Monday, September 22, 2008


BACK IN THE USSA


Hard to focus these days on the beauty of the autumn... I'll go out into it and take a deep breath, do some physical work right in the midst of all that actual magnificence, as soon as I post this...

Never thought I'd live to see what's going down in the US of late, particularly under what was ostensibly labeled a conservative administration; but then again, since when have political labels actually meant anything... China, the last major bastion of socialism, now looks to be a model of financial wisdom and capitalist probity compared to the US. Karl Popper once said that he knew socialism would fail because its success hinged upon the innate goodness of man. It appears that the same is true of capitalism.

The US taxpayers are now, without their consent or prior notice, the collectively puzzled owners of several (and soon to be more) failed financial services (or is it the other way around), with their neonotional debt limit not a freshly printed and inflationary 700 billion dollars (the figure being bandied about by those who don't want the public to know what's going on just yet beyond the smoke and mirrors), but hundreds (thousands?) of trillions of dollars. Money borrowed by the US government taxpayer from the private banking consortium known as the Federal Reserve, the taxpayers' new hedge fund.

I've always wondered why, if the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, it gets to use the .gov domain; just a little thing that bugged me; a small point, really-- never been so small before, though...
.....

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
---Alexis deTocqueville

3 comments:

togei said...

Interesting post Bob.
Dave in Nara.

ArtSparker said...

Shortly after the collapse of Communism, some prescient type remarked that the balance of power had been disrupted and that was not a good thing. I have been wondering if lately if Communism was what kept Capitalism propped up.

Martin J Frid said...

Monday's stock market will be the day to watch, apparently.

artsparker, over at the Oil Drum blog they are noting that the collapse of the USSR came right after oil production peaked in that country. We may be seeing something similar in our parts of the wood right now.

Hold on to your hat...