Kick Me!

By Phasma Scriptor

Remember making those silly signs that said, "Kick me" which you'd apply w/tape to the ass of an unwitting classmate. That's what the dumshitteabaggers are doing to themselves by taking the side the corporatist aristocrats v. Obama on the ground he's a Socialist/Fascist/commie/

pinko. No DST has the foggiest what it's promoting, namely, a continuation of the aristocrats getting richer while the DSTs get poorer ... w/a "Kick me" plea self-attached to their brains. Yeah, I DO mean their asses.

According to Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor during the Clinton Administration, in his monograph “The Root of Economic Fragility and Political Anger”, he uses a breakdown of the breakdown of the payscale of ordinary Americans to show that hourly wages have been dropping, adjusted for inflation, which, at this juncture, doesn’t exist. The annualized rate of shrinkage is 4.5%. Since these kinds of figures aren’t typically posted anywhere, even if wage-earners didn’t exactly know this fact, they’ve come to notice that their paychecks buy less than they did.

On Easy Street (commonly referred to as Wall Street), things aren’t nearly so depressing. Hiring is surging as are the outsized salaries. Compensation for this upper echelon of executives (not even taking into consideration the top tier of CEOs) has recently been bid up past the sweet-side of $1 million, a continuation, according to Reich, of an “ominous trend” - the one where the rocket for the obscenely compensated takes off, whereas the lower-class, fka the middle-class, runs in the same direction as a soap-box racer - strictly downhill, with the only silver lining being that getting to the bottom means you can’t get any lower.

In an inflationary scheme, the borrowing-against-home-equity gambit works since the market value for homes keeps rising; deflation, not so much by a 180, and deflation is what we have now and will have for quite a while (see post on deflation/derivatives). In 2008, the so-called debt bubble went the way of all bubbles. Why this isn’t foreseen is curious since everyone, everyone, everywhere has blown bubbles and watched them pop … without fail. Maybe, it’s just knowing that there’s lots of bubbles per bottle of bubble soap. But, the consequence of an economic bubble vs. a mere soap bubble is the reason why paying attention to the former needs to be as certain as the latter is doomed with inevitability.

Reich provides a simple comparison between the compensation of the wealthy in America in 1928, the year preceding the so-called Great Depression, and 2007, the year preceding the so-called Great Recession. In 1928, the top 1 percent in this country raked in 23.9% of the total income, leaving us serfs w/76%. Put it a different way, .239/1=.239, whereas .76/99=.00768, meaning, that top-shelf 1% was reeling it in at over 31 times the average low-Joe’s shot at goin’ fishin’. The next year, as noted, was the Great Depression, the 1st major funk into which the Federal Reserve tanked the US economy. In 2007, same song, next verse, singing “I have seen the fateful lightning of the Federal Reserve’s swift sword, Chairman Ben tramples out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored … ” OK, they’re not soaring lyrics, but, 2007 (you know what happened in 2008) saw the trample-down of the serf-class again to the point where the ever-heavily-favored 1% were staked to 23.5% of the kitty, leaving 76.5% to … “Chairman Ben” meet the “grapes of wrath” and bunch of guys with one fish.

The first Feudal regime in Britain set the entrance, stage left, for Robin and his Merry Socialists; more on this in the future. The Feudal regime of the Federal Reserve and more to the point, of the moguls of derivatives, Goldman Sachs, et al., the mockers to whom the DSTs have stuck engraved invitations to their brains to please “kick me” again, just like they did last 2008, and 1929, and …

The result will certainly be a return to that Golden Age of Feudalism when the nobility, that small prick of a percentage of the well-to-do (and doing weller faster), able to afford castles by sucking up so much of what the serfs produced that the purchasing power of the serfs was just about literally at the level of the dirt they lived on. Ensuring that whatever equity the lower-class, fka the middle-class, might have in their homes was also vacuumed up by the nobility, the Easy Street boys lured the lower-class, fka the middle-class, into the Easy Money Trap, borrowing against the market value of their homes. As Reich put it, “When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.”

In a perfect world, “grapes of wrath” would fight back instead of always being the low-hanging fruit that gets financially trampled. In our imperfect world (and growing imperfect-er), the dumshitteabaggers have hung those masochistic “kick me” signs on their backs. When that happens (and, with so many apparent DSTs asking for it), we’re all gonna get kicked in the collective serf-class ass.