Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is on the air. Well…at least on the computer.
It seems the airlines are poised to lose a few billion both in 2008 and 2009 after which they expect things to get a lot worse. In a bold cost cutting move, peanuts and pretzels will no longer be available. Beer, wine and soft drinks will remain available for purchase however dollar slots will placed on the restroom doors. After all, these are no-frill flights.
In other news, the investment banks are sinking faster than Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming Queen Mother. Even with their new access to the once hands-off money of the Federal Reserve, the banks are proving what they have told you for years; you can’t borrow your way out of debt.
If you are looking for a career change, Wall Street is looking for some new CEOs to replace the brilliant multimillion dollar men who have lost multibillion dollars for the stockholders. Amazin’ isn’t it, how a person can be worth millions one day and told to get their hat the next? It’s all in the timing of when these people enter the current round of the exponential growth scam that counts. It is luck ya know? Lucky is better than good any time.
The Dow Jones remains some 1800 points off its high but better times are coming, at least that’s the latest from the fat cats of Wall Street.
The whole thing is a charade. The banking system has about run its gamut. All the money has gravitated to the top players and Middle America is reaching the point of no longer having any money to be scammed out of. So, move along, nothing to see here, these people are being phased out in favor of the improved cheap foreign labor models.
Back in the 1950s, it was touted that technology and increased productivity would allow Americans to actually reduce working hours and live a life of leisure. That we could provide all that we need in so little time that the work week would be shortened.
Whoever made those statements didn’t understand our system of exponential growth. If you can make more, we can sell more. If we can sell more, we can make more money. So how about this, work more hours with increased productivity and that creates more money for the stockholders and management until all of the natural resources are gone. But why worry about resources, technology will replace them; not.
And so went America right up until today. Rather than realize the life of leisure that was promised in the 1950s, Americans now put in more hours at work than any place on earth. We have now reached the enviable position of the maximum possible production and debt load of a human being. How fun.
It’s difficult to get our minds around some common realities after being taught differently for a couple of hundred years, but trust me, M. King Hubbert knew of what he spoke when he said that a non-catastrophic solution was impossible unless society is made stable.
Mr. Hubbert went on to say that this means abandoning two axioms of our culture…the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of affairs. Dr. Hubbert challenged the fixation on exponential growth of the past two centuries mathematically (and could that guy do math or what?) as being the opposite of the normal situation.
As a whole, I don’t believe that our society will educate themselves to the realities of resource depletion or the consequences of pursuing growth in a finite world until far too late. Or even that there is a better and simpler life available to them here and now. All it takes is thought and action. There is currently no law against common sense.
