The Winter of Our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
. . . .

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore,--since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,--
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

-Richard III, William Shakespeare

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."

-H. L. Mencken

Don't tread on an ant, when he's done nothing to you,
There may come a day, when an ant is treading on you.

-Antmusic, Adam Ant

It is a bright, cold day in December.  The traffic on the freeways is noticeably lighter.  People on the elevator look drawn, haggard.  They talk about wanting to put 2010 behind them.  Christmas presents fill the back seats of Japanese-manufactured, cheap sedans.  And walking though the office reveals an assortment of plates of Christmas cookies and goodies with plastic wrap and ribbons strewn beside.  Another year over, a new one begun.

Meanwhile, the municipal bond market is in collapse.  The next domino falls.  States and local municipalities will have to pay more and more of a premium to get money needed to run necessary services, and go deeper and deeper into debt, and those who least need any such services grin at new census numbers that ensure yet even more and better control on this strange, internecine and internal House divided against itself.  It is the drowning of "government" in the bathtub.  Someone ran off with the money in the deregulation frenzy, and they continue doing so.  They are bilking the national coffers, the money supply, and, most of all, nobodies like you.

But nowhere in the brightly illuminated telepersons on Faux News is any of this evident.  Next up, how "liberals" are spending too much of "your" money.  The "government" that they are bilking is taking too much of "your" money.  The enemy within is the intelligentsia.  Ah, the enslaved nod and obey.  From between teeth that are bleached too white, and makeup that is smeared on deceptively smoothe, through eyes that reflect the television lighting's glare, the lies are being told.  Ignorance is Strength.

But which is it, this government?  Is it the old and dilapidated buildings huddled around a quiet and cold marsh on the shores of the Potomac?  No, not any longer.  Now, it is elsewhere.  It speaks to you from the media of screamfests on cable television shows and chainsaw voices on AM radio peddling gold and free, misguided and sideways anger.  Those who govern you are not the fools scurrying around the chambers in Washington.  Those are just shills who have managed to cut a better deal than you.  And, ironically, they serve as the scapegoats of those who truly govern you, manage the information your given about your own society, and direct your emotions to pervert your reason, an amygdala-hijack of your own ability to think for yourself.  And they choose as scapegoats the fools in Washington, and almost anyone who can think and feel.

So Merry Christmas.  And Happy New Year.  If you are reading this, then you are already one breath of freedom better than the cars that run endlessly along freeways, going nowhere.  You have taken the pill and are seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. 

An Englishman bedecked in woman's makeup once quipped decades ago about these and other ants.  Just as an Englishman a millenia before him quipped about this winter, and our discontent.

Distress Call From the Year 2010

[begin transmission] . . . S.O.S. . . yes, whoever you are, whatever you are, whenever you are -- you should be warned.  Don't let what happened to us happen to you.

The last three decades of the 20th century seemed like such halcyon days.  We never knew what was really going on.  The decade of freedom and free love slowly morphed into the greatest disparity of wealth in U.S. history, the economic enslavement of labor, the destruction of journalism, the press, free speech, the degradation of the government and community services, and the evisceration of civil liberty after civil liberty, all in the name of "security."  And all of it was by design, all along.

It started with the media.  We never thought that so many could be so misled by so few so much of the time.  But it happened.  The most outrageous lies were broadcast incessantly, to the point that truth and fact became malleable, fashionable, and deviant.  It didn't even matter what was the truth and fact, it was somehow more important to vilify whoever it was that was saying it.  The truth became suddenly either a state secret or treason.  Victor Hugo's post mortem spoke eloquently, "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act . . ."

Then it was politics.  Suddenly, the political machinery became simply a function of economics.  The more money there was to spend, the more influence could be had.  This stratified the wealthy class, which received anything it requested, bought and paid for, while the once-American ideals and principals that had been the foundation of protecting the middle and lower class were discarded, lost in the media deluge of hypernationalism, jingoism, and fundamentalist Christianity. 

The Middle Class was last.  The bulwark of U.S. society, the ballast and the anchor, the center and counterweight to profligacy and excess, was starved out of existence.  Those few who saw the Middle Class emaciated by loss of governmental services and declining real income for decades were attacked by those whom they sought to inform and save.  The anger and ire of class warfare was perverted into a hatred of a caricature of elite intellectuals.  Roosevelt's Brain Trust could no longer save those whom it was intended to save, as it was declared to be an internal enemy.

Finally, without this steadying presence, civil liberties were eroded and eradicated.  The prison system became one of the leading industries, as more and more money was funnelled out of the people's taxes and the people's wealth to imprison them.  The criminal justice system became based on retaliation and contrapasso, rather than rehabilitation and the hope of a better society.  But it was the money that flowed to this system, this Military-Industrial-Media-Prison Complex that resulted in more surveillance, more monitoring, more checkpoints, more warrantless searches, more walls to keep people out and to keep people in.

Do you read me?  Come in.  S.O.S.  Mayday . . . are you getting this message . . .

[end transmission]

Exile on Main Street

Normal Americans once used to Escalades and McMansions now live in exile from the American Dream. Asslickers who once scored $250k/yr are self-pirahnaizing their 401ks and savings, beleiving that redemption is but one Joel Osteen sermon away. Because their thinking is boxed by the Previous American Experience (PAM), they sit in their hollowed out castles completely unaware of the global labor arbitrage that is in the process of rotisserie-roasting them to death. Huddled around the fire are global elitists and hungry ChIndians who long not to have a Christmas home in Santa Fe, but an indoor shitter and some tp to give them and their assholes a new standard of living. Americans can't compete with that. First and foremost, because we aren't willing to. Johnny Walker Blue used to be in Human Resources shuffling papers and hiring hot assistants with tramp stamps that almost made him think he could trash the Cialis prescription. But now that the wife is looking for a Bigger Better Deal (BBE) and the tennis pro at her former country club just gave her 6 orgasms in one night, Johnny changes his tune. Suddenly Wendy's and McDonalds aren't just places for late-night drive thrus, but maybe for early-morning career revival. As a friend once pointed out, Indians and Chinese are plentiful enough and cheap enough to satisfy global demand for just about every good and service. That makes the rest of us nothing but delusional burrito-eating shit factories.

Top 10 Signs Your Hedge Fund is Toast

10. You see an open Bible on your boss' desk.
9. You see certain office equipment like monitors and chairs for sale on ebay.
8. The bloomberg subscription aint getting renewed.
7. You hear the word 'gate' come up alot as it relates to limits on redemptions.
6. A star partner suddenly takes a hiatus.
5. All the traders leave.
4. Even hot secretaries are getting fired.
3. Compliance people cry for no apparent reason.
2. The guy who was gonna allocate $50 million fell off a ladder and wont be able to send the money until he recovers.
1. You hear some subcontractors talking about a wall thats gonna cut thru the office (ie for new tenants).

Markets and Society

When I was in 4th grade, I was cut from the basketball team. I was devastated and cried after school as I watched my friends walking to the gym for practice. One reason I was so upset: I was pretty damn good. I kept practicing and within a few weeks, some scumbag was off the team and I was in. A couple of games in, I scored 27 points in a 24 minute game. Looking back, I would have to say that incident built my character.

By the 1990s, there were no more team tryouts. For anything. All grade-schoolers made the team. All cheerleaders made the squad. And everyone got trophies. Benchwarmer on the last place team? No problem. At the pizza party, the coach would still find some kind words about your athletic prowess as you walked up to collect your Hustle trophy. No one could fail.

Ben Bernanke has taken the stock and bond markets and basically said all assets get Hustle trophies. MBS worth 10 cents on the dollar? No problem, we'll print and take them off banks' hands at 90 cents on the dollar. And for the stuff the banks want to hold on to, we'll give a Federal guarantee. No one can ever lose. Ever. Unless you bet against Ben, which would imperil the existence of numerous small hedge funds trying to make a name for themselves. So get long. Take risk. And don't worry. The end of the year Pizza Party is right around the corner. And everyone is getting a trophy.

Of Anthills and Christmas Parties

"Every ant  knows the  formula of its ant-hill,
every  bee knows  the formula  of its  beehive.
They know it  in their own way, not in our way.
Only humankind does not know its own formula."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So there I was at the annual Chrismas party, bumping elbows with probably one hundred other eager little small business people, the much-heralded and admired American "small business owner," each one armed with a fistful of free vistaprint business cards, a nametag, and some even having a shirt advertising the name of their little niche in the free market.  It's called a "Chamber of Commerce," and it is the means by which the monied class herds the non-monied class out of the source of capital, keeps them in line, and somehow, astonishingly, keeps them voting against their own economic and political interests. 

So many people with so little in common and so little business to do with one another.  You see, the problem isn't that each of these desperate little fools was unwilling or unable to carry out their little contribution to society.  The problem was that their pathetic little contribution really wasn't needed.  And it certainly isn't needed in the volume and the degree to which they seek customers to purchase it.

But these little people, each one probably formerly an engineer, an information technology professional, or a mid-level manager of some sort, was no longer useful in the world economy.  The labor that they used to provide to the owners of capital could now be obtained somewhere far away for far, far cheaper.  So these people were ordered out of the cubicles, and left to find little small "businesses" to occupy their time.  That is really all that they do.  There are far more real estate agents, real estate brokers, salespeople of various worthless goods, insurance agents, lawyers, business consultants and accountants than would ever be needed in the U.S.

Yet there they are, the "Chamber of Commerce," clinging to their little business cards and crawling constantly around in circles, over one another, under one another, trying to get from other ants in the anthill what none of them really have.  Each one, now a jettisoned, individual unit of labor with some worthless license, striving to get some piece of capital.  Only the real capital left the antill a long time ago.  It went overseas.  And the ants are left to mortgaging their homes, cars, and land to feed themselves.  When all of that goes South, the Capital will move overseas, the place to which the wealth is flowing, assets are appreciating, and capital is needed.

Who is left there to explain to them that only they do not know their own formula?

We All Have a Friend Like Obama

C'mon dudes. You know what I'm talking about, and if you don't, you are that friend. You know, the guy who cant go to titty bars. The one who has to take a whole day to find out if he can have a couple of beers with the fellas. The one who gets a call in the middle of a good time and suddenly has to split. The one who laughs a little less hard than normal with the fellas because the wifey is around. Sometimes, they even look at the wife to see if they can laugh at a joke at all. TOTAL FUCKING PUSSIES. They drink water with lemon while everyone else is downing brewskies. They pass on shots. They have no opinion on an incredible ass that just shook a tail in front of your table. Sports? Fuck that, the only time they watch football is the Super Bowl halftime show so the wife can watch Aerosmith. Concerts? Weed? Nope. Totally foreign to him. Yes, we all have that friend.

Today, the House Dems realized NoSlama Bama Obama is that friend. I dont even care whether the tax cuts get extended or not. It just pisses me off watching Obama take it up the wazoo by a bunch of dudes who will pull out and make him taste his own ass juice. Yes, the Dems called him out on his lack of balls. They know its hopeless, but they got sick and fucking tired of watching it play out. This changes nothing..for anyone. After the Dems get it out of their system, ObangMe can puss out again a few more dozen times. Then it will be time for the dems to forcefully remove the duct tape from his crotch and remind him: THESE ARE YOUR BALLS. THEY ARE ATTACHED TO YOUR DICK. THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF!

Check.

Some see it as a capitulation.  Others have called it a betrayal.  Still others see it as a gesture of conciliation.

But Barack Obama's sudden, overnight, sharp move to the center could be one of the most brilliant political moves of a generation. 

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, long silent in their own catastrophic collapses to the demands of their opposing counterparts, suddenly issue statements that the deal Obama struck will have to be re-negotiated.  They will not stand for this sort of thing.

Where, once, they hid behind the tall figure that Obama casts across the American political consciousness, they were now, for once, standing on their own.  They will have nothing of the sort.  They are going to take a stand.

No one who has followed the President's career would ever think he is sanguine in his support for across-the-board tax cuts.  Not a one.  Perhaps that is why this has raised so many eyebrows and has so many strategists scratching their heads.  But perhaps, just perhaps, this was a political move designed to switch places with the Democratic Congressional leadership.  Perhaps this was intended to force them from behind Obama -- a place from which they could distance themselves from the President, fade political heat from the Right, and blame him for their own failures to act.

If so, this was one of the most brilliant political moves in a generation.

Obama has made his move and the chessboard is set.  Their move.

Check.

Ye shall know the truth . . . , Part II

Then it got weird.

Assange, Public Enemy No. 1, turns himself into the British authorities, and the indictment is read.  But it isn't replete with accusations of crimes against the State or crimes against humanity.  No, it is about sex.

Yes, sex.  Descriptions of his genitalia and committing crimes for, among other things, not allegedly using a condom during sex.  The indictment alleges that Assange did not use a condom in a sexual encounter with a woman and “improperly exploited the fact that she was asleep.”  Reference was even made to his “naked, erect penis." 

It calls to mind the torture schemes devised by CIA and used on "detainees," individuals illegally held without hearing or due process and made the subject of bizarre, ritualistic behavior, sexual abuse and nudity.

The Theater of the Absurd has jumped out of the pages of a novel or screen play, and sunk itself deep into the public psyche.  How utterly strange, that the most wanted man in the world is wanted for having sex with a woman while not wearing a condom.  Yet so many are so lost in the Matrix, that they attack him venomously.  They protest:  How dare he reveal secret information to me!  How dare he require that I know what is going on in the world and be treated like an adult, instead of like a child, in fear, regressed, unable to govern oneself without Big Brother.

On the infowars front, the hackers group known as "Anonymous" has now joined the battle.  After paypal and a Swiss bank shut down Wikileaks' accounts, Anonymous struck with denial of service attacks on each of them, shutting down web access for approximately 8 hours each.  Interestingly, they received an almost immediate response.  But, according to the hacker community, going to war with them is a fool's errand.  So much of human life has now become dictated by computer, that those who can hijack the computer can begin having a significant impact on human life. 

As it takes money to wage war, and infowars are no exception, governments have sought the assistance of the credit card behemoths to shut off any funds to Assange.  And they will likely do the same to Anonymous, and others who oppose them.

And so the wars become pitched about access to information, and the question is whether the resistance -- that is, those remaining non-corporate individuals of free conscience -- can fund itself without the corporate collaborators who control the money.

That, and sex.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

QE2 Will Work - Benny Said So

The only time I ever recall any guarantee coming to fruition was when Broadway Joe guaranteed the Jets would upset the Colts in Super Bowl III. I think he even said it with a couple of gorgeous babes draped around his mink coat. While Bernanke doesn't openly flaunt his mink coat, I'm sure the bankers make him wear one on a regular basis without anything underneath as he sits inside the hallowed halls of the Federal Reserve. And one by one, they all drop by during POMO days and slip The Bernank one hell of a stimulus package. And The Bernank can do nothing but take it and enjoy it, just like the rest of us.

Yesterday on 60 Minutes, Benny said he was "100% sure" QE2 would work. This from the man who failed to see the subprime crisis coming, or the general credit crisis it spawned, or the collapse of big institutions like FanFred, Lehman, and Bear. He failed to see those tsunamis coming, even though it was his job to do so. Or he saw them coming, and simply opened up his mink coat to let Dimon, Blankfein, Mozilo, and Thain sodomize the American populace. What Bernanke has created may have no predictable end-game in sight. Whose to say he can't print enough toilet paper to buy up every single worthless asset in The US and Europe? He can and will. He already set the stage for QE3 on 60 Minions last nite. It will just keep going and going until it can't. And when that happens, perhaps before Joan Rivers 20th vaginoplasty, or perhaps after her 60th one, the world as we know it will cease to exist. But by then Bernank will be a "consultant" to JP Morgan pulling in $10 million a year (though in what currency is anyone's guess). That's his end-game.

Ye shall know the truth . . .

The latest Public Enemy No. 1 gracing the growingly-ubiquitous telescreens in restaurants, homes, workplaces, and gas stations is an Australian hacker and political activist.  He is one Julian Assange, and his name will be come household by the end of the next news cycle.

These are the facts, and they aren't in dispute:  Assange obtained top secret files from an Army officer and published them on his website, Wikileaks.  He had done this before and has promised to do so again and again (his next target, supposedly, is the Banking Giant, Bank of America).  But what makes this little episode worthy of this blog is the response that Assange's "Wikidump" of documents received from the U.S. Government, members of the U.S. political establishment, and various knuckledraggers and mouth breathers who pledge allegiance (and their soul) to the far extremist Right.

Assange's website was attacked in what may be the very first volleys of the next generation of warfare.  Cyber warfare.  Information wars.  The battle between what is secret and and what is public knowledge.  This and the technology explosion have forced the question of what should be considered secret from the adult, self-governing public, and what should be disclosed and open for debate, discourse, and question.

Perhaps the vitriol that greeted Assange indicates that the forces in favor of secrecy are determined and prepared.  Word has it that the U.S. Government knew of what was about to take place, and had begun attacking torrent download sites days before the "Wikidump" of U.S. Diplomatic cables.  Members of the U.S. Congress, instead of calling for hearings or a review of the information that was now disclosed, began calling for Assange to be branded a "terrorist" and for his site to be shut down and kept from the Internet public.  Even some "hackers," who professed (if you can believe this) allegiance to the U.S. Government's attack on publication, began attacking the Wikileaks site.  My, how the mighty have fallen.

What on Earth is going on here?  Can information now be considered contraband?  Can your very having access to information that was otherwise public be used to threaten your liberty?  Fundamental to the Enlightenment and its thinking, and the basis of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, was the belief that information (and individuals) should be free.  It is almost as if there is a connection between the enslaving of the one and its resultant enslavement of the other.  Yet one more axiom has fallen out of the public's consciousness.  Yet one more protection once afforded liberty has been relinquished.  Ever darker becomes the sky over humanity. 

The Bible (no less) provides an epitaph for the ages.  Perhaps it is a warning.

Because if you cannot know the truth, then how can you be free?

"It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen . . . "

If you hadn't guessed yet, you're in dystopia.  If you're reading and understanding this, then you're either the Inner Party or the Outer Party.  If you don't understand it and want to move back to watching Home Shopping Network, then you're a Prole.

If you're the Outer Party, like the frog slowly simmering and then boiling, you probably didn't even notice it.  But it's here.  It happened already.  Forget all that you see.  It's not reality.  It's just a fantasy.  Like a shadow at the edge of your consciousness, that you turn your head chasing out of the corner of your eye, you know this to be true.  But I can only show you the way.  It is you who must make the decision to face the facts presented.

If you're the Inner Party, then you will not like the tale that I tell.  You see it as dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to the imprisonment of the intelligentsia and the Outer Party to the Proles, dangerous to the control that must be brutally established and maintained.  It is you who wish to silence this voice calling out in the wilderness.

It's called "social arbitrage," and it is an economic phenomenon that is, if not causing the greatest and longest recession in history, is changing fundamentally the system put in place a century ago.  It is making rich countries decisively poorer and poorer countries marginally richer.  If you're asking yourself how that can be, if you're asking yourself who is profiting from this -- because someone has got to be profiting from this -- then it is time to make yet another introduction in our rogues gallery of heroes, antiheroes, toadies and all that falls in between.

Middle class real incomes have been falling for decades, while the economy was financed on consumer debt.  When Joe Sixpack couldn't afford the new Wal Mart televisions and X-Box 360's, he had to finance them with his credit cards.  Buying junk made in China and financing it at usurious 20% interest.  This created a bubble, as the economy wasn't sustainable.  It was simply being financed for the time being, until everything that Joe Sixpack had to hock was gone.  Even when secondary mortgages became legal in some states, and all of the Joe's had taken second liens on their houses to try to keep up with their dwindling real income and rising cost of living, it wasn't enough.  Eventually it was to run out.

The dream of every American to own their own home.  Well, the cult of deregulation and the cult of the anti-Government managed to send it down the shitcan.  First, the big banks took the Joe's mortgages and decided to "securitize" them.  They bundled multiple note obligations and sold them on a market as an unregulated security.  To do this, however, they had to separate the debt from the mortgage property interest itself, a legal impossibility. 

When the courts began blowing the whistle on the "securitization" of mortgages, and creditors' trying to foreclose upon real property via their "mortgage interest" to satisfy the outstanding debt -- a debt that had to be separated from the "mortgage interest" to "securitize" it, the banks suddenly realized what they had done.  Centuries of settled case law and the Law of Property prevented precisely this charade. 

They couldn't separate the mortgage interest from the debt and then try to use the mortgage interest to secure the debt.  They couldn't put the shit back into the horse.  Suddenly, sensing the onrushing calamity, Congress rammed a bipartisan bill through in the middle of the night seeking to relax the timeless protections afforded a party in foreclosure, and, thankfully, the President never signed it.  Perhaps word had gotten out as to what was going on.

The Party's slogan is that ""Proles and animals are free."  And so it is.  Free to indulge in the coming season of consumerism and religious redemption.  Free to watch cars racing around a cement track over and over and over.  Free to eat themselves into obesity and an early death.  Free to do anything to escape what they almost sense that they know, but cannot quite see clearly enough, in the back of their mind's eye.

"If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles."