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| 30 May 2009 03:15:54 am |
 Sin duda |
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No doubt the car dealers are getting what they deserve. To anyone who’s ever gone into a dealership and come out feeling like they’ve crawled up from the bottom of the pile at a Hell’s Angels gangbang, a little soiled and used, it probably seems like there should be a special place in hell, or at least a hard pew in church, for car salesmen. If there’s any such thing as karma or justice. Out here in our small sand dune in the Mojave Desert we don’t believe anyone – red, blue, republican, democrat, or otherwise. And the only mouthpiece we have is the kind that boxers use when they expect to get punched in the face. We only hunt for elusive, unreliable data and try to do math. Our point, if we had one, was that there is an enormous transfer of wealth going on. Many “haves”, like George, are now “have nots.” Any many many more “have nots” are now “have mores.” That is more debt than they can count. My bet is that George is a Republican, and a football fan. Probably most of the bikers would be Democrats if they sobered up long enough to think about it. I suppose that makes them better people. I don’t know, really though. Like a pen of hogs, they all look about the same to me.
Now that Uncle Sam is in the car business, what do you suppose he’s going to do? I can see the old chap, shuffling around the car lot in his rumpled red, white, and blue suit – accosting every passerby, “Hey, you want to buy a Pontiac?” He may try to build electric cars that he’ll then have to pay people with borrowed or printed money to buy with more borrowed money since they’d rather get the latest slick electric-solar and a teaspoon of gas model from Toyota. Personally I like to see him chuck the whole sordid affair and start building passenger railcars. But that isn’t any more likely to happen then AIG giving the money back. How long do you think Amtrak could run on the money he gave the banks? No, it’s much more likely that China will find something to buy other than T-bills and Sammy will get in another big fight trying to defend his dollar. Then I’ll have to crawl in the rabbit hole and won’t even get to drive my Prius. |
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Category : General
| Posted By : cassandra |  Comments[38] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 21 May 2009 12:58:09 am |
| Ladrones |
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I’ve maintained for some time that there is an enormous transfer of wealth going on in these last days of the late, great United States. It is not the earning of money. It is the grandest of grand larcenies. It is the final looting of the wealth of this country. This letter from a former Chrysler dealer is case in point. If I may try to answer his questions. How can this happen in the U.S.? There exists little difference between the oligarchs now in charge and a well-organized crime family. This dealership -was- a private business, now it’s not. How can this happen in a free market? Well, it’s not. It didn’t happen in a free market economy. And if you think otherwise, you haven’t been paying attention.
Here’s the link.
Letter from a Dodge dealer
letter to the editor
My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business.
We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part of their livelihood. We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community. We have strong local presence and stability.
I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees. Sunshine Dodge is my life.
On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as "new," nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.
Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler's insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.
HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?
THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY
This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong.
This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy. This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families? This is a total economic disaster.
HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?
I beseech your help, and look forward to your reply. Thank you.
Sincerely,
George C. Joseph
President & Owner
Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu |
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Category : General
| Posted By : cassandra | Comments[38] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 17 May 2009 01:12:55 am |
| Cerveza |
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| Lately I haven’t written much about peak oil for two reasons. One, it’s old news, and two, a lot of other people do it a lot better than me. But now that the price of oil seems to creep up ahead of the imaginary economic recovery perhaps we should cogitate once again on the nearly perfect correlation of energy with everything else. In its simplest form it’s like a vat full of wort and yeast. There’s only so much sugar in the wort and the yeast have the job of turning sugar into more yeast and metabolic waste products as fast as possible. In the simplest sense, we’re the yeast, the world is our vat, and oil is our sugar. Now here we are, just past the peak of metabolic – economic – activity. I look around and see the other yeast cells distracted by all sorts of delusions. Nearly everyone believes that some substitute for oil is right around the corner. There are the alternative sugar believers, solar sugar, wind sugar, nuclear sugar believers who all continue to convert oil sugar into waste products – carbon dioxide for instance – as fast as possible despite their beliefs. On this big arc of peak oil all of the other wavelengths of distress – the subprime, collateralized debt, credit crisis, housing bubble foreclosure, unemployment distress are mere noise – little ripples on the big wave. Mirrors in the Mojave Desert aren’t going to save civilization. So down we go on the backside of the big arc. Nothing that you or I do is going to change the path of the rollercoaster ride. All we can do is throw our hands in the air, scream, and feel that sick feeling in the pit of our stomach. |
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Category : General
| Posted By : cassandra | Comments[42] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 10 May 2009 03:03:28 am |
| Qué vamos a hacer |
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We may begin to see the hazy outlines of the next few years, although one never knows when the next black swan will swoop out of the sky. Now that our gubbymint runs just about everything – the big banks guaranteed not to fail, the little banks taken over in the dead of Friday afternoon, the big insurers like AIG, the big mortgage buyers like Fannie and Freddie, Chrysler, GM, GMAC, and all of the enormous defense contractors – Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, General Electric, Boeing, etcetera etcetera – whose only reason for existence is to service government contracts, we might ask how the government runs its business.
Government gets money in basically four ways: taxing, borrowing, printing, and stealing. Now there are a few who might argue that taxing and stealing are nearly the same thing. And it’s quite possible that the only real difference between any of these categories is purely semantic. But for the sake of discussion, let’s look at the relationships. By stealing I mean looting other countries. A good example is Spain after 1492 when millions of indigenous Americans died and boatloads of bounty sailed to Iberia. No doubt España is still paying penance for this ill-gotten gain. But los Estados Unidos never caught on. All of our foreign adventures turn into cesspools of debt where resources get flushed like fertilizer down the drain. You don’t see any boatloads of booty from Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan docking in Boston Harbor.
The standard government revenue is taxation. Thus you constantly hear how the taxpayer is paying for this or that government program slash boondoggle. But sad though the facts may be, the sorry taxpayer is taxed out. There’s no more left to squeeze. Now something like two thirds of our supposed economy is consumer spending. So if we expect an economic recovery on the backs of consumers, then taking what’s left of our disposable income as taxes is simply not an option. So the governments – city, state, and national – borrow. After the housing bubble popped the government piled on debt, perhaps creating the next bubble in government paper. There’s not a rope long enough to fathom the depth of a trillion dollar budget deficit or a 13 trillion dollar “economic stimulus” package.
Comes a point when treasury bills become junk bonds. We know we are almost there when the price goes down and the yield goes up. It won’t matter then what interest rate the Federal Reserve sets. The market will decide that too many bills are looking for too few buyers. Another clue is when the Federal Reserve buys government debt directly and calls it something evasive like “quantitative easing”. Basically this is the government counterfeiting its own currency. Those closest to the printing press do the best. For the rest of us it is as if we all took out our one dollar bills and wrote a few extra zeros after the one with a pen.
So what about the hazy outline of the next few years. Well, besides the drum beating and chanting you’ll constantly hear about how we’ve reached “the bottom”, started “recovery”, and restored “confidence” in the economy – the nominal price in dollars of things having real value is likely to increase once the enormous whoosh of deflation is over. This is a one time opportunity to turn paper into things of real value. All the talk of V-shaped, U-shaped, and W-shaped recovery is so much hope and funny money (dollar bills with lots of extra zeros). Of course there will be V’s and W’s as long as there are fools left to rush in. When the last bobbleheaded pundit has babbled the last word about the bottom, when the last sucker has lost hope, those who have things of real value – stuff like high-quality steel tools, farm animals, and good neighbors – will begin to rebuild the next age. |
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Category : General
| Posted By : cassandra | Comments[38] | Trackbacks [0] |
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