Philadelphia Is Destroying Its Public Libraries

Some targeted library branches may be saved

Mayor Nutter said yesterday that five of the 11 library branches once scheduled to close permanently on Thursday are instead on track to be taken over by private foundations, wealthy individuals, companies, and community development corporations.

It was not immediately clear which branches have sponsors and the mayor did not identify the benefactors.

But Nutter expressed confidence that in time private operators could convert each of the branches now on his budget chopping block into community “knowledge centers” that would offer similar or perhaps even superior services to those now available. Though the services would vary from branch to branch, Nutter said the centers would likely retain book collections, computers, and perhaps even trained librarians.

Emphasis added by me.

This guy is certainly true to form to his surname: Nutter.

Hey, how’d you like to have to rely on, say, the Exxon-Mobil Knowledge Center for information about the oil companies?

I could go on in that vein and get really inflammatory, but fuck it, this blog dies tomorrow and I’m burned out as it is doing this.

This is the systematic destruction of the world as we have known it by the same bastards who brought us to this brink.

Are there any men left in America to stop this shit?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #482: Keiser

Max Keiser: Predicting the collapse of Iceland

Aljazeera re-aired Max’s 2007 prediction of a collapse of the Icelandic economy.

While the program aired in August 2007, it was filmed in April 2007.

Watch for the scene in the Blue Lagoon in which Max predicts a global Depression to be caused when all these debts driven by low interest rates burst.

Emphasis added by me.

It wasn’t just debt — it was outright fraud. Isn’t that correct, Bernie Madoff, you bastard?

Things will get dramatically worse between now and Obama’s Inauguration.

You’ll have to find your Doom fixes elsewhere, however. I won’t be blogging after Wednesday.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #481: Unrest

Russia, China warn of dire economic straits in 2009

Russia and China issued stark warnings on Wednesday about the impact of the crisis on their recently booming economies in 2009, with Moscow saying the downturn could spark unrest in the streets.

Emphasis added by me.

It won’t be the only country where that will happen.

More:

Commenting on the worsening situation, Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky, warned that unpaid wages, the threat of layoffs and unpopular government anti-crisis measures “may aggravate the protest mood.”

China’s top economic planner also warned of “great challenges” ahead.

The head of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping, said “grave risks” lay ahead for goals of fast growth and high employment if the government did not manage to stimulate demand and maintain export growth.

Emphasis added by me.

We all think of Germany as one of the richest nations on the planet. They just opened my eyes to a dimension I hadn’t fully considered:

In a sign of the times in Germany, poodles, terriers and sheepdogs queued up for rations in the country’s first soup kitchen for pets, housed in a disused school in the former communist east Berlin.

The soup kitchen was opened in October and offers free food for pets belonging to pensioners and the growing ranks of Berlin’s unemployed.

Julia Raasch, who heads the soup kitchen, said: “We’ve already signed up nearly 400 people. And our stocks are dwindling fast.”

Emphasis added by me.

I mentioned stocking up on pet food here. But what happens when that runs out? And you can’t afford to buy any more?

Next year will be very bad.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #480: FAIL!

Situation report: global economy, December 2008

What’s next?

Viewpoints about the crisis have coalesced into three camps.

1. The “normal global recession” camp. Just another cycle, US GDP down perhaps -3% peak to trough.

2. The “worst recession since the 1930’s” camp. A bad scene, but the world’s governments are now on the job. Fiscal and monetary policy will do the job, again. US GDP down 5% or so. See this example.

3. The “worse than worst” scenario. Government policy might not work — or it might work but only with long lags. Uncertainty rules; the outcome is unknowable.

I don’t give a damn what opinions have coalesced around as “possible” outcomes.

There is only one outcome: Utter collapse and misery for hundreds and hundreds of millions.

How many of you know the fraud is on a worldwide scale of a quadrillion dollars?

How many of you yet understand that fraud was the everyday way business was being done?

How many of you think we’ll be a placid population while undergoing massive starvation and panic?

Let me try to explain the situation in a manner I think everyone can understand.

Your Windows XP PC has been running for several hours. It’s really a unit a few years old, but that’s what you have to deal with. Firefox has been running because you’ve been on the Internet all that time.

With your limited CPU and RAM, every time a new browser tab is opened, you risk everything seizing up. It’s almost like Browser Roulette: Which tab will lead to a website with so much Flash and Javascript crap that it will totally freeze Firefox?

Our economic system is old. Every new fraud has been a new browser tab. The system has frozen. It is going to crash.

Now, when you reach that point with your PC, what do you do? Do you just take the PC and throw it away? Of course not.

With XP and Firefox there are two choices:

1) Bring up Task Manager and kill the Firefox application. But that doesn’t necessarily free up fragmented RAM, so things could still run slow when Firefox is launched again.

2) You kill Firefox via Task Manager and then reboot the PC.

You’re still using the same system, but now everything has a fresh start.

This is what needs to be done with the entire worldwide economic system from all the way at the very bottom to the top.

Worldwide economic reboot.

The only way that can happen is for every government to agree that we’ve all screwed up. The only way out is a synchronized reboot of the system.

I call that 777: The total forgiveness of all debts, period.

Adam Smith was wrong.

And we are not not not going to have worldwide suffering to prove a goddammed point of ideology.

Ideas are created to serve people.

We do not create ideas to enslave us.

I am not offering this up as a suggestion, either.

I am telling you that every single one of you is going to recognize this as the only way out of this mess, period. It’s inevitable, it’s unavoidable, and it’s the only only only thing that will work.

Everyone is going to left holding a bag of shit at the end, one way or the other, from very rich to very poor.

But our nations will be intact, our infrastructure will be intact, the flows of information will remain intact, our populations will not be sick and dying and frustrated, and the massive release of productive energy this will create will be unprecedented in all of human history.

Recognize that.

I pray you all do so before the chaos really begins and gets out of hand.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #479: Expats

End of the Eldorado dream: A plunging pound and property crash have left thousands of expat Britons on the breadline

This is the key paragraph:

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare. The housing market has gone into freefall, with negative equity now widespread.

Properties are being marked down by as much as 50 per cent – and still not shifting. New building has virtually stopped.

Couples are being forced apart, as husbands or wives head home in a desperate attempt to find work.

Emphasis added by me.

That one sentence is what millions of you will be paraphrasing in 2009 and 2010:

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare.

Emphasis added by me.

Those are the extreme cases. What is so extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the Costas is the suffering of the silent majority. Those most hard-hit are individuals who least expected to find themselves in financial difficulties.

Having worked hard all their lives, they took the decision to move to Spain to improve the quality of their lives in retirement.

Emphasis added by me.

‘None of us came to live in Spain without money,’ she points out. ‘Unlike Britain, which has an open door policy for anyone who arrives without even a penny to their name, we knew that if you came to Spain you had to have money to survive.

‘We brought our own money with us and we invested it wisely. We bought our own homes and we have never taken a penny from the state. But what is happening now is that we are being buried by economic factors beyond our control. It’s really worrying.’

Emphasis added by me.

But when they decided the Spanish lifestyle was not for them and put the property on the market, they were in for a rude shock.

‘I never really settled in Spain,’ explains Jan, 68. ‘I missed my grown-up children and Barrie had sick relatives in the UK who needed looking after, so we made the decision to move home. This time last year we put the house on the market for £228,000 – but there has been no interest in it,’ she says.

‘Previously, you would have just dropped the price a bit, but because of the collapse of the market we have been told that that would make no difference.

‘We need to make enough to pay off our £100,000 mortgage and to buy a small flat back in England, but there aren’t even property developers out there willing to take it off our hands. As it stands now, our dream house is worthless.’

If that weren’t bad enough, the couple are struggling to make ends meet. Barrie’s pension has fallen by 300 euros a month, while their mortgage repayments and everyday costs have all gone up.

‘Taking everything into consideration, we have worked out that after all our outgoings in November 2007 we had 310.41 euros left over every month,’ says Jan.

‘Now, in December 2008, we are minus 154.24 euros every month.’

Emphasis added by me.

Look at how quickly things can change.

How will it change for you?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #478: I.D.

Premise: The rich will not be amenable to any solution that essentially reboots the entire worldwide economic system and leaves them holding a bag of shit. A bag of shit, mind you, that everybody else will also wind up holding.

Solving that is not easy …

… why don’t you try it?

Especially all you whiny crybabies who weep for “solutions.”

This is your cue. Go!

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #477: Biden

Can Drudge get any more stupid than that Scrooge crack?

It links to a George Stephanopoulos blog to pimp Sunday’s This Week interview with Biden.

“The economy is in much worse shape than we thought it was in,” Biden told me during an exclusive interview — his first since becoming vice president-elect — to air this Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“There is no short run other than keeping the economy from absolutely tanking. That’s the only short run,” Biden told me.

Emphasis added by me.

Well, first, the economy is in worse shape than 99.999% of people realize. And in our government, that figure is even higher for widespread ignorance.

And what’s the prescription from Doctor Obama?

Biden said he has canvassed Republican and Democratic members of Congress about a second “big” and “bold” stimulus package. He said the Obama team is focused on creating jobs and spending on energy and information technology infrastructure.

“Every single person I’ve spoken to agrees with every major economist. There is going to be real significant investment, whether it’s $600 billion or more, or $700 billion, the clear notion is, it’s a number no one thought about a year ago,” he said.

Yeah, well, everyone already knows this.

What no one wants to face is that it won’t work.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #476: Rules?

Into the Economic Abyss

Many people — including yours truly — have looked to events of 80 years ago to try and figure out how things might play out in future. But maybe it isn’t necessary to go back that far. There have been other economic implosions in more recent times that might offer lessons that are just as illuminating. In fact, one of my regular visitors, Jason, suggested that I check out a blog, Surviving in Argentina, published by an anonymous Argentinean, which offers up some disturbing but absorbing accounts of life in that beleaguered Latin American nation. After reading a post written a few weeks ago, entitled “Despair in Once-Proud Argentina,” it made me wonder whether we will see an equally calamitous ending here.

If this account doesn’t make you cry, please do the rest of us a favor and kill yourself. You are too deluded to face reality — or you’re one of the sociopathic pathogens infecting this nation.

A few clips:

“I can’t explain it, and maybe I never will be able to[.] [. . .] But maybe you can start to figure out why. You have to wonder: Is all this really happening? Are our politicians so corrupt? Are we now really so poor? Have the banks really stolen our money? And the answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.”

And:

“Am I proud of what we did? No, of course not. Would I do it again? Yes, of course. You start to live by different rules.“

Emphasis in the original.

With each post, I am trying to plant into your head in ways that cannot be avoided how absolutely horrific the breakdown of our advanced society can — will — be.

Because I don’t want it to happen to us!

“You can’t know what it’s like to see your children hungry and feel helpless to stop it,” she said. “The food is there, in the grocery store, but you just can’t afford to buy it anymore. My husband keeps working, but he keeps bringing home less and less. We never had much, but we always had food, no matter how bad things got. But these are not normal times.”

Emphasis added by me.

I paused while creating this post to read the comments for it. That caused me to add my own Comment, which is a fitting way to end this post:

Jesus Christ.

If I read one more whiny crybaby “Offer us solutions!!!” post, I’ll scream. OK, I’m screaming NOW.

WTF is wrong with you lot?

You’ve been given the very rare privilege here of seeing the breakdown of an advanced society into absolute horror. Some of you are thinking, unsaid, “Oh, it’s just those effing spicks, that’s how they are!” The other lot are thinking, “Hey, my gun will be my passport!”

Both of you are unfit for survival with what’s coming up.

Your “solution” — such as it will be — is YOU. What the hell do you think made this country, a pack of crybabies telling the proto-revolutionaries, “Oh, give us a solution EXCEPT overthrowing Old George”?!

Your money is shit.
Your gold is shit.
Your gun is shit.

Start there and YOU can begin to CREATE some solutions.

FA, thanks much for this post. I’m linking to it.

And so I have.

Update: For those who will stupidly dismiss this account because it’s from a “Doom site,” here’s the original source: The Washington Post!

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #475: Know Future

Yeah, I steal from Max Headroom for that.

Incredibly, I missed this huge news. It came out Thanksgiving Day. I was off the PC that day and I think the next few days I was not in a Post More Doom Mood.

But this is serious. It’s from CitiGroup and it confirms what I’ve written here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Citigroup says gold could rise above $2,000 next year as world unravels

The bank said the damage caused by the financial excesses of the last quarter century was forcing the world’s authorities to take steps that had never been tried before.

This gamble was likely to end in one of two extreme ways: with either a resurgence of inflation; or a downward spiral into depression, civil disorder, and possibly wars. Both outcomes will cause a rush for gold.

Emphasis added by me.

This is CitiGroup saying this. Citigroup!

More:

“The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done. When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed though into an inflation shock.

“Or it will not work because too much damage has already been done, and we will see continued financial deterioration, causing further economic deterioration, with the risk of a feedback loop. We don’t think this is the more likely outcome, but as each week and month passes, there is a growing danger of vicious circle as confidence erodes,” he said.

“This will lead to political instability. We are already seeing countries on the periphery of Europe under severe stress. Some leaders are now at record levels of unpopularity. There is a risk of domestic unrest, starting with strikes because people are feeling disenfranchised.”

Emphasis added by me.

Let that first sentence sink in:

The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done.

Emphasis added by me.

What kind of world is it going to be?

A living fucking horror, is what.

And where I break with CitiGroup is over their assertion gold will be a “safe haven.”

Bullshit.

Sure, it’ll run up in terms of value against currencies — but gold is otherwise shit.

You’re starving. You have a wad of gold. The guy next to you is cooking Last Chance Stew, made out of rats he’s trapped, killed, and skinned. Your stomach has been empty for three days.

What fucking good is your precious metal?

Money and guns: Both worthless. Money is shit. And you’ll never have enough ammo. And do you really want to go to your grave having shot other people to death? It’s not like the movies!

Previously here: (gold)

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #419: Gold 2
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #409: Gold
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #407: $2K/oz.
Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #248: Gold Coins

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #474: Cheer

Aw, in these dark times, I thought I’d post a happy, fun video that will make all of us get in the proper spirit of the times!

Watch it completely.

Enjoy.