BAILOUTS: KEEP BLOWING AND BUBBLE WILL BURST
By Frosty
Wooldridge
December 22, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
If you blow long enough, you will burst any bubble. If you fail to maintain your brakes, they will break down at some inopportune time. Failure to maintain personal solvency in your bank account leads to bankruptcy. When you carry a balance on your credit card, you pay far higher than the original cost of the item or service.
How do you—or a nation—arrive at a point of financial breakdown? Does arrogant entitlement and over-extension beyond one’s means resonate with today’s news headlines?
On a national level, we experience the severity of living on international credit—now come home to roost. For the past 20 years, our Congress encouraged massive outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring of American jobs. That caused us to lose our manufacturing base and facilities. Thus, today, we tolerate a $700 billion annual trade deficit. We pay China, India and other third world countries to manufacture our goods at lower prices while our middle class languishes with millions of job losses—and cannot continue buying those goods.
Few Americans realize that when you shop at such stores as Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Home Depot and Target, you slit your neighbor’s and your own financial throat.
James Howard Kunstler, author of, The Long Emergency, said, “Americans failed to recognize the essential fraudulence of the idea that this destruction was ‘creative’ and would lead to a higher good, that the end justified the means, even as they watched their towns die around them. Wal-Mart and its imitators used their wealth and muscle to set up ‘superstores’ on the cheap land outside small towns and put every other merchant out of business, often destroying most of the town’s middle class. They also destroyed the local capacity to produce goods. The public enjoyed this bonanza of ‘supercheap’ manufactured goods without reckoning any of the collateral costs, which were astronomical.”
While Congress dismantled our manufacturing and construction base, and millions of necessary jobs, Congress exacerbated our vulnerability by borrowing (selling), unknown to average citizens, $1.3 trillion in Treasury Bills from (to) China to prop up our moribund economy. On a national level, the average credit card runs a $9,240.00 balance (debt) according to NBC’s Brian Williams. Total consumer debt exceeds $2 trillion. National debt tops $10.1 trillion! Ahh, the abundance of unsubstantiated bailouts flow from a Monopoly Board checkbook!
Additionally, another $700 billion vanishes from our nation annually with the cost of imported oil. Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, this nation failed to place any kind of a fuel-conservation policy into effect. Despite President Carter’s sage warning concerning reducing oil consumption drastically, we ignored him and continued our full-blast consumption habits surpassing California wild fires! After all, Alaska oil fields opened—seemingly refuting limitations! As if to render our insolence acceptable, we continue our myth that another discovery in Alaska, Antarctica or the Gulf of Mexico will dismantle any ‘oil crisis hypotheses’.
“After all, this is America!” Paris Hilton, prominent and highly sought-after Hollywood authority, said. “Limits are unacceptable!”
The day approaches, likely 2010, supported by the Hubbert Curve analysis—when galloping population expansion collides with declining oil extraction.
Similarly, we falsified home values with escalated appraisals cradled in vacuous, lofty ideals. We allowed millions of poor borrowers without down payments or viable financial histories to purchase homes clearly outside their range.
“No problema amigo,” Wells Fargo banker said. “We can work the numbers to make the American Dream yours!”
Surprise! The real estate bubble burst! Millions of foreclosures strangled American citizens and poor migrants who lost jobs while they watched interest rates rise beyond their means.
Can you guess the next bubble to burst? What can we see exploding in our faces? What crisis long denied by our presidents and Congress zeroes-in on our civilization like a stealth missile?
Immigration-driven hyper-population growth extends its ubiquitous tentacles into every aspect of American society.
While, according to President Bush, 573,000 manufacturing jobs vanished in November, the United States imported 200,000 job- seeking immigrants from third world countries. It doesn’t end there! Our myopic Congress proposes doubling legal immigration to 2.4 million annually and giving amnesty for 20 million plus illegal migrants! Watch for that political torpedo in 2009.
U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) promoted an H-1B bill to add 550,000 foreign workers.
That’s on top of another 200,000 immigrants added in December! Add another 200,000 immigrants in January, and the same, month in and month out!
Does anyone see the correlation with our financial plight? Where is the common sense of importing more bodies when our own workers stand in unemployment lines?
Now is the time for sensible decision making—as other countries must decide—regarding how many immigrants we can sustain before exploding into chaos. We accept more immigrants annually than all other countries combined!
Our natural resources suffer over-extension today! California’s accelerating water shortages, arable land loss plus overwhelming debt strangles its sustainability! California depicts and portends America’s future. From the look of things in the past two months, baby, we’re already there!
Why do we entertain inviting millions more immigrants into our country when our middle class stands in welfare lines, visits soup kitchens, floods into food banks and loses homes?
What might make a viable future achievable?
We must return to a frugality mentality. We must pay for only what we can afford. Congress, yeah, that’s you, both democrats and republicans—import only what we need if we cannot manufacture it. How about a hefty dose of conservation versus our rampant national throwaway mentality?
Our current national dilemma stems from Congress’ irresponsible actions to this point. Doesn’t it sound reasonable to change our actions toward functional and viable outcomes?
Our immigration-inflated population and extravagant resource- devouring society must return to balance. Homeostasis of our economy and demographics! Americans decry limits; however, denial of their reality will assuredly burst the balloon of our inflated civilization. Limits exist! Face them now or feel them later!
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Kunstler said, “At peak oil and just beyond, there is massive potential for system failures of all kinds—social, economic and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak oil, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization’s future.”
“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or globally.” -Dr. Albert Bartlett
