American Armageddon

Ooooh boy. Did Molly Ivins' 7/21/05 column, "Big time trouble, America continues to weaken, but why worry?" really hit the nail on the head or what? If you think the U.S. is the cat's pajamas, then you must be one of those heavy sleepers who continues to silence your alarm with the snooze button, trying desperately not to wake up--forever!

I'm taking a short break from my birthday "transcendence" weekend to blog this morning. It's freakin' eerie, however, that in a birthday telecon from my niece and nephew last night, I had mentioned the 1989 demise of the USSR, people dancing atop the casket of communism as symbolized by a crumbling wall and then comes Ivins article to me this morning.

Oh, 1989, was that an exciting point in historical time or what? The dogmatists of capitalisn were right, had prevailed, glorious times were ahead! Prepare for peace dividends and crumbling trade barriers. But now we see that was all bullshit. If you haven't begun to suspect that what's good for American industry isn't good for America, to sense things are drastically wrong, you're still hitting the snooze button. What a different world you're gonna find when you finally wake up!

The death of communism didn't herald the arrival of a new age of peace and prosperity borne on the wings of capitalism. No, what becomes increasing clearer daily is communism's obituary merely preceded our own.

I won't go into a detailed discussion of the dire kind of economics the U.S. practices. This is not the venue for that. It'd only trigger those "hit the snooze button" reactions. Economics is boring shit. But economics is gonna kick our asses if we don't wake up. (It may already be too late. We may have all overslept this one.)

I know little of economics, but the warnings of those who do are out there. It's not the kinda stuff traditional Wall Street orthodoxy will tell you about though. And as Ivins chides, "the mainstream media keep treating the whole problem as though it were about a bunch of protesters in turtle costumes at the G8 summit."

But listen to highly respected investor Warren Buffet. He's trying to tell us. Warren warns America's destiny is not that of an "ownership society" but a "sharecropper" nation. Or Check out "America's Truth Deficit" by William Greider of the NY Times who posits "we face structural economic problems as serious as those that destroyed the late Soviet Union." Or, if you think you can handle it, try a little "Economic Armageddon" by Brett Arends, chief economist for investment banking giant Morgan Stanley who predicts America has a one in ten chance of avoiding "economic armageddon--maybe!"

In the slim chance you haven't hit the snooze button and returned to *la-la-land*, if you're still with me, if you check any of the dire warnings of the Casandras above, then you might want to next check out vacancies under bridges and freeway overpasses as I suggested yesterday. We probably have a future together there--as neighbors!

But for now, it's back to my birthday weekend transcendence. I have a rendezvous with a microbrew and a green chile cheeseburger in a small college town cradled 'neath majestic mountains. To enjoy it while I still can.