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The Last Redoubt
By David Glenn Cox
Many people think of catastrophes as an exclamation point, a lightening bolt from out of the blue sky. The truth is usually that most cataclysms are a series of minor events unnoticed in their individual accounts but it is when the sums are totaled that we begin to see it before our eyes and shake our heads with disappointment in our own rekonings.
The liner Titanic was running full speed through an ice field despite warnings, it was a moonless night and the sea was calm as glass. Had anyone of these three events been different the sinking probably never would have occurred. The ship was ahead of the technology and the crew behind the technology. The cry of iceberg prompted the helm to come hard about dooming the liner with a three hundred-foot gash down her side. Had they hit it head on they would have arrived damaged but otherwise intact. We live in such a world as this.
Where the innocent events coupled with human folly and nature lead to catastrophes and we cry the tears of rage and scream with clutched fist never again! Then we shift on the couch to find comfort and put the newspaper over our face until drowsiness overtakes us only to wake and find the room in flames. The intelligent thing to do would be to run, that would be our human nature, but there is an instant where our eyes refuse to accept the reality before them. In our pride and the bastions of our arrogance we choose to argue with blatant fact despite smoke and flame to answer in affect it’s not so!
America is in such a moment; some of us feel the flames and some of us smell smoke and some are still slumbering on the couch. In Atlanta where I live we have lost two automobile manufacturting plants. The plants employed several thousands each but the repercussions expand out like ripples on a pond. The plant vendors the uniform suppliers, the lift truck dealers the chains the pallets down to toilet tissue in the rest rooms all gone. Their payroll is gone from the Atlanta economy. The restaurants suffer, people move away property values fall and crime rises.
If it where just two plants with their good wages we would just have to take our lumps.But these plants were shut down for cheaper wages overseas and now the two companies are telling the UAW if they don’t get a $2.00 dollar an hour wage concession they will move all their plants overseas. To which I answer, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! I have never owned anything but American cars but my next one won’t be! I thought that by buying domestic and helping the companies that employed my neighbors I was doing a good thing. The companies use globalism as an anvil to drive down wages but not content with that they want the workers dignity as well.
Like begging for a spot on the lifeboat unwilling to accept and understand that the lifeboat doesn’t offer salvation but only the honor of drowning last! These family’s budgets and bills and dreams are based on their current income but the vampires don’t want to kill them all at once but to milk them like cows until they get the last drop. Then to put the stake through the heartbeat of America. The American Auto Industry built the modern America economy that we once lived in and its demise is the 300-foot gash in our hull. The steel industry the tire industry, the machine tool industry all gone. Industrial engines and lawn and garden equipment going fast.
So who will buy the products with our service sector incomes? Real incomes down, the dollar value depreciated and surprise surprise new car sales are down as well. Who would have thunk it? But even more ominous is flat Wal-Mart sales, the expected back to school bump failed to materialize. People were robbing Peter to pay Paul or not buying new clothes for the kids. Traveling around the town I see the parking lot at Goodwill jammed and see the new Mercedes and yesterday a new Rolls Royce traveling the roads, sleep well my prince.
A death spiral, as I pass a shopping center with eight store locations two occupied six empty and construction under way next door on another shopping center. They’ve failed to smell the smoke and they refuse what is right before their eyes. Poor people don’t buy things and don’t need stores or new car lots or bakeries or skating rinks or sporting goods. We are a nation in a spasm of contraction but no one will tell you that, just as Captain Smith didn’t run the decks of Titanic screaming, “Oh shit we hit an iceberg we’re doomed!”
If you owned one million shares of Ford Motor Company stock in July you’ve lost over $2,670,000 in September no wonder you scrimped on back to school. Sure but that is Ford what about Wal-Mart America’s retail giant! If you owned a million shares of Wal-Mart in July you’ve lost over ten million dollars. But ok, like most of you I’m not a millionaire but I lost $20,000 on the value of my home and you probably did too.
Record highs rates of homes going into foreclosure coupled with record lows for new home sales and existing home sales means the iceberg is doubling back and headed for the other side of the ship. The number of available homes on the market has more than doubled. The banks holding billions in bad paper and are freezing up afraid to let even other banks borrow money. As The Wall Street Journal calls on bank regulators to be extra vigilant to avoid any surprise bank failures! Surprise bank failures?
George Herbert Hoover Bush as a sop to homeowners who he so recently referred to as reckless and careless has announced a plan to help them to keep their homes. He will allow Freddie Mac and Fannie May to issue new fixed rate conventional mortgages provided the borrower can meet income and credit standards. Now what is it that made these people take out sub prime mortgages in the first place? And what is it that distiquishes a mortgage borrower in foreclosure from your average mortgage borrower? I’m not an expert on credit ratings but I bet homeowners in foreclosure have lower credit scores than those who are not in foreclosure, George is offering boat rides to anyone who owns a boat.
But in my travels I see the new jobs, Mary’s cake decorating and Joe’s gutter cleaning, Suzy’s Maid Service. Don’t get me wrong I admire their moxy but we can’t build an economy on cleaning each other’s gutters or cleaning each other’s bathrooms. The local Aamco is offering one year of free roadside assistance with any brake job as the pizza chains cut prices and add products to fend off the inevitable.
Sometimes it’s not what appears but what disappears, the signs that read “We buy homes” have vanished and the office of one that advertised “We buy ugly homes” has hand made signs in front of their building that read, Huge Inventory sale! They no longer wish to buy my ugly home and after I went to all the trouble of having the gutters cleaned.
But there is a third more frightening aspect to this tirade and yes that is possible. The administration of George Herbert Hoover Bush is ramping up the war talk against Iran. The recent cover story about accidentally moving nuclear assets should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Stop and think for a moment just how irrevocably the world would be changed by a US first strike with nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear Islamic country or any country for that matter. The ramifications are incalculable, moral, financial, and theological not to forget practical.
The pusillanimous of Pennsylvania Ave insist we must and I feel the despair that those on the decks must have felt that night as the ship slipped down and the water inched up. For there is no rescue for us on the horizon, we are truly adrift and alone. Who will stop this madness? Hillary? John Edwards? Chris Dodd? Dodd the Chairman of the Senate Banking committee is unconcerned about the millions losing homes and has called for investigations into who sold those mortgage backed securities to those poor trusting investors. Or steward? Why isn’t the heat working in my stateroom? Check into it right away won’t you?
We must face the fire and smoke and understand that there is no escaping this. We face a crisis that rivals October of 1962 without a tenth of the wisdom or a twentieth the contemplation. We must never use nuclear weapons again, we are pledged as a nation not to. But the administration of fools and madmen think otherwise and think laws and conventions are merely papers in their path to step around. The first use of these weapons makes possible the use of all these weapons. If we strike Iran then why shouldn’t India strike Pakistan? By what convention would they be hindered? Why shouldn’t North Korea nuke South Korea and why shouldn’t Arabs states make good their threats to wipe Israel off the map?
The Congress should act but won’t for they are drunk on the blood of war profits. The courts should act but won’t as they are ideologically emasculated. That leaves only the military whose sworn oath is to defend the Constitution and who are only obligated to follow lawful orders and also have it in their power to remove at any time any commander who is unfit for duty. So rather than asking you to support the troops I’m asking that the troops support us as maybe our last hope and last redoubt of freedom.
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