You can see more of the globe-trotting photographer and photo-manipulator Ted Guhl’s images in his Picassa albums here and here.

It’s worth the trip.

The two ladies pictured above work for Steven J. Baum, who may be the most unscrupulous foreclosure lawyer in the USA, and their get-up is part of last year’s Halloween office-party, where everyone portrayed homeless victims of foreclosure.

Joe Nocera devoted his most recent column in the New York Times to this festive occasion, illustrated by half a dozen photos from some office whistleblower, and he plods slowly forward to his fore-ordained analysis…

“Appalling!”

Yes, isn’t it! Appalling and insensitive!

Tut tut! Tut-a-tut-tut tut! Tut tut!

“I was never served” [with a foreclosure notice], says the sign, “and why aren’t you more sensitive to my dreadful situation, when you only heard the same lame excuse 10,000 times?”

So the lawyers and clerks who make up the last or the next to last cog on the enormous rolling wheel of foreclosures try to wring a few laughs out of their miserable jobs on Halloween, which was never exactly a sensitive holiday, and the Times tuts&plods as if their real-estate ads aren’t still selling zillion-dollar condos on Wall Street, and as if their plodding columnists saw it all coming when they endorsed and supported the corporate slob Bill Clinton and the bankers’ little bitch Barack Obama.

In 2007 the US GDP was about $14.07 trillion, while the total income of all US households was roughly $7.723 trillion. The $6.3 trillion difference between those two figures represents the amount of money that went round and round somewhere without ever passing through human beings.

Some of us were closer than others to that enormous hithering and thithering of money, like railroad switchmen standing beside the tracks, but none of us were on the train.

None of us received those payments. None of us paid them for his or her own benefit.

$6.3 trillion is the measure of our non-human economy. Human beings aren’t in the loop.

Is there any theoretical or practical limit for the fraction of our GDP which never passes through human beings?

No.

It’s like asking for a theoretical or practical limit for the fraction of trains that only carry freight.
 
 

This awful graph is actually the good news about unemployment in the USA, and there’s an excellent discussion about what it really means at economicpopulist.org, concluding that restoring our economy to its pre-recession level of employment would require the creation of about 19,000,000 jobs.

19,000,000 jobs!

And every month somewhere between 100,000 and 375,000 new workers or wannabe workers enter the workforce from high school or Mexico or wherever, and just to keep up with where we are now about 3,000,000 jobs have to be created every year, which is more than the rate of job creation during Obama’s feeble “recovery,” as portrayed in the graph at the top of this page, reflecting 2,000,000 jobs created in 18 months.

So we’re losing this war, and we would have been losing it for at least the last 15 years, except for the mostly delusional dot-com and housing bubbles, and now it’s time and past time to make peace with reality.

We’re producing almost as much of everything in 2011 as we produced in 2007, before the recession began, and meanwhile the productivity of more or less everybody who still has a job has increased by about 10% since 2005.

We would have to increase consumption by something on the order of 20%, meaning just about $3 trillion tacked on to our GDP of $15 trillion in 2010, to account for our current production and the additional contribution of 19,000,000 missing workers, before we returned to the happy days of 2007, and increase our consumption again and again forever, or at least until the biosphere collapses, and it’s already collapsing so obviously that even the Wall Street Journal’s die-hard denialism is fading away.

So the great machine will produce more and more until it runs out of gas, and meanwhile more and more of us will be reduced to the status of parasites in our post-human future.

Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, Destroyer of Worlds.

kalo ’smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho
lokan samahartum iha pravrttah /
rte ‘pi tvam na bhavisyanti sarve
ye ‘vasthitah pratyanikesu yodhah //

Now the NY Times is celebrating the death of Muammar Gaddafi all over their front page…“Qaddafi’s Death Is Latest Victory for New U.S. Approach to War.”

And who really cares what kind of “victory” it was?

Had Gaddafi completely dismantled his WMD and atomic programs?

Yes.

Had UN inspectors looked under every rock in Libya?

Yes.

Did he continue to support terrorism in Palestine or Lebanon?

No.

Was he a threat to his neighbors or the USA?

There’s no fucking evidence whatsoever that Gaddafi was a threat to anybody.

So US drones transformed Libya into a wasteland, and isn’t Obama a wonderful guy?

No.

He’s the same goddamned con-man as always.

Just move right into this 4 bedroom penthouse at 75 Wall Street, which you can rent right now for the bargain price of $22,950 per month!

But you have to hurry, because the vacancy rate for rentals in Manhattan is only 1.08%, and desirable properties get snapped up the same day they’re listed!

Across New York, rents have not only rebounded from the depths of two years ago, but are also surpassing the record high of 2007 during the real estate boom, according to figures from Citi Habitats, a large rental brokerage, and other surveys.

“As soon as we put something up in the window, it is gone the same day,” said Udi Eliasi, a broker at Citi Habitats.

Conservative (and mainstream liberal) criticism that OWS is just an unfocused mob would be a lot easier to refute if 500 signs said “Restore Glass-Steagall” instead of e.g. “Suck my debt” along with 499 similarly poignant but idiosyncratic slogans on 499 other signs.

Meanwhile the most common theme is probably “We are the 99%,” which really isn’t much of an upgrade from “Suck my debt,” because apart from the top 1%, the top 5% and even the top 10% isn’t feeling much pain, with incomes above or way above $100K.

The Big Squeeze really begins around $50K, but “We are the 60%” isn’t much of a slogan.

Human “personality” is like a boat slowly sinking, and it’s easy enough to see the problem, but you have to get out of the boat to fix it, and then you drown.

While whores like Bill and Hillary Clinton in the USA and David Cameron in England have spent the last 20 years celebrating the “energy, hunger and drive” of globalized economies like India, the real bottom line is that India enjoys the same percentage of illiteracy as Afghanistan and lower per capita consumption of food than any other country, and 450,000,000 Indians are starving: “Underweight, stunted, and sick.”

And it’s gotten worse in the last 20 years, and it’s getting worse right now.