“Tonight I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 1929…”

The USA Today headline on March 13, 2014 was that buyers are stretching out loans because they can’t afford the cars.  SO like the 1920s. Yes, part of it is the unmerited increase in car prices.  But another is that people’s wages aren’t keeping up.

The same paper had an article on how record margin debt was threatening the stock market.  Sounds 1929 familiar too.

And no one is paying attention.  Even if someone credible would simply argue that it wasn't applicable, that would be SOMETHING.

But maybe people know deep inside there's something very amiss.  After all, there’s been a dramatic surge in sleeping pills use…

Will They Vote?

Those who benefit from the Affordable Care Act:

Will they vote? 

Can they stay focused? 

Or will it be taken for granted quickly?

People power or money power?  Which will it be?

Hedges Still Not Wrong

Uh hum.  America.  I keep probing for you to prove Hedges wrong, but you aren’t. 

Rabid, selfish, shortsighted anti-tax mania gets us decaying infrastructure instead of improving and expanding infrastructure, and all sorts of bad 2^nd and 3^rd order effects, including a structurally anemic economy.  The more we close in on ourselves, beset by the uncaring myopic selfishness of the plutocrats, the more we feed a system that is dooming itself to fail disastrously.   

Aching Voids

Even now, over a year later, it can wash over me without warning.

My mother’s not here anymore.

You tell yourself to get over it, be an adult, it’s all a part of the life cycle.

It doesn’t help.

Instead, a tsunami of sorrow floods over me.

That nothing and no one can console.

She used to tell me how much she missed her own mother after she was gone, about how she felt, well, OLDER than she should afterwards.

I couldn’t relate then.

I seem to relate just fine now.

Just Like Your Body Needs Your Good Regulation Of It

Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Corporate America in general are all self-referential echo chambers of “no regulation!”

You need regulation, you need government.  Or what happened to BitCoin is inevitable: sophisticated criminals pillage you without recourse.  And that is only the beginning of troubles.

Ideologies often don’t hold up to analysis.

Irony and Laughter Amidst The Apprehension

The Federal Government was recently suing Sprint for overcharging it for wiretapping. 

Exercise Care

We strengthen government in the areas most to be feared.  We weaken it in the areas we most need its protection in.  We gut its funding stream. We heap derision on it.

One day we could find the results of all that to be that its repressive instruments are strong, but serve only the plutocrats, who use it to keep themselves ever wealthier and us ever poorer and dependent on them for most things.  And the levers that we will reach to pull to try to rein in our oppressors will have broken, rusted out, or been entirely dismantled or made irrelevant.