GM Drives itself off a Cliff.

naked capitalism: "Peak Oil!! Peak Inflation ?!? Peak Credit??"

Having been called a Cassandra for years now, ever since doing a survey for a statistics class at Harvard during the summer of 2002 on the Boston-area's attitude toward the coming Iraq War, I was most interested in reading the above-referenced post of someone calling themselves precisely that (ie Cassandra). After reading said article, together with the news that, as posted by Bloomberg this week,  can there be any doubt that the particularly vicious form of Vampire Capitalism advocated by the US and shoved down the throat of the ROW via the so-called "Washington Consensus" (which is little more than the "right means might" philosophy of "cower to our power") is an excellent way to enfeeble a strong economy and bring it to its knees by shoveling mountains of cash into the pockets of the rich by privatizing big government and socializing industry?

What the Bloomberg article says, is that after spending billions on lobbying that Parliament of Whores we like to call Congress, to keep the CAFE standards low for decades, we the people are now going to be required, by our "representatives", all bought and paid for by that same industry, to shell out billions more for them to do what the Free Market was incapable, apparently, of doing.

So, let's get this straight, GW, by initiating GWII (as in Gulf War II), has not only provided War profiteering to pay James Baker back for helping to put him in the Whitehouse (Bechtel is one of the largest War profiteers, as was GM's Hummer division), but, by constraining oil supplies, via its invasion of Iraq, enriched his Texan cronies (Texas being the largest supplier of Oil in the lower 48), created a patronage trough, known as the "Department of Homeland Security", to be filled with Bushies who can suck from the federal teat while lambasting "Big Government", even as, a la McCain, they funnel taxpayers' money into their own pockets, and call it Serving Their Country. It's merely a coincidence that they happen to thereby obtain higher than the private sector pay scales for their total lack of skills, along with health- care, job security, and pensions, all paid for by the citizens stuck in dead-end private industry jobs with no job security, no healthcare benefits, require skills and/or an education, which, in order to obtain, they had to first put themselves in debt for a decade, and offers only "pay for your own damn pension benefits" plans.

What this should all tell us, and tell us all, is that the particular version of Capitalism championed by the Republicans offers us Medical care and education we can't afford, pension promises, which if they're defined benefit plans, they will either be abrogated or destroyed by inflation, or, if of the 401k variety, mismanaged by professional Financial "experts", of whom, to judge by the retirement plans of the Bear Stearns employees who's savings have been wiped out (if employees of Bear Stearns...employees at the very heart of the financial industry... are incapable of managing their 401k's competently, what chance do you and I have?), will leave us destitute, and can grow the economy only by increasing the federal and state government outlays by unsustainable quantities of debt while simultaneously ballooning asset prices to ridiculous valuations, it's quite apparent that we are all a bunch of suckers who want nothing more than to have bigger and bigger houses built for us not to live in, make bigger and bigger bombs so brutally destructive that we can't use them, while manufacturing bigger and bigger cars that we can't afford to drive, all while paying more and more money for food that poisons us, hospitals that kill us and leaders that sneer at us to live within our means, while they run billion-dollar campaigns to put them in positions where they can collect millions from graft and bribery, all the while calling it by nicer names like "lobbying".

But just as "spin" has come into the vernacular, to enable us to talk openly of politicians' distortion of truth and outright lies, cynically hiring Spinmeisters, like Karl Rove, to better package those lies so they're more palatable for public consumption, allowing us to convince ourselves that a lie by any other name is not still a lie, small government has come to mean larger and larger outlays for the military and the War Machine that enables it, while running larger and larger deficits and pushing up the National debt into trillions and trillions of dollars so that when its bankrupt and unable to pay for social security they can simply shrug their shoulders and absolve themselves of any blame ... "it was the system".

On May 28, 1987, Mathias Rust took off from Helsinki, and, flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, landed a small, single-engine plane in Moscow's Red Square.

This caused considerable embarrassment to the Politburo, and within a year the entire top echelon of the Soviet military had been replaced.

On September 11, 2001, airliner jets slammed into NYC's largest towering skyscrapers and into the Pentagon itself, killing thousands and wreaking havoc in not only those cities but to the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Not one government person lost their job. The head of the National Security council was promoted; the bloated Pentagon budget swelled to catastrophic proportions; Afghanistan, the country that we had armed and made hospitable as a haven for terrorist activity was taken over by those same organizations that had made the attacks possible, and, having set the same trap for ourselves that we had, with much braggadocio, and highly publicized with the release of "Charlie Wilson's War", laid for the former Soviet Union, sprang it on ourselves.

By doing so, a small cadre of left-over Reagan-era apparatchiks and felons, together with their new cronies, took over the reins of the federal government. Having an immensely high opinion of themselves they are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race, and, therefore, brook no dissent. As Alexis DE Tocqueville predicted in his magnificent volume on the United States, "Democracy in America": "they regard the ... states as (their) subjects and enforce the respect for their own sovereignty under cover of the sovereignty of The Union. Things may be done in the Federal government's name, but in truth, the Union would have ceased to exist."

Wrapping themselves in the flag so as to appear patriotic, they can then maneuver the federal government toward a policy of proclaimed national interest whereas the only interests they serve are their own. Since this is also the stance of the entire US Congress now, there's no one from either party in the legislative branch to cry foul at the Executive branch, as the cry would quickly, without falsehood, be visited upon themselves. For by proclaiming Greed, the very epitome of self-interest, to be sacrosanct, how can the same rulers declare themselves patriotic, which by definition puts the interest of the country above their own?

So the entire government becomes enmeshed in a tawdry web of deceit where, since everyone's culpable, and all that newcomers want is to enrich themselves, there's no one left to hold anyone accountable, even for such an enormous failure of all our National Institutions that the calamity of September 11 represents. Consequently, all it's been used for is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand federal spending, without even a pretense of accountability, that has brought us to the downward spiral of loss and defeat for which the US citizenry will pay while its leaders and Aristocracy continue to squander the productive capacity of a great people on realizing their own dreams of attaining Super Wealth by the continuation of the two great vehicles for absconding in the night with the products of labor: Huge budget deficits and Inflation. USA! USA! USA! ... has become a command from the rich: You essay, I'll just sit back and take the fruits of those essays (although I, naturally, won't even stoop to pick said fruit; after all, that's why we allow illegal immigration).