Bubble Pop
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.