Surviving the Economic Downturn: A Guide
Many website offer advice for keeping your finances above water in these times of great turmoil. Duh pookie is much too practical for that. Here is some “real-world” advice that should help to steer you through the times of great distress:
- Buy guns. Any kind will do, even plastic! We all know the criminals shoot better than we do, so a bluff might be the best bet.
- Store the guns in an underground bunker in that piece of property you’ve been meaning to buy outside of Bakersfield. This will be your safe-house, er, safe-yard, er, safe-dirt patch.
- Surround the dirt patch with heavy-gauge barbed wire, preferably razor-style. Make sure the opening to the bunker lies INSIDE of the fenced area!!
- If you are going to be a survivalist, do it in style. Be sexy like this lady >>>>
Everyone knows cleavage is the key to survival. If you are a dude, where a codpiece at all times. Family jewels and all! Not called that fer nuthin! - Whatever you do, don’t forget about food and gatorade. Cannibalism MUST be your last resort.
Once you have followed these steps to shore up your personal stability, you will be well on the way to riding out the doom and gloom of crashing financial markets. Stocks and dollars are just paper after all. It’s guns and ammo that separate the survivors from the turkey necks!! Good luck, Commando!!
Voting for McCain for Your Tax Bill? Think Again.
More bad news on the economic front today, yet more headlines beginning MARKETS PLUNGE WORLDWIDE ON NEWS OF… [enter latest giant insolvency or government bailout here]. I started thinking about how little the election coverage has delved into the implications of McCain’s or Obama’s planned economic approach. When discussing whether I am a Democrat or a Republican (I’m neither) I often quote someone more brilliant than me (author unknown!) that the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats want to spend too much on social programs, while Republicans want to spend too much on the military. Bottom line: they both just spend, spend, spend!
Which leads me to the issue of tax cuts. McCain wants to continue to uphold Bush’s tax cut policies, which sounds great on the surface, but really isn’t. Obama wants to raise rich people’s taxes and lower poor people’s taxes. Yeah, that’s gonna get him elected for sure! But in all seriousness (well, as serious as I can get), neither candidate has ANY SUBSTANTIVE PLANS TO REDUCE FEDERAL SPENDING. Instead, we just keep printing money and climbing deeper into the debt hole. My Republican friends and family are holding onto antiquated ideas that the Republican party is somehow less likely to impact your paycheck. The widespread groan is that Liberals and the ANGRY LEFT want to give your money to fat lazy people and their ungrateful children. This is viewed as offensive and unAmerican, terminally at odds with the great Puritan ethic of lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. It becomes an argument about why on earth anyone should give his money to those people. Transfer of wealth.
So, do Republicans not realize that wars are insanely costly? That corporate welfare is insanely costly? That all this “nation-building” is a hundred times more expensive than just leading by example? It’s all just more transfer of wealth, but without the image of a begging lazy person attached to it. Even Alan Greenspan says the country cannot afford McCain’s tax cuts. (Yes, we can say that Greenspan has been entirely discredited, but I don’t believe that. His fatal flaw was to trust banks and other investment entities to follow good business practices. They obviously didn’t. )
It’s not popular to cut spending. Any spending, since it’s coming down the line to someone, and I guarantee that
someone does not want to give it up. But we Americans have been on a wild spending binge for a long time now using our children’s money in the form of loans from China for decades. TIME TO GET OFF THE FUN RIDE!! If you’re a Republican, you should be sensible enough to realize that it’s horribly self-serving to demand tax cuts when we owe so much debt. If you’re a Democrat and want universal health care or other insanely costly programs, be prepared to pay. In the end it’s what makes me a liberal rather than a conservative: I’d rather help Americans than pay for infrastructure in Iraq. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. The Fat Lady’s already singing.
I’ll Miss David Foster Wallace
I hope a brilliant baby was just born to take David Foster Wallace’s place in the world. If you have not read him, I’d recommend his essays from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Read the essay on how every American wants to feel as though their life is a sitcom or reality TV show. He was light-years ahead of so many thinkers in his ability to size up and rip apart the overarching themes down to the smallest minutiae of any phenomenon. Here’s a brief excerpt of a commencement speech he gave:
…most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
I hope you found peace. We’ll miss you DFW.
Common Ground
Please welcome our first guest contributor, Kim Meglen from Minden, Nevada!!
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So there I was enjoying my newfound camaraderie with the other kindergarten mothers dropping off their children, when I heard someone mention Palin. She is scheduled to be here in Carson City, Nevada tomorrow. One of the gals asked, “Are you going?” And I thought we all had another thing in common. So I replied, “To protest?” And all six of them said simultaneously, “NO, to support her!” What? How can this be? How could these intelligent women support someone who wants to take away their right to choose. Take away their daughters’ rights. And their granddaughters’. The right to govern their own bodies! How could they support a woman who hid her pregnancy from her constituents and family until her 7th month? How could they support someone who tried to ban great literature from her local library? I needed help understanding. And then I realized I would never understand. So as I sat there stunned into silence, the gal sitting next to me put her arm around me and said, “That’s why I never talk politics.”
Looks like it might be time to reinstate my Canadian citizenship!
Petition Against Palin
This arrived in my email inbox today. I thought it nailed my exact sentiments where Palin was concerned. We reject her on her merits, not on her personal details. Sometimes a vote just doesn’t seem like it’s enough…
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Say no to Palin
Friends, compatriots, fellow-lamenters,
We are writing to you because of the fury and dread we have felt since the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Republican Party. We believe that this terrible decision has surpassed mere partisanship, and that it is a dangerous farce on the part of a pandering and rudderless Presidential candidate that has a real possibility of becoming fact.
Perhaps like us, as American women, you share the fear of what Ms. Palin and her professed beliefs and proven record could lead to for ourselves and for our present or future daughters. To date, she is against sex education, birth control, the pro-choice platform, environmental protection, alternative energy development, freedom of speech (as mayor she wanted to ban books and attempted to fire the librarian who stood against her), gun control, the separation of church and state, and polar bears. To say nothing of her complete lack of real preparation to become the second-most-powerful person on the planet.
We want to clarify that we are not against Sarah Palin as a woman, a mother, or, for that matter, a parent of a pregnant teenager, but solely as a rash, incompetent, and altogether devastating choice for Vice President. Ms. Palin’s political views are in every way a slap in the face to the accomplishments that our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers so fiercely fought for, and that we’ve so demonstrably benefited from.
First and foremost, Ms. Palin does not represent us. She does not demonstrate or uphold our interests as American women. It is presumed that the inclusion of a woman on the Republican ticket could win over women voters. We want to disagree, publicly. Therefore, we invite you to reply here
Please include your name (last initial is fine), age, and place of residence.
We will post your responses on a blog called “Women Against Sarah Palin,” which we intend to publicize as widely as possible. Please send us your reply at your earliest convenience. The greater the volume of responses we receive, the stronger our message will be.
Thank you for your time and action.
Sincerely,
Quinn Latimer and Lyra Kilston
New York, NY
womensaynopalin@gmail.com
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Polls, Pols, Poles!
This morning’s polls show McCain ahead for the first time pretty much since the campaigning began nearly 7,000 years ago. (Okay, it just feels like 7,000!) Whatup wid dat?!?! McCain managed to sound fairly authentic in his speech. His speech was not a massive shouting put-down of Democrats after all, and maybe this more humble man became attractive for his seeming sincerity. And for his choice of a regular-joe ambitious working woman for a running mate.
I think this bump in the polls will fade back to low scores. Voters may be romanticizing about Palin as the outrageous, courageous, surprise pick, but I think time will dilute the illusion. She’s just too frightening a prospect for president. The radical right will love her forever, but THANKFULLY they do not determine elections despite what they’d have us think.
I always wondered why the person who lost the presidential election didn’t become Vice President. It would make so much more sense to reassure voters that we don’t have to be trapped in the all-or-nothing syndrome that we have now for the executive branch. I’ve heard the argument that that would be terribly counter-productive, but I don’t think so. It would be an opportunity and a challenge to remind the President that he/she represents ALL of the country, no matter which party elected him.
Don’t you think it would’ve been a riot to have Al Gore as Bush’s vice president?? We would have an entirely different country right now. I think it would’ve turned out well.
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