We are Screwed - The State of the Union

According to Pink Floyd, "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."

I think this financial crisis brought out the British in many of us.  There has been no major outcry of anger, no outpouring of frustration out of so many of us for being played by our own politicians and banksters. ( Give us money or we will crash your economy).  There has just been a quiet diffidence, an indifference, for the most part by most of the people on Main Street. 

Then you come to the bull market people, the banksters and their shill people, whose "irrational exhuberance" is exhausting and annoying at the same time.  Think Dennis Kneale.

No one is looking at the "State of the Union" for what it is.

The banks, the Treasury, and the Fed still hold billions of dollars worth of essentially worthless assets on their books.  This has not changed from last year.  It did not change when they took the TARP money.  It did not change when they repaid the TARP money.  NOTHING has changed. 

Well, I was wrong about that, some things have changed.  We have spent a lot more money that we don't have.

Paulsen's comment to Congress when asked where the money to run the TARP program came from is telling: "We printed it".  And they've kept right on printing...quantitive easing, sounds so nice, doesn't it?  We couldn't possibly be harmed by something called quantitive easing, could we?  Try calling it hyperinflation in a few years, and get back to me on the results of that, OK?

Spending money you don't have without massive cutting of expenditures is a waste of time, and it's a major reason why we are going to end up just as screwed as we were in the last depression...if not worse.  Hank had a great idea...why don't the rest of us who don't have the money to pay our bills just make up a portable printing press and print the money to do so?

Because unfortunately, unless you work for the government, they call it counterfeiting and can throw your ass into prison for it.

Don't you hate a double standard?

If you keep your head clear and your eyes open for the signals, things are starting to fall apart at a faster and faster clip...a little faster each day.  I used to think they could kick the can for a couple of more years...now I'm beginning to wonder if they can make it through this one without something screwing up.

We are one major crisis away from TEOTWAWKI.  The Fed doesn't have the liquidity to pull out of it's ass to save the world again.  Besides...too many eyes are on the Fed now.

More and more of the American middle class are joining the race to the bottom, entering the ranks of the poor every day.  Food Stamps and other entitlement programs have replaced the food lines of the Great Depression.  The only thing we have seen pop up from the Great Depression days are tent cities from place to place, mostly people who have been foreclosed out of homes who had nowhere else to go.

The news that WalMart "restructured" over 10,000 workers has given many companies the green light to once again look at laying off employees, even those who has thought they had trimmed to the bone. 

I hope the government is hiring LOTS of census takers.  I mean LOTS.

But then, realistically, what are they paying them with?  The government is broker than shit.

That, Mr. Oblahma, is the State of the Union.

Just keepin' it real.