Archive for the ‘Greenspan’ Category

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.

September 19, 2007
Today Obama proposed a tax cut and that’s a spectacularly dumb idea.
In all fairness, he did propose some much needed reforms as well as shifts in policy and ideology. He did speak to the widening income gap and therefore, simultaneous atrophy of the middle class and concentration of wealth in America right goddamn now.
But, we’ve got a whole fucking city down south that is now merely a study in compassionless governmental inept broke ass dipshitedness.
And this war is not only shamefully stupid but very expensive. Russia fell because they ran out of money. Russia crawled away from Afghanistan because the coffers were about echo, long since about ring. A radioactive water supply, shit loads of nukes and nuke fuel unaccounted for……………and Putin overtly tightens his grip.
He pretty much fired everybody and took his ball home this week.
By the way, Russia is back.
And this time we’re broke.
Then we have the housing bust, it looked to me more like a soft skull implosion, and the inevitable subprime conflagration. Greenspan maintains he missed that one. I doubt that.
Then there’s the extraordinarily ominous notion that China owns a massive chunk of our asses.
Tax cuts are a really bad idea. Simply because the best we could hope for, were Barack to prevail, is a symbolic cut in taxes to the poor and middle class and no reform at all.
Well, and because it’s a really stupid idea from every other angle as well. The Republicans tried the tax cut tango and by virtue of smoke and mirrors, murder and lasers, fucked every one but the rich.
What we need, is those proposed reforms and re-prioritizing. Repeal the Dick-in-Bush fuckery and close the damn loopholes. You know, the ones that make it free to do business offshore?
We really need to pull an assload of troops out of Iraq as our very first DIPLOMATIC move. While we’re doing that we need to start making some goddamn friends in the neighborhood for once.
We don’t need no fucking tax cuts Mr. Obama. Your move may be a shallow populist grab for the great unwashed because your fellow Donkey/steeds are bustin a nut over healthcare, while you and Hills are on the big pharma tit like no other whorse on the grounds.
Or you may be sincere. I don’t care. Bad form. Gamesmanship: Zero.
I’m simply using you as example Mr. Obama, an example of underestimating what we want and what we know is needed. We have whales to fry. Now is no time to make decreasing revenue an empty priority.
I don’t dislike you, so I’m hoping you do better.
By the way, Stewart and Greenspan tonight was a Frazetta painting of two genuine big brained geeks riffing. It rocked my taint.
Drinks for my friends.