- If you blow long enough, you will burst any bubble.
If you fail to maintain your brakes, they will break down at some inopportune
time. Failure to maintain personal solvency in your bank account leads
to bankruptcy. When you carry a balance on your credit card, you
pay far higher than the original cost of the item or service.
-
- How do you - or a nation - arrive at a point of financial
breakdown? Does arrogant entitlement and over-extension beyond one's means
resonate with today's news headlines?
-
- On a national level, we experience the severity of living
on international credit-now come home to roost. For the past 20 years,
our Congress encouraged massive outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring
of American jobs. That caused us to lose our manufacturing base and facilities.
Thus, today, we tolerate a $700 billion annual trade deficit. We pay China,
India and other third world countries to manufacture our goods at lower
prices while our middle class languishes with millions of job losses-and
cannot continue buying those goods.
-
- Few Americans realize that when you shop at such stores
as Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Kohl's, Home Depot and Target, you slit your neighbor's
and your own financial throat.
-
- James Howard Kunstler, author of, The Long Emergency,
said, "Americans failed to recognize the essential fraudulence of
the idea that this destruction was 'creative' and would lead to a higher
good, that the end justified the means, even as they watched their towns
die around them. Wal-Mart and its imitators used their wealth and muscle
to set up 'superstores' on the cheap land outside small towns and put every
other merchant out of business, often destroying most of the town's middle
class. They also destroyed the local capacity to produce goods. The public
enjoyed this bonanza of 'supercheap' manufactured goods without reckoning
any of the collateral costs, which were astronomical."
-
- While Congress dismantled our manufacturing and construction
base, and millions of necessary jobs, Congress exacerbated our vulnerability
by borrowing (selling), unknown to average citizens, $1.3 trillion in Treasury
Bills from (to) China to prop up our moribund economy. On a national level,
the average credit card runs a $9,240.00 balance (debt) according to NBC's
Brian Williams. Total consumer debt exceeds $2 trillion. National
debt tops $10.1 trillion! Ahh, the abundance of unsubstantiated bailouts
flow from a Monopoly Board checkbook!
-
- Additionally, another $700 billion vanishes from our
nation annually with the cost of imported oil. Since the oil crisis
of the 1970s, this nation failed to place any kind of a fuel-conservation
policy into effect. Despite President Carter's sage warning concerning
reducing oil consumption drastically, we ignored him and continued our
full-blast consumption habits surpassing California wild fires! After
all, Alaska oil fields opened-seemingly refuting limitations! As if to
render our insolence acceptable, we continue our myth that another discovery
in Alaska, Antarctica or the Gulf of Mexico will dismantle any 'oil crisis
hypotheses'.
-
- "After all, this is America!" Paris Hilton,
prominent and highly sought-after Hollywood authority, said. "Limits
are unacceptable!"
-
- The day approaches, likely 2010, supported by the Hubbert
Curve analysis-when galloping population expansion collides with declining
oil extraction.
-
- Similarly, we falsified home values with escalated appraisals
cradled in vacuous, lofty ideals. We allowed millions of poor borrowers
without down payments or viable financial histories to purchase homes clearly
outside their range.
-
- "No problema amigo," Wells Fargo bankers said.
"We can work the numbers to make the American Dream yours!"
-
- Surprise! The real estate bubble burst. Millions
of foreclosures are strangling American citizens and poor migrants who
lost jobs while they watched interest rates rise beyond their means.
-
- Can you guess the next bubble to burst? What can we
see exploding in our faces? What crisis long denied by our presidents
and Congress zeroes-in on our civilization like a stealth missile?
-
- Immigration-driven hyper-population growth extends its
ubiquitous tentacles into every aspect of American society.
-
- While, according to President Bush, 573,000 manufacturing
jobs vanished in November, the United States imported 200,000 job- seeking
immigrants from third world countries. It doesn't end there! Our myopic
Congress proposes doubling legal immigration to 2.4 million annually and
giving amnesty for 20 million plus illegal migrants! Watch for that
political torpedo in 2009.
-
- U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) promoted an H-1B
bill to add 550,000 foreign workers.
-
- That's on top of another 200,000 immigrants added in
December! Add another 200,000 immigrants in January, and the same, month
in and month out!
-
- Does anyone see the correlation with our financial plight?
Where is the common sense of importing more bodies when our own workers
stand in unemployment lines?
-
- Now is the time for sensible decision making-as other
countries must decide-regarding how many immigrants we can sustain before
exploding into chaos. We accept more immigrants annually than all
other countries combined!
-
- Our natural resources suffer over-extension today! California's
accelerating water shortages, arable land loss plus overwhelming debt strangles
its sustainability! California depicts and portends America's future.
From the looks of things in the past two months, baby, we're already there!
-
- Why do we entertain inviting millions more immigrants
into our country when our middle class stands in welfare lines, visits
soup kitchens, floods into food banks and loses homes?
-
- What might make a viable future achievable?
-
- We must return to a frugality mentality. We must pay
for only what we can afford. Congress, yeah, that's you, both democrats
and republicans-import only what we need if we cannot manufacture it.
How about a hefty dose of conservation versus our rampant national throwaway
mentality?
-
- Our current national dilemma stems from Congress' irresponsible
actions to this point. Doesn't it sound reasonable to change our actions
toward functional and viable outcomes?
-
- Our immigration-inflated population and extravagant resource-
devouring society must return to balance. Homeostasis of our economy and
demographics! Americans decry limits; however, denial of their reality
will assuredly burst the balloon of our inflated civilization. Limits
exist! Face them now or feel them later!
-
- Kunstler said, "At peak oil and just beyond, there
is massive potential for system failures of all kinds-social, economic
and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak
oil, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets
are off about civilization's future."
-
- "Can you think of any problem in any area of human
endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution
is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases
of population, locally, nationally, or globally." Dr. Albert Bartlett
|