Mr. Bush's Neighborhood

Yes, I agree that there is something beyond obscene about the recent news that President Nero and his wife Laura have just announced their happy news: they've bought a new home in Preston Hollow, North Dallas, for about $2.2 million.  A specimen of the kind of McMansion they'll inhabit is featured to the left, the sort of energy-wasting, self-aggrandizing, ostentatious joint you'd exactly expect the Bushes to move into after leaving the White House. And leaving the United States, for the rest of us, a smoking ruin.  They'll spend their weekdays there and then "weekend" at Prairie Chapel "Ranch," or at least George & Barney will.  I suppose the consolation story is that Laura will finally achieve her breakaway.  I shudder to think about the logistics involved in getting W, every single weekend, from Dallas to Crawford, if that's really how it's going to happen.  The spoiled little scion is going to demand a helicopter ride, of course; he can't take any chances, not given his "popularity" ratings and the mobs of angry dispossessed he will leave in his ruinous wake.  But if there's one thing we know about W at this point, it's that his new jolly life among the nouveaux riches of North Dallas will be entirely unperturbed by the collapsing American economy.  Deep into his stupid, dreamless sleep he will fall every night, confident that History will judge him a magnificent leader.  As my own personal hero Bugs Bunny used to say, "What a maroon."

At the same time we hear about the Bushes new start in life, the Department of Labor announces that 533,000 more Americans became unemployed in November.  Rest assured that this is a tentative number; the numbers for September and October were revised way, way up at the same time this dismal stat was divulged.  The Department admits at this point that 1.9 million have lost their jobs in 2008, but of course the number is higher than that.  By the end of December, we can have every confidence that Bush's Economy will have delivered over 2.5 million jobs lost.  And since the economy needs to produce about 150,000 new jobs per month to keep pace with population growth, you can see that we're about 4.3 million jobs away from where we need to be.  The "jobs" we're talking about, of course, are the crap jobs of the service economy, but even those are tanking mightily.  

“We have gone from recession into something that looks more like collapse,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist at High Frequency Economics, referring to the accelerating job losses in recent months.  New York Times, December 5, 2008.

There's that word again: collapse.  Shades of Dmitry Orlov and his cheery prognostications about the Soviet-style implosion currently underway here in the Homeland.  Realistically speaking (and what other way is there to speak at this point), there is nothing that can really be done to keep things from getting considerably worse for quite a long time.  Even as I, the humble Pond Dweller, mused months ago, the subtraction of the re-fi and LOC (line of credit) money as "income" available to the stuff-buying citizenry (an insight provided in the first instance by the brilliant Kevin Phillips) portended just this rolling-up of the American works.  Nothing else really could happen.  If 70% of your economic activity depends on people buying stuff, and you take away half their money, the first thing that will happen is that consumer spending will come to a shuddering halt.  The second thing that will happen is that all of those crap-job employees will start getting the axe as people stop coming into the stores to buy stuff.  What we have here, in other words (W's favorite throat-clearer), is a classic vicious circle.  As people get laid off, they lose even the real income part of their "income," subtracting them from the Stuff-Buying Horde. So what starts out as, say, a 35% contraction in the economy brought about immediately by the cessation of re-fi and LOC "income," eventually becomes much worse.  Great Depression style contraction, in other words. 

The Maroon of Preston Hollow was advised this was coming in 2007, so he and his fellow croupiers devised a scheme of sending tax money back to the taxpayers so they could spend some more.  The sole purpose of this plan was to buy time.  Isn't that obvious now? How could it possibly work in the long run? Six hundred bucks?  Bush simply wanted to get to the gated confines of North Dallas without this very "collapse" we're now experiencing.

So that is the one, dismal consolation (along with Laura's liberation) that we get out of this fiasco: Bush didn't make it out unscathed.  It all happened on his watch.  The Democratic "Leadership," in their neverending idiocy, are demanding that Obama "take the lead" now.  Huh?  They want him to own this thing without any real power to do anything about it?  Just how fricking dumb are Barney Frank and Harry Reid and Christopher Dodd?

Nah, this is Bush's Baby.  That stimulus plan should have been directed toward the conversion of the American economy toward a sustainable future.  That was $160 billion down a rat hole, a rat hole already jammed with wasted bucks from the Iraq War and the rest of Bush's nightmare initiatives.  In a vain attempt to stave off the collapse, Bush simply inflicted more damage on a writhing body politic.  And then headed off to settle in with Mark Cuban and T. Boone Pickens in the opulent acreage of Preston Hollow.