Charles A. Pierce writes his take on the recent NBA events.

Here's my favorite snippet:

Another way you know that it wasn't really about economics is that the league's economic public case for its position became more and more preposterous as the weeks went by, and even the public began to notice that it was being taken for a fool. The hilarity hit high tide for me when David Stern started going around explaining that 22 of his 30 franchises were losing money.

Tell me, do you suppose that when Stern sat down and chatted with the Nike corporation, or with the People's Republic of China, to name only two of the wildly successful authoritarian operations with which the league does its business, the first thing he explained while pitching the NBA to them was that 73 percent of his league was in the red? Did you, at any time, expect to see Herb Simon, the shopping-mall billionaire who owns the "small-market" Indiana Pacers — a team that he bought for $11 million and which is now estimated to be worth $269 million — swiping the leftover bourbon chicken off abandoned plates in his various food courts unless the players surrendered to him a chunk of their dough?

Of course you didn't, because your mother didn't raise a fool when she raised you.

(Can the NBA produce financial documents testifying that Simon and his fellow plutocrats were perilously close to selling apples on Fifth Avenue? Yes, because almost anyone could, if they hired Philip K. Dick to do their accounting.)

And the third and most important reason why you know that the lockout was not really about economics is that there was a lockout at all. Because 30 years of propaganda — thanks, Ronnie! — have convinced most people under 50 that unions are for losers, it eluded many of the people covering these events that lockouts are, and will always be, things willed into being exclusively by management. They are not natural phenomena. They are never truly unavoidable. They don't "just happen," and they certainly do not occur because "both sides" are at fault. Lockouts occur when management believes that unions are too strong, and they occur when management believes that unions are too weak, and they occur when management doesn't want a union to exist at all.

Lockouts are not devices of economic correction. That's just a byproduct. Lockouts are attempts by management to exercise control over their workers. Period.

[SOURCE: Grantland.com | Charles A. Pierce | 28 November 2011]

The idea of transference means "the action of transferring something or the process of being transferred" . The branch of psychology called transference neurosis is "the redirection to a substitute of emotions that were originally felt in childhood" . I got this idea from the television series Law & Order that I will watch sporadically throughout the year, when I have time.

The show deals with human psychology and the devolution of unresolved social and personal issues becoming transformed into monstrous consequences. The particular show involved an older gentleman who transfered his traumatized notions of his mother having an affair with a jew into a hatred for jews in general. The man thought his secretary mother was raped by the jewish owner rather than becoming a willing accomplice, unable to admit that life is more complicated, irrational, and hypocritical then what he might have wanted. The man devolved when his mother died and he carried out a series of 7 deaths against hebrews -- which is a rather extreme end to this set of events, but then what do you expect from a tv show that needs to attract eyeballs. To be fair, the show did a good job evincing the characters involved in the script.

But it got me thinking about transference. This might be an innate human mechanism of dealing with very painful events. We redirect the challenging emotions towards a substitute, for whatever reason, and there are many different reasons. The mind makes its own connections and hypotheses of events; therefore, the mind finds and accepts its own substitutes.

Emotions are like water. Some persons control their flow of water at a regular constant drip. Others spray all over the place at different irregular intervals, or rush out, and some even turn off the spigot for most of their entire life. But when emotions fill an underground reservoir of pain, the deposits accumulate and grow. Soon the enormous amount of water has to go somewhere, and where it goes may or may not be the choice of the water carrier. Drainage systems have to be installed, and they are usually installed without any plan, on an as needed basis. So after a while, the drainage system becomes dysfunctional and has to be rebuilt or re-routed. This involves having to make decisions and choices that are difficult because of historical associations and various other personal attachments. However, whatever decision that is made, dictates the drainage construction and infrastructure (or lack thereof) that proceeds afterwards.

Ignoring the inevitable is the most frequent strategy. Lacking any absolutely necessary reason to change or reassess, the human species will merely drift, carrying on the current traditions and practices with which we have become imbued.

19 attempts to evict versus 200 occupations.

We report you decide.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ UPDATE ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Click here for the source of the map provided by Daily Kos. The 200 events stem from the 4th of October when the Kos post occurred.

These guys who shoot these guns at public officials , going back to Ronald Reagan, are all nut bags. Using violence against authority is counter-productive because it always produces a different series of events other than anticipated, and once the desecration occurs the shame will be inescapable. Adherents to the cause diminish. Violence is a tool for utterly impoverished civilizations suffering underneath massive dictatorial regimes; but it is nevertheless is poor choice. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi must be the way forward if any meaningful change is to evolve. Minds do not change when sensibilities of the national institutions are desecrated.

But the fact still remains, crazy violence against public officials has been a fact in American History going back to 1881 when James Garfield was shot outside a train station by a nut bag supposedly upset because he thought he should be appointed consul to Paris despite lacking any qualifications for the role.

Theodore Roosevelt became President when McKinley got it from another crazed moron. The contemporary newspapers carried a speculation that the nut bag was angry about the Phillipines occupation, but it is hard to know for sure. Myths do however at least say something about how a sizable minority saw the event.

The duel between Alexander Hamilton and a sitting Vice President Aaron Burr involved a dispute stemming from the 1800 election when Burr and Jefferson tied and the election got thrown to the House for the deciding vote, controlled by Hamilton's Federalists. Jefferson became President.

Burr was a very aggressively egoistic fellow who rubbed Hamilton the wrong way and Burr saw Hamilton in particular as a foe and adversary. Jefferson was going to drop Burr as Vice President in the 1804 election, and Burr became sore after Burr failed in his bid for Governor because of what he felt was a smear campaign organized by Hamilton. On July 11, 1804 the two met on a duel and Hamilton was fatally wounded. A sitting Vice President had just shot and killed not only a civilian, but also a very well regarded American and historically important figure in the creation of the Republic, as well as political competitor.

This reminds me of when Dick Cheney once shot at de-winged pheasants in rural Texas and accidentally wounded a friend of his who joined him. Cheney waited until the next day to break the news to the press. Rumor was that Cheney was drunk.

But what happened in July of 1804:

Burr immediately fled to South Carolina, "where his daughter lived with her family, but soon returned to Philadelphia and then on to Washington to complete his term as Vice President. He avoided New York and New Jersey for a time, but all the charges against him were eventually dropped."

Watch.

Watch as Herman Cain earns the pay he gets for pretending to run for President. He looks so pathetic being the hired Uncle Tom to make the Republicans look non-racist. He will probably net more than 10 million for his efforts, and now that the secrets of this man's dysfunctional predation rise to the surface, we begin to learn of how this man was blackmailed and used to serve the purposes of his benefactors.

The top 0.5% are not all of the same mindset. Some are enlightened and willing to spend time trying to understand other people and the best interconnected system between people. Others have seriously deranged personality issues and detachment disorders, and prefer to spend significant sums of money trying to take over the media, spread propaganda, and corrupt all democratic institutions. Some are also oblivious.

The system runs because the power struggle evolves and goes to the default position absent any active resistence. It does not take a lot of persons with billions of dollars to influence society and the political culture. If there is nothing standing in the way, those who try to influence the movement to aristocracy will succeed.

This ad was before they over-leveraged their capital assets and took bad bets on sovereign debts.

If you put a down payment of 10% on a loan, you can essentially get 9 times more money instantly. Use this money to purchase some security or something marketable, make some money, keep the down payment, and pay off the loan with whats left plus interest.

For example: with a $10 down payment you get $90 more dollars for $100 total, and must pay 0.25% weekly interest rate on the $90 at the end of the week. Buy a series of stocks with the $100 that result in a net gain of 2% and you have $102. Subtract the $90 loan and the 0.25% of $90 (0.225). You made $11.775 that week on $100. Now in the real world, you actually had $10 million, which is 100,000 more, and you made $1,177,500. A whooping 11.7% gain in funds.

And this is a low-end. Quite often money managers can get more than 2% gain if they are knowledgeable, have a large supply of funds and ample time, and also lucky. Of course, they lose two or more percent as well. But losing $1,177,500 for 20 weeks and making $1,177,500 or more the other 32 weeks is still a minimum of $14,130,000 a year for flipping assets worth $10 million. That's a 41% increase for the year. The banks will roll-over the loans, no problem, if they are confident of a 41% yearly gain..

Now consider that the FED begin to limit downpayment requirements to 2% or less. Thus enabling this skimming of froth to remain profitable longer. The banks and large asset funds like MF Global had their geniuses flipping assets and marketable paper with hordes of cash reserves chasing these profits. And the the Price got so far above the actual profitable value of the asset, or the dividends per share.

Would you want an asset that paid you $1 every 3 months, if the asset was $150? At $4 a year, you are getting less than 3% a year. Or would you want an asset that had no dividends? What if the stock tanks or the business goes bankrupt? You might as well buy bonds, which are loans made by governments and various large businesses. Bonds are safer because governments and large businesses defaulting on their loans occurs much less often than the general population of various businesses that sell stock on the various stock exchanges.

Instead of insisting on the down payment regulations, however, they lowered them, because all the big boys were loving the game, and started to justify their foolish speculative mania, and thereby threw kerosine on the fire.

A bond is a loan that is sold to various investors who trust that institution receiving the loan will pay off the debt. Say you need $100 and are willing to pay $5 for the use of the $100 at the end of the week. This is 5%. So you divide the $100 into 20 bonds at $5 a piece, with a promise that you will pay a extra quarter at the end of the week, or 5.25. In the real world this is actually relected against the initial value. Hence a $5 bond is worth $5 when redeemable after a week, but you only pay $4.75.

A stock is a business's initial method of raising funds to pursue a certain business operation. Once the business is in operation, the business can obtain loans against capital or against revenue streams. The business might also sell commercial bonds, rather than getting funding from a bank, because they might get a favorable interest rate. After the initial offering, the value of a stock is that it allows you an income stream based upon dividends. Stocks that don't yield dividends are only valuable if the stock goes up in value over time. In these cases, there might be valid reasons to believe a stock is solid because the company is solid; but still without dividends, the only point of owning a stock can be that you expect it will gain in value over time.

Now what if it becomes overly difficult for all of these brokers at computers to generate 1% gains and more often to get 3% loses. Then it becomes difficult for banks to roll-over loans, because everyone is doing it. And then all of the inflated assets begin to slide. The whole house of puffed up assets begins to fall, exacerbated by the vast 35 to 1 loan to asset ratios coexisting with decreasing asset prices.

Now why did the tax payers bail-out these morons? So they could do it again? Have we learned a lesson at all?

The lesson : you can only skim the froth from the investment dollars of the nation and misallocate investment for so long before the system crashes. When the various markets of asset classes and marketable paper become valued for the price more than their profitability, the market becomes a time bomb that will burst beyond the containable bounds of man's making.