Reversing the kettling procedure in Madrid, Sept. 25, 2012
Yesterday, Madrid had massive protests over austerity measures. Today, it’s Greece. Will Ireland follow suit or are they just into suffering?
Time will tell but it looks like people will need to get a lot more insistent before the bankers and governmental officials get the point. Austerity and scarcity are artificially constructed situations. What governments haven’t had the guts to do is tell their banker gamblers to take a haircut.
And then there’s all those 401Ks that need to be appeased. We brought that on ourselves when we listened to the gamblers and decided to join them at the global casino instead of saving most of our retirement money in nice, boring pensions. You know, the nice boring pensions that our parents retired on and live a nice, comfy lifestyle with a paid for house and a yearly cruise to the Panama Canal? Is that so awful?? No, it is not. But it is certainly not what you’re going to get if the stock market takes another steep, steady dive and fails to recover before you’re old enough to retire.
Anyway, the peasants are revolting. Go peasants!
Filed under: General | Tagged: 401Ks, austerity measures, Greece, ireland, Madrid, Pensions, protests |
The Confluence 
The bankers are not going to listen to the demonstrators because the Spanish “peasants” are owned by foreign banks. It doesn’t matter the banks loaned to those that overbuilt houses that nobody wants to buy. There are ghost towns in Spain, all new developments. They were built with the assumption that rich Europeans would buy them. Now the banks want their money and a new prime minister, who listens to the bank, Rajoy, was elected because he would fix the disaster. Well, he’s fixing it with austerity and Spain unemployment is 30%
Why doesn’t even Bernie Sanders ask straight out why regular people should be expected to be stock market/investment experts when they already invented pension managers? Whose dumb idea was that?
I will just guess, and phrase my guess in metaphorical terms.
His brain functions within the same Magnetic Brain Field as everyone else’s. People who have figured out how to reverse their own brain’s polarity will have their brains align exactly “backwards” from how most peoples’s brains will align with the Magnetic Brain Field.
People who realise that The Class Enemy is subjecting us all to an Applied Magnetic Brain Field have taken the first step to being able to
“reverse polarize” their own brain. This is all clumsy crude metaphor of course.
From Wall Street’s viewpoint, forcing millions of workers to “invest their own money” without a pension manager was a very smart idea and has worked out exactly as designed for Wall Street’s benefit. Worker “savers” without a pension manager are like sheep without a shepherd or a guard dog. Ripe and defenseless for the shearing or the slaughter.
” Your majesty, the peasants are revolting. ”
” You said it, they stink on ice. ”
– Mel Brooks in “History of the World.”
I’m not sure “we” really brought it on “ourselves” anyway. Didn’t the corporate boards and executives and bussiness leadership elites make their unilateral decisions to force their employees into 401ks? Was any of that really voluntary on the part of employees?
I certainly didn’t have a choice when my then-employer abolished its defined-benefit plan in favor of a 401k back in 1982. I don’t think I “brought that on myself”.
In my case, it was voluntary for the first pharma I worked at. For the second pharma, it wasn’t voluntary but it was supplemental to the pension. So, you could put as much or little as you liked into the plan. But since the company matching portion was so generous, most people tried to max it out. The pension is definitely a pittance. The monthly payment amount won’t pay for my iphone bill, so you’re pretty much stuck in a 401K
So they made it look like a good or even necessary idea at the time, then. So if the whole 401k-rackets “industry” lied about the safety and the lucrativeness of 401ks, the outcome is still primarily “their” fault and not “your” fault or “our” fault for going into them, I should think.
And the company match or double-match is a very powerful incentive to participate. So if the company’s match or doublematch money was also lost to the 401k racketeers, then the company ( or whatever part of the company that match or doublematch money could have been invested in otherwise) has also been just that much ripped off and victimised.
I am in a 403-b of the most primitive sort . . . the annuity which claims to promise a small but real monthly payout till death upon
going onto the annuity. We shall see . . . (And also my SS for which I have been prepaying right along. And which the Republican-Catfood Democrat Coalition wants to destroy).
Of course, now that we understand the nature of the 401k racket, perhaps those with jobs and paystreams and 401ks might consider ceasing further contributions into “their” 401ks if (IF!) they are able to re-divert those paystreams towards aggressive debt paydown to zero,
aggressively weatherising their houses (those who have houses), turning their yards into high powered high-density gardens and micro-orchards and such. That would be turning present money into the foundation of future survivalist wealth.
Should Obama lose this I expect to see an unmuzzled Bill Clinton tearing new assholes. We need an anvil chorus on the Left hammering away the likes of which republicans have never seen.
And if he wins, Bill will be muzzled as usual.
I don’t think so. I think Obama owes Bill big time and everyone knows it. Not only did Clinton give him his convention bounce, but he got the big donors to open their wallets. Clinton’s speech at the convention was so much better than Obama’s it was kind of sad. Obama knows, that is why he joked about making him Sec of Explaining Stuff.
What if Obama proves to be too stinky a pig for even Bill to perfume successfully? Some may say it was Bill’s fault for not spraying enough perfume. Others may say it was Obama’s fault for being too stinky a pig for all the perfume in the world.
I hope President S. Tinky Pig loses the election. Then we will get to see who blames what.
I think even a skunk could beat Romney. He is by far the worst republican politician in my memory. He’s not even human. Even his wife is non human. It is amazing. If the democratic party is imploding the republican party is doing it at warp speed.
I would be enjoying the whole spectacle, but then I remember that someone has to run this country. Can we have the adults back please?
We may have to seek, back, and be the adults at smaller levels of organization . . . state, region, county, city-town-municipal. If the 2-Party Conspiracy against America takes national affairs and governance all the way down to a post-soviet-collapse level (as I now believe they are conspiring to do on purpose), how can adult communities build armor plated survival lifeboat societies at smaller and closer-to-home levels?
And yes . . . I also get a form of that feeling about Romney. He is a
wealth-seeking weasel. I never watched his speeches or his wife’s speech at the convention, but still photographs of her facial expressions looked like twisted masks of supercilious hate to me.
If enough other people get that feeling, then Obama will win by default. I also notice that Colonel Patrick Lang has been arguing subtly but firmly for re-electing Obama to keep Romney’s neo-conservatives away from the layers of power. Colonel Lang’s view may well influence a critical massload number of his voting readers in the DC suburbs of Maryland and Virginia (and perhaps beyond).
It was some of Colonel Lang’s articles that led me to accept that Romney is simply too vile to vote for. So . . . ABOOR for me.
Please forgive my yetathird comment but . . . if home food production is a part of survivalism, I hope you can at some point re-think the possibility of home gardening. I remember you writing that you tried once to put in some bushes (?) but they failed and died in the super-heavy clay of your land? I have been experimenting on improving a tiny bit of garden-land at a friend’s house. They have a 6 inch layer of poor topsoil over clay so dense it is almost like very soft moist rock.
If I get any legitimately encouraging results, I will offer a comment about them when relevant.
I recently returned from a family visit-vacation to Saratoga Springs.
I met someone who claimed to have on his property a couple of 80 foot tall pure American Chestnut trees and he knows of scattered others here and there. He offers the theory that they are not merely “overlooked” by the blight because there are too few A.Chestnuts to sustain a blight infestation. He thinks this tree and others were either naturally blight-resistant or blight-immune. Since Pennsylvania was in the center of the Great Chestnut Forest, perhaps
it would be worthwhile finding local chestnut experts and planting some
American or basically “American” chestnuts to have those as a future food resource?
“warp speed”
Yeah, the difference between the two corporate parties is that the Reptilians want to crash us all into the asteroid at warp speed, while the Dinocrats think impulse power is fast enough. The ultimate result is the same. 😦
Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life in this political system. 🙄
r u ready
I have found some things that will grow in my clay soil and I also have the mother of all compost heaps. So this summer I planted 6 trees. The weeping willow will do great. The dogwood seem happy and we shall see about the apple trees. My hydrangea are doing well as are the bee balm and cat mint. Some other things not so much.
Next summer I am determined to put in raised garden beds. I have enough compost to mix with the clay soil that I should be able to try corn, cucumbers, watermelon and strawberries. It’s an odd crop, but it is what I like so it is what I am going to grow.
( To Teresa actually . . . )
It sounds like you enjoy the gardening process to a certain extent which would put you ahead of those who don’t enjoy the process and even further ahead of those who would actively resent having to endure the process. A good intro-book for gardening in raised beds might well be The Square Foot Garden by Mel Bartholemew. He was a non-gardening engineer who wanted garden food without all the work which gardening-enjoyers happily undertake to garden. His book might well have been titled Gardening For Engineers. Here is a website about it in case you want to look into it and decide whether it might be useful.
http://www.melbartholomew.com/
“Reversing the kettling procedure”
Bueno. At least the Spaniards haven’t been brainwashed into believing they deserve misery.
A friend of mine posted this excellent Spanish video about their economical problems – subtitled in English. You’ll see how familiar it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2C1vBh-Is8
Teresa,
If Riverdaugher does any gardening at her new home wherever that turns out to be, perhaps she will write occasional blogposts about it and that will give other gardeners here a legitimate opportunity to comment about their gardening as well.
We need to get back to having more general discussion posts. We WILL get back to that. I’m not gardening this year (we’re in such a drought) but, I have been working on other things. It would be good to talk about the stuff that actually matters in our day-to-day lives.
Did some of the gardeners and/or farmers you know try gardening and/or farming through this drought? If so, did they talk about the problems and results any? If so, what did they have to say?
(Our drought in SouthEast Michigan was probably about 30% as bad as your drought in Kansas. The thing which hit the fruit sectors of Michigan agriculture worst was the heat wave in March which sucked all the orchard-type tree-shrub-bush crops into premature flower. Then a normally seasonal kill-frost killed all the premature flowers, leaving none or near-none to pollinate and move on to fruit).