I am ‘a simple man’, which is to say I believe nothing is complicated and the simplest solution/answer is ‘probably’ the correct one or the one that is ‘closest to the truth’.
Anyway, on Sunday’s I start my browsing with the editorials in the NY Times and this week Mr. Rich was discussing ‘no drama Obama’s’ too cool approach to catastrophe. Mr. Rich also criticized Obama’s reliance on his favorite scapegoat, ‘the best and the brightest’ that religiously screw up everything they’re tasked with. (Because they seek ‘crowd pleasing’ but impossible to execute solutions so they don’t ruffle campaign contributors feathers.)
As has become apparent over the past three years, you can get an ‘expert’ to endorse the craziest ideas if you pay them lavishly enough. If you can't find an expert willing to proclaim the world is ‘flat’, no problem, for a fee you can create your own fully credentialed ‘expert’ who, being your ‘employee’, will say whatever you pay him to say!
Um, if you don’t think this is a ‘serious’ problem understand that the foundation of the whole crisis rests on the ‘destruction of integrity’ caused by holding people hostage to their paychecks!
You’re not expected to ‘tell the truth’, you’re expected to ‘toe the damn line’ if you want to see your next paycheck!
Gee, have we uncovered yet another ‘serious flaw’ in the ‘best damn commercial system, ever’?
This whole damn thing is falling down around our ears because the ‘race to the top’ is only superceded by the ‘race to the bottom’!
If there’s a ‘silver lining’ here it is the fact that whatever rises from this burning trash heap it WON’T BE Capitalism because it has been proven you can’t TRUST individuals with what everybody needs!
The apologists will say ‘bad apples’ but the truth is good citizen, capitalism is a ‘bad system’. A ‘perfect example’ of free-markets exists in Somalia, where they stick a gun in your face and demand payment for ‘shade’.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time Mr. Panzer has evoked Julius Caesar’s famous ‘seizure’ of Roman government as allegory to our current predicament.
‘Crossing the Rubicon'
In "The Problem with Markets," I argued that the strong performance of one high profile market is less than it seems:
People may...believe, as a great many apparently do nowadays, that those currencies and foreign assets that are risky in their own right are nevertheless a better bet than any of the alternatives --- that is, they are the best of the worst.
That's one reason why the U.S. Treasury market has remained buoyant even though Washington is spending and borrowing money like a drunken sailor and wrecking the nation's long-term creditworthiness in the process. From the perspective, say, of a European who is worried about the burgeoning debt crisis in his own backyard, our market might appear to be a safe haven.
In "The Debt-Bomb Rubicon," Dow Jones Market Talk blog offers up some further thoughts on the threat posed by Washington's spendthrift ways, as well as a far more sobering explanation than mine for investors' seeming denial about the risks [italics mine]:
Real Times Economics picks up on the debt theme, noting that the $13 trillion in U.S. national debt equals 88% of projected 2010 GDP (in a post earlier this week, I compared it to 2009’s GDP and arrived at 90%, but little difference; at current growth rates for both it will soon be 100% of GDP.) That puts the U.S. in a dangerous situation. From the Journal’s Mark Whitehouse:
We’re borrowing to bail out consumers who took on too much credit and couldn’t pay, and to support social security and Medicare systems we can’t really afford. We’re able to do this because financial markets have maintained a surprising faith that we will eventually get our spending under control, and because the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency has kept our borrowing rates unusually low.
The travails of Greece demonstrate the hazard such easy borrowing terms can create. After Greece adopted the Euro, markets began to treat it more like any other European economy, allowing it to borrow at interest rates nearly the same as Germany or France. That, in turn, helped Greece get into much deeper debt trouble than it would have otherwise. As a result, it now has to implement austerity measures that will likely yield much deeper economic pain.
I’ll tell you, folks; we are crossing the Rubicon. We are going to be forced into some very hard choices, choices we have been putting off for years, no matter how the economy’s doing. That’s the real takeaway here, that soon no matter how fast the economy is growing, it won’t be able to keep up with our debts.
I disagree with Mark on one point, though. I don’t think our creditors and the markets are giving the U.S. a pass because they believe the government will eventually get spending under control. There simply is zero evidence that that’s going to happen. No, the markets are giving the U.S. a pass because the thought of a sovereign debt crisis in the world’s largest economy, which prints the world’s reserve currency, and which is in times of trouble the ultimate safe haven, is simply too terrifying to even contemplate.
But you’d be wise to do so.
I’d ‘disagree’ with both of them, first on the ‘Republican/conservative talking points’ of ‘too much borrowing by irresponsible consumers…it didn’t happen in the past because banks weren’t ‘stupid enough’ to lend to people who couldn’t pay! Whose foot is in it now?
Let’s ‘cut to the chase’ shall we and look at ‘economic growth’…(fuckin’ conservative fucks!)
Why isn’t our economy growing with our population? You know and I know what happens when you ‘export’ your productive capacity and import finished goods, you end up with sky-high unemployment! There aren’t any fucking jobs!
And who is this ‘good’ for? The fucking ‘retailers’ and no one else!
Which brings us full circle to a very disturbing situation, if commerce has government in a stranglehold, who is ‘protecting' the interests of society?
Short answer, nobody.
Social protections are ineffectual if commerce only serves those who ‘own’ it and not the population it was founded to serve! And isn’t this precisely what the conservative pukes are saying? We should cut social services (just as the taxes that supported those services were cut, radically!) and ‘pare back’ the government so it could no longer effectively enforce consumer protections.
The fucking ‘Teapartiers’ may not say that’s what they want and (worse) they’ll be the ones squawking the loudest when that’s what they end up with!
For some very bizarre reason, people are ignorant of the fact that government EXISTS to provide protection from the predations of the rich.
Understand good citizen, if not for government, we’d all be slaves and there wouldn’t be a fucking thing we could do about it…except kill every stinking, greedy one of them on sight.
Considering how ‘out of hand’ the situation has become it may well come to that as some point.
Thanks for letting me inside your head (link to mirror site)
Gegner
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