive it. My family has been blessed with a good life, a good home, the intelligence and understanding required to eliminate debt and debt servitude from our lives. With luck and some repetition, I believe these lessons will stick with my daughter, who will pass them on to her own children some day.

We are given a short time on this planet, and I for one choose not to waste it. Our resources are finite and should be managed as such. Greed and selfishness have no place in a polite society, rather we need to embrace brotherhood and seek to be good stewards of Spaceship Earth, because failure to do so means the end of our civilization. We are traveling down a road to great changes and civil upheaval in the United States, indeed the whole world. Macro economic momentum points to a severely curtailed standard of living and the rise of the police state. Those who would demand entitlements will be confronted by those who would be forced to pay for them, and they will most likely lose. Hard working Americans are growing weary of subsidizing an “entitled class” who have no concept of where the money comes from, only that they feel “entitled” to it.

I intend to maintain proper perspective, and remain grateful for all that I have, and will feel entitled to nothing that I have not earned.

Happy Thursday, A Rant

2009-06-18T17:30:00.000-04:00

I was lucky enough to spend my day out at the Space Center, on the Cape Canaveral Air Station side, walking down a project at Launch Complex 37A. This is part of the Titan Program, and I got to see it up-close and personal. There is a “bird” on the pad right now, awaiting a launch date later in the month, and I was escorted to within inches of it this morning. Picture taking is frowned upon at the pad [by armed and dour looking Air Force personnel] when a vehicle is fueled and ready, for obvious reasons, so there will be no pics to go with this rant. The whole thing was so intensely interesting, I forgot about the oppressive heat and 92% humidity for a while, and just marveled at the technology for the duration of my visit. We were on site to look at some repairs that need to be made on the pad surface, as a result of the incredible dynamic pressures exerted at each launch.

Once complete, we returned to the operations building, went over the plans and specifications and adjourned our visit. On the way back to the office, I watched as tourists and locals alike fished, swam and boated in the Indian River, which flows against the causeway leading from the Cape to the mainland. I wished I was out there along side them, up to my waist in the water fishing for ‘reds’. Then, all of a sudden like, it struck me that there were maybe twice as many folks as usual, and I wondered how many of them were fishing for sustenance, and how many were swimming and boating because they had no job, and thus nothing better to do.

Back at the office, I spoke with colleagues about my thoughts, and we ended up in a half hour discussion about the unemployment situation in our area. It seems that the BLS is getting the numbers wrong, because everyone had a story of a neighbor, friend or relative who was recently laid off, lost their business or going through bankruptcy. Each week we are fed numbers that are massaged to include 200 to 250 thousand ‘mystery jobs’ that somehow appear magically to replace some of the massive losses reported to the agency.

When taken into perspective, it would seem that the BLS needs to change their algorithm to show the true state of our economy, instead of hiding the truth and publishing the monthly mendacity. I personally, have grown disgusted with our administration, the continuing concentration of financial power into the hands of those who should be trusted with it the least and the slow and painful destruction of our dollar.

I am weary of a government that has become more interested in paying favors to campaign donors than doing service in the name of the people. It has become a government by the rich and well connected, bent on leaching every last cent out of the pocketbooks of the middle class, and the destruction of our constitution.

A bill in the house which is under consideration, House Resolution 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act will remove our rights as citizens to grow a garden, raise a chicken, make butter or do anything in the realm of food production without certifications, payment of fees, government inspections etcetera. This insidious piece of legislation was crafted by Monsanto, and will destroy our rights to eat organically produced foods, require livestock to be fed antibiotics, whether they need them or not and to report any and all food growing or livestock raising activities to the government.

Folks, this creeping fascism will destroy the fabric of society, and force upon American Citizens a set of requirements so onerous, that the only organizations that will be able to afford compliance will be agribusinesses, the same businesses who contributed enough money to congressional campaign coffers to force this piece of shit legislation down the throats of Americans.

House resolution 875, will be the death of millions of people. The act allows warrant less federal inspector entry on the “farm” 24 hours a day and without prior notice. It includes fines of 1,000,000 dollars for non compliance, and or forfeiture of the farm. This bill must be stopped. It can be read in its entirety here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-875

The lying, covering up and massive power grabs must be stopped. Unemployment will continue to climb until we vote these clowns out of office, and replace them with new blood. The Pelosi’s, Kennedy’s and Franks of the world need to be put on notice, that we will not tolerate their bullshit any longer.

Join the fight.

Introducing the Honeywell Wind Turbine from EarthTronics

2009-06-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

Introducing the Honeywell Wind Turbine from EarthTronics

I thought I would share what appears to be a revolutionary new way to collect electricity by way o fthe wind. This uniquely designed turbine bypasses the traditional gearing and transmissions of older style prop-drive mills.

Have a look and judge for yourselves.

I'm sold.

The Great Health Care Swindle

2009-06-13T13:18:00.004-04:00

We have been informed by those we irresponsibly elected to positions of great power in our nation, that we will soon be subject to complete governmental regulation of our health care system and the due rationing of the same. Without the vote of the People who would be pick-pocketed to pay for this extravagance [American workers] they have groomed an army of sophists to misinform the public and soothe our souls with heartbreaking stories of diabetic grandmothers and cancer stricken babies. They are deliberate in their methods, subtly portraying those with insurance as somehow responsible, if in some small way, for those who cannot afford or choose not to purchase insurance. They tell us the cost of care will fall dramatically, and all Americans will be covered, irrespective of ability to pay.

The cost of this program, it has been explained, will not be borne by the individual rather it will be borne by business and the balance of the American collective. As if these “businesses” will somehow quietly absorb the cost, and continue quietly as if nothing has happened. For every individual in the U.S. with insurance, there are approximately two without. This means that one third of America will receive the privilege of paying for the other two thirds. Whether through additional taxes, or radical increases in the cost of goods and services, rest assured that we will all pay, and pay dearly at that.

The single least efficient entity on this continent is the U.S. Government. Unable to reach agreements on the simplest of matters, we are supposed to believe the Government will be capable of operating a health care system for three hundred and fifty million souls. The mendacity coming out of our nations capital is absolutely astounding these days. Our pay-as-we-go President, wants to “borrow” six hundred and fifty billion dollars to kick-start this abomination of a rationed care system. The Democratic [and some Republican] Congress is actually going to go along with this scheme. They are absolutely delighted that yet another facet of our private lives will now be under government control.

The possibilities are absolutely frightening. How long will it be before they construct a genetic library on every American Citizen? With the government in control, ,it is not only possible, but likely. How long before the “health czar” announces cut-off ages for certain procedures such as hip replacement, heart valve surgery, cancer treatment? What will stop them from making justifications for reducing or rationing care based upon “value” decisions and cost, over mercy and provision of the very best care?

Should this go to a national ballot? I believe it should.

Friday Fun!

2009-06-12T17:09:00.003-04:00

It’s Friday at last. Having no intention to work yet another weekend, I plan to take my daughter to the range with her Ruger 10-22, to sharpen up her already keen shooting skills. Truth be told, the little brat is better than I am; quite the sniper at 100 yards. Today was another typical Florida summer day, at 95 degrees and 90% humidity, it feels like I’m in fucking Cambodia wandering the jungle. Tomorrow should offer a few degrees respite, and we will have an easterly kick up by early afternoon to stir the atmosphere into producing some cooling showers.

The range we belong to is a nice affair, tucked away at the edge of un-buildable Florida muck lands, along side the Florida Sheriff range. We have a number of ranges, but my daughter and I like the 100 yard rifle, 200 yard rifle and the 200 yard sighting in ranges. We have a 600 yard sanctioned range, but I need to prove my worth and skill before being permitted access. While not in a hurry to use it, I am curious if I am good enough to even hit a target at 600 yards [using irons only]. Anyway, it’s near the end of a classic day at our office, and the folks are trickling out the door one by one, with quick a synopsis of their plans, sort of a one-up if you will. We had a rough week, so I let them win. As a matter of fact, it was a 78 hour grind fest, as we cranked out a number of bids and waited nervously as results rolled slowly in.

By Wednesday, I was told by a little birdie that a Prime Contractor with whom I priced a 1.2 million dollar deconstruction and site remediation/restoration project out at NASA won the bid, and was an absolute wreck by late Thursday when we received the call from them. It turns out that we will be awarded the entire project as sub-contractor to them. They were in a group of eight IDIQ contractors who were given the job to bid. Most of them use us on a regular basis to perform their demolition and site remediation. When I bid projects this large [well it’s large for our firm anyway] there is always a certain amount of self doubt that goes along with submitting the price. “Did I miss something”? “Did I double check all of the drawings to make sure they were all full scale, and not half scale”? After all of the worry, I found out the range between the five players in the money was only around 4%, which means we were extremely tight. In fact, our closest competition was a mere 14 thousand lower than us. Unfortunately, their bid was a mere 90 seconds late, and was refused.

I imagine my competition had an aneurism when he found out, but as they say……time to get a new watch pal! So, my job assured for yet another quarter, I leave the office with a smile on my face and lots of hand shakes and back pats. In fact, the Old Man and I just blasted a shot of 24 year old single malt scotch in celebration. This project puts me at around a hundred thousand over my usual 2.5 mil for the first six months, and relieves a lot of anxiety. It has been a weird year to say the absolute least, but now I have regained some hope for the fourth quarter. July through September is the Federal Government fiscal fourth quarter, and the historical dumping ground for dollars each year. We usually pick up 2/3 of our back-log during these three months. This year, the pressure is off, which I hope makes the “bidding season” that much more comfortable for me.

Anyway, it’s good to feel human again, and allow all of the pressure that has been building for 25 weeks blow off. I’ve ‘gotta say though, when it’s good……………it’s really good!

Entropy, A Wednesday Rant

2009-06-10T18:44:00.000-04:00

There is ill-defined and increasing entropy in the U.S. financial system today, and the nervousness among economists and laymen alike is palpable. All of the recent talk of bankrupt auto manufacturers, and the subsequent request for up to ten billion [additional] dollars from the government by a bloc of parts makers has the talking heads confused. They were told a story about green shoots and reported it, now the tune is changing. More and more economists agree that the banking sector has been fatally wounded, and must be kept on life support for many years to come. This life support, trillions of dollars stolen from our children and grandchildren, can never be paid back in full. The hypertrophic credit default swap market will be tested for soundness this month, as wagers placed on Chrysler and GM are called in. It is presumed that as much as 350 billion dollars in swaps were purchased against the failure of these two American Icons, and most of those were betting on failure.

Our own Federal Reserve has hired a P.R. woman to try and boost their public image, a move that will likely backfire. The presumption should be that they are working in the best interests of the United States, but the fact is they are working in the best interests of the corporate elite and unseen decision-makers who are not among the democratically elected. The incest between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury/Fed is quite astounding and has recently been openly questioned on a number of Libertarian leaning websites. We are told that this is the status quo, and to mind our business. Never mind the mendacity and fraud known to have been perpetrated against an unwitting public, never mind that hundreds of billions of dollars were washed through the failed AIG into the back doors of Merrill, Goldman and Bank of America.

There are rumblings about foreign sovereign gold repatriation that cannot be made as a result of U.S. gold “loans” and leases. This gold has been lent and leased to the very same banks previously mentioned to suppress the price of gold, reducing the motivation of investors to seek safe haven through gold investments. Germany has openly demanded return of gold held in various vaults on U.S. soil, as have other sovereigns. Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have also demanded return of their gold holdings from vaults operated by HSBC, another zombie bank being propped up by the Crown. I will posit that this gold will never be repatriated because it simply does not exist any longer. The flurry of gold ETF’s which erupted at the beginning of the new millennia claim to have collectively added more than 1,550 tons of gold to their vaults, with HSBC claiming the largest single portion of that. To be clear, 1,600 tons of gold is 3,200,000 pounds, or 51,200,000 ounces. That my friends is a shitload of gold. Ninety percent of this gold is supposedly held in HSBC vaults, in deep storage. Just as on the Comex, naked shorting of shares in these “trusts” is tacitly permitted, adding to the ability of sovereign nations [read: the United States Government] to further suppress the price of physical gold and silver. When the fraud is finally exposed, and rest assured that it will, the outcry will be heard around the world. The U.S. and Great Britain will be holding the bag for four decades of scheming and lying to the world and our markets will lose what remains of the public trust. Many of these ETF’s do not even deliver gold, they are merely paper certificates that say you own gold, and you cannot stand for delivery. This permits them to sell many multiples more than they actually have, knowing that only a fraction of certificate holders will sell at any one time. These ETF’s along with the Comex will fall like dominoes if the U.S. does not deliver custodial gold that has been requested.

Each day brings new frauds and Ponzi schemes out into the light for examination, yet the mainstream media would rather remain focused on the non-existent green shoots and the latest Hannah Montana photo shoot. We will probably never see those responsible for the destruction of our financial system and the depression at our doorstep face a judge, because they are so intertwined with the highest positioned people in government that to prosecute them would bring down our entire system.

We are at the front of a paradigm shift which will change the order of precedence in the world. America will be passed by China for sure, Brazil maybe, and Russia possibly, as a result of our failure to prepare for our future. Expect to see America become much more local as gasoline eclipses 6, 7 then 8 dollars a gallon and a loaf of bread becomes worth 5 dollars. We will become more dependent upon each other as family security becomes more important than a 75 dollar fingernail job and an hour at the tanning salon. We will re-learn how to clean dirt from beneath our fingernails because we will be growing our own vegetables and effecting repairs to our own domiciles, instead of hopping in the car and running to the store and calling the handyman. These things will become luxuries, just as they were in the past. I expect to see more swapping and bartering for goods and services, to avoid paying the new taxes to be rolled out to cover the socialist health care plans and bail-outs for bankrupt banks, insurance giants and car manufacturers.

All in all these are not negative things, they are positive changes for a society that has become addicted to the stupidity of “consumerism”. We will return to principled spending and thrift, bringing sanity back to our way of life and abandoning the idea that more is always good.

If I Were Emperor

2009-06-07T12:18:00.001-04:00

If I were emperor, life would be very different in the United States today. Ours would be a peaceful landscape, populated by good, patriotic citizens. In my Republic, laws would be enforced, although there would be very few. In the Land of The Free, we would work together to maintain a peaceable nation, dedicated to the advancement of her people and the care of our young generations. Our armies would guard our shores against invasion and illegal immigration, and never venture past our borders unless attacked. We would concern ourselves with domestic issues that directly affect our citizens before venturing to feed the hungry in other countries, or donate money to nations that have suffered from the fiscal irresponsibility of their government[s]. The size of government would be only large enough to perform the most basic of functions, and then only those functions identified in our constitution. Gold and silver would be declared the only legal tender for discharging debts or purchasing goods and services.

If I were emperor, I would simplify our legal system.

In my republic, business would not be permitted to grow so large as to become a systemic risk to the nation should they fail.

The police would return to their original purpose as that of “peace officer”.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be required to enforce our laws, deporting illegal aliens, as well as their children. Birthright citizenship for illegal’s will be revoked.

Ultra violent “video games”, designed to poison the minds of our children, corrupting their morals and ethics will be removed from existence. Those found to be “creating” them in contravention of the law will be permanently removed from society as a danger to our way of life.

Political office shall become a privilege again. No person shall be permitted to utilize their own wealth to achieve office, nor shall any person be permitted to solicit or accept funds from any other than private citizens, and that donation shall not exceed 25 dollars in any given election cycle for any one person.

No politician shall serve in any office for a period exceeding two statutory terms. Period.

No politician shall campaign for office while still in an elected position, unless it is performed outside official duties.

After serving two consecutive terms in any elected office, no politician shall be permitted to seek a higher office for one full statutory term after leaving their elected office.

Any person found guilty of rape, either of an adult or a child, through the collection of incontrovertible evidence such as DNA, shall be put to death…………….immediately.

Any person found to have used a weapon of any type during the act of committing a crime of any kind, shall be placed into the custody of the United States of America Gravel Factory, where that person shall be required to manufacture gravel, [through the use of a sledge hammer] after being supplied with ample boulders. This term shall be no less than twenty five years.

English shall be our national language. Any person found to be incapable of speaking English coherently and fluently, shall be returned to their native country.

All documents produced by the U.S. Government and by the sovereign states shall be exclusively in English.

All legal immigrants must completely assimilate into our culture.

It shall be a criminal act to fly any other than the American flag. Any person found to be displaying the flag of a foreign nation, shall be deported to that nation.

Upon reaching the age of 21, all citizens shall be required to attend an approved course teaching the safe handling and use of firearms. Possession of a weapon will be a requirement. All citizens will be encouraged to wear a sidearm [but not required]. An armed society is a polite society.

Welfare shall be abolished in its current form. It is not the responsibility of this government to provide housing and food for otherwise able bodied citizens. Those who cannot find work in the open market, or those who failed to complete their education and are not qualified for other than manual labor, will be trained by the government and given work repairing and up-grading our national railroad system or performing work on local government farms, growing vegetables to supply our prisons, hospitals and our elderly with food.

Any person, man or woman, who receives government assistance shall be required to utilize birth control for the duration of that assistance. Bearing additional children while receiving any type of government assistance, shall be a crime for both parties to the procreation. Irresponsibility is no longer an option.

Parents found to have abused their children either physically or sexually shall be sterilized, and their children shall be placed in adoptive homes.

Marijuana shall be taxed at a rate of twenty five percent. Growing marijuana for personal use shall be decriminalized.

The rest shall be left to the States, where it belongs.

In my ideal society, a minimum of laws are required, because if those few laws are enforced, society becomes better by default. The single most powerful law will be the immigration law. The crimes committed by people from other countries and the negative influence brought to our cities by gangs and thugs from foreign nations would be eliminated. Deportation is simply and plainly less expensive than incarceration. As a citizen, I should not have to bear the cost of incarcerating people who should not be here to begin with. Residence in the United States comes with responsibilities. Failure to adhere to the rules should result in repatriation.

When measured against the cost of incarceration and the rates of recidivism, it makes zero sense to lock up rapists and child molesters. These people offer nothing to society but misery, and so they should be executed. It is unfair to burden the good people of this nation with the outrageous costs of keeping these animals out of view. They are never “rehabilitated” and re-enter society with the same desires the left it with. Prison is pointless for them.

While no society is perfect, mine would be one where personal responsibility is rewarded, and moral failure is punished. The lines will be clear, and no gray areas will be permitted. We have allowed our morals and ethics to be eroded through the medium of television and the proliferation of “video games”. The violence, misogyny and hatred shown in these media is absolutely horrific and unnecessary for this republic to function. The acceptance of this type of behavior in society speaks to the loss of community, failure of our school system and separation of the races.

When a group of people are permitted to separate themselves from the rest of the Republic using their “culture” as an excuse, we become weaker as a nation. The failure of many groups of peoples within our borders to assimilate themselves into our culture has resulted in the splintering of our society, and the creation of the special interest society. If something is not in the interests of the greater community, then it should be examined on its own merits, without special consideration. This is America, not a foreign land.

Many of my views are indeed extreme, however the deterioration of the American Society requires extreme measures to return it to its former glory. We were once the envy of the world, strong and proud. Now we are fighting for our very existence. Our tax receipts are only a quarter of the amount needed to fund the ideological, grand egalitarian socialist society that our present leader wishes to create. Without intervention, we will be relegated to the children’s table, where our voices will no longer be heard. Unless we effect change, and that right soon, we will become irrelevant as a nation, beholden to the likes of China for our bread and circuses.

Welcome to My Republic.

It's Time For A Change

2009-06-06T16:01:00.000-04:00

Well it’s Saturday again, and as usual I am sitting in my office with complete brain-lock, unable to get in to the work I came here to do. Saturdays are usually very quiet at my office, without the hustling around, million phone calls and constant interruptions. I try to get into the work at hand, but just cannot rally the concentration to do it.

I keep thinking about the injustice of the bailouts and what it will mean for my family. We are trillions of dollars in the hole to institutions who will never be able to pay back these “loans” and “infusions”, yet we continue to print money to satisfy their bottomless needs. Where is the sense in this? We are spending over 50 billion dollars to rescue GM, a company with a market cap of just under one billion dollars. For what? To save 30 thousand union jobs? I say it is poor justification for plundering my families future.

We have yet to have a trial for any of the financial crimes committed during the ten years the banks, mortgage companies and defense industrial complex spent leaning over the trough, lapping up my countries treasure. No one has been indicted over the complete lack of oversight during the “re-building of Iraq”, which is being performed under no-compete negotiated terms, often time and materials contracts. Tens of billions of dollars have simply evaporated in Iraq, yet not a single word in the liberal media. Where is the accountability for the chiefs of Fannie and Freddie? Why are we not reading daily stories about their criminal timeline, and how the prosecution wants to seek a life sentence for their crimes? What about the mortgage brokers who wrote no-doc loans to janitors for half million dollar McMansions they knew damn well they should deny them the loan? I am certain that there are at least ten thousand such brokers to choose from, should the administration grow a set of balls and actually decide to prosecute some of these people.

We are failing as a nation and the administration is speeding up the process. Our president is supporting a bill before the Congress that will actually permit “indefinite detention” for “suspected terrorism”. That means if I decide to march in an anti-Obama parade, I could be labeled a danger to the state and imprisoned, without counsel or a trial. Our rights are being abridged in the most egregious of ways, yet we are as docile as baby lambs. Where is the outrage? Am I the only one here?

I watch with dismay, the daily charts for the Dow, silver and gold. I see the manipulation, and so does the rest of the world, yet it is permitted to go on. The SEC claims to be “investigating” the enormous concentration of short sellers in the silver market, yet nothing is ever found to be out of place or illegal. These are short sellers by the way, who cannot possibly possess all of the silver they claim to have [and by regulation are supposed to have]. How about the stock market? Who in their right mind would want to participate in a “market” that is controlled from behind the scenes by program traders who operate with the blessing and encouragement of our government, and by the government itself?

Maybe I am too cynical for my own good, but I believe that if we as a People do not stand up against the tyranny being perpetrated against the good citizens of our country, we will certainly devolve into the third world, Venezuela style socialism that the liberal left want so badly. I actually prefer a general collapse to what we are facing. We cannot as a nation, continue on with trillions of dollars of debt. We simply cannot. The answer lies in the dismantlement of the military industrial complex, and returning the task of securing our nation to our soldiers. We must radically reduce the footprint of the government and re-train our citizens to be self sufficient. We must admit that social security is broken, along with Medicaid and the welfare system, and greatly reduce them in size and scope.

Without some hard choices, we face an uncertain future at best and a bleak and barren one at worst. It’s time to stand up and effect change. Every incumbent must be voted out of every level of government office this election, and replaced with folks who can identify with the need to eliminate the corruption so rampant at every step of the governmental process. Without radical change, we will continue to devolve as a nation, and that my friends, would be tragic.

Where’s My Hope and Change?

2009-06-03T14:06:00.000-04:00

With the election of Obama, we were promised “change we can believe in” and “hope” for the future of America. We were told that universal health care would be provided, compliments of the top 1% of earners in the country. Obama said that the “pie” was unequally distributed, and the middle class, poor and elderly should have a bigger slice. At the time of his election, we were facing down an unprecedented banking crisis, precipitated by the mortgage crisis. At that time, assurances were given that the “bailout” was a one time thing, the economy would get immediately back on track and Americans should do their patriotic duty by going and buying another car they don’t need. We are two trillion dollars down the bail-out road and counting. Our primary mortgage guarantors Freddie and Fannie are now the property of the American People, along with the associated losses which are estimated in the hundreds of billions. Same for AIG, with their massive multi-trillion dollar exposure to credit default swaps. Our newest socialized industries, Chrysler and GM are in similar straits, with untenable debt and obligations to 450,000 retirees that cannot be met, even after bankruptcy.

We are seven months down the road from the election, and the promised change has not come. The highly vaunted “hope” is fading fast, as Americans lose their jobs, and get furloughed at the greatest pace since the Great Depression. Our government is turning to Keynes for the solution. Rather than backing away from new expenditures, they are spending at an ever expanding pace in what will turn out to be a failed effort to re-inflate the economy.

Our dollar is under attack from within. Our own Treasury is working at a furious pace, printing up Treasury bonds to be sold to the likes of China and Japan. The problem is, there are too many bonds and not enough investors. Even if they wanted to, China could not absorb even a quarter of our monetary needs over the next two years. Our fiscal deficit has eclipsed the carrying capacity of the world, and our government refuses to believe it. Rather than trim down expenditures to match income, we are monetizing our deficits to pay for [clearly] bloated programs and an overextended military. To illustrate the dollars woes even further, Bill Gross of PIMCO fame recently advised his clients to “get out of the dollar”. Not quite the vote of confidence we need right now.

While Obama is incapable of turning the economy, we can change our own micro economies ourselves, and should be doing so right now. Knowing that the Fed cannot hold the curtain closed for long, we can protect what we have by diversifying out of Federal Reserve Notes [AKA “cash”] and into physical assets. These can be anything you will need or consume for the next 18 months or so. Silver and gold are traditional hard assets and should do well to help your portfolio hold its value, but consider some of the other assets we consume throughout the year for potential inclusion. Food is an obvious choice, as we have seen recent volatility in commodity markets cause prices to whipsaw. Storing food for periods of uncertainty used to be a ubiquitous practice, right up through the seventies, but as the Depression generations died off, the practice fell out of favor. Back in the day, those who stored food were considered practical; today we’re called “doomers’. Either way, I prefer the idea of a nutritious and varied diet, to waiting in line for rationed provisions of meager selection. Anyone who thinks the just-in-time system will not break down during fiscal crisis need only look to Argentina for proof. When letters of credit cease to carry the weight and backing of real money, the system stops dead.

We are in a unique position today which permits us to calmly and patiently store up what we need at reasonable prices. These include gold and silver, which are artificially suppressed in price, though not for much longer.

Take this gift of time and prepare yourself for the future. You don’t have to wait for it in dread and anticipation, just be ready.

Political Correctness.....Not

2009-05-31T14:53:00.001-04:00

I was admonished today during a tirade on another website about the state of our public schools system, by an individual I thought not to be a member of the permanent victim class. What upset me about it was the fact that the complainer is a person whom I think is not just smart, but gifted. This individual writes opinions with grace and eloquence, never steering too far from the point at hand and always with respect and dignity given to the opposition. Today however, I struck a nerve and received a written lashing that pissed me off for its politically correct stance, and clear misinterpretation of my comments.

I am not politically correct [by any measure of such a standard] and I hereby attest that I never will be. That said, It absolutely pixilates me to listen to people complain about the widespread exercise of free speech, demanding retractions for comments, apologies for the misuse of a word or dismissal from a job because of an expressed opinion. I have come to the end of the road with these political correctness Nazis and think that the rest of the country should join me.

As a People, we have the inalienable right to freedom of speech. This right is guaranteed us under the first amendment to our constitution. Nothing abridges that right or removes it, yet as a society we are forced to use caution when speaking on certain subjects, lest we be labeled a “hater”, “homophobe”, “anti-semite” or bigot. We are not permitted to oppose the imprisonment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, we are not permitted to believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, we are not permitted to use the words God or Jesus lest they offend a Jew, Muslim or some other non-believer.

The permanent victim class in our country, while a minority, has taken over our right to free expression and hijacked our right to an opinion that differs from theirs. Any time someone offers a viewpoint that is contrary to their way of life, or their position is berated and blasted with epithets. The thickness of skin on the average American has been reduced to that of an onion.

I say its time to fight back. From this point forward, all comments on this Blog may include whatever opinion or position you have on anything written here. No comments will be deleted or edited that offer personal views or positions on any subject, unless that post is intentionally hurtful or violent toward another commenter or myself.

We Are Not The Center Of The Universe

2009-05-31T12:35:00.000-04:00

We are not the center of the universe

It occurred to me today that the United States was not at the center of the universe anymore and that we will soon orbit the likes of China and Brazil, as they waken from their third world slumbers and embark upon their industrial and agricultural revolutions.

The world as we know it is about to undergo radical changes, including the reorganization of world leadership and reassignment of hegemony. It is unlikely that we retain the mantle of Sole World Superpower for much longer, even though we have a nuclear arsenal capable of erasing all forms of life on the planet. We just cannot afford it any longer. We will be subsumed within the larger energies of previously third world nations, and the dreams that they have of emulating our excess. Our debts with them will only grow, as our administration flounders through their epic Keynesian plan to reinflate a popped bubble. As our power and influence diminish across the globe, a new power must rise to fill the vacuum. It is my estimation that China, Brazil, India and Russia will be equal to the task.

China has the workforce capable of producing extremely inexpensive goods, an ancillary benefit of paying people 200$ a month and maintaining a complete disdain for the environment. Brazil has discovered massive oil fields in the region of the Atlantic shelf called the Tupi and Carioca. These monster fields are collectively estimated to hold over 42 billion barrels of oil. This makes Brazil even more relevant to the world as the super giant Cantarrell field in Mexico and Ghawar in Saudi Arabia are now in steep and irreversible decline. Russia has come to the fore in recent years as the owner of the largest natural gas fields on the planet and has begun to construct not one, but two huge liquification plants for the export of their natural riches. Add to these nations the people of India, one of the best educated people on the planet, and they have willingness and desire to work [very cheaply]; now you have a powerful bloc of nations able to test the world with their collective power. No one of these nations could challenge our position in global politics or military might, but as a cohesive unit the game would change considerably.

Already we are witnessing a shift in the global climate, with Western Europe in an economic malaise and the United States in a freefall. Even the once mighty England is suffering the worst economic conditions since WWII, and there is no end in sight. There are many here in the States who are awake and aware of the economy, and vocal about the need to effect change. Unfortunately, our President has focused on the Keynesian welfare route to try and solve our problems, instead of the austerity that we so desperately need. Rather than shrink the government, he is building it up. The U.S. government is already the largest employer on the planet, and Obama is set on making it bigger, even in the face of crashing tax revenues and cratering markets.

I listened for as long as I could to the commencement speech delivered by the First Lady the other day, and could not help but think that I would have told these kids something entirely different. Rather than sugar-coat the future that these impressionable young people face, I would have let them in on the harsh secret. These kids just finished four years of life in an idyllic world, paid for by their parents and enormous student loans [which are not dischargeable in a bankruptcy by the way], and are to be thrown to the wolves. Four years of being told that government is the answer and welfare is good. Four years of being led to believe that there will be an abundance of work available in whatever field of endeavor they choose to embark upon. Four years of beer busts, wet t-shirt contests and frat parties will not have prepared them for the realities they will soon face. Four years of brainwashing by the children of the sixties, who grew up to be the professors and lecturers charged with preparing this generation for the future will have erased any possibility that they will have been prepared for anything other than a government job.

I am a cynic, having been raised in a very conservative household where one was expected to carry his own weight and live up to the “measure of a man”. As a young man, my pop used to say “there are no free rides in life, so if you want something you’ll have to go out in the world, work for it and get it yourself”. These are powerful words, not taught any longer in our schools and universities. Personal responsibility has been replaced by “We’re all winners here!” and political correctness. “Making the grade” has been replaced by quotas that must be filled, irrespective of the candidate’s qualifications.

I look at China and see a young America, full of hopes, dreams and pride. I see the children of India working at night to pay for the opportunity to go to grade school and get an education. Then, I look at our own school system, which has become a neutered babysitting agency, without even the power to discipline a child. I see our teachers unions, with tenured teachers who have no business being around the children they have grown to hate. I have watched as the standard of education has been lowered to account for the tidal wave of Mexican immigrants, who in some states, have sued successfully to be taught in their native Spanish language.

Am I bitter? Yes I am. My country is letting me down, and there is precious little I can do about it. The third world has caught up and may soon make us answer to them. We have willingly given up our wealth to them in exchange for trinkets and baubles, and they are calling our debt due. China has the power to destroy us economically without any outside help. By simply bombarding the market with a few hundred billion dollars worth of treasuries, China could single handedly wipe us out. With no one willing to purchase our debt, we would be forced to live within our means.

Austerity is coming, and that as a result of our own profligacy. We had better get ready.

Weekly Rant

2009-05-31T12:32:00.002-04:00

Another week is gone and we saw another precipitous drop in the value of our dollar. Silver is way up, and poised to go higher. Investors are dumping bonds on the treasury in a nearly panic fashion and Turbo Timmy is on his way to Beijing to grovel before the Premier for more money. These truths are very telling, and serve to reinforce my view that we are on a nearly irreversible path to much lower living standards. We have lost two of our three auto manufacturers to bankruptcy, and will watch helplessly as they are re-sized into significantly smaller entities. The unions have agreed to nearly halve their wages and to pay a much larger share of their health care. In addition, there will be no more lifetime insurance, and pension plans will be reduced in size.

These things, coupled with many other macro economic indicators cannot be ignored any longer. The wheels have been set in motion by our Government towards a future of debt serfdom, lower living standards and greatly increased taxes for the working class. Our middle class is being gutted by the rich and powerful elite aristocracy, and there is little that can be done about it.

As a People, we can only empower ourselves, and prepare for what is to be a very different economic landscape in the USSA [United Socialist States of Amerikka]. Gold and silver are quietly returning to their traditional roles as money, and will be one of a very few asset classes to survive the conflagration. This board is populated by a majority of silver bugs, who by and large hold significant stores of physical metal, and by a minority who hold mining stocks and ETF positions. These folks in particular, will be protected from the dollars descent to the degree that they have stacked silver [and or gold] in physical form. The stocks and ETF’s are another subject, and since I am not very educated about them, I will only say that paper assets are in my opinion just that; paper.

Each and every week, someone that I know personally is getting laid off or furloughed, adding to the swelling rolls of unemployed in our state. Our county commissioners just voted to trim parks and recreation staff by 140 people and to close down over a dozen public parks, trails and boat ramps. Soon, the precipitous drop in our budget will force cutbacks elsewhere. With nearly zero construction going on, there is no need for an army of inspectors being paid 38 grand a year.

I am working to put aside my bitterness at our government for shoving their noses into the crisis and making it worse by spending trillions of our dollars to try and fill a gigantic sink-hole, and how to make my own pleasant reality by taking charge of my own destiny.

Until next time, thanks for listening to yet another maniacal, disjointed rant from a middle aged, pissed off libertarian.