If you hadn't guessed yet, you're in dystopia. If you're reading and understanding this, then you're either the Inner Party or the Outer Party. If you don't understand it and want to move back to watching Home Shopping Network, then you're a Prole.
If you're the Outer Party, like the frog slowly simmering and then boiling, you probably didn't even notice it. But it's here. It happened already. Forget all that you see. It's not reality. It's just a fantasy. Like a shadow at the edge of your consciousness, that you turn your head chasing out of the corner of your eye, you know this to be true. But I can only show you the way. It is you who must make the decision to face the facts presented.
If you're the Inner Party, then you will not like the tale that I tell. You see it as dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to the imprisonment of the intelligentsia and the Outer Party to the Proles, dangerous to the control that must be brutally established and maintained. It is you who wish to silence this voice calling out in the wilderness.
It's called "social arbitrage," and it is an economic phenomenon that is, if not causing the greatest and longest recession in history, is changing fundamentally the system put in place a century ago. It is making rich countries decisively poorer and poorer countries marginally richer. If you're asking yourself how that can be, if you're asking yourself who is profiting from this -- because someone has got to be profiting from this -- then it is time to make yet another introduction in our rogues gallery of heroes, antiheroes, toadies and all that falls in between.
Middle class real incomes have been falling for decades, while the economy was financed on consumer debt. When Joe Sixpack couldn't afford the new Wal Mart televisions and X-Box 360's, he had to finance them with his credit cards. Buying junk made in China and financing it at usurious 20% interest. This created a bubble, as the economy wasn't sustainable. It was simply being financed for the time being, until everything that Joe Sixpack had to hock was gone. Even when secondary mortgages became legal in some states, and all of the Joe's had taken second liens on their houses to try to keep up with their dwindling real income and rising cost of living, it wasn't enough. Eventually it was to run out.
The dream of every American to own their own home. Well, the cult of deregulation and the cult of the anti-Government managed to send it down the shitcan. First, the big banks took the Joe's mortgages and decided to "securitize" them. They bundled multiple note obligations and sold them on a market as an unregulated security. To do this, however, they had to separate the debt from the mortgage property interest itself, a legal impossibility.
When the courts began blowing the whistle on the "securitization" of mortgages, and creditors' trying to foreclose upon real property via their "mortgage interest" to satisfy the outstanding debt -- a debt that had to be separated from the "mortgage interest" to "securitize" it, the banks suddenly realized what they had done. Centuries of settled case law and the Law of Property prevented precisely this charade.
They couldn't separate the mortgage interest from the debt and then try to use the mortgage interest to secure the debt. They couldn't put the shit back into the horse. Suddenly, sensing the onrushing calamity, Congress rammed a bipartisan bill through in the middle of the night seeking to relax the timeless protections afforded a party in foreclosure, and, thankfully, the President never signed it. Perhaps word had gotten out as to what was going on.
The Party's slogan is that ""Proles and animals are free." And so it is. Free to indulge in the coming season of consumerism and religious redemption. Free to watch cars racing around a cement track over and over and over. Free to eat themselves into obesity and an early death. Free to do anything to escape what they almost sense that they know, but cannot quite see clearly enough, in the back of their mind's eye.
"If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles."
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