#47 “Just a few more shopping days until the Apocalypse”

Dear  Don1001,

Give me a break or give me something to break. Three years after visiting the economic abyss, a majority of Americans are still mired in rampant materialism and economic indifference. Not that people shouldn’t enjoy the fruits of their labors but maxing out your charge card and continuing to live above your means, makes the pain, greater, later. Which makes me wonder why would we ever want a business leader to run the country? If the business leaders of the good old US of America are so great, why is China treating us like a doormat? I thought that the economic pain the majority of Americans are in would cause the nation to contemplate the true economic nature of the Universe but it hasn’t. As a nation we keep trusting the same people that almost wrecked the world economy. Like the usual suspects such as Larry Summers, Timothy Geitner and Ben Bernanke, who are the big economic dogs in Obama’s Treasury Department. These so-called public servants remain firmly connected to Wall Street, so no matter where these gentlemen land it will be with the courtesy of a golden parachute. Larry Summers helped sow the financial seeds of destruction under Clinton by losing the firewall between banks and Wall Street. Yet this fact doesn’t seem to outrage many people because they don’t know enough about finances to fill a thimble. For some unknown reason the majority of American people still believe that if we don’t give Business what it wants, we’ll end up like a Third World nation. It’s like the Stockholm Syndrome, we’ve been held hostage by Big Business for jobs for so long, we now defer to our captors. That fact alone goes a long way in explaining why the top 1% of this country controls 85% of the economy. (Although Germany does seem to have a high standard of living, ecology and socialized medicine, what’s up with that?) Which gets me back to my present rant, why in the midst of the most fucked up economy in decades there hasn’t there be an examination of our junkie like relationship with materialism by our so-called business, political and religious leaders? In fact there has been opposite, a bunch of these same leaders are exhorting Americans to get out there and spend, so we can trade the Real-estate boom/bust cycle (which was begat by the Dot.Com boom/bust cycle) for a new boom/bust cycle that has yet to be determined (my bet; commodities). At this moment in time, we have a Texas sized justification for a little navel gazing to see how we got into this economic debacle in the first place, but we’ll probably choose to do a little more shopping instead. The hypocrisy of spending a boatload of money that we don’t have, buying things that aren’t really needed, in the name of having a strong economy, seems absurd to me but not evidently to most of the people that running our country’s economy. Which leads me to a bleak observation, people get led where they want to go and you’d better not let the facts ruin the vibe. This seemingly has led to absurdities like feeling special because a large, faceless multi-corporation made you a friend on Facebook. Which is pretty much like the relationship most of us have with the people that control our financial future.

                                    Looking for something to break, Brother Gregory

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