Thinkin' Outloud

I find it particularly interesting that in the midst of our recession, that will probably manifest into a depression like few could imagine, that our Saudi and other oil “friends” are tightening the screws of the vice that our heads are in. It is obviously an intentional attack upon our society.

Surely with our economy drastically slowed, most Americans are using less fuel. With current prices all of us have cut back and our airlines will pretty much collapse. What is interesting is that this “crisis” didn’t rear its ugly head until our economy was on the path of devistation. How could this not be orchestrated?

Granted, China is fueling demand for oil. But as our demand has decreased due to the economy, that demand is pretty much offset. I cannot see one justification for the current squeeze play that is being put upon us except that it weakens our ability to fight the terrorism that stems from the bowels of the Saudi and Mid-east anti- American society.

The good in the mix is that Americans are fluid and innovative. We can evolve from oil dependency more quickly than any nation in the world. But we need and deserve time. We may suffer, and we may demand fairness at any cost from our oil producing “friends” including the threat of leveling the decadent Dubai in the worst case. The Arabs and the rest of the oil extortionists need to heed to America’s need to economically stabilize or realize that they are committing a virtual act of war against us

If this same scenario happened 5 years ago when our economy was booming, I could have possibly stomached it, but not now.

In closing, let the oil rich, self proclaimed good guy Arabs step up to help with the world’s disasters instead of the proven good ol’ US of A as they are in the position to do so and we no longer are. If they don’t step up to bat, we can exploit their selfishness by simply exposing the truth to the world in the media (but remember that our government has let these Arab folks buy one third of this media). If they step up and show compassion to non-Muslim nations and assume the United State’s roll of rescuing nations after typhoons, tidal waves, and earthquakes we will have some good thoughts. If they don’t, and continue to build another indoor snow skiing resort or building skyscraper luxury buildings 3 times the height of the empire state building, as they are now, and let our economy collapse, we will see a real selfish side of our “friends” who’s countrymen bombed our world trade center.

Simply put, I am tired of this crap. I love America and I want us all to see the world as it really is.

coop

Posted by Garry Cooper at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The oil producing nations are capitalizing on the downturn in the U.S. economy to further weaken it and there is some doubt in my mind as to whether this is a prelude to some major move by the Arab communities to entirely cripple our nation. Surely any imbecile could see that now is not the time to land crippling blows to any nation that one might care about at all. I am certain that this economic squeeze play is well planned and on purpose.

I can say that I think this is a valid strategy to employ if one is inclined to harm a nation already on its knees from a major economic down turn. This also might be a way to damage or curtail our military actions in the mid-east, especially if the Arab nations who now hold much of our debt refuse to lend further or refinance our debts as is done regularly. That is the major move that I am concerned about.

If we were to be economically crippled and forced to take a road in the Mid East that is not prudent , such as being forced to allow Iran to develop nukes or over run Iraq, our nation and the entire west will be in a very dangerous situation. If our economy collapses, as it very well may if our creditors betray us, we would change to a different standing in the world almost overnight.

One might view such acts as those as acts one nation at war might take upon their enemy. This is definitely something we might want to think about and plan for.

Posted by Garry Cooper at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m scaring myself (besides looking in the mirror in the morning). Every day my predictions become more true. Home prices in Southern California were reported to have dropped by 24 percent in the last year alone and America’s largest brokerage, Merrill Lynch has posted another huge quarterly loss of 2 Billion causing the layoffs of another 3000 people. The government is reeling from budget shortfalls sending them seeking to borrow funds at every level from federal to local government. Certainly our credit standing is once again taking a blow. We better pray that McCain gets the job instead of selfish, crooked, Hillary or the wet behind the ears, anti-American, Obama or our nation will surely suffer more harshly in the upcoming re-adjustment of our socio-economic standing.

Almost every analyst sees things worsening. I personally believe we are 10 to 15 percent into our economic downturn and too far from recovery to even measure--Maybe 20 years as a guess. So, we are going to need a leader that understands making good decisions in very difficult, if not insane, circumstances. We are going to need someone that can take the criticism of the masses and be frank with us and give us hope in the darkest of time. We will need someone that can stand upright and welcome insecure Americans to his side and not waiver. That certainly doesn’t sound like either Hillary or Obama does it? It almost describes a man like McCain.

As we weaken economically, we will become more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by our Radical Muslim enemies and or “Muslim Friends” like the Saudis. We may need military leadership and strategy more than ever along with courage to act under fire. McCain again.

I do not agree with McCain’s past amnesty and open border attitude but looking at the times and our choices, we have no choice. In fact, McCain may have fatefully fallen into our hands at just the time we truly need a man like him.

When you vote, think realistically about our future. Don’t fall for Hillary’s daily flip flops and lies and recognize that Obama simply is not qualified and his respect for America’s values and way of life are questionable at best.

Oh, and be prepared to bite the bullet big time and weather the upcoming economic tsunami.

Thinkin’ outloud,

Coop

Posted by Garry Cooper at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our current attitude of letting us know, after the fact, that we have entered a recession seems truly odd. Here are these leading economists from both Wall Street and our government getting paid top dollar to state the obvious after the fact instead of recognizing and acknowledging the obvious and applying solid analytical thought to making things better. You know, like the economic genius Allan Greenspan letting things run amok for years including poor lending practices and the export of our country’s valuable edges in manufacturing and design and then looking back now and saying “holy cow, look what happened!!”

Just like right now--- Instead of our leaders discussing how to buckle down and capitalize on our country’s strong points that we have left and ones that may arise in the future so as to secure our economic future, they are borrowing money to bail out Bear-Sterns and give money away to citizens to stimulate the economy for our past bad decisions with nothing more than a cross-your-fingers-and-hope attitude and virtually no real analytical thought being even considered. Hell, they are still waiting for another six or eight months for the geniuses to let them know that our economy is bad!

I am dying to see what these geniuses thoughts and attitudes will be when this “stimulus package” peaks and dies in a couple of months leaving us in worse economic shape that we already were in. What’s nesx, another rate cut? What will happen from all of this is that our world financial standing will worsen from adding more debt, and our dollar will weaken even further. Given it will take more dollars to buy oil even if the world price stays constant, this economic stimulus will soon compost into more money being taken from us than was given out.

We should have taken those same funds and built a nuke power plant or built a pipeline in Alaska to do real benefit for America including demonstrate some reasonable degree of intelligence to the international community-for once lately. Either of these would have spurred job creation and had the long term benefits of lower living costs to Americans and balancing our trade deficit.

Folks, we need to be thinking about what we Americans have to offer the world and covet and protect it at all costs. For instance, education. Only our legal citizens should have access to higher education (or any education for that matter) so we can regain a hope of a comeback in this world economy. If those from other countries desire our quality education that we have to offer, they should pay very dearly and/or agree that their work be proprietary to the United States for the same length of their education here. In other words, we have rights to their inventions and innovations before and exclusive to all others. Matter of fact, getting a Doctorate should streamline citizenship into our country so we can retain and capitalize off of these professionals for life.

Education is one of the best investments that any society can make as its benefits will reap returns for a lifetime. Perhaps we should have put the entire “economic stimulus” money into our educational system as the best investment we could have made for America. Maybe even using it to get the illegal aliens out of our school system so our own kids could benefit from the money being stolen by them would have been a good idea too. That might have been a “two-fer”.

Just thinkin outloud.

Coop

Posted by Garry Cooper at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lowering interest rates to fend off this recession as the Fed says it is poised to do has more implications than what meets the eye I think.

Investors world wide seek one thing---return on their investment. By that, they mean a reasonable rate of earnings for the amount of money they invest considering the amount of risk they have by that investment. The United States has always enjoyed an excellent cost for the money that we borrowed because we have always been considered a safe haven from runaway inflation, political turmoil, corruption, and default. Investors world wide even came to accept our currency in their own economies, if not at their banks then in booming black market trade. We have enjoyed strength in our dollar as it was thought of as a hedge against uncertainty in other countries’ moneys due to its safety and upside potential.

Things have changed I think my friends. Our dollar has been plummeting against most other currency in the more developed nations. Investors have been trading our dollars for precious metals like gold and silver as they have some doubt in our future apparently. Part might be that some suspect that we may be increasing our money supply (printing money). Some investors are worried about repayment problems and one report that I heard mentioned that Standard and Poor’s (the premier bond rating firm) might consider moving us from an excellent rating to a “B” rating, which is pretty much like getting a D- in school, unless we move towards balancing our budget and trade deficit. The effect would be to drive away investors causing us to have to pay much more to get investors to finance our country’s activities. We are talking higher interest rates that they want.

Back to lowering our rates to spur our economy. Here is the problem---or part of it. If, because of our lackluster economic growth and sales of goods we truly need lower rates to kick start us back into action for the next few years but investors can earn more else-where in places with expanding economies and money from things like oil, why would they accept our next-to-nothing returns. With each lowering of interest rates in our country, your can be sure that heads are turning in the investment world looking for alternatives. After all, are investors willing to accept zero interest and just lend and invest for the fun of it?

With other economies like China, India, and the Petroleum rich nations building factories to supply the world with cheaply produced goods and services while demonstrating their ever-growing economic and political stability, and their strong demand for money and willingness to pay higher rates to get it, we could be finding ourselves in somewhat of a “pickle”. How can we pay higher rates when we can’t afford the ones we have now without risking a recession---or worse.

One could argue, I guess, that these nations would not want us to collapse into economic hard times as it would damage their own economies as we could not afford their products. But we are but just 300 million of the world’s 6+ billion folks and I kind of think that they might be able to get along fine without us. Of course, even we will be buying some of their cheap stuff in the worst of times---especially in the worst of times as our stuff that we produce costs too much which is evidenced by that little “Made in China” sticker inside everything we already use.

Part of me thinks that the answer is getting rid of our idiot politicians who spend like drunken sailors on those special interest groups that bribe them daily with campaign donations, perks, and put those in their place that truly understand the graveness of our situation and by electing a President who is man enough and has the leadership to guide us into forced hard-times to put our affairs in order to allow us to regain or economic respect and standing. I think the right leader and communicator could have the following of us Americans If he or she led by example and wasn’t hindered by a bunch of uninformed idiot senators and congressmen like we have now.

I kind of wonder if our enemies, like the many Muslim nations that hate us like Saudi Arabia, along with Russia and China, are just sitting back watching and laughing to themselves as the world is giving us just enough rope to hang ourselves.

Posted by Garry Cooper at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We need to realize that the liberals have undue influence on our policies as they have both the youthful idealistic energy and apparent time on their hands to make a lot of noise about anything their collective gut reaction tells them to. Allowing this noise to influence our future as a country is like letting the teen-ager in the house to lay down the rules that we go by. Let me give you an example or two.

Perhaps one of the most harmful actions where this undue influence has affected America (an a peeve of mine) is in our nuclear energy efforts. We knew that we were in for an energy crisis and common sense would tell anyone that this crisis would only worsen as not many dinosaurs were dying and pooling into oil each day. So, nuclear seemed to be the answer.

But, along came the noisy liberals pointing out that the world would end if we built any more nuke plants and the environment would be forever ruined. By the way, this was true about expanding our oil fields in Alaska too. This chatter caused our country’s politicians and our energy companies to back off of this controversial program even though I believe that most Americans would support it----especially having known the truth about the consequences of not doing so. The dooms-dayers won.

Now, lets see where it has got good ol’ America. Our energy needs grew, of course. We became more and more dependent on foreign oil. The mid-east became of the utmost importance and with the prices of oil increasing ten-fold in just a few decades, these mostly 5th century thinking tribal countries became wealthy beyond imagination. Fighting between them became more serious, some developed nuclear weapons, and the funds came available to expand Islam into all reaches of the world.

Burning this oil and coal at ever increasing rates caused much more pollution than all of us could have dreamed. Now the liberal noise is that we need to stop global warming due to the last specious noise we conceded to. Lets fix the problem caused by liberal short sightedness with more liberal short sightedness is pretty much what is going on.
\
What we need to do is basic analysis of our energy needs as a nation and achieve goals in that direction. We need to develop as many nuclear plants as possible in the shortest time we can. We need to focus on electricity from these plants as our major source of energy in this country, like France has done. Seventy percent of Frances’ electricity is from nuclear plants. We need full electric cars and rails powered by these plants.

The noisy liberals need to realize their mistakes and accept responsibility for causing most of our current world’s unrest and the “global warming” that has become their new mantra. (Unless I am making the mistake of not believing America is ruining the world by me not riding my bike to work each day.)

In closing, we need this energy to survive as a nation. As I have pointed out before, our country now finds itself in a global economy where we must put our cost of producing goods in line with our competitor nations in this world or we will not be able to sell our goods and we will not economically survive---especially buying $4/gallon gas. We need to think things through as a nation an quit reacting to noise.

Too bad Bush and our congress didn’t have the foresight to put this upcoming tax rebate into nuke plant construction for the real good of America rather than wasting it for political reasons like they did.

Posted by Garry Cooper at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A big economic news story recently is General Motors’ largest loss in the history of the United States auto industry. This loss comes as no surprise to me and we all should watch this “canary in the mineshaft” of our economic viability struggle for survival as it will enlighten us all as to the deep rooted problems of the heart of our economy.

Even in today’s report, GM is taking actions to save itself from extinction. It is offering long time employees lump sum payments for early retirement so it can replace their $28 per hour salaries with those half of that in the non-assembly line sector of its company. It didn’t dare approach the assembly line workers as the labor union that represents them would have had a heart attack. Certainly the non-assembly line cuts were hammered out in some back room deal already.

But, the writing is on the wall my friends. These actual assembly jobs are next. The wages of our auto workers throughout the industry precludes profit in any foreseeable future which I am sure cannot last long. The business will fail. The unions will dig in their heels (so the leaders can keep their cushy jobs), and threaten strikes and the usual. So the battle for survival will ensue.

The problem really is that this wage adjustment is essential and inevitable and the unions may as well go pound sand. The ultimate choice to the workers will be: Do you want to work cheap to compete on the world market or not work at all?. This choice will also include major benefit and retirement concessions such as: Do you want a fraction of your retirement and health benefits or none when we shut the doors?.

Same with the retirement benefits of those already retired. These retirement costs add so much (thousands) to each vehicle’s cost that to continue to pay them is guaranteed destruction of our auto industry as there is no way we can compete with the Chinese or Indians in producing these same vehicles. And certainly, we have seen that our Wall Street leaders will move their operations to that country that makes more money for their company, and that our politicians will support their moves. But, I am not saying that these leaders are wrong in their actions. I believe that it is the nature of the world economy beast that has unleashed itself upon the current world. It’s just that now we must suffer for real the chickens coming home to roost.

Sadly, These retiree’s benefits are not tucked away in some safe little retirement nest egg account in some bank. These companies were allowed by our government to simply keep a small portion of these monies in such a way, and use the rest for their operations and expansions, including the ludicrous salaries and bonuses we have all heard about. These benefit packages are not insured by the government in any way. All of these retirees benefits are one Chapter 13 away from disappearing. The choice here to these retirees will be: Do you want just a fraction of what you thought you were going to get or none when we close shop?. Quite a choice---like “would you like the Gas Chamber or the Electric Chair”.

A very popular idea being employed by this industry and others in the same shape is to shed health benefits from their obligations in their negotiations with the unions, there-by putting these folks on the Medicare system which is already in worse shape than these companies and not possible especially if and when the Saudis and other wealthy people decide not to keep us in business any longer by subsidizing our trillions in debt. And certainly, this is just around the corner as no one is so imprudent as to continue lending to one who has no apparent means to pay them back.

Posted by Garry Cooper at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our economy may be very much worse off than most economists can fathom. Most, including myself, were not born since the end of the Great Depression of the 1930s to have much of a memory of truly hard economic times. I think we are getting ready to see even worse--much worse.

Our current paid economic “thinkers” and “experts” were schooled in how well our policy makers like the Federal Reserve and Congress can act to avert such “major economic cycles” as depressions are called in the business. One can only expect “minor business cycles” (recessions) and the only real question that seems to come to mind is whether it will be short term or somewhat longer before the turn around and the next boom times, they say.

For a simple economy such as we have had up until the recent globalization over the last couple of decades, this historical philosophy might be true. However, our world has changed and our leadership (the movers and shakers on Wall Street) have us jetting at hyper speed like the USS Enterprise on Star trek into an abyss that absolutely no one on this earth can foresee or predict.

We can imagine some possibilities though. That is what scares me. No one can argue that we have become one with the world in economic matters. Therefore, to survive, we must meet the new competitive challenges being placed before us. We have to use whatever competitive edge we have to secure a niche in supplying valuable goods to the world or become obsolete as a nation.

So’

Our natural resources are not abundant or cheap to get to, like in our industrial age, whereas China, Mexico, and other petrol nations are in their infancy. Our labor pool is spoiled with high wages and certainly cannot be competitive with China or India’s few dollar a day salaries to produce the same goods. Our baby boomer retirees are coming to bloom along with their expected retirement pensions which add impossible costs to current autos and items that we produce and most of which are greatly under funded. Our health care costs are skyrocketing as the boomers age, which is a great drain on any economy. With NAFTA and our business leaders on Wall Street chasing profits, any meaningful industry has been outsourced to cheaper nations leaving our workers sitting with their proverbial thumbs in their you-know-wheres. We have taken on the police duties of the world with very little financial support for a mega-expensive task . We allow anchor babies and illegal immigration to tax our system uncontrollably.

All that has had us going this last decade is what I call our “Romanesque self indulgent, self consuming economy”. We have eaten ourselves from within and dismantled our skeleton and vital organs---much like the Romans did prior to their fall. For instance, you build my house, I sell you property, you fix my teeth, I make your burger, I take out your appendix, you make my latte at the corner hangout. I cut the timber and you build my apartments. You drill for gas and heat my home. Where in this equation do you see any value being created by our country to our global customers. You don’t. This is why our trade deficit is out of this world and very likely unfixable.

Unfixable. In a sense maybe from our perspective but albeit not from our global trading partners’ views. The Saudis see one answer by not lending so much to us in bonds but actually buying hard assets such as our stock market, part of CNN, and what is left of our last profitable businesses and industries. They tried to buy our very ports and make moves daily on firms related to our defense industry.

We can secretly print money, which many think we are now doing. This may be why gold has tripled in the last few years and the dollar is plummeting world wide.

What I see is an absolute requirement that our country put its “factors of production” (labor, pensions, health care, and government expenses) in line with the world economy or we die on the vine. This housing boom is over and the chickens are coming home to roost. Think what I am saying here. The “sucking sound” is not just jobs being sucked overseas any longer, it is the sound of our country being sucked into third world status to survive. Its time for ideas and real change.

Our only hope is to dump our current politicians and find real leadership, get our kids off the couch and get them educated so they can innovate, nationalize philosophically to protect our freedom and be prepared to bite the bullet over the long term until the new Bill Gates’ and Henry Fords can innovate us out of this mess. And don't even begin to think there is someone running for office right now that can fill the bill, I am talking a major overhaul here.

This “Economic Stimulus Package” being porkbarelled around by congress now is a joke and should embarrass any thinking economist. Its like dumping a teaspoon of water on the Great San Francisco Fire and expecting to put it out.

I have some more thoughts on this stuff folks so stay tuned!

Posted by Garry Cooper at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)