Sometimes you just have to ask why, even though you know there’s no reasonable explanation. Like the person who just bought one of Michael Jackson’s “bejeweled” white gloves for 50 grand. Why? Unless the damned thing was bejeweled with rubies and diamonds, you have to wonder what’s the motivation here. The purchaser said it was a unique Michael Jackson bejeweled white glove since it was in Australia, tossed to an audience member during a concert in Sydney in 1996. Okaaay… but why?
America’s bankers, desperate to come up with another trick investment miracle, have come up with a real beaut. They want to buy up old people’s insurance policies, say, $400,000 for a million dollar policy, then bundle bunches of them into bonds for sale. Why? Aren’t there other things bankers used to do all day besides scheming up ways to beat the system? The system made these dickheads rich for centuries, so what’s the problem with going with the program? Is being regular rich boring or something, and only dreaming up new scams is fun? And isn’t trying to beat the system what crooks do? Even the bankers who came up with this brainstorm admit that investors could lose money if the old people live longer than is convenient. Looks like we’ll just have to blame those stubborn life-hogging old fogeys for refusing to die when this one blows up in our faces and another recession hits.
President Obama has caught US-Presidentitis. Symptoms include being convinced he can make peace in the Middle East and make a democracy out of Afghanistan, the country known as “The Land That TIme Forgot For Very Good Reasons.” Why? What the hell is in the water supply at the White House anyway? He doesn’t have the excuse his predecessor had, being a complete moron, so what’s this guy’s problem? A whole lot of presidents, kings, prime ministers and emperors have tried making peace in the Middle East, and invaders have been trying to conquer and tame the backward boobs in Afghanistan since Alexander The Great in 330 B.C. No dice on all counts. The rub is, all of this stuff is written down in case anyone in his administration cared to look it up, maybe steer clear of trying to do the impossible, or at least getting a few reality-based accomplishments under their belt first.
The nation is trying to find its way out of the dirty energy business, so what happens in Congress? Senators and Representatives from coal producing states are pushing for coal to remain America’s primary source of energy. Why? Does anybody really believe that there is such a thing as clean coal? Hold a piece of it in your hand sometime, remind us all again how this noxious black lump can be made clean. Or look up the history of the health of coal miners. Just Google “black lung disease,” also called “coal worker’s pneumoconiosis” and read any of the 4.1 million entries. It kills an estimated 1,500 American coal miners annually. Of course, this is a rare condition among members of Congress and their families, who don’t ever actually enter the mines themselves. Lobbyist money talks to our elected officials, even if it means remaining in the nineteenth century, energy-wise.
Finally, a huge WHY? is in order for anyone who still pays any attention at all to the “financial experts” in this country as they predict that everything is just fine again. For them, maybe. They don’t have to be accurate in their predictions since they haven’t been in years and sounded no alarm bells at all when they knew questionable monetary practices were leading the economy to the edge of the cliff it fell off in 2008. Yet they still have their jobs and command serious attention. Why?
For the nearly 10% of Americans who are unemployed, things are not rosy at all and widespread recovery remains one more trickle down rumor from the same wealthy dunces who aided and abetted their nation’s financial meltdown and threw them out of work. They recall that having a job means being held accountable, and in order to be considered an expert on anything you need to be right more often than you are wrong. A lot more, and for a long period of time. So why does every buffoon with a Brooks Brothers’ suit command media attention when he predicts that good times are just around the corner? Are we that desperate for good news that we believe anybody who tells us what we want to hear? Doesn’t make much sense.