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A Bit of ‘I Told You So’ Outside World Bank Talks
WASHINGTON - They told everyone this was going to happen, no one listened, and now see?
As column after column of black Lincoln Town Cars disgorged international finance officials onto the sidewalk in front of World Bank headquarters on Friday, a raggedy group of about 20 free-market protesters gathered across the street to express their sadness - and in some cases, glee - over the global economic catastrophe that some said had proved them right.
"Year after year of unregulated free-market economics have finally come home to roost," said Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change, an environmental group.
"Aren't those the same people who got us into this mess?" added Kenny Bruno, another Oil Change protestor from Brooklyn, with a nod at the World Bank building.
It was a surreal day here in the capital of the free world, as the people who have been setting global economic policy - the Group of 7, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - gathered to plot strategy in the middle of the scariest economic free fall the world has seen since 1929.
The annual meetings of the World Bank, I.M.F. and G-7 finance ministers typically do not carry with them much in the way of urgency. The script is usually so familiar that the Washington police know it by heart: finance ministers arrive in their limos and stake out their tables at the city's best restaurants; free-market protestors dressed like Mutant Ninja Turtles kick up a ruckus in a tiny triangular patch of park across from World Bank headquarters; a few of the protesters get arrested trying to enter the building; and the news media, and the rest of the city, largely ignore the event.
A steady refrain from the protesters has been that more economic nationalism is needed, both to protect the poor and to prevent big corporations from robbing smaller countries of wealth. They have argued that more regulation is needed to keep big business in check, and have derided free markets as benefiting only a narrow swath of society.
Typically at World Bank meetings, officials grouse about the misguided protesters. This year, things are a little different. "There's no question the Washington consensus is dead," one senior World Bank official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly to a reporter. He said he was referring to "the free-market consensus," adding that at the World Bank, the push toward deregulation and unfettered free markets "died at the time of the $700 billion bailout."
Huddled together in groups in the bank's cafeteria, where the specials on Friday included Ethiopian spicy braised chicken and curried tofu sauté, bank officials were focused on their own accounts. "You withdraw your money?" one British accent said to another. "No, no, no, I'm putting my money in!" came the reply.
Outside, the group of protesters included Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange, sporting paraphernalia from the antiwar group Code Pink that routinely gets her tossed out of Senate and House hearings on Capitol Hill. "It's certainly a sad thing to see the ripple effect of this unchecked capitalism on ordinary people."
Ms. Benjamin couldn't leave it there, though, and soon broke into a huge grin. "But on the other hand, to see the fat cats on Wall Street scrambling and losing their yachts! We've been saying this would happen."
For many of the protesters, there is a dreamlike quality to these days. They were in Seattle in 1999, the Woodstock of the antiglobalization movement, when they helped stop the World Trade Organization from starting a new round of trade talks.
They were in Genoa, Italy, at a G-8 meeting in 2001, when they said they were treated like criminals (Italian police even shot one protester) all because, they said, they tried to warn of the perils of unfettered capitalism. They scaled the Plaza Hotel in New York to hang banners decrying corporate greed and marched giant puppets down 17th Street in Washington to warn against globalization.
And after all that, who does the world call on to get the global economy out of this mess? Gazing at the bureaucrats entering the World Bank building, Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, was not amused. "We are doomed if we think that going back to the people who caused this problem will get us out of it," he said.
A block away, outside the I.M.F. headquarters, Clive Tasker, a commercial banker from Johannesburg, was taking a break from the doom and gloom of the meetings inside to check his BlackBerry. "There is a high level of uncertainty, with some pretty frank and open discussions happening as to what possibly might unfold, and in that context, there are as many different scenarios as there are people in the discussion," he said.
As he spoke, a group supporting Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. walked by wheeling a poster that asked "Who will be next?" They handed out fliers quoting Mr. LaRouche calling for the entire dollar-based financial system to be declared bankrupt and reorganized with a ban on derivative trading. Without such action, it warned, "this planet is doomed to a horrible dark age."
It wasn't all doom and gloom in Washington. though. Further on up the road, the ubiquitous line of black Lincoln Town Cars was queuing up in front of Kinkead's, one of the city's most expensive restaurants. In groups of three and four, dark-suited bankers ran up the restaurant's steps, for oysters and Sancerre. Outside, the Town Car armada idled.
49 Comments so far
Show AllIn 1999, the times ran an article with a warning. "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's."
The title of the article is "Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending".
The web site is: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c0de7db153ef933a0575ac0a96f958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
I read it. STF what??
There is a simple lesson in group think. When you get together people who think alike, you get solution without the value of different perspectives. Here we have the same people, who's perspective allowed, if not contributed, to the financial meltdown trying to come up with a solution. Should anyone expect that we will get something different?
Even if they were saints the reality of the situation is that group think leads to group think In the case of these men, and Paulson in particular (with Bernanke in the background), they can't think without considering their own stake in the matter as well as that of their friends and benefactors.
Yet, it continues.
Very good point. Why is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs (Paulson) in charge of the Fed? That's a joke...
And the World Bank/IMF, the global champions of privatization, are holding their annual meeting...
"a few of the protesters get arrested trying to enter the building; and the news media, and the rest of the city, largely ignore the event." --- woa... There where 20,000 protesters there in 2000. I was one of them... We (mostly) shut down the meetings. I bet you they have a similar situation in 2009.
I don’t understand why people put their money in the stock market, or in investment packages that are nothing more than disguised wrappers around the stock market. I don’t have an IRA. I don’t want one. People criticized me years ago for feeling that way. Who is criticizing now? I thought people would have learned their lesson from reading history about the collapse in 1929. Evidently not. My personal belief is that everyone who is losing the value of their stock market based investments and retirement plans is getting what they deserve. Our economy would be a lot more solid if people would just keep their money in more solid and guaranteed bonds and savings accounts. But most people are too short sighted and greedy to restrain themselves. They fall for the trap of sleazy investment analysists. They did in 1929, 1985, and now 2008. When will everyone learn from history? Keep your money in guaranteed bonds and savings accounts and forget the false promises of all those investment analysts who obviously know nothing about what they are doing. By keeping your money in guaranteed bonds and savings accounts you may be curtailing rate of growth of the economy a little bit, but that’s not a bad thing. Indeed, as a result of the economy growing too fast you are now losing all your investments, as indeed you should.
For me, the economy is doing fine. I have not lost a single cent from any of my savings accounts, and the price of gas is going down. Times are good!
I do understand what you are saying. But, I also would have to give to the people who lost their money in IRAs, that the govt's refusal to fund social security properly, the dessimation of unions, the allowed stealing of peoples' company pensions by CEOs, etc. all contributed to making people feel that they had to have an IRA. You dont think that interest rates paid on savings accounts went down at the same time out of coincidence, do you?
Its not true of course (the middle class actually has no business in an unregulated stock mkt). But, the govt wanted the money (power), so they "sweetened" the offer--the employer may make "matching funds". The govt will match your funsd, etc..
After awhile, it must have seemd stupid to NOT invest in an IRA.It was proabaly very hard for them to believe that AIG would ever collapse.
The "Captains of INdustry" do not want the middle cass to have any money or power. That is why they defund everything, so that you end up putting basic needs on credit cards (which you cannot now file bankruptcy on, thanks to Biden et al), or "equity loans". It is the fleecing of the middle class. I know some people got very greedy. But, the average teacher, steel worker, etc. who invested in wn IRA, should hardly be blamed for this
As for me--I have no money. So, it is neither here nor there for me. But,I do have friends who lost alot. I hate to see the middle class lose more power. No middle class--no "democracy"--even in its present limited form.
Times may seen "good" to you now--but, unless you are very wealthy--we should all bemoan the erasure of the working and middle classes.
Thank you for your insight. but what else can I do except blame people who made financial mistakes. I too worked in companies that pushed 401K plans as a benefit. I never accepted one. Why didn’t I fall for it? I think it was just my common sense. I feel uncomfortable giving what limited money I have to other people for such long periods of time that the world and its economy could change in the interim. And sure enough, it did. And sure enough, I’m not surprised. Just read any history book and learn about the human catastrophes that occur regularly throughout the world in every century. And, if most people fell for it, what should I say about them? After all, isn’t blame a legitimate way to teach people a lesson? Isn’t blame a way of encouraging people to not make the same mistakes over and over again? Besides, it is now because of all of their collective gullibility that the value of the American dollar falls even more, and as a result the real value of my bank savings are worth less than they would otherwise be. Yes, I do understand that the real purchasing value of my money has not grown by leaving it in a savings account. My only recourse is that the dollar value of my savings has remained stable. In contrast, both the dollar and the real value of many people’s investments are now going down. Well, at least they are punished more than me. It’s only fair, isn’t it? They are the ones who threw their money down the drain in the first place by giving it to dishonest financial institutions. So I don’t feel sympathy for them. It was really their own greed for an impossible dream that sucked them into the lie that created this whole mess in the first place. Think about it, how long would 401K investment plans have lasted if everyone was like me and didn’t buy them? And in my humble opinion the country would have been a lot better off. The only difference would be a lesser number of financial corporate executives with fancy cars and big yachts. Just look at the incomprehensible wealth of these people. Look at the tall skyscraper buildings that house their companies. That should be enough to tell you that they must be stealing a lot of money from a lot of people.
I agree with you that the government fell short on so many social issues. But the lesson is that reliance on financial corporations and HMOs is not a better way to obtain these needed benefits. Just look at other western, democratic nations. It would have been a lot better to pressure the government through the electoral process to obtain these benefits. It should have started by refusing to vote for the main parties until they change their policies. Remember the independent presidential candidate John Anderson? I still don’t understand why America did not elect him. Most people that I talk to today don’t even remember him. Anyway, hopefully the current gross incompetence of both parties will inspire more people to vote independent. I have to admit. This is another topic on which I blame people. If you voted for either Kerry or Bush in the last election, you should be blamed. And, if you vote for either McCain or Obama in the next election, I will continue to blame you. The simple truth is, both of those candidates guarantee that the same Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that is responsible for the mess we are in will remain in power. You get the government that you deserve. You don’t solve problems by rewarding the very people who created them in the first place.
Like you, I do not have a great deal of money, but I do have enough to feed and shelter myself for the few years that I have left on this earth. Thank goodness I did not waste it by giving it to the financial crooks who almost everybody else believed. Thank goodness I have some common sense.
Unless you actually hold a piece of paper that says you own part of a company, you don't own any stock. If you don't have the actual stock certificate in your hand, your stockbroker is just acting as a booky who takes your money and does with it as he pleases. (Places what he thinks is a better bet with his own booky.)
But you had better be wary of hyperinflation.
"Ms. Benjamin couldn't leave it there, though, and soon broke into a huge grin. "But on the other hand, to see the fat cats on Wall Street scrambling and losing their yachts! We've been saying this would happen."
Those Yachts were bought as business expenses and written off their corporate taxes. Then when the corporation "Needs" a new yacht a year later, the "Old" yacht is sold to the CEOs for a fraction of its value so they can go on cruises without having to entertain clients with $3,000.oo wine bottles and hostess "models" written off their taxes too.
How much does it cost the taxpayers for the government to to lease a Lincoln Town Car? Or do they lease Cadillacs - I forgot.
Until there are real changes in the laws and the tax structure, a mere stock market crash won't make a great deal of difference to these people. There are too many cabals like the World Bank, WTO, IMF etc. that answer to no one but the international ruling class.
If the laws and the economy ever do change in favor of the majority of people, and corporations are no longer legal "persons" we might see genuine wealth and sustainable prosperity for all, grow from this stinking corpse.
I agree with you.
"They" will not really be "hurt" by all this.
The Champagne Regin of France actualy "ran out of champagne" this yeatr--THAT is wht they did with those tax cuts.
We need to just do away with the WB, IMF, WTO--maybe, especially--the G8!! Any chance of "changing them from within" has long been lost.
I admire Code Pink and Billionaire for Bush. I resent it when teh Dems (with the GOP) throw them out of hearings. The Congress is obviously not representing us. Let those that are trying to at least speak.
These guys are used to first class treatment, and I see nothing wrong with that. I can imagine a nice carpeted lounge with sushi snacks where they wait their turn to step up to the platinum guillotine.
No, no! That is reserved for those that "let us eat (their) cake" crumbs!
They take them home to their nasty little purebred dogs.
Henry VIII let Anne be killed by a French swordsman.
If they wil pay for it (instead of leaving it to their dog), we can do that for them.
"It wasn't all doom and gloom in Washington. though. Further on up the road, the ubiquitous line of black Lincoln Town Cars was queuing up in front of Kinkead's, one of the city's most expensive restaurants. In groups of three and four, dark-suited bankers ran up the restaurant's steps, for oysters and Sancerre. Outside, the Town Car armada idled."
This was a great way to end the story...
Yeah, let them eat oysters, I'm sure they eat fois gras too.
I wonder if they have now employed "tasters????"
If things keep going the way they are--they wil get volunteers!
That's really funny!!!
The Friedmanite cooked clash between private and public is daily worsening, with no end in sight. It has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, destroyed democracy and given us authoritarian feudalism with plutocrat kings, a neocon court, compliant subjects, redneck mercenaries, and scared superstitious house negroes. Another conservative disaster.
Unregulated markets, the IMF, the World Bank and sister organizations for globalization, corporatism, disaster capitalism, Chicago School of Economic's "shock therapy", Reagan's trickle-down, communism for the super-rich and fascism for the rest of us continually widen the economic gap between the 1% and the 99%.
The Wall Street Casino dealers and bookies view this mess as opportunity. They get their share in all transactions, no matter who wins or loses. Banks and corporations too big to fail have the public by the cojones and they are squeezing.
Unregulated capitalists form monopolies and oligopolies that kill competition and destroy economic and social democracy by concentrating money-power forever and bringing poverty and misery everywhere they go. Being the government, how can people expect them to regulate themselves?
Uneducated poor and middle classes will multiply and overrun the carrying capacity of their world, causing pollution and disease, resource depletion with crime, famine, war, and species extinctions with ecological destruction. Their representatives are the obligatorily corrupt whose power often depends on keeping their subjects ignorant and superstitiously religious.
Democracy stops working because representative government bears the seeds of corruption. Capitalism and the dictatorship of the proles don't work for the same reason.
If representative government ends in dictatorship how do we stop the next one? How do we end this vicious circle once and for all?
Why settle for an obsolete government because our forefathers did not have the Internet? Why not govern ourselves direct online democratically?
Also, why not nationalize energy and other leased public property and personally receive equal, non-transferable shares of stock and dividends from their use or sale? Why let our corporate government officials get their paws on our stock profits that are big enough to lift us all out of poverty?
There are a lot of things we could and should do to insure that this latest in a long series of social calamities never happens again. Solutions prefaced by "We could..." or "We should..." presuppose that "we" have been given the green light to reinvent the prevailing system. They assume that we live in one of those magic slate moments like after the French or American Revolutions where the old power structures have been pulverized and we sit down in our white wigs and make new constitutions. I'm not sure we enjoy such a moment here, at least not yet. Reports of the death of free market capitalism might be exaggerated. Self serving corruption has been severely discredited, and perhaps has prudently found Jesus or gone for a vacation upstate until things cool off, but it is far from dead and is incapable of embracing a less rapacious agenda. These flies are very much in power, and are likely to remain so until public desperation devolves to the torch and pitchfork level. I fear that in place of substantive reforms and regulations we are going to get a new layer of public relations bullshit, a "chastened" lending industry subject to tough new rules, so that its gullible host is placated. The only solution to parasites feeding in the dark is some form of worm medication. But you'll notice that nobody checked with you and I before dumping $800 billion worth of worm food down the old hatch last week.
"Also, why not nationalize energy and other leased public property"
This is a great idea, but we must be very careful.
Remember when Salvador Allende the democratically elected socialist leader in Chile tried to nationalize the copper mining industry in 1973.
The Opposition (with the help of CIA, Nixon, Kissinger and ITT and Anaconda Corporations) bombed the presidential palace and murdered him; ushering in a reign of torture and terror in South America.
This was done right after the CIA created a financial disaster, so that they could pretend it's what the people wanted... And the day before a plebicite.
These are the kind of people we're dealing with here - make no mistake.
Of course the documents are still classified.
Alan MacDonald
This just in from a NYT report at 1:30 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12imf.html?hp
"Mr. Paulson told lawmakers it made more sense to jump-start the frozen credit markets with “market measures,” by which he meant buying up assets rather than institutions. He staunchly resisted Democratic proposals to require that the government receive an equity stake in the companies it was helping."
Looks like Paulson sort of 'screwed the pooch' regarding the wonders of 'free market' solutions.
'Free Market' ideology = a 'Free Looting' Ponzi scheme
Support for ‘free market’ ideology, in a system which allows the well known ‘market failure’ of ‘negative externality cost dumping’ to be ‘gamed’, is merely support for ‘free looting’, which most knowledgeable people from George Akerlof, US Nobel laureate in economics, to Noam Chomsky recognize.
It should be clearly explained that the root cause of this crisis is crony capitalism's biggest and most 'gamed' market-failure in history --- negative externality cost scamming, as applied to 'debt bombs' in our collective financial lungs, rather than the older model of cigarette smoke cancer in customers' lungs.
Same scam ---- 'gaming' the well known 'market failure' of allowing 'negative externality costs' to be dumped.
Only difference --- this time it's applied to financial products as the cancer carriers, instead of industrial products.
Lesson: if 'negative externality cost' dumping is allowed anywhere in a so-called 'free market', it destroys the market, it destroys people, it destroys the environment, it destroys any common human trust, and it is nothing but 'free looting' for those who game this market failure.
Why not eliminate all 401ks, IRAs and private pension plans and have all retirement paid out of social security at a higher amount plus health care? There are so many inequities in economics even at the basic level. We pay taxes so that people working for government can get pensions and 401Ks but those of us paying the taxes to cover that may not have any retirement plans. The same with the private market place, each good I buy may be paying for the retirement or health care of the employees of the company manufacturing the product, while I - the consumer - may not have health care or benefits. Also, those with a union can many times get these beneifts while those of us without a union cannot. This is highly inequitable.
The 401Ks, IRAs, etc, were all schemes to get the money out of the local communities and then under the control of Wall Street and Washington while at the same time driving up the prices of stocks because there was more money chasing after the same stocks. When you factor in stagnate wages, the high level of individual debt, how much real net equity is there in these funds?
Yes! Thank you ! Well said!
I'm happy to see you have the same common sense as me. Well said.
Yes and why did we bail out AIG? - so that rich people could keep their life insurance! Who can afford Life Insurance!
My mother's life insurance company was bought and sold so many times that when I finally found the company in Texas and tried to get the money, they took 60 days (the legal limit according to the insurance commissioner) and it didn't even cover her funeral. What a waste of money.
First they rob the customers - then they rob the taxpayers.
And their main occupation is to keep people from getting healthcare.
That's their real job.
I have always had just a very small policy $5k, which is worth more now. Just enough so my family does not have to bear the expense of disposing of my body....!
I hope you have a better experience with the company than I had with my mom's.
W/O any insurance - I plan on being even more irritating to my family when I'm dead.
AIG was bailed out to keep it's CIA and war crimes related history out of the public eye. It wasn't so much of a bailout as a blackmail payoff.
This is not completely true. I paid into my own 401K through a salary deduction. But I do agree that these private piecemeal schemes are no substitute for an adequate universal social security system.
Joe
For another perspective - partly from inside the press conference of the G7 - take a look at
http://www.worldreports.org/news/177_german_finance_minister_ambushed_over_settlements
I suspect much of what Story says there is closer to the truth - he has been in the financial reporting business for 40 years.
They must by now be realizing that there is no escape from reality and the leg breaker is at their door to collect his due. They will attempt to worm and squeal and cheat and lie and place the burden on someone else. The leg breaker will have none of it and only the bone cracking remains. Expect the worst from the bankers and politicians. Snap and pop will unfortunately be the only way to fix things. These are base people and that's all they understand.
Sioux Rose
I appreciate being in the good virtual company of a lot of intelligent posters today. VOX I always love your way of extrapolating cynically on the tone of our times. PARALLAX: I read the entire article via your link and whoa... this added to what Catherine Fitts has to say (www.solari.com) and the expose of Patrick Byrne's "Deep Capture," all show different angles on the ROT that has set in to eat our economy out from within. EZE: I would LOVE to see your plan implemented, and if the posting PARALLAX shared proves accurate, this may be the seminal moment when the rest of the world reins in the U.S for its fraudulent policies. What the world can't stop in the way of militarism, perhaps it can curtail with the power of the purse.
There seems a tragic irony, particularly if read as a prayer over the bodies of the million plus sacrificed on the altar of oil in Iraq. Now the prices are down low. Is this what the thieves-in-chief expected? It's like the Ford axiom of paying your workers enough to afford the cars taken in reverse on a grand scale means NO ONE can afford anything, so the profits the rich depend upon also shrink.
Mercury is retrograde and will turn direct on the 15th when more progress can begin to come into the equation. As an astrologer, I truly expected worse next year and am not unconvinced that some VERY definitive tightenings of the screws (shortages) will occur beginning in November 2009. Quite possibly those who bail out the US will act as the World Bank did to those S. AMerican nations whose economies were in ruins. Since those in power show an utter disregard for the remotest concept of ethics, I would not mind OTHER nations pitching in to balance the scales.
OREZ ENO: You seem to have faith that your bank deposits are solid. That's all based on what feels like an illusion these days. The govt doesn't HAVE the $ to make good on the FDIC claim to insure your little piece of bounty. Furthermore, another CD poster made a comment that I have also considered... that in Germany Hitler just began seizing assets. We now have the reason to declare a national emergency. Indeed Bush brought it on with his cronies... and this reminds me all too much of the husband who murders his wife and then pleads with the judge for custody as the sole remaining parent. Bush style logic and justice, right?
Perhaps it’s time to take my money out of the bank and put it in my mattress?
"Is this what the thieves-in-chief expected? It's like the Ford axiom of paying your workers enough to afford the cars taken in reverse on a grand scale means NO ONE can afford anything, so the profits the rich depend upon also shrink."
You would think this was a no-brainier, Rose. How can we buy goods at any price, if we do not have a means of livelihood? What were those who were so gung-ho about outsourcing thinking? Giving us credit worked for awhile, until the credit ran out and we're where we are now. There was a rampant demolition of jobs going on, beginning with the Clinton NAFTA agreement and fast-tracked during the Bush Administration. It was/is clever-foolishness for the upper classes to think they can really gain anything at the expense of everyone else. Greed is apparently a sickness that feeds upon itself, until everything collapses, and shows that we are all really interdependent.
This is so much like Nazi Germany. If only more Americans knew history.
I fear you are right, while we spout recession, depression, hoover parallels, there is more similarity with Germany but now it could be world wide.
Let's be clear; the folks running the Group of 7, the World Bank, the IMF, the Federal Reserve and all the central banks around the world are not "scared" by the economic free fall. They created it. And not a single solitary one of them will suffer from it in any way - unless.....
For those of you who know about the Shock Doctrine you understand the importance of the "ideas lying around". I would like to raise the visibility of The Oil Depletion Protocol described in a book by Richard Hienberg. It advocates a strategy of conscious cocperation in dealing with declining oil production with the benefit of price stability. We need oil price stability in this time of financial instability. We also need it to support a fast transition to renewable energy.
The other idea I would like to put on the table has to do with all of the U.S. military bases outside the country. If the corporations want to saddle the US taxpayer with debt then let us settle that debt with other countries by converting these military bases into facilities for addressing global problems like climate change. The facilities are worth quite a bit. But the real value to the world would be ending US hegemony.
the ubiquitous line of black Lincoln Town Cars was queuing up ... Buddy, can you spare an egg?
A bullet. Or, maybe just the "sandbag bullets" that they are going to use on us.
Sandbag bullets are passe.
The US North American Command and it's Blackwater mercenaries will use the Microwave Area Denial System on you and fry your eyeballs.
You could be right. But, the latest signing statement by W, (written up by Levin and Hunter--sign ed by Kennedy!), calling for suspension of Posse Comitatus, calls for learning to use "bean bag bullets".
I'll put in a link, if youre interseted and have a barf bag./
Sioux Rose
LARAECO: Cool idea! I'll bet if the US did agree to turn the majority of its bases into solar power stations or some other green tech, the GODS would smile on us and shift the direction of the plagues upon this nation that has sought to trespass unapologetically over too much of the rest of the world, when it's been given MORE than it needs! It is time for our citizens to live with less, more simply THAT others indeed may simply LIVE!
What an obnoxious piece of journalism - even in these times the NYT can only mock those who are proving to be so right!
You know--you are right!! LOL
Why do I have a smile on my face as I read this? Maybe it's because we saw it coming, we were warned, but the arrogant assholes who run this nation -- and I speak of the corporations -- thought they could beat it. It almost makes me laugh to think of them freaking out. But it's true -- how can these idiots who created the problem solve the problem? I can't understand the fox in the henhouse logic here. I'll tell ya, it's almost worth it just to think of them losing a car here, a yacht there, maybe a cuppla houses. The great equalizer. As for me...when you got nothin, you got nothin to lose (as the song goes).
I cannot describe to you , how "i have nothing" I am (lol).
But, I do hate to see the middle and working classes go down with them.
The elites have never given a damn what happens to you or me. It had to drift up to the middle class before anyone made a peep. What now?
Vox; On this and a different thread today,you contributed some extemely well crafted comments.Thank you.
Orez-eno;Please find your way to the humanity store and purchase a large supply of empathy.Do you realize how cruel and uncaring you sound?
To the person who keeps saying "life is good", because they "knew how to invest"--see? Some USAns total lack of regard for others bears out whath the world thinks of us.