Part 2: The Hilarity of Waiting For Happy Endings
By Imran Anwar
Just like any movie that does well. This article is a sequel to the one from last week. If you did not read it, what are you waiting for, read it here first.
Let’s get back to the business of American business being driven out of business, by the perfect storm of perfect storms that partly formed, and partly were created by the Bush administration, that we discussed last week.
Thanks to Bush and Cheney the big oil companies were able to rape and plunder the American consumer for the last full year. They did this by causing prices to be higher than they had ever been. They brought the economic engine of the United States to a standstill.
Just as I had predicted, oil prices that were previously blamed on China and India buying a lot of oil, have suddenly, and miraculously, started dropping. I am, oh, so sure, that this decline in oil prices has nothing to do with the upcoming elections and the dire straits that the Republicans find themselves in.
During this same period, the United States dollar, which is as close to a global currency as there ever was one, has been in freefall. Sure, my fellow Pakistanis are hurting because the Dollar seems to be rising as the Rupee continues to fall against it. But in reality, the Rupee would have been even more significantly lower against the dollar, had the dollar itself not become so weak during the Bush administration.
In most countries a falling currency usually leads to greater exports. However, unfortunately for us Americans, we hardly have anything left to manufacture, so all we can export are Hollywood movies (that soon end up on pirated DVDs), some Boeing aircraft (that I can bet China is reverse engineering as I write this) and maybe some software – (that is not being pirated around the word already).
As a result, high oil prices first ground the American economic engine to a halt. Then, money that was being invested in real estate and the stock market started disappearing as that bubble started to burst.
During this time, due to extremely poor oversight of the banking and mortgage industries, some of the largest, oldest and most respected banks in America were caught with their pants down. Assuming that the good times would continue forever, they had been buying up bad mortgages hand over fist. This was also true of two government backed organizations, nicknamed Fannie and Feddie, that also just went belly up with the US government having to bail them out. Today, AIG, one of the largest insurance companies also got a government bailout. All this time, consumers, and ordinary shareholders are bleeding to poverty and financial death.
As a result, when the consumer cash flow stopped these banks found themselves holding billions and billions of Dollars of worthless paper representing real estate that had lost a huge portion of its value compared to the bubble prices that they purchased at.
Some of these stories may sound familiar to my fellow Pakistani readers, who suffered from stock market and real estate market manipulations, reportedly at the hands of the highest leaders of the previous understanding administration. Congratulations, you are not alone. You have something else in common with Americans. You too were ripped off by your leaders just as Americans were.
It is amazing to see the surreal way my fellow Americans are worried about totally insignificant things. They wonder whether Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama loves his country or not, because his plane does not have an American flag painted on it.
Others are wondering if the talented but increasingly unstable Lindsay Lohan will end back in rehab soon. Yet others are so excited that a new season of TV shows and trash reality TV is going to start soon.
Others are lining up to see the latest Batman or some similar blockbuster movies. Hundreds of thousands of others are busy discussing how good or bad a quarterback Bret Favre will be for the New York Jets. America’s future jetting towards disaster is far from their minds.
Thank God there are shows like Saturday Night Live, whose former star Tina Fey came back to do a skit on Sarah Palin. I encourage you to check out the NBC video of this skit. Or, see if you can watch some great comedy but done by real American media heroes like Jon Stewart with The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central. They, it seems, are some of the few people calling it as it is, but is anyone listening. Do check them out on Apple’s iTunes Store (where yours truly also offers a free podcast to listen on your iPod or computer) or at http://www.comedycentral.com/ .
And all through this, the neo-con evil manufacturing factory is in full swing - trying to instill and install a medically, and some say mentally, unfit John McCain as president.
It is almost as if they are making a movie called The WoManchurian Candidate. Many concerned and patriotic Americans are wondering if the game plan actually is for McCain-Palin to be elected by hook or by crook and then the neo-cons hope for a quick demise of John McCain.
He is already a very old man with high risk of stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, 6 types of cancer in his past, former chain smoker, who takes Ambien to sleep. The neo-cons are hoping he succumbs to his medical conditions, so that this woman can be remote controlled to literally control the United States, and the world, far better than could have been done under an incompetent and now lame-duck George W. Bush.
I shudder to think of this perfect storm of perfect storms, all eying the United States, and any state that happens to be of strategic importance to the USA, especially Pakistan.
It is a scary thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to withdraw cash from what is left of my stock market account, so that I can go with my fellow American friends to watch some football games and movies. I hear a great new funny horror flick called “The WoManchurian Candidate” is being filmed around the country!
The writer is a New York and Miami based Pakistani-American entrepreneur, Internet pioneer, writer and TV personality. He can be reached through his web site http://imran.com .
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By Imran Anwar
Just like any movie that does well. This article is a sequel to the one from last week. If you did not read it, what are you waiting for, read it here first.
Let’s get back to the business of American business being driven out of business, by the perfect storm of perfect storms that partly formed, and partly were created by the Bush administration, that we discussed last week.
Thanks to Bush and Cheney the big oil companies were able to rape and plunder the American consumer for the last full year. They did this by causing prices to be higher than they had ever been. They brought the economic engine of the United States to a standstill.
Just as I had predicted, oil prices that were previously blamed on China and India buying a lot of oil, have suddenly, and miraculously, started dropping. I am, oh, so sure, that this decline in oil prices has nothing to do with the upcoming elections and the dire straits that the Republicans find themselves in.
During this same period, the United States dollar, which is as close to a global currency as there ever was one, has been in freefall. Sure, my fellow Pakistanis are hurting because the Dollar seems to be rising as the Rupee continues to fall against it. But in reality, the Rupee would have been even more significantly lower against the dollar, had the dollar itself not become so weak during the Bush administration.
In most countries a falling currency usually leads to greater exports. However, unfortunately for us Americans, we hardly have anything left to manufacture, so all we can export are Hollywood movies (that soon end up on pirated DVDs), some Boeing aircraft (that I can bet China is reverse engineering as I write this) and maybe some software – (that is not being pirated around the word already).
As a result, high oil prices first ground the American economic engine to a halt. Then, money that was being invested in real estate and the stock market started disappearing as that bubble started to burst.
During this time, due to extremely poor oversight of the banking and mortgage industries, some of the largest, oldest and most respected banks in America were caught with their pants down. Assuming that the good times would continue forever, they had been buying up bad mortgages hand over fist. This was also true of two government backed organizations, nicknamed Fannie and Feddie, that also just went belly up with the US government having to bail them out. Today, AIG, one of the largest insurance companies also got a government bailout. All this time, consumers, and ordinary shareholders are bleeding to poverty and financial death.
As a result, when the consumer cash flow stopped these banks found themselves holding billions and billions of Dollars of worthless paper representing real estate that had lost a huge portion of its value compared to the bubble prices that they purchased at.
Some of these stories may sound familiar to my fellow Pakistani readers, who suffered from stock market and real estate market manipulations, reportedly at the hands of the highest leaders of the previous understanding administration. Congratulations, you are not alone. You have something else in common with Americans. You too were ripped off by your leaders just as Americans were.
It is amazing to see the surreal way my fellow Americans are worried about totally insignificant things. They wonder whether Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama loves his country or not, because his plane does not have an American flag painted on it.
Others are wondering if the talented but increasingly unstable Lindsay Lohan will end back in rehab soon. Yet others are so excited that a new season of TV shows and trash reality TV is going to start soon.
Others are lining up to see the latest Batman or some similar blockbuster movies. Hundreds of thousands of others are busy discussing how good or bad a quarterback Bret Favre will be for the New York Jets. America’s future jetting towards disaster is far from their minds.
Thank God there are shows like Saturday Night Live, whose former star Tina Fey came back to do a skit on Sarah Palin. I encourage you to check out the NBC video of this skit. Or, see if you can watch some great comedy but done by real American media heroes like Jon Stewart with The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central. They, it seems, are some of the few people calling it as it is, but is anyone listening. Do check them out on Apple’s iTunes Store (where yours truly also offers a free podcast to listen on your iPod or computer) or at http://www.comedycentral.com/ .
And all through this, the neo-con evil manufacturing factory is in full swing - trying to instill and install a medically, and some say mentally, unfit John McCain as president.
It is almost as if they are making a movie called The WoManchurian Candidate. Many concerned and patriotic Americans are wondering if the game plan actually is for McCain-Palin to be elected by hook or by crook and then the neo-cons hope for a quick demise of John McCain.
He is already a very old man with high risk of stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, 6 types of cancer in his past, former chain smoker, who takes Ambien to sleep. The neo-cons are hoping he succumbs to his medical conditions, so that this woman can be remote controlled to literally control the United States, and the world, far better than could have been done under an incompetent and now lame-duck George W. Bush.
I shudder to think of this perfect storm of perfect storms, all eying the United States, and any state that happens to be of strategic importance to the USA, especially Pakistan.
It is a scary thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to withdraw cash from what is left of my stock market account, so that I can go with my fellow American friends to watch some football games and movies. I hear a great new funny horror flick called “The WoManchurian Candidate” is being filmed around the country!
The writer is a New York and Miami based Pakistani-American entrepreneur, Internet pioneer, writer and TV personality. He can be reached through his web site http://imran.com .
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