Voice of the White House
July 16, 2008
Washington, D.C.: “The economic disaster now bearing down on America moves with the inexorable but slow speed of a glacier. It is coming and we can see it coming but it takes its time and is not answerable to the babble and chatter of an empty-headed media or frantic reassurings of the financial world. The housing bubble was too big and lasted far too long for the damage of its collapse to be minimal or temporary. The bubble was a combination of circumstance and greed, forced into gross overgrown by deliberate fraudulent acts between crooked lower-level local mortgage people and the huge banking system over them. Those who did not know this was a fraud should have and the consequences of the mass-marketing of sub-prime mortgages will prove to be a terrible global economic disaster. Americans have been living on credit for far too long and it was inevitable that what goes up has to come down. In this case, the rise was massive and the collapse will match it. Large companies like GM, facing financial ruin, have taken to canceling all of their pensions to former employees and as the economy shrinks, we may well see a reprise of the Great Depression of 1929-1939. This time, more people will lose everything they have: their homes, their savings accounts, their cars, their jobs and in short, they will be living in tent cities, chasing loose pets for dinner. Whose fault is this? Where can the blame be leveled? At many people including crooked mortgage brokers, greedy and unquestioning bankers, trusting and unsuspecting consumers and, most especially, at George Bush and his cabal for their actions in rapidly accelerating an economic situation that might have been slowed or even corrected if action had been taken from the very top and in a timely way. Bush takes his loot with him and has a nice library in Texas and Cheney will soon be dead of heart failure and where he’s going, his huge profits from hyped up Halliburton stock options won’t be of any comfort to him. And to top all of this chaos, we have the specter of a joint US/Israeli attack on Iran which would bring further chaos to the oil market, probably cause a local atomic war with the probability that Iran, who has at least one warhead and many missiles, will launch a pre-emptive attack on the heavily concentrated troops, diplomats, and military leadership inside the Green Zone of nearby Baghdad. As the Germans used to say, “Enjoy the war, because the peace will be terrible!"