Carnal Reason

A few days after the tsunami I first learned of George Bush’s ritual power to absorb all blame. A poster at the Democratic Underground blamed Bush for the tsunami, which was due (as I recall) to the US not implementing the Kyoto protocols.

It made sense. I never intentionally misplace my keys, but sometimes they’re not where I want them to be. I used to wonder who to blame when this happened. Now I know that Bush sometimes sneaks into my house and hides my keys.

He’s also been manipulating real-estate prices in San Francisco, maybe nationally, as I discovered via a comment at DailyPundit:

My wife’s a broker here in Ventura County, and I was reading something in one of her trades the other day, citing the Mortgage Bankers Association. It said that in the last half of ‘04, 2/3 of mortgage originations were ARMS or Interest Onlies.

The bubble is going to pop, and the carnage is going to be severe. The banks get the properties and they will also be able to attach the borrower in near perpetuity as BK will no longer be an option for these folks.

Cynic that I am, I have to wonder how much of this bubble was contrived by the administration. Bush needed an economic turnaround prior to the election. He certainly got one…of sorts. I work in the industrial sector, and from that vantage point, I saw no recovery; wages stagnating, orders down, investment in capital equipment down, raw material prices higher along with energy costs.

Two can play at manipulating property prices. The Supreme Court today ruled that private property is an alternate spelling of public property. The town you live in is free to sell your house to any developer with a project. Perhaps this will help cool the speculative interest in private homes.

I saw a few expressions of surprise that the liberal justices screwed the little guy in favor of the big corporation. No, they did not. The Pfizer’s windfall profit is a side effect. They screwed the little guy in a government money-and-power grab.

Repeat after me. It takes a village to raise a child. Washington DC is the village, I am the child. Children can’t own property. It takes a village to raise a child. …

Posted on June 23rd, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: law, politics