And aren’t we rapidly approaching a gilded age divide between the haves and have nots in today’s economy? Or have we passed it already?

The wealth has been flowing steadily and strongly toward the few. Now we’ve even got Starbucks charging tons for a cup of joe and people pay it.

What happens when you have two economies: the everybody’s who are scraping by since they’ve given all their ‘excess’ money to the Rich and the Wealthy who are floating in money?

Obviously the Wealthy put their money into investments and boom the markets. That happened in the ’90s. But, the Wealthy manipulators also know how to make money by tossing the market out the window and that’s what they are aiming to do now. Those invested in commodities like gold (Bush family) or oil (Bush family) want the dollar and market to collaps since that makes them even more wealthy relative to others. And they don’t even have to do anything with their commodities, just sit on ‘em. In fact, that’s all they CAN do with their commodities. So, who has commodities must aim to kill the paper economy to get richer. Those who have paper want to take more from the EverybodyElses and print more paper as fast as possible to expand their apparent wealth. Then they can use the paper to buy bigger houses, boats, gold, etc.

We may see it as a war between the Rich and Everybody else, but there’s probably also a war between the Commodity holders and the Paper rich.

Everybody else just gets squeezed until they lose their home, their health care, everything. When that part of the economy goes bust the markets crash and the Commodity holders win. Guess which the Bush family represent just now?

… my dad wasn’t in the military (he worked for bell labs and i think they were primary contractor at kwaj when we were there, ‘72-’74), so that was my only experience of living on a military base. but i was at a very impressionable age (12-14).

when were you there? i never ran into any rogue coconut trees *g*, but i did a pretty good job of almost getting myself killed without any help from the flora.

I’ll have to the first book of Johnson’s trilogy, I grew up adependent, too. Only I was over on Okinawa, in the fifties. I wasa too young to appeciate that the Okinawan adults had actually witnessed or paricipated in the horror of invasion of their Island. The battle for Okinawa was a particularly vicious event, too.

yep, i sure did. but i don’t know if kwajalein was the only one to call their base store macy’s.

Remember – “We don’t torture!”

What IS it?

BTW… Little Georgie likes to be called “W”. You might consider using a more derisive appellation. I prefer to use “Little Georgie”. I believe it would assuredly picqué his petulance.