If there is one thing that should frighten the crap out of you it is the harsh reality that no recovery is possible. You (and by extension, your children) will NOT prosper, not now…not ever.
Um, some (conservative pukes are a fine example) contend that if you manage to survive their, er, ‘austerity measures’, you will have ‘prospered’ (Sadly this is because you aren’t supposed to survive so if you do, they have ‘mis-calculated’.)
Life as it was explained to you in your youth is (unofficially) ‘out the window’. You can forget any ‘scripture’ you were taught for the fraud that it is (and was at the time.)
You have been raised to believe that the world outside your door was a harsh but ‘fair’ place, where advantages were ‘won’ and not ‘snatched’ (bought) by the unscrupulous through nefarious means.
Odd what happens when ‘justice’, like ‘quality’, is ‘assumed’. You ‘assume’ justice is being done even though nobody is held responsible or liable for their claims/actions.
Understand, good citizen, that we are living with the ‘consequences’ of allowing others to make decisions in our name without ever consulting us. The ‘representative model’ as deeply flawed as it was, has now proven itself broken beyond repair and MUST be scrapped!
If civilization is to survive, if humanity is to survive, we must act to end the reckless, selfish actions of the self-serving.
Understand, if we don’t act there won’t be anything left to save.
The greatest ‘flaw’ in conservative ideology is its insistence that individuals are ‘rugged’ and dependant on no one. (For all of their claims of being ‘self-made’, you won’t find one of them who is willing to ‘chuck it all’ and build a second fortune from scratch!)
I have included the following ‘intro’ from yesterday’s Automatic Earth (in case you haven’t seen it.)
Ilargi: Is it merely an ironic twist of fate, or is it more, to see the New York Times feature Robert Prechter prominently over the weekend? Prechter, after all, is the man whose economic theories are based to a very large extent on public mood and herding behavior. Does the paper's sudden attention for him then indicate a major mood swing by itself?
When you see that the new UK government plans to cut its spending by up to 40%, you’d be inclined to think so. The fact that some 750.000 Americans simple dropped out of the work force in June, a near record, -while 100.000 entered- can also serve as a sign of a changing public perception of the economy and their lives in general. As can the 30% plunge in pending home sales that was announced recently.
While US states and counties need to cut $180 billion, or even more, over the next year. Illinois comptroller Daniel W. Hynes says his state owes $5 billion to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, the state university — and it’s getting worse every single day. [..] "This is not some esoteric budget issue; we are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. [..] That is obscene." And there is nothing that points to improvement. So Illinois will have to go where Britain is going: massive cuts to essential services, which always and inevitably will hit the weakest citizens first.
There are now 9.2 million unemployed Americans who don’t get a penny in financial help, says Jeff Weniger at Harris Private Bank. If they all have one dependent, that’s nearly 20 million people in the US with no means of even bare survival other than charity. Moreover, those massive cuts will mean massive additional lay-offs, which through positive feedback mechanisms will lead to more lay-offs and more budget cuts. This will happen in Illinois, in California, in Greece, Spain, Italy, and eventually all over the world. [Make no mistake about it good citizen, this die is cast, this WILL happen!]
I was going to address the upcoming bank stress tests results in Europe, but reading about them made me realize that it would be a waste of time. The European stress tests are just as much of a joke as the American ones were. The fact is that there is no president or prime minister in the present western world who would volunteer to actually look at what's in bank vaults, simply out of fear for what they might find.
Grandiose posturing and equally grandiose bail out schemes, whether secret or public, are far easier and much less risky for political careers. If you let your banks fail, odds are your time in power is over too. And so they continue to talk about recoveries and returns to economic growth, even as the numbers by now make blatantly clear that there is no such thing on the horizon, and as the politicians force those who voted for them into ever deeper and darker holes.
Market analyst Ralph J. Acampora says about Robert Prechter:
"I don’t want to agree with him, because if he’s right, we’ve basically got to go to the mountains with a gun and some soup cans, because it’s all over."
Sounds like it can't be true because I don’t want it to be...
Prechter himself implies that it is already over. We just don’t see it yet, but what's coming cannot be avoided. It's all been temporarily papered over, but that can't last. Not if you leave tens of millions in the US alone in a ditch without any kind of assistance. [Which is to point out the ‘Claret’ is already flowing freely nationwide, ask any cop!]
Prechter has never shied away from addressing the issue of social unrest that must rear its head as a society winds down. Me, I increasingly have the impression that there are new ruling forces out there in for instance the US and UK who would like nothing better than a series of seriously violent riots, with lots of blood and lives lost, so they can install a clamp down regime and a police state in which civil liberties are eroded at 100 times the speed at which they were obtained, often also with loss of blood and lives. [Those who trade their Liberty for Safety will enjoy neither!]
And the -seemingly- strange thing is, as Stoneleigh here at The Automatic Earth has pointed out before, that many people will be so afraid of what comes that they will actually welcome such regimes. Like sheep herded by dogs. It will feel like we're traveling back in time, both financially and as societies, to 1932 Germany. There is one thing that even Americans who don’t have a penny left to scratch their asses will still have lots of: guns. That and a ruling class that knows this very well. [Hard to tell what Ilargi is pointing at here. I’d speculate he’s saying the tyrants will be particularly vicious in an attempt to dissuade the peaceful from resorting to defending themselves. Only ‘sheep’ will willingly submit to the privations these monsters will subject them to.]
The typical answer has always been: expand, go conquer nations, find Lebensraum, and rally the people around the troops. In both the US and in China there's a palpable danger that the respective regimes may choose to go that way. The UK may side with America, but continental Europe lacks the political cohesion to join in. Pakistan, India and Russia may either feel forced to take sides or see opportunities for themselves. We’re well on our way towards a far more volatile world, both domestically and internationally. As Prechter would confirm.
Ah, the old ‘nation at war’ as cover to preserve ‘national unity’. Just how far will the criminals go to hang on to political power? Will these ‘I don’t give a fuck’ types destroy large swaths of the planet to demonstrate their ‘superiority’?
For this reason alone many believe mankind does not deserve to survive; must be the ‘liberal’ in me that falls back on the old ‘one bad apple’ defense…even if I had to qualify that with the recognition that we can’t move forward as a species if we don’t address the task of ‘weeding out’ the bad apples among us.
A Simple Plan provides the vehicle to tackle the road ahead, all other (mainstream) options only lead backwards into despotism and destruction.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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