Friday, August 21, 2009

Two really good questions

clipped from www.time.com
How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?
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'Nuff said.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Right wingers get a pass

The Villagers have spent the last 30 years chasing phantom hippies and black panthers.
They have not cared about or even noticed the radicalism on the right, which doesn't fit their picture of scary political terrorists because right wingers look like what they think of as Real Americans. How in the world can these nice, white middle aged and elderly people possibly be so crazy?

Every editor in the country should assign all of his reporters and spokesmodels to listen to Limbaugh, beck savage, an d the rest for a solid week. Then they might not be so surprised to find out that the people who listen to them are paranoid, racist, hysterical, narcissistic and stupid. And there are a lot of them. And they aren't wearing headbands or tie-dyed t-shirts. They look just like David Broder and Cokie Roberts.
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Monday, August 10, 2009

Jim Kunstler: Get ready for a much lower standard of living

The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government. Who, for instance, can really comprehend what to do about the number problems infesting Fannie Mae and the mortgages associated with her? There's really only one way out of this predicament: to get ready for a much lower standard of living and much different daily living arrangements. We can't wrap our minds around this, so the exercise du jour is to play games with numbers to persuade ourselves that we don't have to face reality. We're entertaining ourselves with shell games, musical chairs, Chinese fire drills, Ponzi schemes, and Polish blanket tricks (where, to make your blanket longer, you cut twelve inches off the top and sew it onto the bottom).
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Friday, August 7, 2009

The unanswered questions about the US economy

How does an economy based heavily on consumer spending recover when so many high-value-added jobs, and the GDP and payroll tax revenues associated with them, have been moved offshore and when consumers have no more assets to leverage in order to increase their spending?

How does the US pay for its imports if the dollar is no longer used as reserve currency?

These are the unanswered questions.

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