Crude oil futures soared past $145 a barrel for the first time ever Thursday before a bounce in the U.S. dollar cut into the gains.
Be Warned, good people. Regardless of any of the happy lies flowing from the mouths of pretty much all our politicians as well as the wanna-be contenders, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. The world has ridden the crest of the prosperity wave for a long time and now that wave is crashing on the rocky shore, as all waves must.
The Fed has run out of fixes for inflation and can now only issue statements designed to slow it down. It can’t actually do anything any longer, and it’s running out of statement material as well. The interest rate can’t be lowered more than the 2% it’s at now, to keep mortgages payable so people can afford housing. Raising interest rates raises loan costs and sucks money out of paychecks, which reduces sales of homes and goods, which puts people out of work, which results in recession/depression. This would ultimately reduce inflation except that now, the current inflation is being fueled by the rising cost of oil, from which comes all of our plastics and almost all of our fuel to transport all our goods.
The rise in oil prices is due to the devaluation of the dollar. When oil is $50 a barrel and then the value of a dollar drops to half, oil goes up to $100 a barrel to compensate and it does it RIGHT NOW. Wages and most goods take longer to react since it takes awhile for the increased costs to be felt.
Since the world is tied to the U.S. economy and our dollar, the lessening of the dollars value has an added impact beyond the increasing price of oil. China’s economy, for instance, is slowing down, since they sell so much to us. Our devaluating dollars that we pay them with, buy less oil and raw materials as each day passes. So they must raise prices to us. Higher prices mean that we can afford to buy less because our wages haven’t caught up, which means that more companies have less income and put more people out of jobs because of it. 62,000 more jobs this past month in the U.S.. This rising unemployment bounces back to the other countries, like China, whose economic growth is dependent on our trade, and they start laying workers off, too, which creates recession/depression in their countries.
The original cause of the devaluation of our Dollar is simple. Printing too much. The global economy is based on international credit and the reality is that only about 5% of the money in circulation is paper and coin. All the rest is electronic and exists only on computers and notes in ledgers, so creating more money is a snap. The money supply of the U.S. can be doubled or tripled literally in seconds on a computer keyboard. This sort of thing can raise havoc with a national credit rating, and it has for us.
In order to finance the horribly expensive war in Iraq, our government has created the money out of nothing. The longer this has gone on and the more money that’s been created, the less that money is worth because our credit has a spending limit the same as you have on your credit cards, in the international market place.
Now things are out of control. It’s like a snowball rolling down the mountainside. The farther it goes the bigger it gets. This is the whole purpose of our system of Checks and Balances in our government that George Dubya Bush has completely violated, and this is why the snowball has become an unstoppable juggernaut. Our government is supposed to be financed almost entirely by taxes. As corporate profits diminish and employees are laid off, government tax income steadily decreases. Yet our government continues to escalate its spending, by both borrowing and increasing the money supply. We’re making less and spending more. No one can keep that up for long, and no nation, either. We’re about to crash.
For some time now I’ve been watching how both major parties politicians, House and Senate, are grabbing off all they can get instead of doing their elected jobs, and it finally dawns on me, why. Just now. This is partly why I blog, as digging into this stuff always makes things come clearer. They’re rats abandoning the ship, and they’re gorging themselves as much as possible before they jump off at their own safe harbor.
This is a bad sign, Folks. A real bad sign. Before, I just thought it was a mutual feeding frenzy before the Democrats take over again, but the Democrats are just as much into it as anyone else. They’re all doing it with utter disregard for their political futures. That’s a black omen of things soon to come. Gird your loins, kiddies. Load the old blunderbuss and stock up the pantry, I do believe Hell is coming to breakfast and the Devil is going to be hungry.
Your Leader. Here I am, eating grass. Pretty good grass. Do you like my ear tag? I wonder what it's for.
Singing, Drinking and Voting
Thursday, March 6th, 2008Today’s a better day, neckwise. The strain pain is gone so now I’ll try to make up for yesterdays lack of scintillating repartee.
Found an article this morning about an Irish bar owner who declared March a “No Danny Boy” month, being sick and tired of drunk patrons singing this dirge-like lament, which reminded me of some of my own past mischief. A friend and I frequented a German-style bar where the band would play faster and faster as the night wore on, thereby inducing their customers to drink faster and faster. So this one evening we carefully chose a small table in the back, in the shadows and behind a pillar, and after things were rolling rapidly along, they began taking requests, which they always did after the crowd was half-looped.
So I sidled up and requested “Danny Boy” and quickly slipped back to our hidden table. Since the poor fool had uttered the name into his microphone, he was stuck with it. He tried to find the dirty rat who’d requested it, and coerce said rat into having to sing it, but I was well hidden. So the band played it and sang it, the drinking in the place virtually halted as everyone stared deeply into their beer mugs and it took them a good half-hour to get things going again even close to what it was before.
Years later I’m still laughing.
Florida and Michigan are in the deep fat now over the silencing of 5,163,271 American votes in their primaries, because their Dem. parties violated the rules by holding their caucuses too early. The real question here is can the National Dem. Committee deny voting rights to over 5 million U.S. citizens? Politics aside, this action seems basically unconstitutional and the governors of both states jointly stated “It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions”.
If my vote had been rendered worthless by some over-penalizing party bureaucrats, I’d want them to pay for my time and the gasoline it took. Multiply that by 5 million. By nullifying all those votes, they went too far in their idea of enforcing party rules. They forgot about all those who voted.
Since the McCain issue is settled, now it’s all about Clinton vs. Obama and the latter is showing his whiny side, crying over her “kitchen-sink strategy” in winning three of the four states primaries that were just held. Ummm, I think it’s called “politics”. Obama is a great speaker, full of lofty rhetoric that pours out of him apparently without effort, but every time he’s asked a hard question he equivocates. His experience really is lacking, he’s a junior senator who has done almost nothing during his short time in Congress, and there’s still the matter of that Blacks-only church of his.
Here’s some info about him and his church: Obama said “We were always playing on the white man’s court — by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn’t. The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage.”
Obama’s once described the white race as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”
“That hate hadn’t gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”
In 1983, during college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.
According to this site, Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother’s side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father’s side. Why does his father have an Arabic name? Why does every ancestor on his father’s side have an Arabic name?” The answer is obvious: They have Arabic names because his father’s side of the family tree is Arabic. Hussein Obama isn’t black, he’s half Arab, which explains why all the Arab and all the Islamic organizations including Louis Farrakhan support him. Yet he claims to be black. He’s not.
He’s coming across more and more as a very thin-skinned guy, while with Clinton I sense a certain amount of desparation. Both of them are under tremendous pressure, and one of them may end up doing a Dean Scream yet that will decide which one gets their parties nomination. It’s fascinating to watch, anyway, while they pant and suffer.
Something I’ve never understood is why anyone would want that job so passionately. Bush, with Big Oil behind him, now that makes sense. But just because they want to be King of the Mountain? Mitt Romney spent a chunk of his personal fortune, millions, on a losing campaign and Clinton has tossed in $5 million of hers.
Usually, by the time your term ends, everyone hates you anyway. I just don’t get it.
Tags: election, Obama, oil
Posted in Commentary, Herd Instinct | 1 Comment »