OneWomanWreckingCrew

Money
By Pink Floyd

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay.
Money, it’s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.

Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
Giving none away.
[…]

And so it goes:

Crashing Davos (Jeff Faux)

The world’s rich and powerful are heading this week to their annual meeting in the plush mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland. Hosted by the great global corporations (Citigroup, Siemans, Microsoft, Nestlé, etc.), some 2000 CEOs, prominent politicians, pundits and international bureaucrats will network over great food, fine wine, good skiing and cozy evenings by the fire contemplating the world’s future.
[…]
—the U.S. governing class—is in trouble. The opposition to the war in Iraq has demonstrated the limits of America’s willingness to send its children to die in order to force the world’s cultures into one vast shopping mall. And the looming crisis of America’s foreign debt will cramp the ability of our elites to use the countries’ economic power to support their global corporate backers. The erosion of the American social contract—already being reflected in stagnant wages, financial insecurity and collapsing health care system—could soon force the governing class to pay more attention to Bloomington, Ill., than to Baghdad, Iraq.

Globalization will not go away. Improvements in communication and transportation will continue to make the world smaller for as far into the future as we can see. Nor will economic classes soon disappear. The question is, as always, who sets the rules and in whose interests? So although the parties at Davos may not be over, the rest of the world seems less willing to pay for them.

• Read the Full Story

More on the state of the economy:

• US economic growth slows sharply to 1.1% (FT)

• State Of The People’s Union (Robert L. Borosage and Troy Peters)

• China to drive world economy as US stumbles: economists (Sino Daily)

• China to ease foreign exchange accumulation (FT)

Reality Check:

• Analysis:
  Index Portfolio Performance for the First Five Years of the Bush Administration (Dark Wraith)

Also noted by Dark Wraith:

Now for some meat on which to chew. The securities markets are still running sideways. The run-up that had occurred before the end of last week gave solace to Mr. Bush’s supporters and apologists, but the small leap was quickly brought back to Earth on Thursday and Friday as the major market indices again ensured that it is not yet time for the objective capital markets to broadly cheer this Administration’s economic performance. This is, of course, part of a long-term disaster: recent articles here have pointed out that the federal budget deficits are not being reined in, personal savings are being eaten up to supplement current income for many Americans, and the Treasury debt markets are drifting closer and closer to displaying the dreaded inverted yield curve of which your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums has been warning for months.

This is not a good situation; and the looming problems will make their partisan origins to some extent secondary. The Bush Administration, together with its allies in Congress, will certainly deserve all the condemnation sure to spill forth in the few years ahead, but other than for the growing prospect that the condemnation will lead to the rascals being thrown out of Congress, the problems we are not yet as a nation facing will need solutions, and the solutions are not going to be easy nor painless to implement.

As an example, the “controversy” over Social Security has now died down, but the neo-conservatives won a major victory: the adjustments that should have been made several years ago—adjustments that have been made before in a timely, responsible, and bipartisan manner—have not been executed this time around; and every year, every month, in fact every day the adjustments aren’t made, the corrections required to maintain the long-term solvency of the trust fund will have to be more dramatic and more painful. This makes the corrections ever more vulnerable to that insidious breed of extremists who are so adamant that a government program is wrong that they will wreck it just to prove their spiteful point.

So, just keep all this in mind when the Bush Cabal tries to shove their Red Rhetorical Economic Kool-Aid down your throat…Special Thanks to The Dark Wraith, and to Pink Floyd, of course….

Onward…
Shine On…
M#

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.