Class warfare comes spilling out of a rented coach

I often think that we get robbed by politicians and businessmen so often that we think it's our fault, and that we should just go home and get distracted

by alcohol,
sports,

or by junk tv.


Anything to get our minds off the sh*tty way we feel at being pantsed so often.
When you're so busy paying the bills, it's probably easier and less frustrating

to just screw yourself and get it over with.

Sick of doing that? So am I.

pt1- I don't believe in physically attacking any one person or thing,

but attacking the ideas and assumptions that the Powers' wealth and asphyxiating control over us are based on. Like: we trust in the fools who govern us; we trust that the law will be fair and will be applied to EVERYONE equally; that tomorrow will be better; we trust that capitalism is good without supervision; we trust that 40 years of employed drudgery will get us a paid mortgage and a pension...etc.

pt-2 However, I'm not against a shocking act or two, for publicity purposes.

Any ideas? See below.

How about, lets keep reminding ourselves of the fact that this kind of criminal is roaming free and getting richer, just in case you or I should ever want to invest in the stock market? I say, let the brokers get a real job. They're not getting my money.

The story below, by Mark Ames, that I found on alternet, was basically about just such a shocking act; a chance to break through the invisible barrier separating us from those who steal our money. Mark clambered onto a bus to see how the rich and famous live. He writes about it as a voyage of discovery and a social event of significance. It's so amazing. He touches on some issues I wrote about in my 'middle'class' article. It promised so much, but alas.... At least others can copy it in their towns.

Sell maps, give tours for a free beer.

I would have made it a regular trip and just recover my costs, as a public service (whatsat?).

Here are some of the best parts:

checkitout- (originally posted on playboy.com)http://www.alternet.org/story/139479/what_happens_when_angry_citizens_crash_the_gates_of_america

What Happens When Angry Citizens Crash the Gates of America's CEO Class?



I was there when the so-called “Class War” went down. I saw the whole thing happen, on a cul-de-sac called Golden Pond Lane. ...


You may have heard about this in the news: a group of protesters angry over AIG bonuses chartered a bus and toured the mansions where the AIG executives lived, going straight to their front doors. With no intention of Christmas caroling or trick-or-treating. No, this had class war written all over it. And for the first time, the plutocrats were running scared.


Here’s how the “Battle of Golden Pond Lane” unfolded: On Friday, March 20 -- after a week of populist rage over news that Americans were funding obscene multimillion dollar bonuses to the same AIG multimillionaires who ruined our economy, word spread about an anti-AIG bus tour of the mansions of the company’s execs, planned for March 21.

The plan was to transform the bus into a kind of Class War Assault Vehicle, and steer it straight into the upper-class New England hamlet where all the AIG execs live: Fairfield, Connecticut. It was like Stripes meets Spartacus, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The robbed would see exactly where the robbers lived, what their homes looked like, what their addresses were, where their front doors were located…

The bus tour was arranged by an organization called Connecticut Working Families, a group with deep ties to ACORN, the bogeyman of ...Fox News.... That was all the plutocrats had to hear -- a busload of commies and ACORN panthers were heading into their neighborhood, like Mugabe’s goons, to burn down their mansions.

For about 36 tense hours, suburban-New York’s plutocrats felt like the Byzantine Christians in 1453, with the barbarians just hours away from slaughtering and raping anything that moved in Fairfield, Connecticut.

In a panic, nine AIG execs announced that

they were handing back

their million-dollar bonuses to the American taxpayers.

It was incredible.

For the first time in living memory, “the people” were starting to win. They had the power to instill fear and claw back some of their wealth. And all because of the Magic Class-War Bus and its Angry Pranksters....

Joe Dinkin, the communications director for the Connecticut Working Families Party which organized the bus tour, ... “I’ve been getting all kinds of death threats and crazy calls today!” Dinkin told me, laughing nervously. “Rush Limbaugh attacked us on his show today, and that got all his crazy fans after me. They posted my cell phone number on Limbaugh’s site, and ever since then it’s just been crazy, the things these people said to me on the phone. Death threats… Man, the hatred in their voices is just crazy!” Dinkin was laughing, but I don’t think he knew just how ferocious a monster he’d pissed off ...

The next morning, I drove out to the AIG Bus Tour meeting point, in the depressed center of Bridgeport, Connecticut -- one of those decaying mid-sized cities that America seemed to have abandoned about 40 years ago.

By the time I arrived that morning, the parking lot next to the Domino’s pizza outlet was already crawling with media figures: reporters, cameramen and TV semi-celebrities. There was no way we’d all fit....-- New York Times, CNN, New York Post, NBC. ...



So one by one, they started pulling protesters off the bus to make room for the media. Eventually we -- media types -- all got our seats. As we pulled out, one of the reporters shouted, “Where are the protesters on this bus?” .....The bus arrangement mirrored the same elitist structure that was supposedly being challenged: people who mattered were on the bus that mattered; the nobodies were put into miserable minivans that followed behind us.

The charter bus slowly made its way from depressed working-class Bridgeport into Fairfield. It was like the anti-Heart-of-Darkness, a journey from decrepit Bridgeport, up-river into familiarly sterile middle-class suburbia, and then deeper still up-river to the socio-economic headwaters, a hamlet of unattainable luxury and civilization that we could only dream about. We’d gone from shit to champagne.


The reporters’ sneering and quipping died down to a hush as we slowly rolled past perfect, gleaming colonial mansions, with their grotesquely-vast front lawns and their perfectly-kept streets.

All of this divine luxury had a strange way of transforming the anger on our bus into something a lot more feckless, like awe and self-loathing. We didn’t belong here, and we knew it.

... What was this ugly beast doing here, in Fairfield, mucking up the view? The remaining half-dozen protesters who were kept on the bus like protected species also felt this awe. One of the protesters, Mark Dziubek, recently-downsized from a steel rolling mill, told me that even though he’s spent his whole life in nearby Southington, he’d only been through Fairfield once in his life.

...The bus stopped and let us out at the corner of Mine Hill Road and Golden Pond Lane. Last out of the bus were the showdown’s two stars, both African-Americans. One was a middle-aged pastor named Mary Huguley, and the other was Asaad Jackson, a 24-year-old ex-boxer-turned-activist sporting dreadlocks down to his beltline. They were going to confront the rich white AIG executive, Douglas Poling. He was the one who took the largest bonus, $6.4 million. Poling apparently was so unnerved by the scenario that he returned his bonus a day earlier, while Poling's fellow AIG exec neighbor up the street, James "Jackpot Jimmy" Hass, blubbered to reporters that he had also given back his multimillion-dollar bonus and couldn't people just look into their hearts and show him some mercy.

Huguley and Jackson deliberately and dramatically marched down Golden Pond Lane towards Poling’s mansion, while about 50 members of the media elite jostled and swarmed around them like worker bees with the queen. This scene unfolding was every American plutocrat’s worst nightmare, once unimaginable, now a reality that could be viewed from Poling’s second-story window: Two poor, pissed-off black people, surrounded by a phalanx of the liberal elite media, marches up to my hard-earned mansion in broad daylight, banging on my front door, demanding a cut of my wealth. On the deepest-fears scale, Willie Horton rates about a 2 compared to this class-war nightmare. As we got closer to 177 Golden Pond Lane, we saw some uniformed policemen standing at the edge of the cul-de-sac with three healthy-looking white men in weekend sweatshirts and baseball caps, and two undercover cop cars -- sporty SUVs --in the driveway of Poling’s neighbor. A regular Fairfield cop car slowly tailed our crowd from behind -- just want to make sure nothing happens here, folks…. Two menacing bodyguards patrolled Poling’s front yard: a shaven-headed guy in business casual wear with a goatee and shades, who tried giving the impression of a relaxed, experienced veteran; and a gorgeous Latino woman in a Ninja jumpsuit, who paced the lawn like a caged she-lion just begging for one of us lowlifes to stick our hand into her range, where she’d tear it off with some jujitsu move.

Poling was apparently gone that day --I imagine he was scouting out citizenship opportunities in plutocrat-friendly autocracies like Kazakhstan or Liechtenstein. So here we were: the big Class War showdown. Pastor Mary and Asaad Jackson gave the TV cameramen time to adjust their positions, then the mob moved forward right up to Poling’s driveway.

... It was amazing to think how vulnerable America’s elite are: they don’t use high walls and security fences and armed goons to guard their wealth, the way they do in so many countries. Instead, they just rely on our sense of shame, something innate that tells us, we don’t belong here, we’ll be leaving now, sorry…This was

the moment to smash that peasant sensibility.

Now that we’d smashed through that barrier and found ourselves

facing a robber-baron class

that only bothered pitching two security goons against 50 or so of us, the Great Class War was about to begin, right here, on Golden Pond Lane. The security goons blocked the two African-Americans from delivering a letter they were carrying to Poling. They had been instructed not to confront the bodyguards or anyone, so they didn’t. As reporters jostled for the money photo, the security goons started to threaten the rest of us if we so much as crossed over Poling’s gutter.

And then we walked back to the bus. What began as the promised opening shots in the Great Class War instead turned out to be something like a field trip for a high school civics class, with everyone learning the importance of being responsible. The organizer, John Green, deemed it a success, and since then his group has never flirted with anything remotely as incendiary again. By the time we got back, the news was already announcing the end of the Class War: “Outrage Over Bonuses Wanes.” Congress backed off from its posturing, news pundits backed off, and we, the people, returned to doing what we do best:

getting screwed. ...

___the end

I find something hard to believe though. How can you get so many 'mansions' on one public lane? To me, a lane meant two mud tracks going off into the wilderness. Oh, I see! They're being cute, in kind of a barbie-doll-house way. Lane means 'we're comfortable, anal, pure, white and rich, so f&*^%k off.'

-Costick67 ( 8^P
free pics from fotosearch.com

coming to a country near you- US terrorist fighters

As witnessed in Bolivia recently, gangs of stateless, wandering international mercenaries can actually be employed to overthrow governments.
As usual, the test bed for these American-style political shenanigans is the shaky democracies of Central and South America. This time it was Bolivia's turn. Previous victims include

Argentina,

Brazil,

Chile,

El Salvador,

Nicaragua

Panama,

Cuba,

Columbia,

and many other wonderful, sunny countries

for example the Applied Economics Experiment:

Milton Friedman & the

Chicago School Economics Road Show(see old story)

Think 1970s.

Sprouting out the barrel of a gun.

It needed dictators to come to full fruition.

It's was so vulnerable and precious.

lookitup: Pinochet & Chile, Generals & Argentina

Remember Iraq, whatever's left of it?

Well, now Bolivia is the lucky winner of the raffle

for

the next country to be taken over

in the interest of getting control of its natural resources

on behalf of the world's biggest consumer of such things.

Guess who?

So here's the twisted network of stories, in a poem:

The Wars of the Rozsas

Post-WW2 Catholic Church helps Croatian Nazi sympathisers

set up in Latin America.

Some Croatians in Bolivia would later become

very successful businessmen.

Daddy Rozsa (Jewish) moves from Hungary to Bolivia,

marries local woman (Catholic).

Eduardo is born. Family (Communist) moves to Chile, Sweden.

Adult Eduardo goes to Hungary. Starts in journalism.

Eduardo goes to Yugoslavia. Drops pen, picks up weapon.

Eduardo joins Opus Dei and PIV Catholic militia for Croatia.

PIV, including Croatian Bolivians, commits war crimes.

Eduardo finds common cause with the Croatians from his bario,

even though they're essentially Nazis,

and he is ethnically half-Jewish.

Eduardo flip-flops between journalism and killing people.

Hungary has a small Nazi-type Romanian separatist gang.

Part of White Bolivia, rife with ex-Nazis,

wants to separate from the 'Darkie' part,

and take the natural resources under their feet, with them.

Who do you think would like to have those resources?

How much do you think they'll be ready to pay?

Eduardo and his new Croatian pals,

and two Romanian-Hungarians,

go to Santa Cruz.

They're kept in the best hotel in town, and they're armed.

One rich Croatian-Bolivian effectively 'runs' Santa Cruz.

It seems the boys are funded by this rich C-Bolivian.

Eduardo obviously now right-wing and Catholic.

Rumours abound that he was actually, by then, a Muslim.

Police raids their room. Eduardo is killed and so are 2 others.

2 go to jail.

They had fake journalist passes.

Eduardo, you shouldn't have.

Government says they were plotting to kill government ministers

by posing as journos.

It looks to me like they were planning to start a separatist war,

probably at one and the same time.

They had a bunch of guys with separatist killing experience.

D-uuhh!

Prime Minister of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma

an indigenous man, confronts Barrack Obama, a mulado,

(watch out for the white part)

at an Americas conference and demands that

Obama state publicly that the US had nothing to do with this.

Silence.

Or, as it's known in the US,

taking the fifth (amendment).

Coming soon. Your chance to join the American foreign legion.

-Costick67 ( 8^P

if in doubt, checkitout: Time Magazine (Eduardo Rozsa Flores, Bolivia)

governments smogged-in

Have you ever wondered why most governments keep making worse and worse decisions, causing ever bigger and bigger calamities?


Well, the truth has been revealed:

PARLIAMENTS ARE DIZZY!

most parliaments are found in old industrial capitals

most of those capitals have piss-poor air quality

Therefore, members are not getting enough oxygen

to feed the hypothalamus,

leading to disorientation, dizziness and bad decisions

Short-term solutions have been devised in the UK

1 Oxygen breaks in the cafeteria. Just bring your own personal gas mask.

2 London could actually make public transport MUCH cheaper than driving a car into the capital. It's now

5.20 for a damp, crowded, shaky sardine-can ride

vs

8 pounds for dryness and climate controls, Dolby stereo,

fresh coffee and plush upholstery.

No contest.

Longer-term solutions: In the UK, where ministers get funding for a second residence in super-expensive London, every third sitting could be moved to the Hamptons.

Members would then get funding for a third home as well, or they can fund whichever two of the three is most expensive. That is of course, unless they already have a home in the Hamptons, which 75% already do. In this case, they will have to move their secretary to work in that home, making that home their 'office', sort of like off-shoring (for corporations).

-Costick67 ( 8^P
pics from fotosearch.com (free)

Mayday, Mayday, prospects are Sierra-Hotel-India-Tango

BYLINE: While the economy sinks,

like the Titanic,

governments are adjusting the deck chairs.

THE ILLUSION

While workers saw nothing but blue sky ahead,

THE REALITY
now all we see is what looks like a wind turbine


chunked up with brown guano.

THE PLOT THICKENS
However, some people knew this day would come, and to prepare for that day, they took our money to feather their plush nests.

You know, there is such a thing as rich-man's paranoia. Hey, that's the reason why we've got the police and the courts.

The government, and our taxes, have kindly volunteered to protect their private property.

For the rest of us, bankruptcy court will take care of our private property

On this Mayday, the worker's holiday, how many of us are able to relax with our jobs under threat and the bills piling up?

One day for workers? What about the other 364?
Who's going to sell you your burger?

Certain rich folk have taken control of our economy,
saddled us with debt, and
taken away our rights and our democratic choices.

[i.e.It doesn't matter whom you vote for.]
They did this in quick and easy steps: Crisis-after-crisis

War, Terrorism, Economic collapse, the Flues

what's next?

Since the powers are running all four* crises, they're not worried.
However, we certainly are.

Marxism/Communism scared the powers because it promised workers' rights. At that time, the powers needed local workers to run their factories. So, to fight communism, they gave us social-democratic countries: universal voting, health care, universal education, pensions and so on.

subtitle: A STAB IN THE DARK

Now that the destitute slaves of the 3rd world are making our products, Western workers are expendable.

So, with communism gone, the powers are slowly trying to make it like social-democratic values never existed.

So, they're returning us to

pre-WW1 conditions

few rights,

little or no free health-care,

little or no free education,

no freedom of speech,

little or no democracy,

rampant warmongering,

and in the end, absolute tyranny.

-Costick67 ( 8^P

pics from fotosearch.com (free)
* e.g. check: for war: Haliburton/Cheney; for flu: Gilead/Rumsfeld; for anything: Carlysle Group

Burlesconi wants supermodels on his (Euro-politics) D

a new crisis in Euro-land:

BURLESQUE-GATE

The Italian PM Burlesquoni, acting evermore like Snoop Dogg or a pimp, has started training supermodels to be politicians, in true Felini fashion, so he can send them to the big catwalk up in northern Europe, as his answer to Strasbourg and it's Machievellian politics.

It's a bit of light-hearted sex/comedy/romp ala Caligula:

A bit of SEX equality legislation (everybody should get some)

a bit of agricultural policy

a bit of hard negotiating

____
Here's day 1 of Samantha's 4-year term in Strasbourg.

MEP Jan (D): So, what should we do about illegal immigration?

MEP Samantha (Italy): "Let me think about that over a glass of champagne. Okay? Now move, please, you're crowding my aura."
___

Here's the secret plan: Whenever the discussions on corruption turns to Italy and Berlusconi, his secret agents whip into Charlie's Angels/ fem-bot mode and change the subject, while trying to get a 'rise' out of their colleagues:

MEP Charles (FR): What should we do about political corruption? I hear Berlusconi has been chopping up the Italian penal code and eating it for lunch.

MEP Maria (IT): It's funny you should say 'penal', it reminds me of another word. Turn off your microphone...."
___
Rumour has it that French Prez Sarkozy is a big fan of the Moulin Rouge burlesque show (the real one), so look for a five star review of new EU policy.

This is the presentation for a new law on textile quality:

___
This kind of politics is not unprecedented.
In 2006, Bulgaria's president tried to send prostitutes to the 'Bourg, but as the representative of the Balkan branch of the world's oldest profession, Jizzelle, said:



Jizzelle: "Unlike myself and my colleagues, politicians have no morals whatsoever. They'd *&%*$, smack and sell their own mothers, all before 9 am on Monday." and "We in the field of full-contact adult entertainment have some moral lines which we will not cross. We'd feel dirty if we did."

-Costick67 ( 8^P
pics from fotosearch.com (r-free)

Update: more photos from Budapest

Costick67 was here
see my old Budapest story if you want the setting.

here are some SLR photos:
inside the opera (without a flash)





metal bridge with trams


church in a cave

Dublin Baile Atha Cliath

Costick67 was here

My report on this grand city on the Liffey has arrived. I am now sober.
A hearty 'Pog mo thon' to you from the verdant isle.

Language:
Dubb Linn= Black pool, or pool black (the "English" name for the town)

Baile Atha Cliath= Ford of the river
(Gaelic. because it's Ireland, they get 2 names for the place)

I spent 60 hours in the Dub. The sun came out. People fell out of the pubs, looked up at the sky and then went screaming back inside. More about the reasons for avoiding the pubs late, but I was in the main park for a whole afternoon soaking it up, smoking a cigar and enjoying the scenery.
I found the people friendly, especially when compared to London. The big L is so sour, so self-absorbed.
I'll try to make the story and photos interesting:

As I said, I was a little drunk. I got soused in London, because I was so upset at not being able to afford to get drunk in Dublin. How was I supposed to commune with their great authors if I wasn't three sheets to the wind?


The cheapest pub in town. Unfortunately, there's no ceiling and no taps. The place is derelict. Go to a pub with a roof, or a patio and you pay at least 4 european currency units for a pint, or is it a litre?

The name of the pub, Barley, goes to show you that Ireland, despite all the crying, was not a potato monoculture. Unless you think that Yeats was getting his inspiration from a bottle of ABSOLUTEly Ireland.


I actually had a hard time getting into town scaling these here town walls. Hard to do after a few beers.

Dublin is about more than drink. Here are three wild statues hinting at the consumption of rather more way-out substances, outside of a Afghan pot/heroin/halal collective.




This is the Half penny Bridge (or "Ha penny", for drunks). It used to be a toll bridge across the Liffey. If I were poor, I'da just got a free bath crossing the river below.
In modern times, it's still a toll bridge due to the number of street people and Gypsies whose begging bowls you have to walk around.

Even though I was quite sober taking this photo of the National Library, I coulda died because I had to go into the parliament compound to take it. When the staff told me, my response was "you learn something every day, if you survive long enough."

If I had been drunk, you'da read about me in the news.

Drunken Tourist Dies Clutching "Disposable Camera"

-a camouflaged explosive device?

In truth, If I'da wanted to blow up, all I had to do was spontaneously combust on potatoes, cabbage and Guinness.

Some of the best real-estate happened to be owned by the Church. This is a shrine to St. Padraigh. Try to say it after 3 pints and it'll sound like Patrick.

I went soon after the 17th of March, so I guess they found the time to remove the puke and green toilet paper from the surroundings.


Here's another site of pilgrimage. A shrine to St. Guinness of Dublin. It's the beloved brewery of 250 years.

A meal in a glass.

You'll notice the nod to ancient art over the entrance, or is that the head of Guinness' mother-in-law?


This last shrine is to lost packages everywhere, literally. It's the post office on O'Connell.

Two last sites of note. Merrion Square has a reclining statue of Oscar Wilde, well hidden in the bushes (more on that later), across the street from the house where he grew up, the son of an eye doctor and a poet. I'd hate to see what a 19th c. eye doctor did to his patients, but you get an idea how Oscar was both a man of the written word and yet how he could gouge out someone's eyes with some of his well-chosen barbs. A good artist and an even better gadfly of hypocritical Victorian society.

I did wonder however if this park was the place where he learned to chase, catch and sodomise little boys (hiding in the bushes?). But again, you can see the similarity in Wilde's treatment of his political victims.

The last place was the store-front of Sinn Fein. I went in out of curiosity to see what that was all about. They had the usual Che Guevara stuff and shirts of Bobby Sands of latter day saints. No use having a commemorative mug of a guy who died on hunger strike in prison. Though he certainly did "scale" those walls, didn't he.

WHAT I MISSED:

I was staying near the writers' museum in Parnell square, but I never got to the museum, but what did I miss? a pen, paper, an old typewriter? I'm not old enough to spend my vacations in museums and as I always say, it'll be there next time. Museums never die.

I close with an Irish toast. "May the road rise up to meet you."

By that, I don't mean having the false impression that the road is rising up to meet your falling head because your so drunk that you didn't even realise that you were passing out.

that's all. Now be off with ya!

-Costick67 (8^P

Ontario, where bankers are men and businesses are scared

My home province has taken the opportunity (what took them so long) to trumpet the benefits of the best banking system in the world. I can't argue with that.

However,
When I was a young man, I was cursing the so-called family compact sort of behaviour which saw the government feeding other viable parts of the economy, to the banks. They gobbled up almost everything in sight, for example, insurance. Why do banks need to do insurance? (by the way, that very type of regulation, in the US in '99, helped lead to their well-known economic fiasco, but that's the States for ya!)
Of course the media was asleep at the switch. They reported this stuff as if nothing was wrong.

The banks were like the plant in the Little Shop of Horrors screaming:

"FEED ME!"

People and their livelihoods started disappearing into this dark stinking maw.

Anyway, Canadian banks became stronger, and avoided the corrupt derivative and sub-prime, essentially American, way of doing business. Congrats.

-Costick67 ( 8^P
checkitout: investinontario.com/soundbanking

the Financial Times they are a-changing

I'll provide a report on the FT, seeing as I "borrowed" a used copy at Dublin airport.

It's incredible how it is papering over the real issues and trying to scare its readers into calling up their friends in parliament and asking questions like : "You're not going commie on us, are you?"

Nice to see them helping the present rot continue on unabated and undebated.

Cage match to the death: Banks vs. Manufacturers

In order for Richie to make ridiculous amounts of money, the globalisation thing had to tick along and people in the West had to keep on working and spending and borrowing like drunken sailors.

OOOps, somebody screwed up.

The economic model failed.

The bankers put their heads up their own buttocks.

Doc: Turn and coff. Give 'em a trillion or two and don't call me in the morning.

I think that one part of the new world order wasn't speaking with the other part. Are we seeing a rift growing between manufacturers and bankers?

This is especially true in the US where bankers have been cashing government cheques, no questions asked, while GM and Chrysler are being asked to commit suicide.
You'll be interested to know that a strong economy needs manufacturing while we can do without the present, useless bankers because they're easy to replace.

You see, in an economy like the one I describe below*, the best entrepreneurial minds had migrated from manufacturing to financial speculation. It's so much easier without government regulations (Thanks to Bush43 and Brown!).

You'd be stupid to open a factory in this type of situation. Who wants to make health insurance payments and destroy unions, even if the law allows? Instead of building stuff, the brains played with paper and were they ever clever! In fact they played with Cartesian reality.

Bad is Good.
Junk loans are an investment vehicle.
Sub-prime teaser loans are actually illegal predatory loans
made especially for poor minority people with bad credit!

Even Isaac Newton would have said "that financial balloon is coming down like a lead weight."

So, let the fighting begin. I'm grabbing a box of microwave popcorn and taking a front-row seat.

Cage Match!
Business vs. Banks

* Just reviewing an old theme, because of globalisation, the Western economies were descimated by the escaping factories which were magically reappearing in the Third World. So, (whether consciously or not) our economy was buoyed by nothing else except consumption and the fake sense that we had strong investment portfolios in shares and real estate when our economy wasn't producing but a fraction of the manufactured goods that it was consuming. Can you say 'balance of payments'? We were effectively growing our market by borrowing (from China, from the future).
Why would banks lend money to poor people by teasing them with the illusion of a cheap loan? Because they had no more ideas about how to make good money, so they repackaged these bad loans and sold them as investment vehicles. All they were thinking is "somebody's gonna pay my bonus. Screw the economy."
It was all fake. We should have been living in reality, but it was too sh*tty for politicians to get re-elected, what with the factories gone and the people up to their eyeballs in debt, so it looks like the government helped to cook the books (mainly the US and UK) in order to stay in office.