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musings of mark since 2001

Looks like June 1 can be picked as good as any other day for when the bubble popped on the housing market in the US after reading what Barron’s Online has to say about the speculative housing market. Maybe they have finally figured out down there that when you go in debt to the tune of almost 2 billion dollars a day in part to finance an empire and the rapacious appetite of the Federal Reserve interest, sooner or later payments have to made and it’s reflected in the so-called “consumer confidence” starting to dip for May.

Although some would argue that the US is simply the latest fascist state to come along as Roosevelt predicted it would and that many will just go with the flow, Noam Chomsky wonders if the state has already failed in his latest book being excerpted at The independent. He notes that Exxon Mobil is in partnership with the Sino-Saudi oil deals so no matter what, they are winners in the game of power and money.

I’m not quite as pessimistic as Noam. Marx also has said that the plight of the proletariat has always improved over the years through education and organization, and in this connected world the elite find it a lot more difficult to keep the masses uneducated. Hard to say when or even if the tipping point between the public opinion and public policy is going to reach a flash point down there, and if a repeat of the turbulent 1960’s is around the corner. Perhaps it will come from within the new non-citizens of the country, which are the government employees themselves finding out that they are no longer protected under the First Amendment while on the job like the rest of the citizens.

At least it isn’t as bad as living in Baghdad, which has now completely fallen apart. Difficult to imagine that the same person that broke the Abu Ghraib story is now saying that Iran is going to be next, but those are real people dying out there miles away from this little island paradise where a commoner means little to an empire.

Wouldn’t you know it, the company that bought Terasen against the wishes of a majority of the people in this province, which purchased BC Gas and privatized yet another essential service, is now moving to turn into a private company itself. This has a lot of advantages for Kinder-Morgan, mostly in that regulations for private companies are a lot more lax than for publicly traded companies.

Let’s see what we have we sold so far - so much electricity that we have to pay a premium to buy it back when we run out, the natural gas and crude oil pipe lines, the telephone lines that once belonged to the province, almost all the timber, all the ore, the rail system to transport goods, the work of dunning citizens for taxes, and our privacy. Not bad for just a few years work, the neocons and corporate wigs should be pleased. Next up is to break that nasty transit union in Toronto, the employees aren’t really human anyways and what right do they have to complain about the unnaturalness of working night shifts? Grab some water and we’re outta here to exploit the next country.

The former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration has penned another article lamenting the direction his country has taken. Sure glad I don’t live down there anymore, it’s just got too wacky with all the stuff that is being fed their children and now they are going to put tags on them too.

Even the normally staid Buisness Week is wondering what is going on, the control of the neocons since WWII has never been so powerful and the deal with the devil is starting to look like just that. Sheila Samples takes the devil anology to the level of the nature of the beast and has no doubts herself about what is happenning, hard to say whether it’s hysterical or historical.

Dave Lindorff has been wondering just how many civilians were really killed in the latest bombing run on a village in Afghanistan while Bush and Blair, (and Harper for that matter too), are still imagining that the world thinks they are promoting peace and democracy abroad.

With Russia in a position to pay off some of it’s old debts and the Paris Club ready to accept early payment, their march to their own drum is beating loud as new laws are passed to state all currencies in all publications and media in the ruble denomination only. Al Jezeera .com has their own views on the subject of the new bourse they are opening, and some like Dave wonder if the collapse of the petrodollar is coming or not, indeed, there is lots of money to be made out there, and new exploration is going on still.

Like a train wreck bearing down on us is how some pundits view the current world situation;  the movements away from the dollar, in conjunction with a US dollar that is worthless if their won debts are called in, make for some very worried people.