The Bear is Yet to Come: The U.S. Economy will fall into a Depression

With today's announcement that Bear Stearns, the 5th largest investment bank needed an influx of cash to remain solvent to its outstanding investors/investments, it calls to question: what will happen next?

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs are the benchmarks for high-yielding banks that produce money/provide liquidity in the Capital markets. If they start to falter, the next group is the commercial banks, which affects all Americans, Europeans and Asia markets.

The signs have been clear: Commodity Prices (Gold, Corn, Wheat, Silver, Oil) are at record highs, Mortgages are failing at huge rates, with ex-Fed Chair Greenspan asleep at the wheel in allowing the housing market to gallop ahead unrestrained, the United States Dollar is at record lows versus the Japanese Yen (99 Yen), Canadian Dollar (1.01), Swiss Franc (0.9987), The Euro (1.567) and to add to that, we are in a economic standstill right now, zero growth.

The United States Economy will trigger larger problems as it continues to pump liquidity into the market via lowering interest rates (expect .75% ease on Tuesday), thus causing the dollar to decrease in value and thus continuing to raise commodity prices, which introduces more inflation into an all ready, dicey situation.

Inflation has been a European concern of utmost importance which is why they have not lower their interest rates in lockstep with the United States. They are uniquely aware of the triggers of the Great Depression, which started in Europe, namely Germany, after WWI.

We are just at the beginning of a major economic shake up. And we have one Presidential candidate, John McCain, who said, "I don't understand the economy..."

Which leads one to wonder, do you want another ill-equipped President running a country in a economic meltdown? What did the Iraqi war gain us in economic terms? (The cost and money spent could have been used better...)

George W. Bush, with a Harvard MBA, has taken us back to the edge of the 1929 October financial meltdown.

He and his policy people pushed for easy/no regs on lending of money to people that should not have ever received a banking loan on a house. These people got over their heads. Then the banks got too tight - on lending, or passed their bad paper on to other banks, and other banks did the same,etc. - and the money has been devalued in the process. Meanwhile, the Fed and Government has done us in with bad policies.

Oil prices are being driven by devaluation of currency. Your money is buying less and less - and the problem is spreading to corporations that are cutting jobs - as Ford, Chrysler, GM and other big manufacturing are reducing their forecasts but cannot lower prices, while those that do overseas business are doing ok or better. So, not all is lost.

So, I am sounding the alarm on the 1MC: "start preparing for a long downturn in the U.S. Economy. Expect prices to rise 20, 30 and 50% above today's rate. And get your money out of risky investment vehicles. Hedge funds are the first to go. Stock up on staples. Get prepared for more bad news..."

Predicting another Great Depression is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the government as currently constituted is not going to save you or me. "Let them eat cake," is their mantra.

I have made numerous posts on the American Economy prior to this, which means I have been paying attention longer than just today...so, though this is radical to say "Depression," in 12-18 months, it may "bear" itself out.

Police Songs: For a blogger that voted for me

Just because I am a big Police fan, I will post a few songs by The Police and Sting. I can remember getting Message in a Box, the entire catalog of Police songs, and thinking, "I'll never sell this." Well, I fell on hard times, and sold about 400 CDs and over 400 tapes. I needed money. However, before I did, I did save them on my laptop, that which I could. (Now, the laptop crashed...haven't listen those 1,200 plus songs in over a year.)

Well here are the Videos/Songs I like:
Too Much Information


Englishman in New York


Demolition Man (In Chile, 1982)

The Soul Cages


Invisible Sun (with Bono, live at Giants Stadium)


Tea in the Sahara (live)


If you Love Somebody, Set Them Free (Dream of The Blue Turtles)

Of course I could put Every Breath, Message, Roxanne, Spirits, Fields of Gold, and plenty of others on the list, but I just gave my oddball favorites.

Thanks Cooper! Easiest Post I've Done!

Howl: I Hear America Singing

Since we last left this blog, in a state of disarray and political dire straits, I haven't gotten it right inside. So instead of boring you with my pedagogical and pedantic rants of disillusionment, I mashed together two poets of note: not Starsky & Hutch. (Ginsberg and Whitman (pictured left))

I am no expert on their writings. Not some scholar bent on the critique and disection of their works. I just think most Americans should know who they are.

I got most of my positive innoculation to their writing well after college. I was an Engineering major, which meant my typical semester course schedule included Thermodynamics, Differential Calculus, Operations Research, Linear Programming in C and Egyptian History. I took one English class and a Com class in my 5-year plan not worked out by Stalin.

But back to the show!

Walt Whitman. I Sing the Body Electric! The title was added after the original publication - as was the line. I Hear America Singing is usually thought of as his best work. Patriotic. Workman like with the toils of Americans at their best.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, ...
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Meanwhile, a century later, Ginsberg stood the conventions of the time on ear with a Howl! Again, another potrait of America in my uneducated view:

The first 4 lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,...

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking trafficlight, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliancein the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in the submarine light of Bickford's, floated out and satthrough the stale beer afternooon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crackof doom on the hydrogen jukebox,...

It goes on for quite a while like that...reciting it would be a bitch, unless you were on some sort of 'happy pills.'

Ginsberg used a a repetitive style, like Mr. Whitmans, likely borrowed. Repeating the line introduction, nearly the same cadence always - with poetic quirks - and describing as good or as bad as we have it in America.

Seeing the world either as positive or as negative, as crass or as saintly, as to men could.

I got no more time today!!! I'll see you next week!!!

AUDI 5000!!!!

R.I.P. : Netscape goes to The Tech Great Beyond

Netscape is officially a dead end as a technology platform, as it will no longer be supported. (Picture above is from blog.wired.com.) I came into knowledge of the internet via Netscape and Mosaic browsers. (Picture below left is from browsersheritage.com.)
In 1993, while at Purdue University, I spent an inordinate amount of time in Grissom Hall doing web searches on Mosaic, an NCSA platform, while learning little or no code, but downloading alot of worthless information. "Back in the day", my account limit on this information to store on the local university server was like 10-20MB. I, personally, didn't own a 386 or 486 Intel at 25-75 MHZ, nor could I get a baude rate above 9600 KB/sec. But it was fun, nonetheless.

I chatted often with a college girl, Jennifer Hollingsworth, who went to Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania in 1995 while in that same Grissom computer lab. We'd kill hours of time, talking about school (more her schooling than mine), discussing politics (which I knew nothing of) or relationships (ours, friends or families.) Probably for 3+ months, we racked up close to 250 hours of chat room time, all for free. The internet was good.
(Though this relationship ended over whether I would visit her in Pennsylvania - I would have, but I was broke - and the fact she pulled a 2.0 in that semester, honors student, mind you, thus pissing her family off to undoubtedly no end. She cut me off before I could either apologize appropriately or fix what I fucked up...pardon the language.)

While I was screwing the pooch of on-line relationships, Netscape took over from Mosaic as the browser software of choice, in my opinion, during the mid-to-late 1990's. But that was soon to be a thing of the past as Internet Explorer took over dominance, thanks to good ole Microsoft.

As blog.wired.com suggests:

Netscape released its browser’s source code and created the Mozilla project in
1998. AOL then acquired Netscape in 1999. Recognizing that
Netscape got some things right and others wrong, Blake Ross and some of his
developer friends branched off to create Firefox, which for all
practical purposes is the current incarnation of Netscape. Many believe the original Netscape died with the AOL purchase. Since then, the web
browser scene has been rife with change — Mozilla gave way to the leaner, faster
Firefox and Apple developed its own Safari browser — and Netscape’s browser has
been rendered largely irrelevant. Indeed, as AOL's director of the Netscape brand Tom Drapeau points out, his team has failed to put a dent in IE’s dominance, and the latest release of the Netscape browser is simply “a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.”

I didn't give way to Internet Explorer - using Netscape until probably 2000-1 - but I was different anyways: I didn't own my very own computer until 2001. (My aunt bought one in 1999, but never used it, never knew how, so, I generally kept it updated with software or moved my files via the old 1.3 MB disks...yikes!)

I would also go to Kinko's to do my interneting then. (I was making good money, then, but not thinking very smart - except that a Kinko's girl would usually let me work over Kinko's for nearly no charge.) She was a very nice person - but unavailable, in that sense.

AOL hadn't been a dial-up of choice until I got that 1st computer in January 2001. (I figured those handy drink coasters (those disks) had to have something on them, so, why not?) After only 3 months, I wasn't interested in AOL anymore. I did Compuserve for awhile (after a stint in the Westville Hilton) using, "AOLSUCKS" as my password.

AOL /Time Warner deal (picture from webcomicbattle.com) has turned into the biggest joke. The relevancy of both corporations has diminished to the point that I really don't know what either one (as if they are seperate) is doing.. this after being one of the largest mergers in American history. (And, at the time, the dot.com bubble had not burst.)

Meanwhile, Netscape, the initiator of this story has gone to moth balls. 14 years it took to go from new kid, to industry leader, to struggling competitor to bad platform, to defunct/obsolete program.

This mirrors often how I feel: in 1993, life was looking better. I was young, impressionable, quick to act, and had ideas for the future. After graduation in 1996, my path seemed set to go - I could make some hey, drive towards new heights, maybe innovate something. By 2001, the wheels were tettering on a precipice of legal malaise. And, in 2008, I feel quite defunct and outdated.

We might all have to die - figuratively - a 1,000 deaths before we get it right. As browsers now are nothing more than 1st generation access points to others in the world. As all the applications on Iphones, blackberries and Steve Jobs-only-knows-what-else come to fruition, we see things get replaced, get outdated or wither away in this tech world. (Ms. Pacman, Nintendo box, Atari 2600 for pictured examples.)

To go beyond, as we approach 2012, the Mayan's end of celestial time, we might see the future as not so bright.

The intrusions into people's lives are becoming more pronounced, more impassioned by a less-than-enlighted society that hasn't understood technology from the git go. The governments learn from people they wouldn't hire 25 years ago - even though these nerds could hack their mainframes, and essentially disrupt commerce, the most important aspect of technology today, money flow, in the time it took most of the nerd herd to masturbate over some floozy they can't get nanoseconds from. This manipulatory fact has hastened the demise of individual freedoms, just ask your government, if you can.

The death of one technology or platform only gives rise to another with faster transistors, more complex algorithms and more uses by us, the consumer, but less understanding, by us, the controlled. The entertainment value alone made it that easy; seeing what the TV has done, the computer became like an uber cocaine to people without personal connections. Governments caught on, and we serve them, now, more than ever.

Hopefully, this tour down my memory lane, through the technology life cycle will remind you that you are the most advanced system ever developed - so don't be a slave to a box constructed by others, like you. Be your own system - and update, revamp and design for the future. Or you'll likely be another defunct person walking around.

KEEP IT FRESH TO DEATH!!!

Mildred Clark (nee Koepl): 16 Years ago today

I really did not want to write this post. Not due to any ill will at all. Quite, quite the contrary. I loved my grandmother so much. It is just that in remembering that it's been 16 years since she past, it reminds me of what has gone on, what she would be saying if she had lived through to see the tumultuous situations I got into, and where her daughters are today in their lives that depresses so.

She was a tough-minded, work-till-you-sleep, never-pulled-any-punches type. She was of German descent - so, that explains a lot of that. She worked from age 10 onward; grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, cooking for 20-30 hands on a farm in her early years. She drove the tractor around before she could really legally drive - and continued to drive without a license later on in life from 1962-1992. She was stubborn that way.

Her older sister commited suicide at age 17. I can't image what Milly felt about that. It wasn't a subject discussed in great detail. She carried on, doing whatever it took to make it best for herself.

She met my grandfather, William, after WWII when her family moved south to Dyer, Indiana. They were fixed up by friends of theirs - though I don't think those friends were around much after that. During a baseball game at old Comiskey Park where a fresh-from-the-fighting Ted Williams was leading the Boston Red Sox, they fell in love, almost literally - with my grandfather trying to catch a foul liner hit by Teddy Ballgame down the 1st base line. He dove over my grandmother and got a bruised hand and a wife in the process.

They married on February 18, 1950 in Niles, Michigan. For some crazy reason, which I believe had to do with Grandma's mother's disapproval, they drove up to Michigan in a snow storm. The story related was that Mildred gave my grandpa an ultimatum : either that day or forget it. They started out their marriage $75 in the hole - the cost of the justice of the peace.

Unlike others in the 1950's, they had a difficult time. At one point, they were living out of their car while letting their daughters stay with relatives or friends at the time. My grandpa was undereducated - 9th grade was his last year - so, that might of been part of it. He did finally get on track in construction and worked in the mills for 25 years. But whatever the fallout was from that period, my grandmother lost her own mother's love, what little likely existed before that. As a result, for the last 30 years of her life, Mildred didn't speak to most of her family, and never to her mother again.

By 1968, my grandmother was well entrenched in the housecleaning/janitorial business. She did that for the remainder of her life. She cleaned the Lowell Public Library (I write from the new one) for 20 years - passing away 4 months after the new one opened. During the mid-1980's, I would go to the old library, push mow the 3/4 acre grounds and saw grandma during various stages of getting the library cleaned from stem-to -stern. I enjoyed this - I liked trying to give her a break, getting her to talk about sports, especially those Cubbies, who she came to mock after their inglorious 1969 season. I thought she was wrong, but alas, it has been 100 years since those Northsiders have done it right.

She would do anything for me - college, for one, she assisted me financially more than I really know - and I think saw what she and grandpa wanted in a son they didn't have...maybe.

When the doctor diagnosed her with cancer in late 1991, it was too late. She had hid the fact she had been bleeding for months - she hated doctors, I suppose for the reasons most give and the fact she lost husband to cancer - and it had spread from the uterus to her liver.

On the day she passed, the doctor was in North Carolina on the links. I remember seeing her take her final breath and just going nuts. I stormed out of the room, pushing my aunt and mother aside. I slung a food tray down the hall watching peas scatter like marbles all over the place. A nurse or CNA screamed something incoherently as I went to the elevator, then I turned and said to her: "Shut...your...mouth...bitch!!!" And I got in the elevator as mad as I have ever been in my life.

My mother and I had drove up seperately that night. I had my grandparents old 1967 Electra 225. This car had plenty to give under the hood; I nearly had an accident one time at age 17 in a McDonald's parking lot when the accelerator got stuck as I pulled away from the drive-thru. It took a miracle for me to stop the car before I roared out onto the main road in Lowell.

But that night, I was all for speed. I got into that 2-ton monster with one intent: to see how far I could push my luck. I tore out of that parking lot looking for a sitdown with God I think . The old ambulance route is a winding road with a speed limit of 40MPH. It has one stretch where you might be able to get up to 80 MPH and hold it on the road. I wasn't interested.

Before I could think clearly, I buried the needle beyond 120. I took a curve at probably 95 MPH, using as much skill as sure luck to keep it on the road. I managed to come to my senses as I reached a T in the road.

I stopped and cried.

(That was the last time that car saw a speed over 60. We sold it 6 months later...)

My grandmother hasn't yet received her headstone due to finances. My grandfather got his from his Naval service. Every year, I put two quarters on that stone - my grandmother kept coins prior to 1964 since they actually contained silver - in remembrance of this profitable quirk. She kept a huge change purse - I think we counted out $58 in coinage upon her death. And she had another $550 dollars, all prior to 1964, upstairs in her room. (Of course, that got spent by her oldest...)

I would have posted a picture - and I will (March 3, 2008)- but I didn't think I would write this post. It just didn't know what would be best.

Thinking of you grandma Clark!