My question is, what’s wrong with this picture?

So we’re in the middle of an economic clusterfuck. Um, no shit.

The housing bubble erupted like a volcanically abscessed cow and deflated into a crater with a bottom below sea level. Tragic. I saw it coming. Twenty five percent annual appreciation in home values was unsustainable. Duh. I understood housing sales and speculation to be the last pole standing underneath the tent of our economy.

I was at the table, bought a brand new house in ’94, sold it in ’96 just after I no longer had to worry about capital gains. In and out at the last minute. I was lucky.

The consistent erosion in value of the dollar against foreign currency was troubling. Dragster fueled gold prices were an omen. Unemployment began to walk up a precipitous ladder. Then there was a deficit ballooning like a hemorrhoid after a dinner of habaneros, jalapenos and horseradish. A senseless war we couldn’t begin to afford.

I was and am a salesman, I talk to people all over the country everyday. I saw it coming.

Jon Stewart made a hysterically funny point tonight about how CNBC, a self proclaimed financial network, just missed it. Didn’t see it coming just like Alan Greenspan didn’t. I don’t know about CNBC, but Alan Greenspan is a liar.

How is that? You know, Greenspan turns into an idiot overnight and entire network devoted to the economy has fiscal Down Syndrome?

I predicted it. Read my old blogs. Am I a genius? One could argue it as a purely academic exercise, but that’s not the point. I am as clueless as the next Joe in most matters financial.

Shhhh! We’re hunting wabbit. See what I’m saying?

Here’s my point. We’ve got 90,000 troops in Europe, almost a hundred thousand in Asia and various amounts in twenty or thirty other countries. We’ll be spending well north of six hundred billion this year for “defense”. More than ten times as much as any other country.

Economies expand and contract. America’s economy is contracting at about the same rate as that of the planet. Our actual vulnerability in terms of national security are more congruent and even symbiotic with world economic fortune than any other facet of anything we do here on the blue marble.

Time to reckon and then contract. Not saying we should get all xenophobic at the bacchanal. How about we shrink some of our imperialistic aspirations around the globe? America must sacrifice her codependent love affair with the military industrial complex. If we don’t, we’ll fold like the Soviet Union for the same reasons and in the same way. Trust me.

It will be chaotic, noisy and there will be food lines.

Drinks for my friends.

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