Three cheers for Barack Obama he got Osama Bin Laden and now perhaps, he can direct his attention towards the collapse of the American economy. The value of an American home dropped an average of 8.2 percent in the last twelve months, 28 percent of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages and new home sales are near record lows. Those are astounding figures especially when the decline in value is added to the last three years of falling prices. Home prices aren't just falling they're imploding, a collapse unrivaled in American history.
This is directly due to the federal government's abdication of its duties to the people. Rather than to do what was necessary to salvage the Real Estate market and the American people. The Obama administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve have put all of their faith and our money into saving Wall Street rather than Main Street. Zero to .25 percent interest rates have reinflated the Wall Street bubble yet employment numbers are tepid and stagnate. Wages are falling and consumer confidence is low and credit hard to obtain.
Each year since 2008 we've been told, this year will be the peak of home foreclosures crisis and yet the following year we are told the same again. The Obama administration offered first time home buyers a $6,000 tax credit to purchase a home but with an 8.2 percent drop in home prices those purchasers are already behind the eight ball. Twelve billion dollars, tax dollars down the drain in a governmental bait and switch, a corporate give wrapped up as a gift paper of public assistance.
New car sales are still below the numbers of those being crushed each year and yet somehow with a straight face the Obama administration speaks of recovery. April is the month when spring hiring begins in earnest. Last year the administration called this green shoots when all that it was, was springtime. The Bureau of Labor statistics announced new 244,000 jobs this month while down the street from me the local ice cream shop opened for the season. The grass has begun to grow and swimming pools are preparing to open for summer. Yet despite all of these new jobs the administration has created the unemployment number went up!
Volatility is returning to the markets, four dollar a gallon gasoline will strangle any hope of recovery like a baby in a cradle. When I bought my first car for five hundred dollars gasoline was at .46 cents a gallon and the minimum wage was $3.00 per hour. It meant that I could buy six gallons of gasoline for an hour of labor. Today that would be less than two gallons while the number of Americans working for minimum wage has risen by forty percent.
The U-6 unemployment number for April is 15.5 percent a scant drop of one percent year over year and only 1.5 percent from the a record high of 17 percent. Three hundred thousand new jobs created in a calendar year while three million more Americans are counted as "Not in the labor force." Wage growth for those fortunate enough to have jobs is statistically insignificant. Wages are rising by pennies an hour while inflation is discounted and ignored. A two pound can of coffee is now a pound and a half and a half gallon of ice cream is now one and a half quarts.
These converging forces of high unemployment, rising inflation coupled with zero wage growth means nothing less than the strangulation of the economy. The home bubble is gone what is now eroding is the meat of the economic body. What has Mr. Obama suggested to cure this illness? What has Congress suggested to cure this illness? Nothing! They have ignored this economic withering and growing lethal danger to the economy. The Federal Reserve has acted under Ben Bernanke's watchful eye; the Fed under the title of quantitative easing has inflated the money supply yet again.
During hurricane Katrina George W. Bush played air guitar while an American city drown. Bush then flew overhead in Air Force One and stared blankly out the window at the catastrophe and was rightfully pilloried for his callousness. Yet Barack Obama might as well fly over us in the space shuttle his coolness not to be confused with aloofness.
An economic catastrophe equal to the Great Depression and the administration's economic policy is to allow the Federal Reserve to do what ever it wishes to do. Obama stands on the deck of an imaginary aircraft carrier and declares victory and goes home. Never has an American President done less to aid the struggling citizenry since perhaps Herbert Hoover. The politics of Ronald Reagan combined with the cluelessness of Herbert Hoover and now with the new and improved smirk of little Rambo.
President Obama recently went to the Texas border region to preach again for his neo liberal immigration reform. The cluelessness of the captain of the Titanic shouting, "Bingo in the Grand Salon everyone! Bingo!"
These politicians are not stupid people, they are well aware of what is going on around them and so we must ask ourselves, either, the federal government is lost in its own intellectualism and fishbowlism and are unable to form a consensus? Or they know exactly what is going on and have decided to save themselves and the top ten percent by keeping the public occupied with wars and birth certificates until they fill all of the available lifeboats. Or even a darker and sinister version where they intend to sink the economy Weimar Republic style.
Inflating the economy while shrinking wages, Social Security then becomes irrelevant without a politician ever laying a finger on it. Retiree's will still get a check each month with the caveat of "don't spend it all in one place." Keep in mind that the investor class no longer needs America. They have built for themselves a new one in continental Asia. This new one is growing at 10 percent per year and is everything that the investor class could have ever dreamed of, coal fired electrical plants with plans for more nuclear plants. No civil or worker rights to deal with, no unions or activists or environmental controls. A neo liberal paradise of high profits and low taxes of masters and slaves.
Charles Schumer recently sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano asking for tighter security on Amtrak trains. Schumer asked not only for more money but for creation of a no ride list! Suddenly Democrats are all in favor of the war on terror. The irony, thousands of uninspected shipping containers arriving on our shores each week. A President that preaches open borders with a failed narco state while a member of his own party wants to control who will be allowed to ride America's trains.
A government that treats its citizens as a commodity to be controlled and relegated, legislated against and when it suits their purposes or simply ignored.
That leaves us with our options as being what? A single neo liberal party state where Democrats support tax cuts for the rich, wars for aggrandizement with a burgeoning state Gestapo organ and a Republican Party that answers, "That, but even more so! God, guns and abortion control and getting government off our backs by cutting even more taxes."
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