Some Thoughts for What’s Next

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America’s political problem is basically simple. A relatively small group of corporations, led by the big banks, became large enough and concentrated enough wealth to entrench their positions and buy the government so as to transform the economy from production based quasi-capitalism to financialized feudalism based on parasitic rents and con jobs.

 

The looting of the country was concealed for many years by propping up the middle class with ever-increasing debt, while globalization was able to keep consumer prices low. Add in the IT hype, and for a while the “American dream” propaganda was successful.

 

Of course the only way to import cheap consumer products was to export real jobs. So the very consumer base the middle class ideology depended upon was cannibalized. It’s that same old contradiction of capitalism Marx analyzed all those years ago.

 

But the only way for the finance parasites to keep extracting profits from the debt dream machine was to keep blowing up ever more absurd bubbles. Each bubble was the same scam. You convince a bunch of people that the price of some asset (stocks or real estate are two favorites) will keep going up forever; get them to go into debt buying it (most of them intending to sell it to the next mark at a price higher than subsequent inflation); get the government and the mainstream media to be the cheerleaders; run a ponzi scheme where you pay off those taking profits with the new money coming in; gamble heavily on all the casino games you yourself have invented and are running and rigging; take out huge personal profits in the form of “bonuses”. And then, when the bubble bursts, you go into vulture mode. You use the government support you bought with bribes in order to use taxpayer money to collect on your own bets, make acquisitions among your less agile colleagues, and keep paying yourself those bonuses.

 

This scam cycle has been run several times, but we’ve now reached its ultimate plateau. There was no way the system could sustain the bursting of the mortgage bubble, because it was the last bubble propping up the simulated middle class. This middle class has nothing left – no jobs, no productive economy, no plan for the future, no solvent entitlement system, no political power. It had nothing but these ever-inflating housing values.

 

Similarly the finance sector had only two good extraction points left, the housing bubble and the permanent war. (They’ll now try to find new ones in a carbon bubble and a health insurance stick-up racket, but neither of these will be able to extract more blood from the already overbled turnip.)

 

So government policy is now completely dedicated to the artificial continuation of bubble conditions for looting. The Bailout War and the Global War on Terror are both artificial wars, wars of choice, private wars waged by medieval warlords upon their own serfs (and, in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, foreign serfs). The goal is to continue extracting through force the rents which can no longer be extracted through rigged economics. The bubble has collapsed; the reserve currency will collapse; oil will become scarce the moment demand resumes its former level.

 

That’s the precarious position of the American elite. That’s why their prostituted government has embarked upon the class war policy it has. This government will never again be responsive to the people. It’s been hijacked. It’s now the pure tool of finance tyranny. Its policy is permanent extortion. Forever. It’s our enemy. It’s lost to us. Anything we’re going to do we have to do from the bottom up.

 

 

The finance sector is the organizer of this Great Crime, the ringleader, the monarch among warlords. It grabbed all the choke points. It seized every critical position. It has written government policy, captured regulatory agencies, bought the very “souls” of legislators and jurists, become the MSM’s pimp.

 

They blew up the bubble, they saddled Americans with odious debt, they crashed the economy, and they forced the government to bail them out, and to keep bailing them out. The bailouts are intended to last in perpetuity.

 

We have to launch a bottom up educational campaign. Across America we need community workshops to explain the crisis, who is responsible, and how the people can fight back.

 

The agenda should be:

 

1. The basic description of globalization and financialization, the bubble, the bailout crime and hopeless state of the current polity.

 

2. Rap sheets for individual banks: their crimes in financializing the economy, corrupting the government, and blowing up the bubble; their crimes during the bailout, during the insolvency era; and how much they have looted and continue to loot through the bailouts.

 

Similar rap sheets for individual criminally corrupt officials, politicians, and media whores.

 

3. Commentary on the broader social contract and how it has been broken from the top down; how we owe nothing to the structure or any part of it, including where it comes to these predatory bubble debts which were foisted upon people in violation of Chicago’s own ideology (transparency? “information”? riiiight.).

 

How our great imperative and our great challenge is to rebuild the social contract from the bottom up. We can look to our friends, family, local communities to see what can be restored and how to get to work.

 

It’s not we the people who dissolved society. It’s really just a few scumbags at the top, in government and law and business and the media and academia.

 

If we could come to understand what’s happened, who has betrayed us, who we can trust, and where we can start rebuilding, that would be the first step toward a new America.