Ignorance or denial of the current economic situation does not exempt one from reality. This stimulus package is only setting us up for a much larger mess. First off, Obama’s “team” is comprised of a bunch of piratic crooks; they fall very short of a cabinet fit for “change.” Geithner, straight from Wall St. (NY Fed.) is a Rubin-protégé who only wants to carry on the legacy of Bush-Paulson peculation-policy, and float us out of this mess with another inflationary bubble at the expense of tax revenues – not to mention that Timmy never once addressed the impending doom in the credit markets back in 2007; perhaps this was to keep the irresponsible swapping (i.e. opprobrious gambling) on Wall St. persistent. Next in O’s cabinet we’ve got Summers, a man culpable for the housing shit-show whom facilitated the rescinding of Glass-Steagall. Summers also encouraged and dragooned, along with Rubin & Alan ‘Bubbles’ Greenspan, Brooksley Born (chair of Commodities Futures Trading Commission) to resign. Prior to throwing in the towel, Born was urging for regulation of the markets in new derivatives.
The crux is, in 2009 we are going to witness mass foreclosure in commercial real estate, consumer credit defaults, more residential foreclosures, and rising unemployment. These will all converge, militating any amelioration of the current crises, and rather exacerbate the crisis as a whole – this is a fact. For the U.S. to even come clean in ’09 it needs to generate at least $2 trillion – not gonna happen via tax revenues my friends; and if you look across the way to our debt-retaining pals in the East – they’re not doing so swell either; besides, they’ve had enough of our devalued dollar (a currency that has depreciated 96% since 1913), so we won’t be getting the $ there. The entire global market has turned on U.S. Treasury Debt – there is a Bond-Market collapse on the near horizon too. The Managing Director of the IMF has officially stated that the world’s advanced economies are already in a depression; the entire world, minus the U.S., is in virtual revolution right now. It’s myopic to believe that we’ll fare well through this. It’s only a matter of time (no earlier than 2010) that the U.S. undergoes total collapse.
As for the recent election, it is fascinating to read the purple content generated by folks who can’t separate the great achievement – the act of electing a black man into the white house, from the role of the actor. Hope has got many in a stranglehold but, as Derrick Jensen asseverates, hope is investing your existence into a future in which you have no agency over.
Now, aside from this entire economic debacle, Obama has already wavered with his foretokens regarding change and progressive policy. Troops were supposed to be taken out of Iraq, now he’s keeping 80,000 troops in Iraq and will be deploying 17,000 more into Afghanistan; so much for moving away from military industrialism. Let’s also not forget Obama’s pledge to AIPAC to invest $30 billion more into Israel. The litany of questions I ask all of the Obama zealots is what change is he really going to usher in? An end to the military industrial complex? An end to the Zion alliance? An end to financial conglomerates and syndicates? An end to industrial energy endeavors that are rapaciously tearing apart the ecology of this planet? An end to bailing out banksters with our hard-earned wages? Or does Obama stand for other changes? And if so, what the fuck are they?! Just some simple questions regarding his hopeful platitudes for change.
Currently, there is much prattle regarding conspiracy, NWO, et al. Whether or not one dons the tin-foil hat and alleges a grand conspiracy for world domination and senseless population control (which I believe propinquity shows we’re very close to this being a truth – viz. power and wealth is concentrated in a small few, and people en masse are constrained by the market and consumerism) – anyway, whether one professes conspiracy or not, the results are still the same, view it through whichever lens you choose. Personally, I believe this is all a result of a simple power-equation rather than a finely tuned and calculated conspiracy machinated over millennia by a bunch of Rosicrucians. The financial crisis, well, yeah this could be intentional, it appears to be moreso than accidental when you accrue the facts, but it’ s only about funneling money to the top, it was a heist not a doomspiracy.
The truth is, centralized power can never engender equality –that’s what this is showing – that is what is and has been happening. Furthermore, every single society, shit – every single civilization and empire throughout time has collapsed. Why would anyone think we are exempt from that inevitable pattern? The U.S. (as well as any other ‘civilized’ country) maintains itself, let alone grows, by the importation of resources from elsewhere. The U.S. no longer produces enough domestic resources to maintain a healthy economy. After a while of plundering peripheral communities and landbases for resources, conflict emerges, you scar the ecology of the planet, spin the earth’s climate out of control, and eventually run out of resources– simple math. My advice to hopeful optimists and marketeers– don’t omit the idea of total collapse of civilization from the scope of real possibilities. And besides, considering the current state of the planet on account of the behavior of the dominant culture, perhaps total collapse should be the optimistic outlook. But of course it all depends on what you make of things. If you think it’s not all too bad, and it’ll soon be a market world for a market man, go invest in vice funds in the interim. If you’re starting to believe that things are rapidly descending then do what’s wise: invest in a garden and transcend the indoctrinated hyperindividualism – practice neighborliness.
Moving along now. As for the folks who think the ‘military industrial complex’ is an anachronism, it has hardly been imbibed by obsolescence, but has only grown to virtually integrate the entire market. And now we have the keystone elements, security and surveillance, driving what’s left of the market as well. A precipitous recrudescence of security and surveillance also attests that things…well… are just going down the tubes… gotta protect and maintain the empire, so hire more goons.
I’d like to talk about the economic crisis for a moment again and touch upon the lefty-Dem argument that a Keynesian stimulus is the only thing that has worked throughout history, and will work just fine now. First off, when has your history begun? Last I checked capitalism has been around for more than a century…and let’s not forget that Keynes was Treasurer for the Cambridge University Eugenics Society…not that that has anything to do with his ideas, just with his personhood. Anyhow, the Keynesian model is a bubble-machine, the only reason these doctrines have ‘worked’ is because they were able to inflate a bubble that could drift us up and over and into the next set of dominoes to knock over. But about bubbles – hasn’t capitalism itself been just a perennial bubble that has conveyed the facilitation of the transformation of life into death the world over for the past 600 years or so? I believe it’s time for that bubble to pop once and for all. Perhaps this is what Marvin Harris meant when he admonished in his writings the impending burst of the industrial bubble.
The recent years of the new millennium (the Aughts) have seen the merging of ultra privatization and a corporate stalwart, that whether anyone wants to deny it or not, has bought our world governments off, which in my opinion echoes a caveat of semblance to Mussolini’s promulgation of how to successfully fructify total fascism. Now, I’m not one to sound the tin-foil trumpet of esoteric agendas waving the ‘Sword of Damocles’ over our heads (not that there couldn’t be one) but again, the more you centralize wealth i.e. $$, you centralize power and the default of the latter is total control (and then of course paranoia, abuse, corruption, etc.)– a more natural way of explicating the phenomena we are witnessing but keep sealed behind our lips lest an NSL finds its way through the mail slot.
As for Obama – again, let us recognize the people’s overdue exudation of indoctrinated racism and rejoice in that, but as far as the role of empire, just look at the policies and the cabinet members; we all know Rahm Emanuel’s sentiment regarding Middle East policy and we know about his dual citizenship and time spent in the IDF; where is his allegiance, really? And Gates and Billary… harrumph…
Anyhow, let’s get back to resolving this pecuniary mess. How exactly will the U.S. be able to generate the needed revenue? China’s government is definitely learning their lesson about their abuse of their role in the global market with their currency suppression and civil repression and all– which, ultimately, was a choice of their own – now severely repercussive with millions of angry jobless Sinos. However, is not the U.S.’ exploitation of putative Communist China’s propensity to funnel wealth to the center oligarchy rather than to the community a flaw that has its own repercussions back here? Those dowdy doodads come with a cost, other than the price paid at WalMart. I don’t think China will be buying any of our debt any time soon.
Boy, the U.S. seems to be stuck between a rock and hard place, huh? And what about all that rancor and bellicose language directed toward the U.S. from Russia lately? Well America, geopolitics is a fluid and dynamic wave that cannot be controlled, only slightly directed; foreign policy has some wacky protracting corollaries … but of course 9/11 had nothing to do with this latter allusion.
Now, the kicker is the eco-bill. Humans have been walking along for the past 10,000 years or so with it ingrained that we exist outside of an ecological context, completely submerged in the abstraction of ‘social-construct.’ The fact is we are circumscribed to the ecology of this planet. Derrick Jensen states (and, really, any remotely intelligible person can arrive at this conclusion), ignorance or denial of ecological law does not exempt anyone from the consequences of their actions. I believe we are witnessing the incipience of a convergence of economic and ecological repercussions of actions that have been steered by power desideratum for way too long. We will undoubtedly witness mass exoduses – in fact, we already are, just look down to the global South. And Africa is on deck. And aren’t we already emerged in resource wars that are slowly aggrandizing into a global phenomenon?
What I want to know, as crises seem to be picking up velocity, is how will we handle these issues? Why, at the most critical time in human history is Big Pharma in collusion with the FAO and WHO?
Why have they applied ‘risk assessment’ to nutrients when a billion people are starving for christ’s sake? Why are advanced economies still pumping $ into the weaponizing of nanotechnology? Why does U.S. military strategy now have a domestic focus? Why do we have InfraGuard? What is the purpose of all the fully guarded yet empty prison camps within the U.S.? What will happen to radical scholars, activists, and unionists in the ensuing years in the wake of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007? Why am I nervous? There are soooooo many questions I’ve got shootin’ around in my head. Anyhoo, the future appears bleak if you want to look at things through this sort of lens.
Tin-foil hat or not, facts are facts…and so we turn to rhetoric to help us decide what the facts do indeed allude to.