Last July, I took a novice's look at hedge funds, housing, gambling and America's ass-backwards foreign policy and declared what I thought to be the obvious. The spiel landed on Alternet in the form of a supposedly sensational article called The Crash of 1929: Are We on the Verge of a Repeat?
I thought it was a hoot. Others thought I was high.
But it ended up being obvious. June gloom just killed off the second quarter of 2008, and the Great Depression is finally going viral in the mainstream media. CNN Money's closing report on yesterday's trading dropped it three times, including once in the subheadline. And they're not alone either. The economy has become the top election issue of the year, and chatterheads like Jim Cramer and Lawrence Kudlow are looking worse while doom prophets like Naomi Klein and James Kunstler are looking cooler by the day.
Which totally rules: The more people unplug from the Kool-Aid machine, the faster we can get past disaster capitalism and onto the next stage in our economic evolution, which is alternative energy. I say economic evolution, but it might as well be our salvation. If we don't get off gas fast, we're headed to a junkie's end. Ever seen one? Not pretty.
The first thing we need to admit to ourselves is that the war and the economy are the same issue, not separate ones. The next thing we need to to is unplug ourselves from the chatter, and plan for the future. Which means turning off Fox, CNN, MSNBC or talk radio, if only those programs that bypass research for retardation. Or redundancy, if you are offended by the metaphor. The point is the point, which is a tautological way of saying you are wasting your time if you are getting your news from people who are not only giving you not just their opinion, but the worst possible opinion available in
contemporary media.
See the games for what they are, and help those around you see them as well. We're trillions in the hole since Bush took office. Let's make sure the next president knows his way around a game theory, or two.