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James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency-Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty First Century) speaks well for Floydian thinking:
"You can't have all the manufacturing in Asia, all the paper shuffling in the U.S., all the banking in London, and all the tourism in Europe. Nations and cultural groups need to have more well balanced economies. If you import all your food, sooner or later you're going to get in trouble. In the U.S. we've offshored all our manufacturing, so if we can't afford to have products shipped right to our doorstop, or if China gets pissed at us (just send Sarah Palin over for three days), we're in trouble. And sooner or later something is going to break down with trade relations, or shipping corridors, or the price of fuel, which is how wars start.
Another reason I say we have a bullshit economy is for about 20 years much of the so called wealth we generated was based on housing prices going up, so people could use their homes like ATMS, borrowing against their value to buy more stuff. We had a so called consumer economy based on easy credit-essentially financed by the rest of the world-which enabled millions of non credit worth people to get into the housing market, driving up the price of housing, leading many of us to believe we were wealthier than they were. And most of us could think of nothing better to do with our wealth than buy cheap plastic crap from China-pallet loads of SaladShooters and flat screen TV's. We let our cities and towns and infrastructure and local retail economies disintegrate, but we didn't care, as long as we could drive our SUV's to the mall, drinking bottled water"
This leads back to my blog last week on "WE are fucked", and sadly, we are. A recent photo of a lady at a Republican led "townhall" meeting showed her with the sign "Keep Gov't Out of our Medicaire". It really says it all.
Most of us as a populace expect the following:
1. Everything that is wrong to be fixed quickly, but we really don't even know all that is wrong.
2. The economy to improve quickly, so things get back to what we were used to, and what is "normal"
3. Obama to moderately make all the right changes that we can all agree on, despite lobbyists and Congress.
4. Housing to slowly return to reasonable prices, where we have home equity, and the stock market to continue its rise.
5. That Obama is preaching pure socialism and within a few years we will have nationalized everything, and have a massive national debt.
I'll share with you #1-4 won't happen,and #5 is a perfect example of where FEAR propaganda has been used by a "vast right wing conspiracy" (which does exist) has taken a calm man that wants only to distribute wealth fairly (not redistribute to the poor), but to make it fair in how to make money.
As most of you know I believe the chances of the average Joe in America (person earning less than 40k a year) actually getting ahead are nil. The decks are stacked against these folks, and the "from the bootstraps" success stories are statistically far from a norm.
When I say repeatedly "we are fucked" it is the provocateur asking you if YOU understand the depths of what we are "undoing" and the turmoil that is being created, not in the name of good, but of politics.
