Some of you have been complaining that there hasn't been enough Chicken Littling on the ol' BoBblog lately, for you I have:
- This on the imminent economic collapse that will come of W's idiocy (first he drove an oil company into the ground, then he ran a baseball team into the ground, then they gave him the safety scissors that was a Texas governorship and some wethead thought it'd be a great idea to have him run the world's most powerful nation) The 'he' in the following, by the way, is not some loopy outsider. It's the chief economist of Morgan Stanley. Be afraid.
To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.
That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.
Sustainable? Hardly.
Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.
Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.
Today the figure is 85 percent.
Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.
- When I was regularly reading the Boston Globe (that being, in other words, when I was living in Somerville and working in Newton) I was always thankful for the editorials of the always passionately ethical James Carrol. A man of faith and a man of convictions, he served as a reminder to me that there are people who are truly spititual among the clamoring hypocritical masses of the merely religious. In a recent column he describes the dragging deadly occupation of Iraq as a moral abyss. He cautions us to remember that, despite what he calls the insurgents' "low-tech 'shock and awe' assaults," the true horrors of war come not from individual moral lapses but from prolonged campaigns of bombing and destruction. I've often wondered how the destructive power of a 747 fully loaded with jet fuel compares to the destructive power of a cruise missile. ("We don't fly planes into buildings!" the apologists cry, implying that we are more ethical in war than our enemy... we don't have to, because we've spent billions on high tech weaponry to do the job more efficiently) How many 9/11s have we perpetrated on people halfway around the world, defiling the memory of a horrific attack on our people by using it as an excuse to generate more pain, death and suffering?
- A propos of that, we have Ted Koppel showing his own courage. I wonder how much crap he'll catch from the locksteppers for daring to suggest that there might be an underside to war?
OK, only one of the above items was Chicken Little. The other two were just kneejerk and shrill. Trust me to stick to my topic...
