By the third day of a three-day weekend anything resembling a ‘consensus’ is lost.
Even yesterday’s North Korean nuke test failed to attract much attention. Once again Mr. Obama trotted out the same tired, threadbare posture that has passed for the US main line on nuclear proliferation for years…
He didn’t say HE was upset about nuclear testing, he said THE WORLD condemned North Korea’s ‘flouting’ of global regulations. Where does this fit in with a nation that attacked another sovereign nation, without provocation and continues to ‘occupy’ that nation?
Since North Korea can’t deliver its nuclear warheads to rain down destruction upon its ‘enemies’, the only people ‘worried’ about a Korean nuke are its closest neighbors. (No irony should be lost on the fact that the nation most in danger of being on the receiving end of a North Korean nuke, is also the only nation that ever had nuclear weapons deployed against it during wartime in recorded history.)
But hey, no big deal.
So the next ‘hot topic’ of the day appears to be the commercial Real Estate markets. As businesses rush to shrink their ‘footprint’ in efforts to cope with diminishing consumer demand, the business of ‘renting to business’ is collapsing under its own weight.
But again, no biggie…the now colossal ‘For Lease’ Corporation is making an enormous amount of progress in the current business environment.
While other businesses contract, the For Lease Corporation is growing in leaps and bounds! (A huge tip of the hat goes out to off-shoring and globalization!)
While we’re here I would be remiss in not taking a few well-deserved swipes at my favorite punching bag.
A hearty FU to all of the treasonous bastards in the US government that placed the interests of their campaign contributors ahead of the welfare of the workers of this nation!
And another FU to the campaign contributors responsible for throwing tens of millions of US workers out on the streets, cutting their benefits and suppressing their wages during decades of record breaking quarterly earnings.
By the way, selling out the welfare of your nation for personal gain is the very definition of Treason…and we all know what the ‘penalty’ for treason is.
The law [lack of enforcement to be specific] protects you today but it won’t protect you forever!
Moving on, I stumbled onto this article by none other than the illustrious Paul Krugman that can be read a dozen different ways…
World economy stabilizing says Krugman
ABU DHABI, May 25 (Reuters) - The world economy has avoided "utter catastrophe" and industrialized countries could register growth this year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Monday. [Note the ‘qualifiers’, a lot of things ‘could’ happen, it’s just that some things are more ‘probable’ than others.]
"I will not be surprised to see world trade stabilize, world industrial production stabilize and start to grow two months from now," Krugman told a seminar.
"I would not be surprised to see flat to positive GDP growth in the United States, and maybe even in Europe, in the second half of the year." [Two ‘I would not be surprised’s’ in a row! Is he merely providing a hat tip to the ‘spin doctors’ or is this a simple admission of the fact that ‘anything is possible’?]
The Princeton professor and New York Times columnist has said he fears a decade-long slump like that experienced by Japan in the 1990s.
He has criticized the U.S. administration's bailout plan to persuade investors to help rid banks of up to $1 trillion in toxic assets as amounting to subsidized purchases of bad assets.
Speaking in UAE, the world's third-largest oil exporter, Krugman said Japan's solution of export-led growth would not work because the downturn has been global.
"In some sense we may be past the worst but there is a big difference between stabilizing and actually making up the lost ground," he said.
"We have averted utter catastrophe,[for now] but how do we get real recovery? [I strongly suspect ‘real recovery’ is not and never was a part of the plan.]
"We can't all export our way to recovery. There's no other planet to trade with. So the road Japan took is not available to us all," Krugman said.
Global recovery could come about through more investment by major corporations, the emergence of a major technological innovation to match the IT revolution of the 1990s or government moves on climate change. [Um, bizarrely, both of these ‘initiatives’ rely upon a ‘solvent’ customer base, something we do not currently enjoy… ]
"Legislation that will establish a capping grade system for greenhouse gases' emissions is moving forward," he said, referring to the U.S. Congress.
"When the Europeans probably follow suit, and the Japanese, and negotiations begin with developing countries to work them into the system, that will provide enormous incentive for businesses to start investing and prepare for the new regime on emissions... But that's a hope, that's not a certainty."
What do you find ‘interesting’ about this particular article?
Did you see it, right there at the end?
Did you see the enormous rock we’ve been beating our heads on for the past thirty years?
Worse good citizen, do you see the ‘insanity’ of repeatedly trying to break that rock?
What rock am I babbling about?
It’s the next ‘big’ thing. The technological break through that will create millions of new jobs, lifting the population of the planet out of poverty…temporarily.
Instead of working on creating a ‘sustainable’ social model, these idiots are seeking another ‘bubble’ that will lead us to the next bubble!
Don’t look now good citizen but Mr. Krugman points directly to the ‘next big thing’…the ‘problem’ is there isn’t (currently) a ‘profitable’ way to do it.
In case I’m being ‘opaque’ here good citizen, it is Mr. K’s reference to ‘another planet to trade with’.
If we were ever to crack the ‘speed of light’ problem, all of those twinkling lights up in the sky would instantly become ‘real estate’…and the governments of the world wouldn’t hesitate to sell it to you!
Flipping that rock over, developing this technology would nullify the government’s monopoly on ‘death from above’. That aside, it is hard enough to enforce laws on even a local basis, how well do you suppose a ‘galactic tax law’ would hold up?
No, when viewed on a broader scale there is little incentive for the ‘powers that be’ to fund initiatives intended to ‘reap the stars’.
Worse, those same powers are incapable of conceiving of a social model that doesn’t involve slavery.
So for them the only solution is to leap from bubble to bubble, even if it involves ever-greater degrees of civil unrest (due to increasing marginalization of the working classes.)
What do you suppose could be developed quickly, with a minimal draw on resources, that would generate tens of millions of jobs?
Can’t think of anything? You’re not alone. The ‘Masters of the Universe’ can’t come up with anything either…that’s why they are spending heavily on methods to monitor and suppress the ‘rabble’.
Until there is something truly ‘new’ under the sun, the probability of economic recovery will remain ‘remote’.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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