Marching Toward Zombieland

For a couple of weeks Kunstler veered off into neo con land. Today Kunstler is talking about the banks. Peacenik doesn't know when speculating about something turn's into advocating something. But this article sounds incendiary. Or is it just a warning? Peacenik is glad Peacenik is not a banker.

By James Howard Kunstler
on October 19, 2009 7:23 AM

When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as "an enemy of the people" you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company, which last week announced third-quarter earnings of over $3 billion largely derived from converting zero percent loans from taxpayers into zero risk profits off of anything paying more than zero percent in interest, revenue, or dividends.
The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the content of their dreams, but you can't argue with the fact that they are heavily armed to an extreme. And although it may be hard to measure with precision, one might venture to state that they are increasingly pissed off. How else explain popular entertainments like "Zombieland?"

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Evil Syndicated

Peacenik just got back from a wilderness survival course. Some interesting stuff on mushrooms and the biomass of salamaders. Peacenik was out of the information loop, but did notice a newspaper box headline declaring the recession in Canada over. And Peacenik got some text news flashes from a Punditman correspondent, that in fact the recession was over. Peacenik goes away for one week and all the problems of society are cured. Is it time for Peacenik to admit that Doom and Gloom is dead? By the way Peacenik has CNBC on tv in the background right now. The pundits sound hysterical. Maria Bartolomo is hyperventilating. Apparently there is no limit to the upside. Was Peacenik wrong? Should Peacenik put his meagre savings into mutual funds?

Then Peacenik scanned the blogosphere. The bubble economy is back. Or is it? Was Peacenik wrong? Peacenik thinks the economy is close to absolute collapse. Read Kunstler's take on the stock market. Is Kunstler right? Peacenik thinks so. And ask yourself this. Why would you believe anything that any central banker, or corporate spokesmen or politician says about the economy?



by Jim Kunstler

By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday's loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves - the Nasdaq in particular - in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called "churning," in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society - i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation - it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end - shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early - is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation - that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs's CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

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July 16, 2009: Desensitization

As Peacenik walked to the bus this morning Peacenik noticed swarms of little red ants on the sidewalk. They seemed aimless. Peacenik wondered if these were the new European fire ants. What did they know?

Then on University Avenue Peacenik saw swarms of people, also seemingly aimless. What did they know? World leaders, and the leaders of Wall Street look at people the way Peacenik looked at those ants. 500,000 more unemployed people in the U.S. this week. 500,000 more people who won't be buying new cars or new tv's this week. The leaders don't care. Is society, and peoples' economic well being, and peoples' health as fragile as the ants Peacenik saw this morning? Everyday people choose which information to act on or to ignore. Why did Peacenik notice the ants this morning. Were they a sign? Is a storm coming? Were the ants a warning? People ants. Ants people. Have a good weekend.

by Ilargi

Unknown Hit me baby February 13, 1922
Washington, D.C. Ingenious Prohibition-era fashion accessory, the cane-flask.
Foreclosures. I’ve never been foreclosed on. I can only imagine what it must feel like, be like. Having to tell your little children that they will never see their home again. That they will now live with grandma, or in a smaller place, or a tent.

"More than 1.5 million properties received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in the six months through June, the Irvine, California-based seller of default data said today in a statement. That’s a 15 percent increase from the year earlier. One in 84 received a filing."

Annualized, that's 3 million homes, or one in 42 U.S. households, which directly affects some 10 million people, and indirectly perhaps as much as a third of the population, with neighbors, suppliers, family etc etc. tossed in.

We’re threatening to become blind and immune to numbers. "Trillion" is a household term, where it never was until 2 years ago, like almost no-one would have known what a tsunami was until one happened, and now everybody thinks they do. The effect of billion and trillion becoming so normal in our daily language, what does it mean to those of us not directly impacted that 10 million of our fellow citizens are under threat of losing their homes?

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