Alan Greenspan spoke to the Senate again. He has now made himself into a total toady for the building of the coming Economic disaster. Unfortunately people are still being gulled by the cheap money campaign waged by the Fed that resulted in W's reelection. I know, I know the 2004 election was waged on values and the Republican's won, that's all there is to it isn't it?

Well maybe the world we live in is a tetch more complex than that. Maybe all of the ads that sold the public the bill of goods that this President has great values were successful. Perhaps it was because the words God and Jesus fall trippingly but sincerely from his lips. It is more likely that those ads often worked because the real world wasn't pinching the average household significantly enough yet. Would W win today? Maybe not even against Kerry; and the pinch hasn't really started yet.

Iraq was neutralized because Kerry had a sodden conversion to the neocon philosophy of conquest first then democracy. Well, we won in Iraq, didn't we? And Democracy is on the march everywhere, not just in Iraq. Hmmm, I think the instant results mindset will not probably win out in the end even if the conventional wisdom right now is that Iraq was a success. Will it look that way in five years, in ten years, how about in twenty five years? I only know one thing for sure; Iraq will be different in twenty five years, massively different.

It is more than Forty years since some of us from my high school graduating class were drafted into the Vietnam war. Vietnam is becoming a labor source for the world the way that China has in the last ten years. Democracy has no power in either nation but we are trading with them and they are accepting our capital and building factories like there's no tomorrow. Waging peace was successful there in the way that waging war had not been. It only took time. Vietnam will eventually have a more liberal government than it does today; financial success does that for nations. Ask the survivors of Chairman Mao and his Red Brigades. Oh yeah he was still there around forty years ago too wasn't he?

Alan, the man who made Ann Randy when he was young, has discovered dissimulation in his old age. That happens to a lot of us. I just read an interesting book "Financial Reckoning Day" By William Bonner with Addison Wiggin. The book is delightful, humorous, informative and scary. It is also clearly not a song of praise for our current politics or economics here in the USA. Two guys who saw the Tech bubble coming and have a basic understanding of human nature wrote this book. I recommend it highly. It dishes the real dirt about Alan, who is after all just another ideologue in a powerful office.

What I see in Washington on both sides of the aisle is a greed-fest of mammoth proportions. I am equally disgusted with both mainstream parties. Every one of the "Leaders" in our government has their hand out for the corporate graft that flows through our sewer on the hill. It is how business is done there now. It is obvious that both parties have been co-opted into the unthinking worship of markets that underlies the prevalent wisdom emanating from our capitol. Markets have been elevated to the pantheon of perfect human institutions along with Democracy. The step to helping corporations help themselves at the expense of the people is a short one in that environment. Both parties have done it over and over again in the past few years and they are getting more adept at it every day.

Unfortunately for all of us, imbalances like the one in Washington are bound to create instability in the system that spawned them. This bubble of greed will burst and dump its smelly contents on the public at large eventually. When it does some of the people that it lands on are going to be unhappy. Let's see, "Corporate profits are up so the economy is good and all's right with the world," is that how it goes? Would that such truisms reflected reality, it would be an easier world to live in for all of us.

Decoupling the fortunes of the Fortune 500 from those of the working class in the USA has not been Washington's finest hour. The people who built that wealth live here but they are increasingly losing any semblance of control over any aspect of how it is used and who benefits from it. The people of this nation also have lost the benefit of one of the most important elements of that concentrated wealth, the jobs. Those jobs are leaving our shores never to return. That is starting to cause a great big problem for our society. If capital leaves the USA for China or India in multi billion dollar chunks as it is doing now, will we be made richer by that change? It hardly seems likely.

Now that the richest companies in the world are no longer investing seriously in projects that create jobs here we have lost a resource. The absence of that resource will decrease the amount of wealth available to our working classes. It may be a surprise to some of us, but most of us are aware that without a well paying job held by at least one member most families fail. Social instability is not reduced in times of financial stress. The ten trillion dollars or so of value held in the hands of our major corporations represent the life work of several generations of our citizens. Will the next generation here profit from those massive concentrations of wealth? It seems unlikely at this point in time.

How can they really leave us behind? After all we represent one forth of the total world market today. Yes Grasshopper but that market is expanding all around us now. The demographics suggest that China is four times as large a potential market as the USA. India is potentially three times as large and growing fast. We only need to hold on for a few years and the growth in those places will replace our function as the dominant market in the world. Of course all of that wealth belongs to the world now, not the USA.

Does that capital ever really leave our shores when we own the dominant number of shares in those companies here? Will an ownership society change all of that for the better and allow us all to live without working? The answer my friend is blown in the winds of international trade. First and foremost we are draining wealth from this nation to feed our greed for products that are produced elsewhere now. One trillion dollars a year in value is leaving our nation between financing our government deficits and our balance of payments deficit abroad. At that rate we will only own half of the forty trillion in wealth that exists here in twenty years. Of course the total amount of wealth in our nation will have doubled in that time. Unfortunately the deficits are expanding more rapidly than wealth is being created.

Furthermore can you say that Chrysler Corporation's wealth exists here any more? Benz owns that venerable company now and the wealth is not here any more. It is somewhere in the world but not here. As the automobile building capacity of the world increases will our production of cars decline or even stop? Look at the textile industry if you want an answer to that question. The competition for jobs in the textile industry has been won and it is not here that those jobs have settled; it is in China.

We do have a problem but it is not an easy one to recognize or solve. It is much easier to participate in the greed-fest than to even try to understand this problem. I feel the winds of change blowing cold across my neck. But what the neck the noose isn't there this morning yet. I think I'll go out on my patio and listen to the wren that sings there every morning. Have a nice day!