High gas prices have prompted 63 percent of U.S. residents to reduce driving and 56 percent to cut household spending, a New York Times/CBS News poll

[...]
Working-class people are being hit the hardest by high fuel prices on top of flat wages and climbing mortgage interest rates, the newspaper reported.

Many such people live far from their job in places where they find affordable housing.

"If you're poor, you're forced to make choices," Stephen Cecchetti of Brandeis University told the Times. "All of a sudden, when the price of something that you can't give up skyrockets, you still have to go from one place to another."
[...]

But Bush said the economy is booming and he's responsible for it.
His tax cuts are the instrument of Amerikkkan economic magnificence, which is why the republikkkans just delivered another 70 billion dollars worth of tax breaks to the nation's wealthiest folk.

Bush must think that loud popping sound in the background is the sound of the economic boom. Of course, Bush also thinks Rummy is doing a good job in Iraq and spying on Americans without a warrant is legal.

Bush thinks a healthy economy is one that pays a handful of people a fortune and forgets about every one else. He thinks an economy based on moving money around is fantastic. It's in his blood. His family made part of their vast wealth by moving money around for the Nazi party during WW2.

It's dandy with him if America doesn't really make anything but war anymore. After all, putting pickles on hamburgers is a manufacturing job according to the republican party. And privatizing defense is a sort of manufacturing industry too.

It's okay for America to have little to sell and much to buy from other countries, and buy with credit. Bush's friends in the financial services industry still prosper, and prosper like mad. Especially with fantastic bipartisan sponsored treaties like NAFTA that enable them to enslave populations in other countries and call it prosperity.

From all indications the real estate market, pumped up on purpose by astoundingly low interest rates engineered to create a boom, to offset the stock market bubble burst perhaps, is softening and will soften a lot more very quickly. That ought to be a pretty sound.

It's okay though, because the people who sold the Remax Franchises to the scurrying, balding little pricks who are wired to cell phones 24 hours a day, so they could use their insect like energy to market overpriced houses, and the money guys who financed the crummy cosmetic rehabs on the inner city apartment stock, so it could be sold it as condominiums and destroy the housing stock from every imaginable direction, and built the shoddy, over priced nonsense strip malls all over the country made their money already.

And that's who matters.

Watching the right wing economy work is like being a kid again. It's like sitting outside on sunny summer afternoon, blowing soap bubbles through a giant plastic wand, watching them float away and burst one after another.

Even people who should know better spew dumb-ass commentary about markets.
No, an increase in the Dow does not generate jobs in America.
No, large sums of money are not required to capitalize large projects, because such projects should not be undertaken in the first place, and the global economy occurring with the spread of global fascism is no coincidence.
This kind of economy leaves out large numbers of people, eventually leaves out most people. It is inherently unfair and certainly not compatible with any kind of democratic system.

But our politicians are crafty bastards, so they hand out easy credit and low interest to enable people to buy what they can not afford, to suck them in, then, as the economy passes the tipping point of losing value, change the bankruptcy laws to force even those in the most desperate situations, say uninsured with multiple sclerosis, to pay back, pay back, pay back.

It's a form of servitude and Barack Obama from my state of Illinois voted for it, which is one reason he can blather about Iraq until his lips fall off, but I know he's a right wing flying money who supports the right wing fascist mode of doing "business".

So if gas gets so expensive that people can't afford to drive to work, they can put it on a credit cared, or if they can't, it's no skin of repiglikkkan ass, because they're are feeding their base and nurturing the oil companies who are pushing the idea that gas is expensive because ENVIRONMENTAL controls are preventing them from building refineries.

It is an argument the America public is uneducated enough to buy, just like they bought Saddam the Jihadist.

However, I can think of many solutions. One grand idea is a massive anti trust action against the oil companies. Why should the people who locate, drill extract, refine and distribute all be part of the same handful of behemoth, monopolistic corporations when the economic security of the nation rests on this product?

And rests on this product because the last president to address the problem of oil was Jimmy Carter, even though the mindless, blood thirsty, Calvinist, narcissist American public voted him out of office because he wouldn't suit up, grab his shot gun, jump into his pick up and GO TAKE THE OIL.

If refineries were just refineries, rather than pieces of gigantic conglomerates, they'd have some incentive to build more refineries within the bounds of environmental law (and sanity), wouldn't they? But these companies are so enormous, like the media companies, so vertically integrated that they are impervious to real market forces and can do what they damn well want, including demanding and getting war in the middle east and forcing the tax payers to pay for it.

Makes me sick.

A close look at the oil companies is the best argument I have ever seen for a socialist economy.
Boom Boom. He shot me down.