Geez, you guys in CA are still paying more than 2 bucks a gallon? You can thank your politicians for that one! Unfortunately, our low fuel prices are due to a glut in supply because of weak demand. Weak demand caused by a world economy that has retreated. Typical "do you want the bad news first, or last" scenario. Wifey lost her job a couple of weeks ago. Her company does a lot of business with health insurance, pharmaceutical companies, and Wall St. firms. Once it became apparent that Obama was going to win, they cut their projected spending with my wife's company - and in turn, her company had to let people go. Good job with the class warfare Obama! When are you douche rockets going to realize that "big evil" companies employ thousands of people, and that "Main St." and "Wall St." are connected.
Regret to inform sir that the class warfare began many decades ago. Yes indeedy, we can blame politicians...that were bought and paid for by megalithic insurance & investment conglomerates...for removing all of those nasty safeguards that kept the current mess at bay for a couple of decades. I know, where would we be without altruists like the former CEO of Washington Mutual? I'm sure that all 3 weeks of his tenure there were worth many times the $19 mil he pocketed...before taking off like a streak of sh**. Depending upon your point of view, the first shots were either "wage & price controls", the "war on drugs", "WIN" (whip inflation now, which should have been LOSE - let's oust the senate entirely:21, the cash cow known as the national 55mph speed limit, or Reaganomics. Since then, we've been
"trickled down" upon, laid-off, "downsized", "rightsized", "outsourced", "globalized", "NAFTA"ed, marginalized, "vetted", "redacted", "bought out" and more to the point SOLD OUT:thumbdown:. The "cheap" gas (and with the price of oil still triple where it was when president numbnuts and vp toejam took office, I have to wonder just how many days that will last) is at best a pyrrhic victory. That a president-elect could wreak decades of class warfare before even taking office is very scary indeed. So, I have to ask which is more plausible: the current economic collapse being brought about by our new president-elect or through macro-manipulation of a relatively small number of overly-powerful individuals, hiding behind faceless corporations, who are still ultimately incapable of keeping the Ponzi scheme going forever?
My wife and I have burned through more jobs, courtesy of runaway corporate power, than you can imagine over the last eight years. And that didn't come from something that began overnight either. I hate to see our country take it's deserved beating. Yes, I said it...deserved. That's what happens when the lessons of the last gilded age & subsequent collapse (a teensy blip known as the great depression; it was in most newspapers for a little while) are forgotten. The only options are to learn from the mistakes of the past or repeat them. The nation became indolent and complacent, until it was too late. I mean, 300mil+ population and only 2 political parties, both of which suck!? All it would take is pulling a third lever or checking a third party box. Or, better yet, doing away with partisan politics altogether. But sheep don't behave like that and there's a lot of sheep out there. That would require independent thinking and that's uncomfortable. It means missing a few hours worth of dumbed-down, intellect-killing, "reality TV" and finding out what at least some truth of what's going on in the world. Sadly, it seems most people would rather be wrong and stand together than be right and risk standing alone. So, keeping on listening to horses asses like Beck, Robertson, Scarborough, Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity etc, it's your right. (funny, though, that so many right-wing neocons instantly come to mind when "the media" is completely left-wing...just ask any of the aforementioned individuals. We're still all free to agree to disagree, at least for the next four years (though God only knows what downsides we'll see in the meantime). For now, I'll end this rant with a useful rule of thumb: when the side in power blames the victims for their failings, that's not a good sign...not by a longshot.
Let's hope that gas prices keep dropping and things get turned around soon. That'd be a miracle and those happen sometimes. From what I've learned, it takes a major crash to break complacency and bring about positive change. FWIW, I actually hope that history ends up proving me wrong.:bolt: