Time To Rant: Banksters Blowing Out Country

The posts here are about men being raped by family courts, or by laws constructed by a male-hating class of radical feminists (cough, Pelosi, cough). But this post is about what's happening on a much larger economic scale.

Most people are simply wildly ignorant of what's actually happening. I'm a complete nerd who does nothing but research random economic theories and the general study of finance, politics, sociology, psychology, and history, so allow me to fill you in.

The country is on the path to complete ruin. That's right mom and dad: THIS ONE. YOUR country. I'm not talking about Zimbabwe here. I'm talking about the good 'ole U.S. of A. If anyone lost count, we've committed some 20-odd Trillion to the financial crisis between bailout and promises. The Government is now holding up three industries with its bare hands, BORROWED money and re-structured laws that encourage accounting fraud and racketeering. That 700 billion we gave away to multi-million dollar-swallowing, self-aggrandizing banksters last year? Yeah, we didn't have that stuffed down the front of our pants. That money is being borrowed in the bond market, a massive fixed-income debt market that could hold 10 stock markets in its back pocket.

Let me be as plain as I can - insiders report that the normal issuance of T-bills (debt issued by the Feds that they promise YOU and me will pay back), is about 20 billion a week. Sound like a lot? That's because it is. And what do they issue these days? Try 200 billion per week. That's insane. That's beyond the pale. Even with people and sovereigns (that's foreign governments) fleeing into the bond market to buy, the buyers are COMPLETELY overwhelmed by the massive issuance of U.S debt. So what? So this is a freaking problem. Here's why. The interest rate on bonds determine the interest rate we pay on the national debt. If that interest rate gets just a TAD too high, we're effed. We don't pay down national debt - we just roll it over - borrow anew to pay off the people we owe - PLUS INTEREST. As the amount of interest we have to pay - JUST the interest - will get so large, the country won't be able to make its debt payments - at that point the United States, the beacon of financial stability - must either default on its debt (cataclysmic) or else, MONETIZE the debt (that's a big fancy word for printing dollars out of thin air and using them to pay the nation's debts). So what are they doing? (They being the boneheads "in charge.") They're printing money like Hell and using it to purchase the T-bills being issued. Get it? The Federal Reserve board uses PRINTED money to purchase DEBT issued by the U.S. Treasury. Cute, eh? It keeps the purchases of T-bills up and interest rate paid on them down (rates and prices on bonds move in opposite directions). Its often referred to as a PONZI SCHEME. Its highly risky and ALWAYS collapses.

Check the value of the dollar lately? DXY is the dollar index. Its getting slaughtered - go figure. The Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, and Germans are less than thrilled with us printing them into OBLIVION. You see those people hold MASSIVE amounts of U.S. dollars (T-bills) and if we're printing like crazy, the dollar value will crash (more printed dollars means the dollars currently in circulation are worth much less); that's something john q. public is finally starting to figure out as well. Prices of everything are rising thanks to the print-fest being run by the private Federal Reserve Board.

Bottom line is that there's no way out of this but to kill the big banks (as they tried to kill themselves). Bailing them out is causing the Feds to print to avoid defaulting on their debt, but all the printing is killing the value of the dollar, which will increase consumer prices, and make the Fed back off their printing. They wind down T-bill purchases and the like by October and mortgage security purchases, asset-backed securities and the like by year end. That could allow deflation to take hold again and drive the value of the dollar up (oh no), which makes interest rates rise, and anything priced in dollars (including houses) fall. That's a good thing for nearly everyone but the big banks, who will order the Fed to go back to printing immediately (The Federal Reserve board is private, not public, they can do whatever they like), re-pressuring the dollar again, raising consumer (yours) and producer (your boss) prices all over again. This will repeat for as long as 4-10 years or until the weight of our debt and interest payments CRUSH us.

Think it can't happen? Interest is an exponential function. Do some math. We're not getting out of this alive unless the big banks stop being the black hole of our money that they are. And given that the banks OWN congress.... WE ARE UP THE PROVERBIAL CREEK.

For more info:

www.zerohedge.com
www.institutionalriskanalytics.com
www.market-ticker.denninger.net
www.bigpicture.typepad.com
www.nakedcapitalism.com

Rememeber, there is no government that stands FOR YOU OR FOR US - THEY STAND FOR THEMSELVES AND THOSE THAT PAY THEM. THAT IS ALL. WAKE UP AMERICA. YOU'VE BEEN SOLD LIKE SLAVES.

Ain't it Wonderful to Come Home Exhausted to the Kids Everyday!

[Let me summarize for everyone who has never been married or had kids - YOU CANNOT HAVE IT ALL - NOT WITHOUT A LOT OF PAIN. Couples who both work and try to raise their kids too, are exhausted, don't have sex, and waste the extra money on crap they don't need such as luxury cars. Couples with one person - EITHER MAN OR WOMAN - staying home with the kids are going to have a cleaner house with better food to eat and healthier children who receive more attention and probably get better grades, don't drink, smoke, or abuse drugs and don't get pregnant at 15.

BUT, that means one parent will have to feel a bit left out of the career world and you will not drive a Mercedes. Its called SACRIFICE. Families sacrifice. That means EVERYONE. Guess what? Hubby may be doing a job he hates because THE FAMILY needs the money and he's ignoring the new, sexy secretary, and gives his paycheck every week to the bank for mortgage, credit card payments, after-school clothes, and car payments. He does this because he loves his wife and children, but somehow this never counts as a sacrifice, or as an honorable thing to do. Its ASSUMED and its taken FOR GRANTED. EVERYONE sacrifices in a family. Its how families function. Get used to it. Selfish people get divorced or get used by other selfish people. Jesus Christ. Look around and grow up, already, people.]


Having it all is a myth girls, so just make sure your daughters marry rich men
After years of fighting, it is not the glass ceiling but working mothers’ dreams that have shattered. Is there a new way forward?



India Knight


When it comes to mothers and work, the question I would most like to be answered is: “Would you like your daughter to have a life like yours?” If you asked a man the same thing about his son, the answer would probably be: “Yes, give or take the odd thing.” But for mothers the case is usually different. For an increasing number of women, the answer now seems to be a resolute: “Absolutely not.”

This was certainly the answer I got from a friend last week — an ultra-successful, glass-ceiling-busting woman with an enviable job — when I asked her about her two little girls and what she’d like them to do when they grow up. “I’d like them to marry rich men and do a little light charity work,” she said. Of course, it seemed laughable. But she was deadly serious.

Last Sunday, in the pages of this newspaper’s Magazine, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, the likeable and apparently sane presenter, and his daughter Cecile did the Relative Values column. Cecile, a spirited 13-year-old, said: “Daddy . . . says, ‘You’re not clever’, which is pretty much true, I’m not very bright, but I love fashion. Daddy says that if everything goes wrong with fashion I’ve always got a safety net, which is to marry a rich man.”

Admittedly, two hard-working, successful individuals wishing nothing more than haut-bourgeois domesticity for their daughters does not exactly constitute a sea change: perhaps they’ve both gone temporarily insane. But the idea that clever girls crave domestic bliss, too, seems to be gathering momentum. The other week saw the publication in America of Smart Girls Marry Money, which “challenges the ideals and assumptions women have blindly accepted about love and marriage, and shows how they’ve done so at their own economic peril”.

“Mercenary marriages,” the authors claim, “make the most sense for future happiness.”

So I asked some of my friends who work in offices if they hoped their daughters’ professional lives would end up being like theirs. “What?” said one. “See your babies for about 45 minutes a day, like I did for years? I don’t wish that for my daughter.”

But, but, but . . . “I’m just being honest,” she continued. “We have a very nice life and I’d like her to have a very nice life too, obviously, but not like this.”

It’s not that my friends don’t support the advances women have made. “I want to say yes,” said another, “but I can’t. You’re asking me if I want my daughter to have a life governed by compromise and guilt. No, is the short answer.”

Another summed matters up neatly: “When my daughter was little, her school friends thought her nanny was her mother. I’d turn up to the nativity play and 10 little children would say, ‘Who are you?’ That would be a pretty weird thing to wish on my own child.”

There was a little more joy from the stay-at-home-mother camp, but not much. “I’d like her to spend as much time with her children as I have with mine,” said one woman, “but I’d also like her not to wake up in the middle of the night wondering what happened to her brain, her life, her ambitions, her dreams. Not wondering, really: panicking.”

“I would like her to have a life like mine,” said another. “Except I’d like her to be in a civilised world where going back to work is an easily achievable goal. I feel I’ve been put out to pasture and I’m only 36.”

Alpha Males Extinct

[I love this article. Apparently it doesn't dawn on the author to examine how the academic curriculum in schools has changed in the past decade and how this might affect boys' grades and test scores!?!?!?!?

Does anyone realize boys are being asked to read Jane Eyre in HIGH SCHOOL?!?!?! I love the Bronte's. I read a collection of their work - WHEN I WAS 28 - and I have a degree in English. I'm a reader's reader. I read Shakespeare and old English poetry. But I didn't get into 19th Century English Literature until College and didn't truly appreciate it until my mid-to-late 20s. So I'm guessing your standard Engineering, math-centric, 17 year-old boy MAY NOT YET BE READY for old-English romance novels - JUST MAYBE? Hmmmmmmm?]

Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."

DWINDLING ALPHA MALES
by Grant Stoddard

Is the Alpha Male in Danger of Extinction?

As more and more guys seem to lose their drive and females become increasingly ambitious, women wonder what this means for their lives. An investigation yields some startling consequences--and they aren't all bad.
Grant Stoddard

Having a penis used to mean something. From the time our species got its start until very recently, being a guy came with a codified set of behaviors and responsibilities: hunting large, dangerous mammals, charging into battle, subjugating would-be usurpers. Men who displayed prowess in these areas quickly rose in status within the group and increased their popularity with the ladies.

One reason for their success: For heterosexual women, sexual attraction is sparked by a collection of encrypted biological signals that offer vital clues about whether a man can protect and provide for a prospective family. And on a gut level, neuroscientists say, women respond favorably to Alphas—men who exhibit the right genetic stuff in their looks, intelligence, resources, and leadership. In fact, a 2007 study published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that when females (well, female mice) were exposed to the pheromones of dominant male mice, their tiny girl-rodent brains actually grew new cells that guided them to choose the Alphas as mates.

But it looks like among us humans, the behavioral Alpha signals men can emit—machismo, cockiness, the aggressive protection of their place at the front of the pack—are getting progressively weaker and less common as women's roles in relationships, jobs, and the economy become stronger and more central. With their traditional dominant, moneymaking position eroding, where does that leave men? Consider what might happen if the peacock didn't bother to fan his spectacular plumage, if the ram could no longer muster the will to clash horns, if the mighty lion neglected his patrolling duties. Can humankind handle the diminishment of the Alpha Male?

An uneven playing field
Right now, a woman's chances of finding a man who is as educated and financially secure as she is are small and, according to recent studies, dwindling. Women earn a greater share of high school diplomas as well as associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Significantly fewer men enroll in college than women, and an even smaller percentage graduate.

Those statistics suggest that men are both lazy and quitters, bringing to mind recent pop-culture depictions of dudes enjoying a prolonged adolescence of beer and PlayStation3 marathons—think Knocked Up and numerous other Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan films—and freeloading off Mom and Dad (even before this recession, twice as many men as women ages 24 to 34 were living with their parents).

In his book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, Leonard Sax, M. D., Ph. D., identifies a maelstrom of factors heralding an era of arrested male development, including video games, environmental toxins, and what he describes as "our culture's neglect of the transition to manhood." Sax notes that this phenomenon is not solely confined to Western cultures, and he disagrees that it's a consequence of women's achievements. "Think of Qatar, where women are still oppressed— yet a growing proportion of boys and men there are unmotivated."

Whatever the causes of men's waning drive, the women outperforming them in academia will surely have an impact on the future job market. But that market is already shifting radically along gender lines. While women working full-time still earn only 77.8 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, the recent economic downturn has highlighted the diametrically opposed trajectories of our work lives: The male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors have taken a huge hit, whereas the overwhelmingly female-staffed professions of education and health care have been relatively insulated. From November 2008 through last April, employment among men declined by 2.5 million, while among women it was down by fewer than 700,000 jobs. And some economics experts think that women are better suited to the new "knowledge economy," in which such traits as sensitivity, intuition, and collaboration are valued over typically Alpha jockeying-for-power games.

This new female-centric model may in fact signal a return to gender equilibrium rather than a break from tradition. For much of human history, being a skilled provider wasn't tied so closely to earning money—it also meant hunting; farming; gathering materials for food, clothing, and shelter; and protecting one's goodies from covetous neighbors. "During most of our ancestral past, individuals in a family had to produce all the material and social goods," says Elizabeth Pillsworth, Ph. D., an evolutionary anthropologist at UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. "This created an interdependence between men and women."

Once our society became centered on a wage economy, she continues, "if you had cash, you simply purchased all the goods you needed. As men became wage earners, they assumed the role of sole provider. Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."