The following blog post was written after to my departure from the Betty Ford Health Center and prior to my excursion into Mexico.
If you are an adult and reading this, then you should know better than to drink Kool-Aid
Kool-Aid is a colored sugar that flavors water. In fact, Kool-Aid is a sweetener. It makes something bland taste better, and it becomes a magical drink for little kids. I know it was for me. For adults, it's unhealthy even though it still tastes good and if I refuse to think about the consequences of its effects, I might just like drinking. But I want to think about how the effects of this sugar, with food-coloring added, ruins my health in favor of water or even Gatorade.
Now, why do we say, "Stop Drinking the Kool-Aid" as a metaphor? Is it because Jim Jones placed poison within Kool-Aid during the late 1970s to kill a bunch of cult followers who could not think for themselves? Yes, that's one reason. The other reason is because it is a metaphor for not wanting to face up to the truth.
I have been trying to write about financial truth for the past couple of years, but I'm going on hiatus. I can't drink the Kool-Aid anymore--I'm too old--and I have to leave Washington, D.C. for awhile to see the world for myself. I'm going to cross the border into Mexico.
Some Wall Street salesmen who would, of course, call me "negative," stand up on Bloomberg Television to tell us the stock market is not overpriced, unemployment is improving because 65,000 people have more McDonald's jobs and the economy in general is slowly improving.
Recently in New York City, I realized that "You Can't Fight City Hall." It is true, and I give up.
Like economist David Rosenberg said a few months ago, it's not that I don't see a huge stock market crash within the next year or two but I'm just tired of waiting for it.
The Treasury Department (Timmay) pressured the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) into changing mark-to-market rules so that banks do not have to write-off or write-down billions of dollars of residential and commercial real estate loans, not to mention consumer and corporate debt, so that they can receive billions of dollars in taxpayers money and hike up fees on taxpayers if they do not make their credit card payments each month.
They receive that money from Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, who first tells 60 Minutes that the Fed can print money and then, in his second interview, tells the viewing public--taxpayers--that he does not print up money. He said the subprime market was contained.
CEOs of major Wall Street investment banks lied to shareholders weeks, even days, before their values plummeted because they swindled investors by mixing subprime loans and prime loans and paid a rating agency to say they were all AAA loans. The Securities and Exchange Commission finds Goldman Sachs guilty of fraud and they pay a fine in taxpayer money.
The Federal Reserve pushes cheap debt to banks--taxpayer money--to large banks and they invest it into the stock market. Traders make money, Wall Street CEOs make money--our taxpayer money--and we look at the stock market as the President says the economy is improving.
My next door neighbor needs to sell his home and others are barely surviving on low-paying part-time jobs or no jobs at all. And, it's not like they are stupid or incapable of working. But, when a company owner is uncertain about an economy fueled by printed money, they are not going to hire anyone full time. So now, we have more than 16 percent of part-time workers who are frustrated that they are cannot get a full-time job. We also have people who dropped out of the labor force. We have people who are getting first-time unemployment, and it is increasing.
We have people like myself living in a home and not making any payments on my mortgage because laws prevent mortgage companies from foreclosing on me. As I move to Europe and lock up my home, it will sit, prices will remain stagnant and they will eventually fall once the bank forecloses on all the "modified" homes in the neighborhood.
When the neighborhood falls, residential prices drop and so does commercial real estate. And, when we fall into a double-dip recession, we might finally say, "A-ha, so it was a depression. That's what it felt like."
Of course it's a depression. We never made it out of the 1970s because after Jim Jones passed around the Kool-Aid in Guyana, the Federal Reserve borrowed in the name of USA and added debt to this country that lowered unemployed and boosted the stock market until it crashed in 1987. S&Ls borrowed to build commercial real estate until it was so overbuilt that it caused a recession and those materialistic 1980s were done.
Reagan said, "Just Say No" and everything in life would be great. Really? I don't think so. It was more like make as much money as possible and everything would be great. A reunion concert meant rock stars sold out, just like the baby boomers thought money can buy love.
With Bill Clinton, we thought we might have that liberal who would bring us back to thinking of ourselves as human beings rather than walking moneymakers serving the ruling class, or people who had alot of money thanks to multi-national corporations moving overseas.
But, no. Clinton--with Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and all of those Republicans in Democrat clothing--founded financial engineering that churned capital into computers, personal computers, and start-up Internet companies that quickly went bust.
Then, in response to the President's blow-job in the White House, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and then, after a questionable election, we got George W. Bush and deregulation.
By then, baby boomers and their spoiled, self-centered kids brought the US into the age of narcissism, adding reality television to mix. At this point, we literally gave $1 million to the biggest a-hole on an island. We continue to reward bad behavior in sports, media and politics because it is really only about big-screen televisions, 24/7 access to information and lost in a sea of subtlety that we cannot even sit in quiet and think for ourselves.
So now, after I drank the Kool-Aid one last time with Barack Obama and really thought he was change I could count on, we continue to feed the Wall Street beast and listen to early stories about how Osama Bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before getting shot because it's exactly what we want to hear. Only, it's so good that they can't keep up the propaganda.
I grew up in a world where I thought propaganda started and ended with the Pravda and when they tore down the wall, I thought propaganda was gone. But, of course, spin substituted for propaganda and now it runs rampant in the U.S.
Propaganda, generally lies presented to the U.S. to make the nation looks better, is alive and well and stronger than ever. And, I'm tired of fighting it. I want to enjoy what is left of my life.
So, as I write this and finish my fifth of scotch, I will finish off my joint and take a temporary break from the hell I've been living in for the past few years trying to push the truth in the financial markets.
Go ahead, America, and listen to the salesmen on Wall Street's trading floors, and the well-dressed salesmen and saleswomen in Washington, D.C. because they sell what most of us in this boring, mediocre society crave for--fantasy.
We do not live in reality. Our agenda is greed and fear. Greed for anything and fear that we might not get it for ourselves. We are spoiled, self-centered children who need to express our views to everyone on the planet because nobody in our workplace wants to hear it--or read it. The million-dollar, or billion-dollar CEO doesn't want to hear it.
The President doesn't want to hear it. Congress doesn't want to hear it. Even consumer groups do not want to necessarily hear what 16 percent and more of the people want to say--let's help the people live in decent housing, get decent healthcare and take the pressure off the USA.
Frankly, I'm tired of feeling like Atlas, lifting the world in my little, insignificant job, so I can help produce a profit for my billion-dollar CEO. I'm tired of seeing other people pay their mortgages while I sit and pay nothing to live in my home. I'm tired of seeing banks lose paperwork because they only care about profit. And, I'm tired of U.S./multinational companies move outside the country and hire cheap labor so that they can make a profit at our expense.
We're paying for this. We pay more money in gas so speculators can make money; we pay so the U.S. can go into trillions of dollars in debt to give the illusion that we are in an economic recovery.
We earn our little salaries--those of us who have jobs--in little cubicles or offices as our supervisors monitor the mundane, daily work we have been doing for the past years, trying to build a 401K and hold onto health benefits. It's a rat race and, frankly, it's no fun.
So, I'm going to Mexico--leaving urban U.S. for awhile--because I want to see firsthand how real people live. You know, the people not in virtual, 3-D world, zoned out on reality television shows so that they can feel better about ourselves.
To all my readers, Hasta la vista, baby.
