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“Gas prices are too mother$*#^ing high,” Cracks in the Empire & "American optimism has got completely out of hand"

August 29, 2008 – Comments (15) | RELATED TICKERS: SKF , GGP , ARO

“Gas prices are too mother$*#^ing high,” declared rapper Sean Combs -- aka Puff Daddy, Sean Jean, P. Diddy or just Diddy -- yesterday in a YouTube upload.

“I do own my own jet and I have been flying back and forth to L.A. pursuing my acting career. Now, if I’m flying back and forth, like, twice a month, that’s like $200,000 or $250,000 round trip. F^&! that. I’m back on American Airlines right now.”

“Look. I want to give a shout out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and sisters and all my brothers and sisters from all the countries that have oil, if you could all please send me some oil for my jet, I would truly appreciate it. But right now, can you believe it, I am actually flying commercial…”

What a travesty.

“This is proof that gas prices are too high,” P. Did goes on, offering an explanation for why Americans continue to elect exactly the type of leaders they deserve: “We need to do something about it, so tell whoever the next president is that we need to bring gas back down.”

Above stolen from Agora Finance. 

Wisdom from P Diddy! Remember to "Vote or Die!"

Cracks in the Empire

by Michael S. Rozeff

Another good article from Lewrockwell.com some insight about Fannie and Freddie here:

Building an empire is one thing. Preserving it is quite another.

"If the U.S. government allows Fannie and Freddie to fail and international investors are not compensated adequately, the consequences will be catastrophic. If it is not the end of the world, it is the end of the current international financial system. The seriousness of such failures could be beyond the stretch of people's imagination." These are the words of Yu Yongding, who is a Professor in Beijing and a former advisor to China’s central bank (August 22, 2008, in Bloomberg news).

We should listen to Prof. Yongding. The Bloomberg article reports: "Yu is ‘influential’ among government officials and investors and has discussed economic issues with Premier Wen Jiabao this year, said Shen Minggao, a former Citigroup Inc. economist in Beijing, now an economist at business magazine Caijing."

China has loaned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac huge amounts of money: "China's $376 billion of long-term U.S. agency debt is mostly in Fannie and Freddie assets, according to James McCormack, head of Asian sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings Ltd. in Hong Kong. The Chinese government probably holds the bulk of that amount, according to McCormack."

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that have invested in and supported the U.S. housing market these many years, have essentially already failed. The equity of stockholders is 95 percent gone, due to the bad loans these companies made and the prospects of further losses.

Professor Yongding is notifying everyone that China has first priority at the "bankruptcy" table. Even if there is no formal bankruptcy procedure, China, as the foremost creditor, does not want to absorb default losses on its loans to Fannie and Freddie. China is pressuring the U.S. to make good on its implicit guarantee to support the GSEs.

The U.S. taxpayer is the ultimate bagholder in this process. U.S. citizens borrowed heavily from the GSEs and thus from China to build and buy houses. They are being asked to pay off these loans and not stiff their creditors. If they do not pay, China will hasten to wind down its loans to U.S. institutions, and that includes the U.S. government. This process has already begun."

The rest of the article is here. 

Vox Day, a Conservative Liberterian has a good post here and article in WND:

Derb at his conservative and gloriously pessimisstic best:

"American optimism has got completely out of hand. A corrective is needed. The corrective must come from conservatives, the people who understand that "human nature has no history." We must revive the fine tradition of conservative pessimism. In this age, optimism is for children and fools. And liberals.

Some children will be left behind. You cannot "remake the Middle East" or "defeat evil." The poor will always be with us. Black and white will never mingle together in unselfconscious harmony. Corporations will not research and explore without hope of profit. Russia will not become Sweden. Forty million immigrants speaking a single language will not assimilate.

Conservatives used to know all this. Some — the infallibly sapient Roger Kimball, for example — still do. The smiley-faces are leading us to perdition. They must be shouted down.

"Yes, we can!"

No, you can't, you bloody fools."

I am for shouting down these idiots as you might have noticed on some of my CAPS replies.

"He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes."

Proverbs 13:24.

Vox Day has a good write up the Empire here: 

How America's empire will fall

It is important to note, many compare the US like the Fall of Rome. But the US is more like the Government of Athens, Greece, then Rome.