Meltdowns

So the Fed thought we were close enough to an economic meltdown today to lower the prime rate more than expected. Not much more... but more.

We've been on the verge of such a meltdown for a long time as the corporations in charge of our economy make bad loans to each other and to Americans whose ability to repay their debt is tied not to real equity but to the promise that their income will continue to grow exponentially.

Guess what? The whole economy is tied to such assumptions. It's the fundamental assumption of capitalism that the economy will grow, must grow. What is different now is that like our venture into Iraq, if any minor assumption that one sector makes goes sour, the whole house of cards goes down.

It's just like our culture of Celebrity. What do we have right now? A bunch of people famous for gambling that their youth and beauty will cause us to forgive them their lies and misbehavior. And an inordinate number of them are melting down. Today Heath Ledger died. A few months ago, Owen Wilson nearly died. Both men were not sober, possibly suicidal, but certainly out of control. Britney Spears is out of control, as is Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Amy Winehouse, and yet the media is still quite busy extracting value from their drugged up corpses.

Meltdown is profitable.

I mentioned Iraq. I'm reading Fiasco, and frankly can't stop talking about it to friends who are hungry for something interesting to come out of my mouth. Fiasco is one piece of bad news after another about how textbook a failure American is in the Middle East. It's a testament about how lying to the American people affects policymakers' ability to learn from their mistakes, and about how the American military has demonstrated one more time their inability to function without clear, unequivocal and wise direction from political leaders. The Bushies had assumptions, not a plan, going into Iraq. The assumptions were wrong, and they spent 5 years denying their failures. Big surprise, eh?

This meltdown of American foreign policy has been profitable for some American sectors, at the cost of millions of Iraqi lives and livelihoods, and thousands of American casualties both fatal and nonfatal. And the costs only begin there. And who benefits?

Some people get rich off the suffering of others. China has sunk tons of money into buying American war debt. Eventually, China will want to be paid back.

But with what? We can't write IOU's to cover IOU's. Watch as each branch of Government tries to do just that. That's what the Fed did.

But the chickens are coming home to roost. Celebrities are dying. Banks and other lenders are looking for bailouts as their balance sheets bottom out. Americans are losing their homes. And the crisis in the Middle East has turned world opinion against American hegemony, whether America "gets" that or not.

American institutions are going to fall. Mark my words. More meltdowns are on the horizon. And then we'll have a (rigged) election.

If America fails to learn from our mistakes, individually and as a body politic, we'll be left with nothing but a bowl of dust.

Here's where I see the hope: People are (again) saying Americans have to change our assumptions about their place in the world, the consequences of our political and economic choices are real, and our view of what's important in life should inform how we live it.

"There's no there there." Get it?