Alternate realities...

While most Americans sit on their hunches and try vainly to wait out the desperate spiral our economy has taken, Big Business (our government) continue to make inroads on extracting the few remaining dollars that record breaking oil prices and inflation have left, Bushco continues to deny that our economy is anything but crumbling, and Cheney spouts nonsense about the success of the Iraq war and the additional troop deployment.

After months of absolute tumult, the increasingly unstable stock market took another blow this weekend as financial stable Bear Stearns was thrown a life jacket in the form of tax payer’s heard earned cash from even bigger financial devil JP Morgan Chase Bank, who bailed the insolvent company out by buying up shares at an egregious discount of $2 a share. The bailout, which came after JPM Chase made a secured loan to the company on Friday (basically a loan unto themselves), potentially saved the entire market from certain demise after investors and lenders begin to call in the collateral on speculative loans made to Bear Stearns. These loans of course, were strengthened on the basis of the company’s two hedge funds which lost heavily amidst the sub prime mortgage fiasco. Investment banks such as Bear Stearns are vulnerable anyway to the totally speculative part of the market that includes hedge funds and bond funds; anytime loans are backed by computer earnings that have little to no respective (real) collateral, it leaves the underbelly of the company exposed. Whisperings of trouble for other financial institutions that rely on securities backed by securities backed by securities are on the horizon. Says Anil Kashyap, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, "My guess is by next week, there will be rumors of other large, familiar institutions" that could be in trouble.” What does this spell for the average consumer? Well the Federal Reserve, you know, the institution that hoards our taxes for themselves and prints and sells us our money back to us for a fee, is backing the loan that JPMC Bank is giving Bear Stearns and is backing the transaction that will make Bear Stearns a part of the larger institution. Not only that, in order to back the dubious loan and transaction, the Fed had to resort to an ancient, rarely used provision called the Federal Reserve Act, allowing it to lend funds to a non-bank financial institution. Which means that you and I are paying for the JPMC Bank coup of Bear Stearns, although we’ll never see a dime of any future earnings when JPMC Bank sells Bear Stearns back to the public for a price that will be at least 1000% markup of the $2 steal it has currently garnered, and if this is any sort of precedent, we, the public, will be paying for future bailouts of insolvent, risky scam-like companies as investors call upon them to realize all the money that has been speculated into them. Confused? Don’t be; this kind of nab and sell happens all the time on Wall Street, and is the reason why CEO’s of financial institutions make 10-15 times the salary as the average American. It’s a scam, pure and simple, but one that the Fed endorses, so we really have no say in the matter.

Bushco continues to make headlines of his own. This time he swears that not only are we not heading into a recession (he’s right, we’re heading into a depression), but that he has complete confidence in the ability of the markets to turn us around, this despite the record number of growing insolvent speculative markets which include the aforementioned Bear Stearns. This is also on the heels of his complete ignorance on the ability of gas prices to soar to over $4 a gallon by this summer (certain markets on the west coast have already seen the price of a gallon of gas burst the $4 mark). Bushco sounds increasingly like a maniac on the loose when it comes to domestic affairs, and lends new air to the phrase lame duck.

“…The temptation of Washington is to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in the housing market amounts to inaction. I strongly disagree with that sentiment. … Government actions are — have far-reaching and unintended consequences.”

What we don’t want or need, Bushco, is a government handout or bailout, but a severe reduction in overseas military imperialistic sentiments that are bankrupting this country by the hour. You know that when NYT, the cheerleader for the White House, is reporting that Bushco should lay off the ganja, that things are very wrong in the world (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16sun1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin.)
Why the insistent ignorance on all things domestically challenging from this Presi-tator? Well, for Bushco and his cronies, this economic instability couldn’t be better. From the Big Five to Halliburton to Blackwater, government contractors are riding an enormous wave of unprecedented earnings and profits. For Bushco and his dictatorship, their eyes are on the bigger prize of Iraq and stolen oil and the woes of everyday Americans are of little consequence to them.

Speaking of stolen oil and contract profits…Cheney and family are on a tour of the ‘ever improving’ Iraq on the eve of the 5th anniversary of this immoral and imperialistic war for oil. Citing reductions in violence and an overall up tick in political advances, Cheney derided current invocations of pull-outs pending the change in leadership come November… "It would be a mistake now to be so eager to draw down the force that we risk putting the outcome in jeopardy," said Cheney, on an unannounced visit to Iraq. "And I don't think we'll do that." Even after record deficits here at home, with the country’s economy spiraling into disaster and destitution, Cheney refuses to acknowledge that even though the violence that this war instigated is perhaps indeed faltering in certain areas, we have incurred unimaginable and staggering damage to the Iraqi people and their way of life, replacing the harried regime of Hussein with an equally horrendous occupation that continues to displace millions of Iraqis and do irreparable psychological and emotional damage to our troops. Of course, since troops admittedly fall into the lower or middle class of citizens, their well being is negotiable for this administration, which has so fool-hardily led them into danger that could and should have been avoided…