The Green, Green Shoots of Hope

“Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet. …”

-Winston Wolf

A quick Google search brings up in the neighborhood of 28,000,000 results for the masterfully concocted propaganda term “Green Shoots”. Just when it appeared that looter capitalism was on the ropes with Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer being exposed as a preposterous fraud who shilled for the Wall Street casinos and angry mobs were descending on the homes of AIG bankers the oligarchy went to the mattresses to save their spoils system. Helicopter Ben came out and launched the first fusillade of this malarkey on his 60 Minutes interview of March 15th. This on the heels of the now famous leaked internal memo from Citigroup CEO Vikram ‘the Bandit’ Pandit that spoke of wonders of money falling from the sky and the healthy quarterly results of his banking colossus and the pure hit of optimism opium was picked up and run with by the corporate public relations armies and their pocket media. The crack ho economy received the kiss of the sweet, sweet spike and it’s been to the moon Alice ever since. But it’s all a big lie of Hitlerian proportions.

I don’t know just where I’m going

But I’m goin to try for the kingdom if I can

cause it makes me feel like I’m a man

When I put a spike into my vein

Then I tell you things aren’t quite the same

-Lou Reed (Heroin)

The Surge, Morning in America…how many times have we seen this. The suckers game is on again, just queue up in line to rub the balls of the golden bull. Even better than being duped into believing that the illegal war and occupation in Iraq could indeed be won led by the almighty warrior General David Petraeus this re-inflation of the bubble and the kick ass confidence game that has been run for the past two months would have Joseph Goebbels himself drooling in awe. The markets came roaring back accompanied by the standard bits of hyperbole that appeared in nearly every story as though pumped out of the same mighty Wurlitzer – picking up steam, robust, green shoots surged and Jesus, people bought it. Largely ignored was the relaxing of mark to market accounting rules that artificially juiced the bankster balance sheets by allowing wads of worthless ass wipe derivatives to be valued at whatever the fuck fantasyland number that the plunderers chose. The banks won big time, they took the money and told the pope of hope to go and fuck himself when it came to any serious regulation, as though they don’t own his ass lock, stock and barrel to begin with given the amount that they had funneled into his presidential media campaign. The bought and paid for whores in Congress conducted such grand public hearings that you would think they were hauling Barry Bonds or some other overpaid meathead baseball player out to berate him for using steroids. But as it always is in the land of the fucked, it was all a grand illusion, a farce, a tragicomedy.

And the oligarchs fought back, Cramer mocked Nouriel Roubini who had predicted the big collapse (although he was not the only one) by making the ludicrous claim that ‘Dr. Doom’ had caused a lot of investors to lose money by not trampling each other to get back into the casino for the latest game of pump and dump. The much ballyhooed stress tests were all based on phony premises, the best case scenarios that silly assed, reality denial stricken Americans so love as they skip down their primrose paths to perdition marveling at the plethora of white picket fenced yards and foreclosed homes though their rose colored glasses. Americans are saps, suckers, fish, rubes, marks, schmucks and all too willing victims to the looters. They exist in a rotting capitalist debt slavery gulag in which they trade their lives and souls for the glory of owning bigger and better things for the shackles of escalating credit card balances from which, thanks to a feckless and wholly owned subsidiary of the Wall Street scum that resides in Washington District of Criminals they will never be allowed to shed. The bankruptcy laws were forever altered well in advance of the coming economic doomsday machine which indicates fraud as well as collusion on the part of all involved. But who can you call when even the beat cops are crooks.

I found this wonderful piece by James Quinn of The Burning Platform dealing with the diaspora that is America, I excerpt a bit from his latest, Jesus of Suburbia:

Beneath the finely groomed blissful suburban façade of America lurk desperation, denial, hypocrisy, and anger. The kids of suburbia today have an entirely different reality than the suburbs I grew up in during the 1970’s. The Ozzie & Harriet idealized version of suburbia from the 1950’s has degenerated to the Green Day nightmare vision of today. The suburbs have mansion-like homes with spotless interiors, entertainment centers, three car garages, manicured lawns, and no soul. The children of suburbia have been brought up on soda pop and Ritalin. They come home to empty mansions, as both parents must work to pay for the glorious abode. Our homes have gotten bigger and better, while our lives have gotten smaller and less satisfying. One third of all children in the United States are growing up in a single parent household. Many kids feel angry and disconnected from their families, friends and home. Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. The kids feel rage and hopelessness at their existence in a suburban nightmare. There are 2 million children who take Ritalin every day. Is this because they truly have ADHD, or it is the painless way out for overstressed suburban parents?

And as with the fantasyland version of a prosperous and virtuous America (there are no roads out of Pleasantville) it is all an illusion, an illusion that is rapidly becoming unsustainable for even the spinmeisters. While the little flim flam man Timothy Geithner was out lying his ass off once more in saying that the U.S. financial system was beginning to heal the retail results came in below what even the charlatans had predicted. By the way, I absolutely love the way that the economic spin goes whenever results are announced, it’s like we suck but because we suck less than we thought that we’d suck everything is getting better, well this time the numbers really do suck and people just aren’t buying shit because they have no fucking jobs. Also, the banks that the rigged stress tests said were so healthy are waiting for the next tsunami sized wave – credit card defaults, foreclosures hit record highs, GM will soon be exporting to the USA cars that are made in China and some pessimists at Standard and Poor are now predicting that the banking crisis is going to last until 2013. And here is my all time favorite, fresh off of Reuters:

Bear Warning: Stocks still face deflationary collapse – Jim Cramer meet Winston Wolf.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Longtime technical analyst Robert Prechter, who forecast the 1987 stock market crash, predicted this week that U.S. equities may plunge to half their lows hit in March as a deflationary depression bites.

Oil and U.S. Treasury bonds are also locked in long term bear markets, while corporate bond prices will plunge precipitously by next year as broad economy, banking system and company earnings sustain more damage from a financial crisis that’s akin to the Great Depression, he said.

The U.S. S&P 500 stock index’s .SPX rebound by nearly 40 percent since it sagged to a 12-year closing low of 676 points on March 9 is not sustainable, Prechter said in an interview with Reuters.

“It’s not the start of a new bull market,” said Prechter, chief executive at research company Elliott Wave International in Gainesville, Georgia. “Our models are (showing) right now that it is a much bigger bear market than most people realize, something along the lines of 1929-1932,” he told Reuters in a wide ranging interview. “It’s a very rare event,” he added.

“I think the next leg down will be at least as severe if not more severe than what we just experienced.

Boo hoo hoo banksters…

Somebody GASP has the audacity to piss on our nurturing little green shoots, realism you see is lost on the average corporate drone American. Optimism is for schmucks and they are once again all too happy to play their career role as fuckees, some people just aren’t going to really get it until they are standing in a fucking soup line, and even then it would be a miracle. Me, I listen to the guys who got it right from the beginning, Stiglitz, Krugman, Roubini and Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute, who in addition to being pretty much spot on in calling this fiasco happens to be as funny as hell. I will close with his latest Green Shoots or Greatest Depression?

The financial fields replete with sprouting “green shoots” should be viewed with suspicion, if not alarm. They are not a mirage, but they are ephemeral.

Field Marshall Ben Bernanke and his Green Shoot Brigade have fertilized the economic landscape with trillions of sweat equity dollars extorted from today’s public and the public of generations to come. Regardless of how depleted the land, heavy doses of dollars spread so thickly over the financial and government territories, will force “green shoots” to grow. But the fundamentals of the economy remain unsound. They will not be corrected by forced fertilizing barren acreage.

“Green shoots” may sprout, but they will not flower. The economy cannot be coerced back into growth with tons of money manure. As the ancient parable puts it:

“A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” – Luke 8:4-8

Now hear this: it is inconceivable that the “green shoots” are signs of sustained economic recovery.

No one could have forecast that the government would not only intervene in the markets by pouring unprecedented trillions into bailout schemes, but that they would commandeer the whole free enterprise system.

The 800-pound gorilla has ridden the elephant into the Oval Office, and they are there for all to see. But few will call a spade a spade. Benito Mussolini described Fascism as “The merger of state and corporate power.” He suggested that, more appropriately, it should be called “Corporatism.” By whatever name, Corporatism or Fascism, what it’s not is Free Market Capitalism, much less Democracy.

“Green shoots” can only be brought to harvest through real productivity. Pumping gigantic sums of money into too-big-to-fail financial institutions to jump-start the lending/borrowing cycle is to perpetuate a failed economic model. (See “The Greatest Depression.”)

We can extrapolate creatively from data, but cannot prophesize wild cards, such as acts of God, acts of nature, or acts of man that can only be described as “schemes undreamed of.” While there have been warnings since the founding of the United States, no one, but no one, could have predicted the mega-merger of Wall Street and Washington that is now a fait accompli.

With so much money being dumped into the system, there will be money to be made … and lost. The agile and the knowledgeable may be able to reap “green shoots” while they’re sprouted. But beware!

“The Greatest Depression” – that we forecast would begin to set in by the end of this year – may have been postponed, but it has not been averted. When it does set in, it will do so with enhanced intensity and at a pace accelerated by complex financial finagling … all under the guise of nation-saving action. Rather than let the failing industries fail and the failed banks go bankrupt, the government is deliberately bankrupting the nation.

The lesson to be learned from the financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007, is that nothing succeeds like failure. The greater their failure, the bolder they become. The more they lose, the more they take. The greater the chaos, the more control they exact. The bigger they fail, the harder we fall.

No act is too unthinkable or measure too draconian for the Washington-Wall Street Mob to concoct in order to maintain power, make money and cover their losses. While it is impossible to second-guess what the government will do next, it is absolutely certain that they will stop at nothing.

The “green shoots” will wither and conditions will deteriorate. Those who are prepared for the worst will not have been taken by surprise.

Words of wisdom if there ever were any in this sad era of stupidity, sloth and moral depravity.