Malaise

We’ll note that Bloomberg is reporting that amidst the last financial crisis, Wall Street’s financial elite received over $1.2 trillion in sweetheart loans (ultimately backed by the taxpayer) via the Federal Reserve. That’s around the face amount of all of the “bad” loans then held, btw. Just part of the “back story” going into the current financial crisis– presaged by last week’s nearly thousand-point drop in the DJIA, and various announcements of probable insolvency among European banks that will presuably slam American banks as the “sovereign debt crisis” rolls along.
Anyway, back to the $1.2 trillion thing. This, of course [“this” being the diversion of most of our GDP to the totally parasitic and unproductive financial sector by one means or another], is why we’re told that there’s supposedly just no money left for anyone or anything else– nothing– no pensions, no health care, no food aid, no housing, no education, no nothing… (except of course for our nation’s simultaneous twin industries– besides enriching rentiers and the rest of the financial sector– those being (1) imposing unnaturally early deaths on people abroad, and (2) unnaturally belaying deaths of unhealthy, usually elderly people here.) I’d say we were a sick society with our priorities up our asses… but then… you already know that.
You also know that the supposed right/left dichotomy is a kabuki designed to divert attention from the have/have not dichotomy, in which pretty much anyone holding anything less than a home owned free and clear with at least a million dollars in liquid assets or cash equivalents, is in the “have nots”… and such people [as, well, over 99% of us, anyway] can expect to have our real incomes decline just as our real expenses increase… for the foreseeable future (certainly and without doubt as long as Barack Obama is in office; I love “the quiz” that opens the interview contained in this piece, to wit, “Is Barack Obama (a) a Marxist, (b) a Communist, (c) a Socialist or (d) a Nazi… the correct answer: Barack Obama IS A REPUBLICAN!” In any event– he has delivered for his campaign donors on Wall Street, just as any other Republican, whether bearing an “R” or a “D,” would have done).
So… stop wasting time doing things like reading blogs! Go stock up on precious metals, ETFs specializing in things like food and water… and for that matter… stock up on food and water! Learn to grow food– I’m at least on that arc, albeit barely– and go learn to preserve food (something I’ve got to learn, and fast). See above re: “we are a sick society with our priorities up our asses”… you don’t want to try to change such a society– you want to try to escape it, but, given the realities that only a few of us will be able to pull that off, you want to endure it and survive it.
Concluding that the left/right thing is entirely nugatory has, of course, made blogging less fun for me [Barack’s seamless continuation of the whole GTMO and “war on terror by different nomenclature but identical policy” should have been the giveaway… but then, you know that too.] Which is why there’s less here, of course, and why I expect you’ll see less for, well… I can’t say exactly, but, you know, what with gardening, cooking and trying to stay in shape and hold down the job and spend quality time with wife and child and all… well, you know… not as much time or energy, and quite frankly… not as much fun. Such is the nature of malaise… be it macro or micro (the reader may select which).
Oh… looks like Qaddafi– however you spell it– is toast… or might be any minute now… maybe. Doubtless well worth whatever trillions of American taxpayer dollars (and all of the lost opportunity to invest in anything productive) were expended to achieve that result, mere decades after Pan Am 103 and only 8 years after Qaddafi was George W. Bush’s poster child for the success of the Iraq War.
This has been “Malaise.” No telling when it will let up, either.