Greetings, loyal fan. It has been five years since the rant was concocted by yours truly. What a five years it has been, too. The last year has been a particularly entertaining one as most of my predictions have come true.

The Idiot of the Year, 2008, was George Bush Jr. Here is a man who was never remotely qualified to be a President of anything who used money, lies, dirty tricks and various forms of subterfuge to take power in the USA twice. He is man with no redeeming qualities. He has bankrupted his country, cause a depression throughout the world, caused hundreds of thousands of war dead and done absolutely nothing to make America safer from its enemies. The Bush administration has shredding the Constitution, tortured people and paid some of the worst regimes in the world to do it for them. I did not ever think that at my age I would ever witness any major power do such things and could hardly imagine the United States being at the forefront of such monstrous behaviour.

The greed if the Bush years will go down in history as the highest form of larceny even devised. Literally millions of Americans, the loyal, flag waving lemmings that elected the Idiot in the first place, have seen their savings swiped by wealthy elites. People are losing their houses, which they should have never been had in the first place and losing their jobs. This is because Bush’s economic “boom” never was; it was based in printed money that didn’t actually produce anything. Ever wonder why the housing “boom” was centred on the South? Well, that is because the cheapest, illegal, Mexican labour was there to do the work. What has Bush done to get the Mexicans out? Sweet Fanny Adams, that is what.

The ironies of the Bush years are so great that the after affects are scarcely comprehendible. The national debt the USA has now doubled, to $12,000,000,000,000, a figure so huge that people can’t wrap their brains around it. Let’s look at oil, shall we? Well, oil hit $147 a barrel in July and now it is at $37. Well, what a coincidence, it is not exactly what it was at in September 2001. Sure we have almost killed GM and Chrysler but we will nationalize the debts of these companies (called a bailout). GM in particular has screwed all asunder, especially its shareholders but do they care? Of course not! The corporate brass will still get their huge salaries and bonuses, courtesy of the taxpayers. The “economic crisis” will allow GM to shed about half its workforce and concentrate on using government money to finance low interest loans on the cars that really make money for GM, trucks and SUVs. Wagoner and Lutz will still get their fat salaries and that is all that matters.

You see, GM is not in the business of making cars for money for its shareholders. It is in the business of making money for the top brass of the company. Now, if I owned stock in GM I would go the annual general meeting and raise one helluva stink; where has my money gone, the stock is worth one twentieth of what it was five years ago? But this doesn’t happen because the stock is largely owned by investment banks through mutual funds. As long as these bankers get their big, fat pay cheques, all is well enormous bonus payments, courtesy again of the taxpayer, the fabled bailout, that wonderful instrument that allows complete greed and corruption to be rewarded with huge mansions in Florida.

Watching Wagoner before Congress was about the worst thing I have ever witnessed; this bald faced liar had the gall to state that GM’s product was not the problem it was finance! Well, gee, the only way we can get our knuckle draggin’ customer base into an SUV that costs $50,000 is by leasing it to him at 0% to get the payments low enough so he can afford it. Then when he cannot make the payments, you can get a bailout from the taxpayer to cover the residual, which ain’t Jack Shit because the tuck is Jack Shit and will fall apart the day the warranty expires. The thought that GM might actually produce a competitive car that people would actually buy with their own money, that won’t fall apart in three years is not even considered and is indicative of the entire rot of the USA as a whole.

We, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, are going to be in some really tough times soon. It hasn’t hit Cancuksitan as hard as the USA yet and it probably will not because we have programmes that actually help working families retain buying power but there are going to be many young people as well as the unskilled who are going to have tough times. I kind of pity the under 30 set because they don not know hard times, nor can they recognise them when they are on their way. The main reason I stay in Korea as long as I did and left when I did was I saw the economy on an “upswing” and I knew damned well I had better get home and get things established before they went down again. I have been successful in that, got a nice place to live, a nice car, a good business going and don’t owe anything to anybody. But look at generation Y, raised on cheap and east credit. They are going to have it bad because when one of them loses a job, they won’t be able to make their payments. They are used to restaurants, leased cars they cannot afford and ski holidays. Living without that will be a shock and will have a ripple effect down the entire economy.

So, here we are, at almost 2009 with a new President and uncertain times. Last year was easy to predict, this year much more difficult.

Here is Kimchipig’s to do list:

-Health Care: One of the major reasons American companies cannot compete is health costs. American has to have a national health insurance programme similar to ours.

-Bailouts: They have to stop. Instead of bailing out the TOP of the system, the greedy fucks that caused the crash to begin with, bail out the BOTTOM, the working stiffs who are going to end up on the street. Defer their mortgage payments, put them on partial payments, do future value financing, anything but give millionaires more millions.

-GM: Let it fail. Nationalise the pensions and sell assets to cover them. Health benefits will be paid by the national health insurance.

-Energy policy: The USA has to stop being held hostage by big business. The super corporation has become so mind bogglingly corrupt it defies logic and most of that is based on the oil and car companies. More so oil because it doesn’t actually cost much to produce oil compared for what it sells for. These bastards owned Bush and got what they wanted. The best way to pull the rug out from under them is a real energy policy that mandates real energy use reductions. If America could cut its oil use by one quarter, not a single Arab could hold America hostage again.

-Education: In the last 30 years, I have witnessed one of the greatest dumbing downs of society in history. It started with Regan and even Clinton could not stop it. It is not about math and science scores, these are meaningless; it is about teaching people that they have to think for themselves and question what is going on around them. The blind (foolish) “patriotism” I witnessed in the USA after 2001 was about the most shocking thing I have ever witnessed, second only to Nazi Germany, and it led America into disaster. Unfortunately, uneducated lemmings are not terribly productive and tend to wallow in drugs, alcohol, tobacco and jail and unless you have a whacking great war to cull them, they are kind of useless in the long run because they don’t vote (or can’t due to a conviction) anyway. If you educate people they will find productive things to do.

-Off shore money: This has to stop. The elite exports the money they US taxpayer shovels into them via either defense or bailouts so it cannot be taxed. This is the main reason the money supply is so grossly huge and the market place has been distorted. The government doesn’t have the ability to tax it back like it did in World War II.

-Illegal aliens: They have to be booted out so Americans can have a chance to get jobs. Really, it is a scandal that more that 25,000,000 Mexicans labour in the USA, something like 20% of Mexico’s population. What Kimchipig thinks will happen:

-Obama will try to do just this. The corporations and the Republicans they own will scream, holler, lobby, go to court and try to get the stacked Supreme Court to strike anything down that might strip away the power of the super corporation to enrich it leaders. -

Oil will stay cheap to in an attempt to pull the rug out from any real energy programme.

-The economy will not bottom out in 2009. It will continue to decline until real spending power is restored to the working people. This will take some time and is couple with improvements in education.

-Obama has about a year to really get the ball rolling. We’ll see how successful he is because America really is teetering on the edge now.