This economics stuff ain't so hard

Here's my plan to stimulate the economy, but god knows they won't use it because it's just too common-sensical:

• Keep all the proposed stimulus money out of the hands of banks, financial professionals, and anyone connected with any Wall Street institution. Those bastards put us where we are today so no way in hell should they be allowed to handle one cent of that money.
• Use some of the money to fix every highway and bridge in the country.
• Use some of that money to fix up and update every public school in the country, and that includes all public universities.
• Use part of that money to restore art, music, and gym classes to every K through 12 public school in the country.
• Use part of that money to do energy audits on every federal, state, and local governmental building in the country. And then if changes are needed to make those building energy efficient then use more of the money to makes the changes needed.
• Use part of that money to purchase solar energy systems that will be mounted on every federal, state, and local governmental building in the country.
• Use part of that money to purchase solar energy systems that will be mounted on every retail building, church, and non profit in the country.
• Use part of that money to start industrial hemp farms all across the country. If we grew less corn and more hemp it would benefit our economy and our health because there would be less corn to make High Fructose Corn syrup with.
• Use part of that money to fund local neighborhood farms and farmers markets.
• Use part of the money to re-open factories that were closed when companies moved their manufacturing to China and other places.

Most everything I have listed could be done easily and would benefit the country in the short and the long run. If we used the bulk of the money to fix our crumbling infrastructure and to wean ourselves from using coal and oil then it's a win win for all of us, well except for big oil and big coal but who cares about them anyway, they've been fucking us for years and it's about time we fucked them back.

Everything in the above list can be done with American workers and can't be outsourced. It would put millions of people to work and hundreds of new companies would spring in to business to help accomplish all those things.

If we give stimulus money to Haliburton and Blackwater we are screwed. If we let big business handle things during this tricky time we are screwed. If we let Mitch McConell and Bob Corker get their hands on this money we are screwed. Same goes for Diane Feinstein and any other Republican wanna be.

Made in the USA

Do you want to know when the economic mess will be over with? Do you want to know when this country will get back on track and our standards of living will improve? Well boys and girls, I can tell you when. Come here and listen closely to me...the economy will get back on track when the stuff we buy is made in this country again. Simple, isn't it?

You see kids, the 1940's and '50's was our last real economic expansion. And by 'real economic expansion' I mean it was a time when millions of people made good money and got good benefits on their jobs which enabled them to buy houses, cars, and send their kids to college. Almost everyone shared in the economic prosperity, not just the top 10 percent of the richest folks in the country. And the reason why we had that big economic expansion that lifted our parents and grandparents out of poverty was because most everything we sold in this country was made in this country. Your family and friends and neighbors worked in all those factories that made the TV sets, the recliners, the gas guzzling cars, the frozen foods, the cans they put Spam in, the Spam that was eaten, and so on. And they made good wages for doing so. And the companies back then took an interest in the communities they had their factories in because they had to, they wanted to keep their workers happy so that they would continue to work and produce so that they, the company that owned the factory, could make profits.

Somewhere along the line American business decided it wasn't making enough money and that the American worker was being greedy by asking for things like health insurance and a 5 day 40 hour work week, so they decided to shut those factories down and move them to Mexico, China, and other places. And for a time this worked out okay because we kept right on buying the stuff that we used to make that was now being made overseas.

But then it caught up to us and now we're paying the price with this global economic melt down. The economic house of cards is collapsing around us, as well it should. It's just absurd to think that any system like the one we've got can succeed. You can't keep wages and benefits low and expect people to be able to buy the flood of consumer goods that are made in cheaply in China. If you are out of work because your job got sent to a Communist country then you're not going to be able to afford what ever it is they're going to make and export back to us. The mantra for big business for the past 30 years has been 'profit at any cost!' and now that cost is finally being felt.

When we bring manufacturing back to this country and we do it in an environmentally sustainable way then we'll see this mess begin to fade away. And when we restore some sane regulation to big business, banking, and Wall Street we'll get the other part of our economic house in order. One of the things I learned from reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, she's another of my celebrity girlfriends by the way, is that the way out of the mess that Milton Friedman hath wrought with his free market fantasy bullshit is through a mix of government take over of certain key industries and by retaining manufacturing inside a country that has been hard hit by outsourcing.

It's my feeling that we'll have a saner more economically and environmentally viable world when we stop making American consumer goods in China and make them here instead. Our planet will thank us when we stop telling people in India that they have to use their land to grow flowers for florist shops in El Segundo, California and Sioux City, Iowa. Your kids and your grand kids will thank us if we stop burning so much gas and oil to bring the cheap sweatshop made clothes from islands in the Pacific to the malls of America and Canada.

If we make here, in an environmentally and economically sustainable way, then we'll all benefit.

(This post was inspired in part by this post by Matty Boy and by an increasing sense that the people at the top really don't know what the fuck they're doing.)

Sign of the times

This sign was on the door of a local junk shop that I sometimes frequent:

What are you doing to help your country in this time of financial crisis?

I'll tell you what you're doing, unlike Sparky and I, you aren't doing a damn thing. We, on the other hand, are keeping all your sorry asses afloat by selling our condo and buying a house. And let me tell you people I'll be damn glad when it's all over with.

We've spent our entire summer either getting our place ready to sell, looking for a new place, and stressing out over doing both those things. We got tossed out of our place when prospective buyers came by to see our condo and we had many people tossed out of their homes when we went to look at their houses. Finally when we agreed to sell our place to our buyers we then had to worry about finding another house to buy after one that we made an offer on had major problems with it. Thankfully we found a great place and we move in on Tuesday.

While I will never put the address of our new homes on this blog and I also will never put a photo of the outside of the house on here, I will tell you that it's a great house. If someone would have told me that we'd end up buying this house when we started out all this months ago I would have told them they were crazy but here we are with a great house in a super neighborhood. We are both excited as anything to be moving out of the condo we currently have and into the new place, in fact we got so excited that we couldn't stand it yesterday afternoon so we drove by the new house and as we drove past it we noticed that one of our new next door neighbors had an Obama '08 yard sign in their yard. Sparky and I both squealed with delight when we saw it. I'm never going to tell on this blog how much we got our new house for because I know some smart ass will leave a comment that says something like, "You couldn't buy a show box for that price where I live." But I will say this, we got a good deal on what to us is a lot of house.

In just a few days we'll be out from under the condo association, take possession of our new place, and move in. And when we become masters of our own home destiny then all this stress, all the worry, all the bull shit, all the hard work we did getting ready to sell our condo, all the hard work we did packing up our stuff will have been worth it because we will be in the last house we'll ever buy, barring either of us winning the Powerball and or Mega Millions jackpots that is.

So that's what we're doing to help the economy, we're buying a house, paying movers, and buying some stuff to go in our new place. We're doing all we possibly can, now it's time for you slackers to do your share too.