The end is, if not here, certainly near.

Why is it so difficult for consumers to recognize we are at war?
No, I'm not speaking about the propaganda wars of rhetoric we've been supposedly fighting for years. You've heard of these constant battles; "The war on poverty", "The war on drugs", and who can forget "The war on terror".
These are just ill-conceived, Utopian schemes to get your tax dollars into the government's paws a bit faster(!)

I'm referring to the most underhandedly criminal and viciously oppressive regime
we've ever faced. I'm speaking about our benevolent trading partners, the Chinese Communists. If the word "underhanded" also springs to mind, read on.

Don't doubt for a second that their trading ambitions are anything short of bleeding us dry, in every possible way, financial and otherwise.
The Chinese, and their corrupt and polluted government, are making an indelible and irreversible impression on our economic, and even political, landscape.

Can there be any reason our Treasury Secretary Paulson is glad-handing and visiting and pretending all is well with these manipulative characters?
Paulson is not Commerce Secretary, so what's he doing involved in these matters?
He's attempting to stave off(delay) our pending economic demise!

Over the past decade we have over-financed and outsourced and bought ourselves in to an economic quagmire, and neither Paulson, nor anyone else will fix this disaster.
You can't believe the Chinese are reciprocally buying shiploads of plastic trash with the trillions of dollars we've sent to them.
Oh, no.... they're buying power plants and transportation infrastructure and production capacity and shipping and hotels and even interstate highways in our own backyards. How long can this keep up?
By the way, They're buying military might, too.

Maybe we should dispatch our Treasury Secretary to save our precious currency from collapse when the Chinese dump our trillions in debt they've accumulated (under the not-so watchful eyes of our own government).
Is this looking like an apocalyptic vision, yet?

The Chinese are able to produce vast quantities of cheap and junky consumer goods not only because of their labor economics, but also because they have nonesuch of the crippling environmental laws we face in the USA.
Nothing is "cheap", when the end result is the loss of our economy.

So how is it that the world's worst environmental violator is kindly labeled "most favored trading partner"? That's the end result of lobbying, and the selling-out of our own government and elected officials.
If you haven't lost hope in our electoral process yet, just keep those campaign contributions coming!

The greater problem is the bigger picture of macroeconomic regression.
Even if we were able to instantly stop or slowly wean ourselves from the tide of Chinese goods, we no longer have the skilled workforce capable of mass producing those products here.
No problem, right....as long as we're still the "fattest" country on Earth.

The Chinese people are industrious and ambitious and will do anything to maintain the upper hand in this battle.
This portends very poorly for a nation churning out public school graduates who can't read at a forth grade level (forget about math!)and are only marginally prepared to sling burgers and serve-up fries.
None of these apocalyptic visions is by accident or coincidence, but are the result of a long-term decline in our educational standards, overseen by incompetent elected officials and inept political appointees. We've elected flunkies, crooks and complicit yes-men. Where have all the leaders gone?

Don't kid yourself; these problems start where the buck stops, right at the top!
Keep up the good work..."Great job there, Brownie".

This is most definitely a war we are losing at a record pace.
Check the label, and Boycott China, Now.

We are near the point of no return.
Once the foreign government controls out currency, we are in a financial quandary from which there is no escape. Effectively, we are out of business.

There will exist no economic balance and we will be bled dry from the forces we, as a society, conspired to create through wanton(not the soup) greed.
Unlike prior wars, however, this one has no breaking point, no defining event.
This war is based on a steady, insidious decline in our society, and like water already over the falls, shows no sign of abating. DR

I wasn't born yesterday, and neither were these warnings.

Why are we perpetually expected to trust the clearly distorted opinions expressed by the mainstream media regarding the economic crisis facing not just the USA, but the entire world?
These deliberate misrepresentations of economic facts are intentionally naive notions or outright lies about the direction of our economy. By prolonging the inevitable pain we only worsen the crash ahead. And history proves it's coming, trust me.

What we fail to foresee as a society is that history not only repeats herself when we neglect the signs of what's ahead, but provides all too many obvious signals for those bright enough to listen. We should not be misled by the political rhetoric of a supposedly "healthy economy". These lies are built on the premise that greater calamity ahead will eventually, if manipulated effectively, overshadow the gross and ill-advised missteps which drew us to this precipice of societal and economic collapse.

This week's convenient manipulation of our commercial banking industry was cheerfully touted as a "cash infusion". What occurred was no such thing, but an outright bailout of Citibank, a desperate and failed business, brought to its knees by the corrosive greed of managers caught in their own addictive cycle of profit and results at any cost. Go ahead, sell the farm. We'll make it up later, right? ..Not so fast, Shifty.

The demons of these schemes and slippery accounting are finally coming home, and they want to be paid!

Fed Chairman Bernanke continues to chase the Fed Funds rate ever lower. That's great for equity markets right? Not a Bailout, mind you but, here we go again, another "cash infusion".

The cost of borrowing for a commercial bank is at historically low rates. That's good, right?
Check to see the interest rates being paid by banks to account holders just to "hold" our money. Several percent is quite a spread, dangerously unprecedented, I might say. The money supply in our economy is evaporating, and nothing is done to alleviate the hemorrhage.
Merely acknowledging the problem would help.
Want to feel better? Another run to China-Mart ought to help.

Now watch as government agencies rush to cover the piracy of our financial markets caused by the so-called "subprime crisis". You can paint a happy face on anything, but the hard truth remains that future income models for these companies are disappearing, just vaporizing before your eyes. Today's equity and money markets are fabricated on an opportunistic illusionist's view of the universe. The Fed Chairman and your own government rely on optimistic and unsophisticated investors to prove "functionality" of their theorems and elliptical market manipulations.
Now our own country is running short of "investors".

China, Saudi Arabia and The UAE, welcome aboard.

Well, I'm not asking for help. If we'd learned, as a society, to live well within our means, these events would be far less significant than the potential apocalypse they portend.

Nothing in these markets, or our universe, occurs in the proverbial "vacuum" of space.
If Bernanke, or anyone else, is scrambling to avert catastrophe, it's because it's too late, and their past calamitous errors have come back with a vengeance.

When the Fed pretends to "fix" anything, be assured; they're not going to pay; you will.
Wake-up and plan accordingly. DR

Out With the "Politicians" !

Am I the only one to whom it has occurred that the patently worst candidate to replace Senator Domenici is any regressive career politician, whose variant and circuitous motives are merely another political power grab, another rung on their ladders of influence?

We are innately capable of finding and essentially recruiting astute, competent and dedicated officials if only we aim slightly higher with our electoral choices.

Any of the current crop of political hacks and 'glad-handers' angling to replace Domenici would be fortunate to shine his shoes, much less fill them.

The foundations and integrity of our political system are in jeopardy when we knowingly overlook reputable and articulate potential candidates for these positions of great responsibility.
This inequity is proven when we repeatedly choose to elect the 'agenda-driven' political and social climbers who inevitably line-up when an office of this stature is in contention.

It is the cancer of power mongering and manipulation which has become, by default, the path to societal ruin for civilizations, once great,
who myopically chose to ignore these dangerous trajectories.

The most qualified candidate in the difficult times of trial to come may well be the person who consciously steers away from the presence and corruptible influences such positions seem to inspire.

This concept follows another adage in life;
"You get what you pay for."
With allowances for bad grammar, this premise proves we tend to elect whomever is standing in line and yelling the loudest.

It's time we reversed the trend which has brought us to the precipice of evolutionary and economic obscurity. DR

What? Me worry. The government is in charge.

We are facing an educational crisis in our country of pandemic proportions. Accordingly, we may want to occasionally unstrap ourselves from the figurative thermonuclear catapults of our government educations, because this is not what you think and, fortunately, won't include any gratuitous boosts to your precious self-esteem(!)

The education we are in the process of receiving is a timeless, harsh reality; greed, and laziness, an ill brew by themselves, combined with ineptitude creates a dangerous and self-perpetuating chain reaction.
Unlike what we faced prior to the Great Depression, however, this perfect storm is foundational and unprecedented in our history, not the financial unraveling which predicated October 29, 1929.

How long can our foundering economy and home-grown labor markets expect to absorb the seasonal harvest of societal flotsam produced in abundance by our self-serving educational bureaucracy. When did learning to read, write and converse fluently in English become tertiary to just showing-up and assuring 'no child left behind'?
Having once been a child, and knowing a few in my time, I can assure you; some of them need to be left behind(!)

Well, here we are, and who knew?
The hamsters, (or gerbils, for those that choose to swing that way) that run in the little wheel powering the economic engine have finally come home to roost...if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors. The immediacy of wants and needs of generations who've been taught money does indeed grow at the tree of the ATM, actions today don't really have consequences later, and no matter how bad things get, there will always be someone wealthier and therefore of greater visibility on whom you can blame your insidious woes.

Watch carefully now, as Fed Chairman Bernanke ponders yet another rate cut in an ever escalating spiral downward. He is desperately chasing the inevitable, trying to stabilize credit, and hence, equity markets built not on productivity but on overheated, irrational speculative exuberance. But, never mind all that because we have our on-board DVD's, McMansions and political correctness. What could possibly go wrong?

In a productive society or sustainable civilization, as in general accounting theory, assets must equal liabilities. For far too long we have been padding the wrong side of the balance sheet.
If an entitlement mentality combined with insolence and a keen knowledge of "American Idol" can be considered assets, then we're on the right track.
As if this weren't enough to convince you, we now have Senator 'wide-stance',
'Larry ToiletHands' out in, of all places, Idaho(!)
I couldn't make-up this kind of material...well, maybe I could.
Perhaps it's time for Sen Craig to 'reach-out' to his constituency....uh, I mean maybe Craig should put this disgrace 'behind' him. ....OK, that's enough.

And while we're on that track, put your head back in the sand, because that train coming around the bend has a "Made in China" stamp right in clear view. DR

The "perpetual motion" of political maneuverings.

Recently I've developed a remarkable affinity for shifty politicians. With their array of evasions and dances around what are not very complex issues, they make such easy targets for my derision. Some of these characters, OK, almost all of these characters, talk out of so many corners of their mouths I would think they're going into the Utah coal mining business(!)

Witness the latest bandwagon loaded with mindless rhetoric about renewable energy sources and "alternative" fuels and independence. This is politico-speak for the various classes of ethanol, an alcohol distillate. But, you don't dare hear ethanol
defined by these guys and here's why; concepts by themselves are such honorable and noble 'Causes' when equated with ambiguous phrases like "renewable" and "alternative", concepts the average half-wit voter will never understand.

Reference one of the defining principles of our known universe, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but merely changes form. Do you ever hear the masterful liars in public office disclose that the energy content in a quantity of ethanol is only 85% that of gasoline? Of course not. Vehicles achieve lower mpg with ethanol because there is less potential energy to convert back into combustion.

Billions of our tax receipts are being spent on disrupting our direct food-chain with corn-ethanol and chemical plant construction for that politically motivated purpose.
Here's a relevant comparison; one gallon of ethanol requires more than one gallon of oil to attain usable grade. So let's siphon-off the agricultural product which is an integral part of our food-chain, combine it with the petroleum we could use to travel further, and create a much-less-efficient "alternative".

Are you surprised OPEC and the big oil companies seem to Love this great idea?
Just keep those huge campaign contributions coming...and "remember to build that ethanol plant in my district".

Witness the latest BP television commercial in which various actors masquerading as concerned and mentally engaged consumers parrot the basic party myopia, energy independence and "alternative" fuels. Are we as a society so starved for good ideas that we attach our collective consciousness to the first dumb idea marketed down our throats?

We are repeatedly focusing on illusory, short-term schemes rather than long-term realities. We must dedicate ourselves to solutions and not mere panacea. The only non-renewable resource in short supply is innovation, without which we will surely perish. DR

The hidden evolution of political power

The sudden, albeit measured, emergence of Democrat candidate Obama is no fluke. His positions, scripts, gestures of appeasement and entire campaign is a political amalgamation, engineered and created by the most likely of sources. Watch carefully here, for the masterful slight-of-hand.

Assume you were the collective strategists of the dominant political party aligning
yourself to maintain control of not just the WhiteHouse but also the country and international policy. Unfortunately, the agreed national agenda as defined by your party is not proceeding as planned. An ongoing and escalating war, homegrown economic calamity, collapsed foreign policy, and an unprecedented lack of confidence in our government conspire to shift the leanings of the electorate away from your favor.

What to do? What to do? ....You manufacture a candidate. Not just any candidate, mind you, but someone without a defining history, someone so junior in his career that the person himself is a direct result of central casting's request for an untarnished, unassailable character, so remarkably generic and pre-packaged that he appeals to the widest and basest demographic; someone not-too-black, but, God Forbid.... surely not-too-white.

Barrack Obama is an engineered candidate, created by the Republican Party to counter the political juggernaut that is the Clinton-Senator from New York. Obama's positions and poll rankings are carefully controlled to represent an "underdog" in a contest run and managed by political "machines" and insiders like Clinton.

The Obama Leftist leanings are timed and scheduled to coincide with the early stages of the campaign. Recognizing full-well the microscopic and reptilian short-term memory of the average democrat voter, watch for the Obama positions to emerge as "refreshingly" centrist, as the campaign progresses. Naive voters of every variety and persuasion...(not just caucasian) will openly and publicly glad-hand each other for their forward-thinking, "progressive" outlook. Watch as the term "progressive" becomes from all angles the operable theme of this campaign.

If your chances to claim victory in a fray already fraught with political "land-mines" looks in doubt, find your way into an arena where you can win. Karl Rove left the Bush WhiteHouse to quietly accomplish the impossible for his side, maintain control via the only sure routing.
Is it any surprise Obama warrants Secret Service protection? I don't think he arranged that for himself.

The political party itself is only an ingredient of the winning formula to the politically uninformed outsider. The agenda and resultant ideology will sustain itself and thrive in whatever incarnation necessary. These leopards don't ever change their spots. DR