I've just posted an image update with just under 1,700 new pictures for today. I'm sorry, I don't think the cover model has an IAM page (correct me if I'm wrong) but you've seen his full Japanese body suit in the galleries before. As always, thanks to him and all the other contributors for their help on today's update.
The rest of this entry about the future so stop reading now if you don't give a damn about your flaming demise. Some rather disturbing predictions came out from the folks over at Morgan Stanley… here's what their chief economist had to say (more):
America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic “armageddon”. America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded. Household debt is at record levels … a “spectacular wave of bankruptcies” is possible.
None of this is a secret — Morgan Stanley is not some conspiracy-driven anti-capitalist collective — and anyone who understands the basics of economics sees it not only happening, but getting hugely worse due to Bush's reckless spending platforms. Where it gets “funny” is when you look at them from the start (as in y2k onward), they almost seem designed to drive up these problems, as nonsensical as that must seem at first. While one might be able to explain market fluctuations and downturns, trying to explain Bush's apparently suicidally indulgent economic policies is not so immediately simple.
That said, let's try and explain why Bush is doing this, and why instead of lowering spending as he promised during the “election“, he's continuing to increase US spending and debt levels.
Skipping over “he's an idiot” (more) or “he's a religious nut” (more) type explanations, there is only only one good reason for Bush to take the economic steps he's taking that actually serve the interests of his constituents who as you may remember he described jokingly as “the haves and the have-mores”. The end effect of a “spectacular wave of bankruptcies” is not that America itself evaporates and becomes Afghanistan. The end effect is that most private property and assets (and even public assets as they are privatized) are transferred into fewer and fewer — and richer and richer — hands.
I believe the current economic downturn is designed to steal the remaining assets of the poor and middle class into the hands of the ultra-rich ruling class, who will be left with perfectly legal slave ownership (and lives of luxury) as a result. They'll have additional power to do so because of Bush's only-for-the-rich tax cuts and corporate welfare policies stuffing their coffers pre-collapse… Unless of course the Americans have the courage and sense for liberty of the French that is (more), which unfortunately I doubt in these beaten-down and intellectually oppressed modern times.
“Parea non servin,” you say? Somehow I doubt it…
