Watching Your Future go down the Drain.

Sure feels like Friday the 13'th, luckily it comes on a Saturday this month. The natives are abuzz with talk of the imminent demise of WAMU, AIG, or Lehman's, the logic being, that if the Fed had to take over Fanny and Freddy, whose assets are known to be of a higher quality than most, then what does that say about the garbage held by those scumdogs at Lehmann's, or Wamu?, who was giving loans at the Mexican border ... well, for a fee, let's not get ridiculous.

But all the talk is of how to get back to where we were, or how to profit in a declining economy, how to ride peak oil to vast riches, alternative energy can make you rich, gold is going through the roof, dump dollars and buy foreign currency, all micro-plans based on your own scheming and oblivious of what directions the New Economy is taking us. This New Economy means deprivation and want and lower expectations, as the results of the Smartest Men in the Room being allowed, under the rubric of "Free-Market Fundamentalism" to rig the economy of the Triumphalist United State of America to siphon the productive capacity of the entire globe into their own pockets, so the demand for yachts would sky-rocket, making them invest those dollars, wrung from the sweat of Chinese peasants, into production facilities to make even more yachts and other useless baubles for the Paris Hiltons of the world to flaunt in our face, as we, fools that we are, applaud their "achievements".

The real New economy will reflect the devastating costs of trillions of dollars in malinvestment for Real Estate and defense spending on which we've squandered the output of the productivity of an entire generation to maintain the vanity-driven car culture to this crescendo of madness. The US has  inflicted the world with a mania for auto motion. It affects every sinew of the global economy. Because the real heart of the economic dilemma is that the staggering cost of the transportation system in terms of infrastructure, resource depletion, healthcare costs, (not even including those that result from the carnage from "accidents": they aren't; they're built-in, as intractably as unemployment is in the economy), and the militant mind-set it fosters, is now being added to the fact that the import bill for autos themselves is rising faster than that of oil, as the US automakers continue to offer gas guzzlers. Let's face it, that's where the high margins are; that's what they want to make and sell, using "supply-side" economix: make it and they will come.

Although no one believes it, that was the plan all along. Such was obvious from inside the computer industry. As industry after industry spent billions to enhance their IT infrastructure to enable them to rid themselves of all those nasty pesky employees and run them with a permanent skeleton crew, the entire manufacturing infrastructure was reorganized to set in place facilities to serve the needs of the wealthy, by offering luxury goods like SUV's and refrigerators the size of yachts to a citizenry persuaded, and foolishly obliging, to pull "savings" out of their homes and spend it on the "American Dream" of constantly expanding expectations of living off the fat of the ravaged land while the countries that supply them with all the cheap crap provide hordes of enslaved labor to sustain the gluttony and stoke the greed.

The results of which is that we now have an auto industry (and this is just one example in one industry in one country: globalization has had the effect of retooling factories worldwide to supply the Rich, the needs of their own citizens not presenting the high-margin profits demanded by their foreign investors) completely incapable and unprepared to manufacture vehicles the marketplace can afford, since all their plants have been tooled to provide cars to the rich, whose ranks have shrunk dramatically in the last year, and are shrinking even more dramatically now. Because as the Government hails the so-called 3.3% growth rate of the 2'nd quarter, not a single comment has been made about the fact that the unemployment rate is accelerating as the economy grows, so what's going to happen to the unemployment rate as that growth inexorably turns negative? You'll get the answer to that question in the form of a pink slip.