Economic Diaspora Over. Chickens Coming Home to Roast - er - Roost.

The days of college graduates having multiple job offers all over the world are clearly over. Their best bet now lies in moving in to mom's basement and taking bong hits with other 23 year olds in the same predicament. Mom and dad wouldnt mind so much, except that dad's real estate deal is $600k under water and mom's 401k is down 48% from its all-time high. Soon Junior gets married, and suddenly Lovely Laura is moving in also with a baby on the way. These 3 people will not be taking part in a process so stoked in tradition that it has never been questioned in almost 100 years: Household Formation. And as this scenario gets repeated millions of times, the only economic response is COLLAPSE. There can be nothing else. Everytime this happens, someone WILL NOT be giving mortgage business to a bank. WILL NOT be hiring a gardener. WILL NOT be needing new furniture. WILL NOT be paying property taxes. WILL NOT be buying a new car. WILL NOT be going to Vegas. WILL NOT be investing in the stock market. WILL NOT be very inclined to have real health care. WILL NOT be dining in fine restaurants. And on and on and on. So as the bubble-induced economic diaspora comes to a screeching halt, we will do something that in reality has been the case throughout 99% of mankind's history. Relying on and helping each other in a communal sort of way. Harsh economic realities now in effect for 3+ years haved forced even the most die-hard capitalists to realize this new reality. We will live with each other more often, nepotism will make a surging comeback from the highest to the lowest economic classes, and micro-socialism will be the norm among us as senseless economic policies are enacted merely as an attempt to placate the masses.

Aside from young graduates/new adults no longer taking part in the formation of new households, there also another dire situation taking place which is exacerbating the aforementioned phenomena: Household De-Formation. The number of men in the 30s living with their parents has also surged to all-time highs. So aside from a lack of new entrants into the household formation category, there are also millions of Gen Xers literally dropping out of society as we know it, and shacking up with mom and dad. Add to this the growing list of folks in their 70s and 80s who have been hit by the triple whammy of rising health care, zero interest on savings, and significant drops in 401k balances, and the holidays may soon be a time to get away from, rather than visit, the extended family.

Of course, a grand economic re-set would be one way to solve these problems. But that would entail a whole different class of folks taking huge economic hits. And those folks never take economic hits. You, on the other hand, do.

BCS Championship: Old Money vs. New Money

Well, they had a ball didnt they? They saw the burgeoning successful American middle class as on opportunity for just one thing: The Heist of the Millenium. And now it appears the vault is empty. There really isnt much else to plunder and pillage. Between housing, health care, education, utilites and consumerism, only the lucky ones still have a sustainable lifestyle, and even they are on borrowed time. So when theres nothing left to steal, nothing left to squeeze, and no one left to trick, the elites turn to each other. GAME ON, MF'ers!!!!. Get ready for the most epic battle of all-time, as TPTB set their sights on each other. The good news is, you are out of their cross-hairs. The bad news.... its only cause they blew you the fuck away.

Subtle hints of the elites turning on each other have been going on for a few years now. Making former BofA CEO Ken Lewis gobble up worthless entites like Countrywide and Merrill Lynch were some of the early opening salvos of this battle. Merril stock would have opened that Monday at about $0. But for some reason, Ken Lewis offered $29/ share on Sunday night. Then he was forced out. Do this. And this. Then get the fuck out! Thanks Ken. Or Dominic Strauss-Kahn getting pulled off an airplane about to depart and arrested on ultimately baseless rape charges. Never would have happened when all the elites were on the same page. The latest, of course, is Dave Corzine and MF Global. $1.2 billion in segregated customer money still missing. No real explanation of where it is. Turns out Corzine decided to load the boat on bail-out dependent European soveriegn bonds at a time when his brethren were despereately looking for a way out of these investments. How convenient. Global banks were all too happy to dump, and MF Global was gone in a poof. Of course, there will be no perp walk for Corzine..at least for now.

So its Old Money vs New Money. And though it might be billed as the Ali-Frazier analog of Wall Street, in reality, it will be no contest. Old money will blow out New Money. See, Old Money is clean. Made many times over, over the course of 100+ years in some cases. Pure. No debt, no derivatives, no 30-1 leverage, no CDS. Just pure money, free and clear. New money on the other hand, is largely dependent on leverage, accounting trickery, fractional reserve lending, and stock market levels. It is the new money that is desperately seeking to hold on to what they have. It is new money that will implode should the derivatives market, or interest rates, or emerging markets, or real estate be allowed to find their natural levels. Thus all the shenanigans and bailouts by the Fed, US Govt, and the Euro counterparts. But the Old Money is getting tired of carrying the New Money. They kindly, though reluctantly, let the Grand Global Bailout Scheme have a chance to succeed. But now its grown long in the tooth. And so the Old Money is getting ready to pull the plug. All the plugs. They realize that no country or union's currency that was predicated on foolish printing, or endless and unlimited bailouts, has ever flourished. It will be ugly. But it should happen relatively quickly. And then, we start over. Week 1.

The Slave Morality

Wilhelm Freidrich Nietzsche wrote about the slave morality and the master morality.  The two are locked in an eternal dance through human history and psychology.  Nietzsche abhorred the slave morality and saw himself as a champion or a savior for the master morality.

And he may have been on to something these strange days, although not in the way he would have anticipated.  How many people do you encounter on a daily basis who, although having attained higher degrees and professional success, are so out of touch with what is really going on, that you find it hard to apprehend?  Have you encountered these types in your daily life?  It may go something like this.  (The names have been changed to protect the guilty.)  You have a neighbor or someone you know at work.  You typically only talk about the yard, if it's your neighbor, or work, if it's your co-worker.  Then something slips into the conversation, seemingly innocently.  These days, it may involve something about the government, a look into the invisible Iron Curtain that runs between Blue America and Red America, or, worse, something about religion.

So it falls into the conversation.  You suddenly realize that this person is one of them.  Almost like the aliens from the movie "They Live," this is one of them, and now you can see it.  Somehow, they have bought into the media lies that stream and spill 24 hours per day, seven days per week.  They have bought into the lie that the government is evil and that its supposed spending habits somehow resulted in this person's slavery.  It doesn't even make logical sense, and you have been over it in your head again and again.  It still doesn't make any sense.  Yet this person has been led by the nose to believe it, and believe it this person did.

It could also be about Barack Obama.  I recall speaking with a long-lost friend who kept referring to "him" and what "he" was doing.  After some time of politely nodding, hoping that it would end, I finally ventured to ask him, "who is 'he'"?  Silence.  He looked at me testingly.  Perhaps it was for him the reverse of the experience I was having.  Perhaps he was questioning, wondering whether I was one of "them," albeit a "them" diametrically opposed to him and all that he apparently stands for.  Then he suddenly and nervously laughed.  "Surely," he thought, I "can't be one of them."  So he continued.  "Yeah, so he bought not one but two black buses, and he had them flown around the country."  There was a litany of things that "he" (or "He") had supposedly done or been doing, and it sounded bizarrely conspiratorial, and very personal.  Eventually, I asked him about economic policy.  Back to "him" it went.  "No," I asked him, "forget 'him' for just a minute, and focus on the policy aspects and implications of what we are talking about."  He looked at me for a split second, then responded with "But you can't."  I tuned out, having peered into the chasm separating us, and realizing it was a waste of my time and energy to try to help this person.

You see, people must be viewed more than just by their intelligence.  Because some moderately intelligent and very capable people can be so lost in the media brainwash that one would think intelligence would allow them to think their way out of it.  But it doesn't work that way.  In addition to intelligence, each person has a level of slave morality.  The level of slave morality corresponds directly to their ability to think for themselves and escape the media matrix.  A low level of slave morality means that the person is not likely to succumb to the lies about the government and forced to vote as their religion tells them to vote.  A high level of slave morality is the exact opposite:  such a person is a mental slave.

This convention allows you to deal with the dissonance much better, the dissonance between the truth as those with a low slave morality can discern it, and what we are told by the media -- Fox News, AM radio, and the Republican presidential hopefuls -- and what we know to be the unattractive truth.

Because being in the middle of that dissonance for long periods of time is difficult.

You: Statistical Outlier

Ever wonder why, when you wake up in the morning, you have fresh running water, or delicious food you can cook or buy? Ever wonder why you get to sit in an air-conditioned setting on a 104 degree day. Is it because you are a raging success? Is it because God loves you more than say, the Somalians? Or is it perhaps that you simply happened to be a member of the lucky sperm club? The fact that you were born here, or in Europe, rather than in Bangalore, has far and away the most impact on why your life rocks --- for now (rocking being a relative term). But as the market implosion of 2000, 2008, and now 2011 demonstrate, things built on luck and pipe dreams and folly, eventually get arbitraged away by that funny little thing called mean reversion (no pun intended). And the reversion your about to experience will be mean, cruel, and ruthless. Oh it seems like a grand occurence now, but when someone pens The History of the World - Condensed in say, the year 2235, your existence and the mean reversion you experienced will be but a blip. Perhaps a couple of pages at most. See, mean reversion happens all the time in a historical and statistical sense. Its nothing new, rare, or strange. You got laid 3 times this month? Odds are, unless you are Brad Pitt, you probably won't get laid again till New Year's Eve. You made $2.5 million in 2007? Odds are you will not see that kind of jack again, well -ever. You are a 3rd generation industrial tycoon heir? Well, in a few of generations, there's a fair chance your descendents will be working at Wal-Mart. That's just the way random shit happens.

Here Come the Robots

In "The Graduate", Dustin Hoffman is advised by an older family friend to get into "plastics". If they ever re-made that film, they'd maybe say get into "robots". Mexican laborers may seem cheap compared to American workers, and Chindian workers may look like a bargain compared to Mexicans. But Everyone is expensive compared to robots. Robots don't unionize, get sick, need 401k's, or insurance. They don't get pregnant or cancer. And perhaps most importantly for FoxConn (they make all the iphones and related gadgetry), Robots don't jump ot of windows (unless directed too). See, Foxconn recently had to install nets around their buildings. Turns out too many employees were jumping out the window during their shift. After a bogus PR campaign that included the CEO walking around the factory floor, giving 20% pay hikes across the board, and a bunch of hand-shakes, some genius at FoxConn decided enough was enough. Let's just bring in the robots. So the company announced their intention to have a million robots working for them within 3 years. They omitted their 5 and 10 plans out of fear that the nets may not have been strong strong enough to support all their workers jumping out simultaneously. And if Chinese workers are screwed, then you are REALLY screwed. Here you are, preparing to do battle over the rest of your life to better prepare yourself for the New Normal/Economic Blitzkrieg that is surely coming; that is, the lowering of your Standard of Living as that of the Chindians rises meteorically. Your plan was to minimize the pain and hope to meet all those other guys somewhere in the middle. Only, Robots change all that. With Robots, there is no middle. Just an abyss. You're gonna hit terminal velocity soon. The thud will be horrific.

Of Napkins and Sweet n Lo

Dining at a relatively upper scale restaurant, one frequented by trendy zip code retirees and stay at home moms in Land Rovers, I've been noticing something: They all head out with a wad of napkins and artificial sweetener. Hell, I'd expect this this at the Taco Bell. Taco Bell napkins and my ass were well acquainted in college. But that was college. And that was Taco Bell. This is the golden age. This is a French restaurant. These people are driving Lexus'. A recent poll said 64% of all Americans do not have enough saved for a $1,000 emergency. If that's not third world, I dont know what is. This reminds me of the moment in 2002 I realized we had a housing bubble. $2 million dollar homes had beat up Mazda trucks and rusty Corollas in the driveway. That didnt "fit". And people in trendy zip codes hoarding napkins doesnt "fit" either.

A Global Economic Hit (Part the First)

"By the way, I took care of that thing for ya . . . "

Pete (the Killer), Goodfellas (1990)

The S&P has downgraded U.S. treasuries for the first time in history, but it is also probably the first time in history one of the principal owners of the S&P is one of the largest supporters of a presidential candidate running against the current president.  Harold McGraw is a principal of McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor.

And so the numbers come crashing and crashing downward, and it really leaves you to wonder.  What if there were no "economies" and "markets" churning in computer servers with green and (mostly) red digital numbers.  There would still be a bunch of people with a demand and a bunch of other people with the ability to meet that demand with supply.  Is this not an economy?  What grand bargain did our governments strike to take away this self-evident truth, that we are, in essence, the economy?

This question led me to ask further questions about government debt.  I have been in awe at the recent feverish, insane hysteria of austerity.  It reaches everything.  You would think money is a bad thing the way the media has hoi polloi barking like a rabid dog at anything even remotely resembling debt.  What has hoi polloi so set off?  And why?

Certainly, the way hoi polloi laps up the ideas it needs to think directly from the media, whatever it is telling us should be telling in revealing what has put us in the unenviable position of being victims of all of these failing numbers, and this strange "economy" that exists apart from us, yet inexplicably holds us all indebted to it.

The author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man writes recently that what he had done for the U.S. decades ago has now evolved and transformed into a hit on all of us.  He talks recently about how that growth model is now being used by global corporations to enslave even Americans.  But that is far too complicated for our purposes here.  Our question is what happened to our economy?  You know, you and me making and serving and selling, and used-to-be, getting paid.

The reason why the hoi polloi are calling for the dismantling of their governments is because the corporatists want to take over the work, the economic muscle and financial remuneration, from these governments.  John Maynard Keynes knew that governments play a role -- and are meant to play a role -- in the economy.  The modern state must maintain a government, and inevitably that government becomes one of the biggest players in the economy.  On the global scale, these governments wield an extraordinary amount of power, not only themselves, but their relations to corporations contractually, as they hire contractors to perform for the government, and regulatory.

Worse, when the corporatists get into trouble, they have the governments bail them out, and hoi polloi pays for the bailouts.  That is why these governments are all so massively in debt.  Defense spending?  Corporatists.  War financing?  Corporatists.  Banking and financial speculation?  Corporatists.  Infastructure or human services?  That doesn't make the corporatists any money, so you can forget it.

You see, the corporatists have hoi polloi calling for their own enslavement.  It was a brilliant plan, a global economic hit on hoi polloi.  And the killers even made their prey like it.

Floods, Tornadoes, Earthquakes and Fires

Mother Nature has belched in all four elemental forms.  There is either too much water, or not nearly enough.  The wait for some economic respite, the wait for the horror to recede, hoping that tomorrow, we'll all be free.

But this is a systemic change.  There is nowhere for the pendulum to return.  Everywhere in every way and at every time-type of change.  Go outside and look at the sky.  Think about every organism that looks to it for sustenance as it goes about its busy way.  Think about all of that changing and the scale of something like that changing, and changing permanently.

If your employer can pay a person with a high school or even a college diploma in India or China or the Philippines less than your employer pays you, then something is going to change.  Assuming the Internet and technology can defray any associated costs with the distance involved between your employer and his new employees in India, China or the Philippines, the change is going to take place.

You are going to lose your job.  And with that change comes another.  You will have to find other work that cannot be outsourced to India, China or the Philippines.  It will likely pay less, at least for the short term.  The next change is that your standard of living.  It is going to go down.  You will have to change your spending habits, the type of  food you eat, whether or not you can afford entertainment, and, most importantly, where you live.

You will no longer be able to afford the house you live in.  This will likely result in a default on your mortgage, or your selling the house at a loss in order to get out of the note you no longer afford.  Eventually, when others like you have their job outsourced to India, China or the Philippines, they too will default or sell at a loss.  The result is that the housing market goes into decline, then free fall.

To the extent you had been using your house to secure any debt, you will default on this as well.  Since the value of the security is declining, it may not be able to secure the debt.  You can no longer live on debt any more because you have used all that had been extended to you.  You are entitled to no more.

On the macroeconomic scale, the change results in an equilibrium between your earning power and those you now compete with in India, China or the Philippines.  Economic principles dictate that, if your employer pays his new employees over there less than he pays you, eventually the earning power between the two parts of the world will become the same.

With this equilibrium in earning power comes an equilibrium in spending power and, eventually, standard of living.  If you make the same as someone over there, then you will have the ability to pay the taxes only as much as someone over there.  Infrastructure depending upon payment of those taxes will also begin to suffer, until it is in equilibrium with that of India, China and the Philippines.

Your local municipality has lost its tax base.  So roads and bridges and human services begin to suffer.  After spending four trillion on a war designed to propagate the lie that America is still superior to all others, your municipality is without that money to pay any teachers.  But without teachers, you are only raising a population that is less educated, less likely to question, and less likely even to understand the process taking place, as you are reading it here and now.  So consider yourself lucky.

Without property taxes or sales taxes, the property taxing authority has to foreclose upon property to get taxes paid.  This results in foreclosure sales that further send the market into free fall.  The more that default, the more that are foreclosed upon, the more the market goes into free fall.  It is a never-ending feedback loop, an express elevator to Hell.

The types of goods that you can buy, and therefore attract to the market where you live, will also fall into equilibrium with India, China and the Philippines.  On a national scale, not only does infrastructure suffer, but so too do things like the space program, the arts, and military.  Eventually, everything has changed.  What was once a Superpower or a Hyperpower is now a backwater.

But that's not all.  Operators are standing by.  Dial the number on the bottom of your screen.  These changes began to have an extraordinary impact upon your pysche.  The American Dream that you had been brought up with begins to rust, and cloud up, and evaporate.  No longer is there really anything that makes you special.  The fireworks on television from super-high-tech-jet-fighters are relics of the past, designed and manufactured with bloated defense budgets that were eventually lost in the trillions that the defense firms ran off with.

No longer does  the American dream ensure that you are better -- or at least better off -- than the rest of the world.  In fact, as your federal government goes further and further into to debt from trying to keep the show going on, what money you have becomes inflated and less valuable.  The stocks that you scrimped and saved to buy are not worth what the ballooned market says they are.  It is government printing and spending and debting that propels this balloon.  You and I both know that it must eventually pop.

So what are you left to do?  Well, there is ol' time religion and its new-bred brother, religious fanaticism.  Forget all that you see, it's not reality, it's just a fantasy.  Reality, you can begin to believe, exists in another time and place no one has ever been to and returned.  But it is so much easier, because you still believe in the dream.  You can even ward off the fears and the disillusionment that is wracking your soul by focusing on the simplicity and reptition of ol' time religion and its Siamese twin, the Other.  The Muslim Terrorists, or the Illegal Aliens from South of the border -- now those are the ones at fault for stealing your dream.

How can you find meaning in all of this?  Well, you can take up the mythical fight.  Pretend you are on the beaches of Normandy, even though you never leave the Lazy Boy.  Rail against the Enemy with your cheerleaders on television.  Those millionaires make more in a month than you will ever now see in your life, but you whimper and rub up against the bottoms of their feet because their anger seems to make it so much better.

Don't blame yourself for electing those who sold your dream.  Don't blame yourself for supporting those who robbed you and made you into a moron.  Don't blame yourself for buying into the fantastical lie that the Other took away your American Dream.  And, most important of all, don't blame yourself for now being unable to do anything about it.

Go back to sleep.  Hopefully, the floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and fires will lull you further into your own deep sleep.

And when you look long into the Abyss, the Abyss also looks long into you . . .

We are clearly outmatched.  And outgunned.  And out run.

Whatever intelligence it is that maintains this stranglehold on the proles is not an accident.  You have literally millions of Americans voting and complaining and hating, rather vociferously, the very people like them and who would act for them.

You have millions earning pennies and just a few, powerful and organized with all of the billions.  And, yet, for some reason, in this century and on this continent, the exploited cannot see it.

Mass media?  Clever advertising?  Emotional manipulation?  Or are they even better than we think.  Have they scientifically mastered the proles.  Certainly, by now, they would have had the time, the money, and the inclination to do so.

Radio station and radio station tuned to religious programming.  Regular media featuring endless editorializing voices favoring the Corporatocracy and the Kleptocracy.  Certainly some of those among us know what is going on, yet still serve their masters against fellow slaves.  The concentration camp prisoners who served the guards in meting out punishment to other concentration camp prisoners.

Look around and see for yourself.

What the End Will Look Like

Today we see dictators fleeing with their respective countries' gold and dollars. But soon, it will be corporate CEO's, their puppet politicians, and perhaps their helpful lobbyists who will be fleeing the enraged, destitute masses. Maybe the Fall of Amerika will mirror the Fall of Saigon. Every last person, even closely related to those with private aircraft, yachts, or underground secret bunkers, will be clamoring to get in. Few will find sanctuary. Then, like the secret police trying to blend in with protestors once they realized it was too late, the patsies will join the rest of us. But we'll ferret thme out. And it could get ugly.

The End of Neoconservatism

Penny for the thoughts of the Neoconservatives who took power with George W. Bush and launched the Iraq war based on what are now largely undisputed falsifications.  That country fell in a top-down, brutal military invasion that destroyed its infrastructure and decimated its populace.  It was essentially removed as a nation.  The costs of the war will be dwarfed now by the costs of rebuilding. 

And the twin Neoconservative lies that (1) Democracy could be created by force without grassroots organization or institutions, and that (2) Democracies don't launch wars are now exposed, also even outside of any reasonable dispute.  But what we did learn from the Neoconservative Junta is that dictators launch wars.  Thus their fetish for the Unitary Executive, a President that can launch wars without a declaration of war from Congress, create extrajudicial "commissions," hold individuals indefinitely in violation of Due Process.  They installed a dictator and did exactly what they purported to oppose.

Rewind to the speech Barack Obama gave in Cairo.  An opening and a reaching out to the Arab and Muslim world.  Victor Hugo's maxim, that stronger than the mightiest armed force is the power of an idea whose time has come, writ large, has been realized right before our very eyes.  And with it comes the messier forms of a Democracy.  What is the West to do when those they violently disagree with are elected to power though the very Democractic process they so vocierfously purport to hold as their mission, the raison d'etre?

This will get interesting indeed.

Fading, Slowly.

Learn to fade. Slowly and gracefully. And pace yourself. If you dont, you'll implode in no time. But string it out and the neighbors wont realize that over 10 years you went from a Hummer to a Maxima. Or from Aspen vacations to KOA campouts. Or from Salzbury steak to cheese sandwiches. Or from cocaine to meth. They'll never know you're 'consulting' consists of making phone calls that are never returned, watching Springer, and re-living the glory days with former peers. They never know your kid dropped out of college and joined the Marines. Or that your 401k that once was the dominant topic of conversation with friends, is now gone. They'll never know you really moved not to be closer to family, but because all you could afford was a one room efficiency. And they'll think you dont go to the Cuntry Club anymore because management offended your wife. So Relax. Fade. Slowly. The old saying "Time is money" also works in reverse. Particularly in a depression.

Welcome to the Age of Austerity

"Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!"

-The Age of Aquarius (The Fifth Dimension)

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

"We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions."

-James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

"A sane person to an insane society must appear insane."

 -Kurt Vonnegut (Welcome to the Monkey House)

And so it begins. The age of plenty and the age of accord have given way to the wreckage of systems that allocate, whether it be allocating wealth, labor, materiel, all of them seem to be veering off course. And the only response that seems to be wafting from those who pretend to understand is that you must cut back, conserve, preserve, save and deny.

It has pervaded everything, from sales and marketing to the service professions.  Governments everywhere have been forced to guarantee the banks after the banks went on a spending spree for a decade or so.  Unregulated financial frauds in which the financial markets now swim were traded up and up and up, and then, at the last minute, dumped for the government to save.  Privatized profits and socialized losses.  Where there is enough for one to have all, there is somehow never enough for all to have enough.

So the question for you is whether there really is not enough?  Or whether a system that misallocates or misdistributes is actually desigend to create the falsehood that there is not enough.  Is there not enough for all, or just not enough for you?  A system can withhold something in order to increase its value, and use that false scarcity to achieve political ends.  This is an economic axiom.

When there is a contrived situation of not enough, there is a false competition created amongst those who need it.  There is a fight amongst them that diverts them and distracts them from the realization that there really is enough.  And in the fight and in the competition, there is disunity, lack of community, lack of organization and the ability to make change through mass movement.  This is the socioeconomic and sociopolitical result of a system designed to make sure that for some, if not most, there will never be enough.

Welcome to the Age of Austerity, Hope you Survive the Experience.

A Simple Question

If Arab nations continue to unravel, including the grandaddy of them all, Saudi Arabia, it may be due to one very simple questions Arabs are asking themselves. Why are a minute fraction of us worth trillions of dollars based on a naturally occurring resource which sits under all our feet, while the rest of us aren't worth camel shit? Because they're royalty? Now why should that fly anymore. Didnt Napolean say a revolution is only 3 meals away? And so this may be the Black Swan nobody saw coming, Oh they tried to decipher what it could be. But it may be here in the form of the resurgence of Pan-Arabism. So far Egypt took a 21% 2 day plunge. Saudi down 6% yesterday. Monday will be very interesting. Hey Bernank, get those helicopters a-roaring a la that scene in Apocalypse Now.

Dedicated to Hosni

The King called up his jet fighters
He said "You better earn your pay"
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the Casbah Way
As soon as Sharif
was chauffered outta there
the jet pilots tuned to
the cockpit radio blare
As soon as Sharif
was outta their hair
the jet pilots wailed:

Sharif dont like it
Rockin the Casbah
Rock the Casbah

The Clash - Rock the Casbah

The Machine Stops

"To the rescue! Avenge the Machine! Avenge the Machine!"

-The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

So often it isn't easy to accept change.  So it may be with the overall re-structuring of economic systems that had long served so well, but no longer.  These systems will not recover now, or possibly ever.

And from the awakening of the long denial of this ending, so springs human desperation and frantic discourse.  Religious beliefs substitute for long-lost reason, some of these beliefs so fairy tale that their origins can only be in make-believe.  But this is easier to accept than real change. 

As the old Chinese blessing (and curse) goes, "May you live in interesting times."

Slide.

"Slide."

-Fight Club (The Power Animal)

"You're the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine."

-Memo From Turner (Jagger/Richard)

So what are the sociopolitical effects of the economic transformation that is unhinging society?  Have we reached another period when the tectonic plates underpinning human events start shifting again?  The Renaissance was followed by the Reformation, as rebirth and expansion and creativity, then religious wars that brought the need for stability, and the Counter-Renaissance designed to restore stability and continuity, according to Toulmin and his followers.  Paging Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and his friends the thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

And if the economic models that were constructed in that day no longer hold true?  If, in fact, economic systems are not inherently stable, but inherently unstable?  Chaos theory imported into economic policy teaches us that there are butterfly wings thousands of miles away that manifest themselves here as a hurricane.  Is human economic behavior any less predictable?  So, it seems, we are finding out for ourselves.

So what are the socioeconomic and sociopolitical effects of that maelstrom?  Shall we address how the economic hurricane sweeping the globe impacts those in its way, their political institutions, their civil liberties, their fundamental rights and obligations?  Methinks that the man behind the curtain would rather you not know. 

Perhaps more importantly, are these economic developments simply the billions and billions of interactions of human beings, albeit in the form of economies, or is there some other purpose, or design?  Is there a hand (or hands) holding the massive miniarette and intentionally aggrandizing not just materiel, capital and wealth, but political power as well?  Or are many hands struggling for hegemony over this sinister mess?

And, if there is a design behind what we are seeing, who is behind it, and what is its purpose?

Where are the Hippies???

Well? Where the eff are they? They were once all over the frickin place. Doing drugs, having group sex, living on the road. But I have a sneaking suspicion, given we know how most if not all those self-absorbed assholes turned out, that the whole time Moon and Morning Honey Dew were living the life, Western Union wires from Mom and Pop were the only thing standing between them and mass assimilation. And of course, Charles Manson didnt help their cause either. By the time LAPD was combing thru the Tate-LaBianca residences in August 1969, astute gold investors should have known the ship was turning. Slowly, but it was turning. As the movement died, the hippies slowly matriculated into LAWKI (Life As We Know It). Again, slowly at first, but then with exponential speed. A few got PhDs in Computer Science at Berkeley, got good jobs, and traded in their VW vans for Beemers. And then their junk status peers noticed, and they went off to get advanced degrees and conquer the world they'd thought they set straight. HELLO INFLATION!!!

Now enter Ronald Reagan stage right. And bingo. Of Course Tricky Dick filled in the first few bingo squares by getting us off the gold standard, but Reagan, de-regulation, and deficit spending set off a secular 25 year bull market from hell. Instead of fucking in open fields, the hippies had fun in mountainside homes, yachts, and cocaine-laden discoteques.

They got on the Grid in a major way. And the grid was ever increasing in intensity and consumption. You had to run like Carl Lewis just to stand still. The homes, the private schools, the Euro vacation, waxing for the wife, then expensive divorce for the wife who breifly lived with Bruno the personal trainer, charity balls, Range Rovers and Lexus's. It never stopped. Until it did.

So now the generation who once appeared to hold a moral compass above everyone else, in the end, became the most corrupted generation since the Romans. And their kids were like disgusting extensions of themselves. Porshes at 16, incessant bullying, cheerleader Darwinism, Ritalin, Xstasy. I'll stop here.

Now, the Worst Generation could (dis)gracefully exit stage left of their scorched earth policy. But you see, they can't. 2008 wiped out perhaps what was the biggest cocktail party converation topic of the last 15 years: The 401(k). So they need to keep showing up at work shuffling papers and screaming into phones. And there are a whole bunch of next-genners who just want them to get the hell out of the way so they can take the positions, salaries, and security the hipsters had when they were the next-genners age. They obviously can't lead. They will never follow. So they need to get the fuck out of the way!