TITS UP!
The Global Financial Markets.
Tits up, tits up, tits up!
The Pseudo Free Market-All-OnCredit-Capitalist Charade.
TITS UP!
Gnashing, Insatiable Metastasis of Consumer Madness.
TITS UP!
Not to belabor the point, but TITS UP!
This is how it is.
Take your choice. Tits Up, or the less prosaic, Dick in the Dirt.
Not normal tits, BIG TITS! Trillion dollar tits.
The empress has no clothes. She has been stripped and tripped and is lying flat on her back. And damn, sans Victoria Secret lingerie, and in the nipple hardening breeze of reality, she looks magnificent for a bloated old whore who’s been fucked every which way from Sunday.
Imagine
Imagine, in the space of 3 months, most world equity markets have plummeted. The US stock market is down approximately 40%, while those of Poland, China and Hong Kong are down more than 60%.
Imagine all the zeros as 16 trillion dollars of equity get sucked through a black hole. Yang has swallowed Ying.
Imagine Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia, AIG and virtually every other major con-game/Ponzi-scheme masquerading as financial institution has either gone under, or been bailed out and reconfigured.
Imagine: the price of General Motors stock is now less than it was in 1950. Japan’s stock market is at its lowest level in 20 years. Approximately 10% of homes in the US have a mortgage that is at risk of defaulting.
Imagine: Uncle Sam has already promised 1 trillion to bail out banks, insurers, the auto industry, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. France, Germany and England have pledged another trillion to shore up their own institutions. Two trillion dollars that could have been spent on education, healthcare, development of clean and renewable energy.
By the way, the 2 trillion is just the beginning. Multiply it by five and we get close.
Imagine, tent cities popping up around the US like zits on a teenager who eats at MacDonalds.
Imagine the arteries of global credit so clogged that pre-death rigor mortis has taken hold of businesses large and small.
Kiddies, all the bubbles have burst, the champagne glass has been crushed under foot, and the bottle smashed on the side of sinking ship.
Iceland almost went bankrupt. Bjork tiny homeland is Ba-roke.
Christ on a crutch! Golly Gee Wiseacres and Hell in a Bucket. It don’t look good.
As the saying goes: A trillion here and a trillion there; eventually it adds up to real money.
It’s all going kafooee, kerpuff, adios, seeeeeeee ya!
Yessiree, unfettered and systemic rapaciousness has met the law of unintended consequences.
OOOOOPS!!!
“Oooops! Sorry. Our risk model didn’t work,” say the half-witted Harvard whiz kids running hedge funds.
“Oops,” says former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, “silly me to think that total deregulation and a loosey-goosey monetary policy would not lead to mass larceny. Ooopsy.”
Ooopsy, maybe someone should have listened to Warren Buffet in 2002 when he described derivatives as financial weapons or mass destruction.
The maggots of short term private profit have devoured the whole apple pie and the oven it was baked in. There is a breadline at the door and the maggots have said, “Write us a check and we’ll build you a new oven. Till then, STARVE, SUCKAS!”
Uncle Sam said, “Sure, why not? Here’s the check.” Because, in truth, old Uncle Sam himself is just a pile of maggots stuffed in a clown suit.
This is how things are. This is how things are PRIOR TO A GLOBAL RECESSION SETTING IN. Fuck Republicans. Fuck Democrats. The Kleptocrats have won and smashed the game board.
And it’s just the beginning. Now it is going to get interesting and messy. (Or maybe it’s the end . . . I mean like, THE END. . . . scroll credits. . . . God I hope not, I still want to learn to play the harmonica.)
IT’S GETTING INTERESTING
It’s going to get interesting because it was long overdue for this farce to cease.
It’s going to get interesting because modern capitalism has been revealed to be an ugly cross-dresser where the profits get privatized and the losses get democratized and the bandits keep all that they’ve stolen. Modern day capitalism is socialism for the wealthy, Disney Land for the duped middle class, and promises for the rest. Not exactly what Adam Smith had in mind.
It’s going to get interesting because we are about to live through both an overhaul of capitalism and witness a serious shift in global power. China is already vying to be the holder of the world’s reserve currency, and given their balance sheet it probably makes sense.
It’s going to get interesting because the overhaul of capitalism may be for the worse, not the better. Remember the solution cooked up on Wall Street and in Washington is to put the reconstruction into the hands of the same crooks and ideologues who fucked everything up in the first place.
It’s going to get interesting because the zombified, lobotomized, and supersized of the First World are going to have to learn to make do, to get along, with less, to perhaps question everything. . . to perhaps stop marching the consumer goose-step toward a social and ecological abyss.
It’s going to get interesting to watch bloated babies get angry that every day can’t be Christmas.
It’s going to get interesting because constructive creativity sometimes emerges from the ashes of anger and desperation. Let’s pray a lot of it does.
GETTING MESSY
AND IT’S GOING TO GET MESSY, horribly messy, because all these numbers and percentages reach into real lives.
The Third World, the countries that are most vulnerable and out of Western view, are already being battered about due to currency fluctuations, inflation and soaring commodity prices. To put it another way, more people simply can’t get food and clean water. In the last year alone, and directly related to the collapse of the markets, directly related to idiotic deregulation and blind greed, 100 million more people have been pushed into poverty and as many as 2 billion on the verge of disaster. This is according to The World Bank. Remember that half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day and does not have access to fresh water.
Hey, but who really cares, out of sight out of mind. Well, you’ll care soon enough, because as things get worse the Third World will encroach on the First very quickly and perhaps not so peacefully.
In the First World it’s going to get messy too. Already under-funded and vital social programs will have less funding. There will be more pink slips and more jobless and more homeless and more people crowding emergency rooms because of a lack of insurance or a rise in violence or more substance abuse. There will be more people looking for scapegoats and finding them in the guise of foreigners or people of a different religion. The anger will be stoked by the same media outlets which, for the sake of ratings and advertising dollars, play to our worst fears, the same people who brought us the war in Iraq and are cheering for one with Iran.
It’s going to get messy as those about to retire see their savings halved. It’s going to get messy because the homeless shelters are at overflow.
It’s going to get messy because in the U.S. chaos and protests will spill into the streets giving the government false cause to restrict more personal freedoms, abuse The Constitution and label everyone who disagrees with them unpatriotic or a terrorist.
God, I wish none of this were so. But when I do the math 1 and 1 still equals 2.
If only I could borrow a calculator from one of those hedge fund boys and make it equal 10 trillion.
Merry, Merry Christmas….