David Seaton's picture

    Weimar America

    A link at Doonesbury once led me to the following, fascinating, information:

    Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks - The Big Picture
    (...)If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures - combined:

    • Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
    • Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
    • Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
    • S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
    • Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
    • The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
    • Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
    • Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
    • NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

    TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

    If a currency is supposed to have any relation to actual value, when I see these numbers it seems obvious to me that the dollar has already entered the territory of the Wiemar Republic Deutsche Mark: meaningless paper.

    The fear, of course is deflation, but a dollar that once bought victory in WWII and trips to the Moon, but today cannot save a few banks, must be a ticket to coming hyperinflation.

    It is impossible to escape certain unpleasant realities of world power

    No matter how seductive the figure of Barack Obama might be, glamour cannot offset the drag of worthless money combined with military impotence.

    Joseph Nye's famous "soft power" is just that "soft". The brutal truth is that candy and flowers, a thoughtful word are important rites of seduction, but after these rites are performed, something hard is expected. If the USA cannot "cut the mustard", other, perhaps ruder suitors will be sought and found.

    To me these numbers mean that we are living suspended over an abyss, held only in the slippery hands of a fraudulent system.

    Comments

    And what did they do with all those funds, with those guaranties that kept them solvent?

    Why they fired half their work force and increased the wages for top management.

    And all these organizations and experts are screaming that the felons are using their incredible profits to buy back their own stock rather than investing those funds and creating jobs.

    I get too damn mad just thinking about all this.


    I get too damn mad just thinking about all this.

    There is a Spanish saying that those of us who have one foot in the grave might well apply to ourselves to remain in a state of equanimity. It goes, "Para lo que me queda en el convento, me cago dentro." This is hard to translate into English well because it depends on the rhyme, but literally it says, "For the time remaining to me in the convent, I'll shit inside it".

    I hope you find such folk wisdom of comfort in these hours of trial.


    Brilliant line, David! I hope you don't mind, but I copied it to my fb page, offering it as "the Republican platform and their philosophy of governance as translated into a single line of Spanish." It pretty much says it all.


    The problem is they are going to be in the convento with all that mierda for a long, long time.


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