The Illusion of Consent

     

      The world financial order, and in particular, the United States Empire, collapsed in 2008.  At least, that is how history will record it.  Everything that followed will ultimately be seen as the natural consequences of collapse, including the confusion, denial, looting, panic, and fraud that followed, which is what we have been observing the over past 5 years and which has been generally described in contemporary (and official)  terms as, "recovery."  It should have been obvious to everyone that when the President gets on television and tells the country that we need to give someone 800 billion dollars on short notice or the financial system will fail catastrophically, the event is already occurring or rather, has already occurred.  While many find it remarkable that the President of the United States pops up in an unplanned TV appearance to make such a request, and question just exactly how was it that all of the Ivy League geniuses, elected and unelected, charged with keeping an eye on such things, didn't see this coming, I find it more interesting to question why they even bothered to pretend that the public was going to be in on the decision about the bailout or that it's permission was necessary.  One has to believe that the experts actually did not see the disaster coming; otherwise they certainly could have arranged a Presidential appearance that would not be quite so humiliating in historical context.  The bumbling idiot who amazingly inhabited the White House for 8 years and presided over the annihilation of international respect for the United States, its squandering of resources, its abandonment of moral authority and the rule of law, the institutionalization of torture as a tool of national policy, and the murder of an untold number of civilians in distant countries, had to, with one final admission of criminal incompetence, go panhandling on national television.  They might have made him wear women's underwear, a dunce cap and a rubber ball on his nose to visually underscore his final monumental failure.

            One wonders if the appearance was necessary for some reason other than to give the populace the impression that it's opinion mattered, since that clearly was not ultimately necessary.  Had there been a popular vote, there would have been no bailout.  Americans may be stupid, uneducated, uninformed, prone to beliefs not supported by science, etc, but they are sufficiently cautionary in their daily lives that they will not give a large cash loan to a complete stranger at the request of a distant brother-in-law known to be a retard;  they would have presumably wanted to know a bit more about what?! and, to whom?! and, for why again!?? before opening up the wallet.  "I can't explain now, but it's really important!"  would not have sufficed.  All of the principals certainly knew this, but the fix was in with the politicians, as they were told that their expense accounts and access to Congressional pages and interns would have been curtailed if the bailout were not passed.  There was never any question that Congressional votes would be affected by public sentiment. 

            I think probably the idea was to get Bush out there to punctuate the moment and give a historical face to the instant of collapse.  They knew that they were fortunate to have an imbecile in office who was willing to stand in front of the television cameras and make the most absurd request in history.  I remember thinking at the time, "WTF?  Haven't they been emphasizing for quite some time that we are broke already?  That we need to cut back on Welfare and Social Security and Medicare because we don't have enough money?  Where the fuck is $800 billion going to come from?"

"Bush was the one that asked for it!  Check the tapes.  And you guys agreed to it, so don't look at us."  That was the point, I think; fix blame on the idiot who was the face of every other failure for most of the preceding decade.

Copyright 2013, Michael R. Moore

The Eternal Sunshine of the Collective Irrational Mind

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THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE COLLECTIVE IRRATIONAL MIND

By Michael R. Moore

"The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man"

-Patti Smith

" I am...in a world...of shit."

-Private Leonard Lawrence, Full Metal Jacket

"Where did all that borrowed Greek money go?”, you ask?  It was spent on coffee and cakes by prematurely retired civil servants and went the way of all such entertainments:  into the pie-hole and out the other end and down the toilet to whatever sewage arrangements had been made when the Greek infrastructure was still functioning.  Getting it back requires a new alchemy whereby excrement is changed to something of value that will placate the bankers. Perhaps someone in Greece would be working on such a project if they weren't in the streets tossing Molotov Cocktails at the bearers of the bad news from Germany.

Meanwhile the central banks elsewhere are engaged in the metaphoric exercise of this same sort of alchemy, printing what amounts to deodorized and dehydrated excrement which will shortly have as it's sole useful purpose the wiping of one's behind, at least while there is still food on the shelves. The irony and recursive allegory of everything amounting to shit would be amusing if it were not so accurate and present. 

That no rearranging of the beads on the abacus will solve the problem, no matter who takes a stab at it or how many permutations and combinations and patterns they generate, seems to be impossible for any of the politicians and Nobel prize winning economists to accept and admit to publicly.  Each month we're told of the finance ministers of Europe convening to try to figure out a way of avoiding a Greek "collapse."  They've tried almost everything - including turning the abacus upside down and sideways, painting the beads different colors, and looking at it through various fisheye and other distorting lenses, which by mutual agreement gets them through another month while they all secretly hope that something will arrive and distort the space-time continuum in a such a way that the whole thing just disappears.  At home they are hiring extra security personnel and stocking up on canned food and converting paper assets to gold in case someone or something does not arrive and perform the loaves-and-fishes miracle they are hoping for.  In the United States where attention spans are measured in seconds and concern for the future extends only out to the next weekend, the populace is being pacified by endless unemployment insurance payments and food stamps, and entertained by the quadrennial ritual whereby it is allowed the illusion it has some say about which head of the same monster will be featured on television for the ensuing 4 years.

Politicians figured out long ago that the public could be hypnotized by recitations of numbers containing the syllables, "-ill-ions", even while its education has been degraded by design to a point that few could pass a quiz on how many zeros go with which "-ill-ions" number is being recited, let alone comprehend what such numbers mean in reality or apply grade school arithmetic to spot the absurdity of the associated lies and promises.  Every plan everyone has will save trillions over the next ten years, while their opponent's plan will cost multiple trillions over the same interval.  That for some time it seems we have been unable to accurately project what will happen in the next fiscal quarter doesn't seem to alter everyone's assertion that they know enough to forecast the next ten years.  Whether the promises and projections of someone's economic plan is the distillation of hundreds of hours of calculations based upon the most complex of econometric models, or rather is just something improvised by a speech writer the night before, matters little.  If all the PhD's and policy makers haven't managed to fix anything in the last 5 years, how is Joe six-pack supposed to decide which recitation of millions, billions, and trillions (note:"millions" is not heard much anymore) is more likely to be coincident with reality?  Since votes are cast based on likeability rather than policies, why don't the candidates just get up and tell jokes and humorous anecdotes?  The repetitions of the "-ill-ions" words turns into a drone of meaningless noise much less entertaining than Gregorian Chant and containing less useful information than listening to a prolonged repetition of Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō  by a Nichiren Buddhist. At least the Buddhist isn't trying to hoodwink anyone.

The gifted and now sadly departed writer David Foster Wallace wrote a book entitled, "Everything and More," which dealt with the mathematics of infinity.  He noted that historically, many mathematicians who investigated the subject ended up going insane.  One wonders if the European finance ministers have reflected on the infinite hole they are constructing by lending Greece the money to pay the interest on its debt each month.  The mathematicians that Wallace reported on all possessed brilliant intellects.  Such may not be said of the finance ministers.  It may be that they do not see infinity even when it is staring back at them, or that lesser intellects are not so uncomfortable with the subject.  One wonders exactly what goes on at their meetings:  are these just shows for the public, and once the doors are closed, do they break out the booze and in shout in  Dionysian revelry, "Après moi, le déluge!"  Or do they actually open their briefcases and seriously consider the question of how to "solve" the Greek crisis, and while they are at it, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

It is a continuing surprise that each day passes without this ending badly all at once. No one can say the hour, but the time will arrive where things do end badly,  and possibly with little warning. Allowing Greece to fund its Endless Club-Med Vacation with Euro denominated bonds was the equivalent of hawking sub-prime jumbo mortgages to the janitors and waitresses aspiring to the American Dream, but who clearly didn't actually have the price of admission. All of the economists who claim genius status based on what alma mater gave them a stamp of approval didn't see this coming? Rewriting the exponential function in an endless number of ways does not alter the mathematics.  Greece, and the rest of the world, is going to face the consequences of the years of living in LaLa land where it was thought the rules of compound interest had been suspended, or at least could be ignored indefinitely.  Unless the new alchemy falls from the sky, the excrement will overwhelm the assets and we will all get to live in a world of shit.

Copyright 2012, Michael R. Moore

A green shimmering light poured from the sky into the decaying attic while rain flowed along the walls from the leaky roof. Old Christmas decorations and wrapping paper were in my way

What Keeps the United States from being a Third World Country?

When I was a child I remember pondering the mystery of my good fortune at having been born in the United States. I would see news programs showing third world countries and displaying life in mud huts, children either playing in the filth of the slums of Sao Paulo or sitting in dirt with swollen bellies being swarmed with flies in Ethiopia or the Congo. The question naturally arose as to why the United States was different. Grade school textbooks and teachers supplied us with the answers: we were blessed with a large country filled with natural resources (usually avoiding the issue of the theft and genocide that had secured this blessing). We had abundant fresh water and large rivers that afforded transportation and hydroelectric power. We had oil in Pennsylvania and Texas and California. We had coal mines and copper mines. We had a healthy and youthful population to man the factories of General Motors and US Steel. We had enormous forests that provided timber and paper products. We had great Universities, funded initially by wealthy philanthropists and then eventually State Universities funded by tax dollars, all of which turned out scientists and engineers who developed more and greater technologies upon which the rest of the world relied, and which we used to further exploit the natural resources we were blessed with.

I remember that our collective world view growing up and even extending into college years in the early ‘70’s consisted of the United States being at the pinnacle of the world, with Europe occupying an intermediate place between ourselves and third world countries, partially because Europe had been blown to bits in two World Wars, but also, as it was subliminally implied, of the natural superiority of the United States and its people. I remember being told that in Europe, individual hotel rooms did not have bathrooms, but there was a shared bathroom everyone used at the end of the hall, and which was not supplied with toilet paper. Hardly anyone owned automobiles because gasoline was $5.00/gallon over there. Europeans were unable to get blue jeans and the conventional wisdom suggested that if you traveled to Europe, you should take a couple extra pairs of blue jeans because people would come up to you on the street and offer to buy the pair you were wearing for $100. I didn’t make it to Europe until I was 37 years old and it is funny how these beliefs, imparted in grade school, stick with you and do not allow for changes with time. I was somewhat surprised that my hotel room had a bathroom and that everyone who wanted jeans seemed to be wearing them and no one seemed particularly interested in my pair. While some cultural differences could be appreciated, they were minor compared to the gap that I had been led to believe existed. Apparently over a decade or two Europeans had managed to build hotels with individual bathrooms, and acquire toilet paper and blue jeans. Parking places seemed to be a much larger problem than lack of automobiles, at least in Amsterdam. So much for the time stability of cognitive constructs and assumptions about the world.

Events of the past year and a half caused me to ask the question once again, in a slightly different way: What is it that keeps the United States from being a third world country? The simple explanations offered in my childhood seem to no longer pertain. While the United States can still claim to have natural resources, the descriptor “abundant” has to be dropped. Abundance of course, only has meaning in relation to demand. Demand has expanded in response to parallel factors of technology and more importantly, population. Fresh water is a problem, especially in the Southwest where the population has exploded and the Colorado River can no longer supply the thirty mouths of households and agriculture. Most importantly, we have been unable to supply our own needs for petroleum since we became dependent on imports in the ‘70’s. As infrastructure was erected in Asia, the cheap labor force was exploited and manufacturing jobs left the United States with the transparent result that the US is simply unable to compete with countries whose labor force is willing to work for far less than the ever increasing federally mandated minimum wage. The factory jobs in the United States have devolved into service jobs, retail jobs, and jobs that relate to imaginary things, like financial instruments.

For the last 2 decades employment in housing construction and related businesses provided the illusion that the US lifestyle could be maintained in spite of the inability to compete on an international scale with countries producing things the world needed. The US government and its people have been living on borrowed cash and borrowed time. There are only two ways that the inability of the US to compete in the world marketplace can be reversed: either all of the workers in Asia refuse to work for less than the minimum wage set in the US (which won’t happen), or the US worker will have to accept wages similar to what are being paid in Asia for similar work. Suggestion of the latter solution triggers such indignation and anger that it can scarcely be mentioned in public without endangering one’s physical safety. The cognitive dissonance aroused by such a suggestion is so extreme that it can hardly be imagined. The belief remains that Americans are necessarily entitled to a superior lifestyle as if by divine right or simply by the nature of things. There is no way bounds into one’s consciousness when one hears that Nike is paying workers in Malaysia from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Myanmar $1.51/hour (or rather, $262/month, with knowledge of just how many hours they work for that not being reported) . One might surmise, however, that these workers do not expect to have cable service, two cars, a stereo and an iPod, all the pizza and beer they feel like consuming, nor for that matter, the ability to purchase a pair of the Nike shoes they produce.

What kept the United States from being a third world country in the past was wealth flowing into it as a result of providing things the world needed. For the last thirty years, all that has been flowing into the US was debt, and consumer items that were being purchased from elsewhere with borrowed money. Resource depletion and population growth fueling ever faster resource depletion, as well as the establishment of a manufacturing infrastructure in Asia have erased the advantages the US had over the rest of the world in times past. In short, I cannot see anything that is now keeping the United States from being a third world country. When the debt spigot is turned off, as it will be, and when the mad printing of money leads to the devaluation of the dollar to the point of being nearly worthless, widespread poverty will ensue. The only thing the US will have at that point to cling to its perceived righteous position at the top of the world will be its military strength. One can anticipate with near certainty I believe, that the leaders will resort to use of that final resource to avoid their own embarrassment and fall from power. The world can expect that, if the United States goes down, it is going to bring others with it. What else is a failing and panicking empire to do?

Copyright 2009, MRM

Pity the Young

How lucky, those that have died already and never had to know this time.  This time of impending doom, of wars, and police states, and economic ruin and the coming hunger and disease and competition for the remaining scraps of the consumer age.  The best TV is worth nothing once the programming stops.  The hot tub is worth nothing once the power is turned off.  An expensive guitar is useless once you can't buy strings.  Pretty soon, all that is going to matter is getting fed and staying warm. 

Pity the young. 

Before you know it...

Time runs out. Anything past 50 is definitely borrowed time, though for some reason everyone has the number 65 burned in their mind for retirement and most people presume they will live beyond the frequently quoted life expectancy of 75. I'm not sure if 75+/- 2 years is the mean, the median, or the mode, but roughly speaking about half of the population must die before 75. The conservative assumption is that You (meaning you) will die before 75. And ask yourself, exactly how much fun does the 65-74 year old club have, anyway? Very few are skateboarding or sky diving. There are exceptions of course. You future Senior Olympic participants can stop reading right now. For the rest of you, wake up. It was all a big joke up until age 50. Now the next 10 years are the most important of your life.

"Your 40's are the old age of your youth, and your 50's are the youth of your old age."

It's in quotes because I didn't invent the observation, but I don't know who to credit it to. But think about it. Young people regard someone in their 50's as being irrelevant, while the 70+ crowd looks at 50 year olds and think they are just snot-nosed brats. So, 50 year old dudes and chicks: it's time to rock.