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.