As uncouth as it might be, I feel compelled to redirect your attention to that slow motion train wreck we call our ‘civilization’.
As I commented earlier, we lurch from disaster to disaster largely because, UNDER CAPITALISM, disasters are ‘fought’ with copious amounts of money.
[No irony should be lost on the fact that this ‘money’ is both useless and, er, ‘make believe’, a legal construct at best and a noose around your neck if you allow yourself to be bound by its ‘promises’. (The ‘worse’ part of this argument is entirely ‘relative’, so fill in your own blank…)]
Which is to point out that not only is our system of commerce ‘fucked up’ but so is our political system.
Understand good citizen, the level of ‘incompetence’ we are regularly expected to tolerate would land the most robust commercial venture in bankruptcy court in record time!
Yet, try as we might, we seem unable to ‘elect’ competent leaders.
In fact, we seem unable to elect anyone with enough backbone to so much as open a door for themselves!
What we have are puppets serving unseen puppeteers. And these puppeteers are driving our civilization off a cliff for their own unfathomable reasons.
I have posited before that we are headed for a ‘kill-off’ because of the way our society is structured. Our entire civilization is based on ‘cheap and abundant’ energy.
The problem is we have arrived at a point where the ‘exponential increase’ in the number of end users has shortened considerably the projected life span of energy reserves…
Oh, what to do? Since we can’t ‘Abracadabra’ more energy into existence there is only one other thing to do that will put the equation back into ‘balance’ and that would be a significant reduction in the number of, er, ‘surplus’ people.
You don’t suppose our political system is ‘fucked’ because these self-serving assholes have only one way to control policy and that is to ‘buy’ our politicians?
Again, no irony should be lost on the fact that ALL money is FUNNY, so these idiots are selling the future of our species down the river for some worthless pieces of paper!
Like tonight’s offering asks, precisely ‘who’ is all of this bailout money ‘owed’ to?
And, naturally, why is ‘the public’ being asked to pay for something they had no hand in?
Once again we are confronted with ‘treason’ on a grand scale but those we elected to uphold the laws are both ‘blind and deaf’ (and soon to be dead, due to their own, er, ‘machinations’, compounded by their own stupidity!)
Let’s Try Some Perspective
The drumbeat against the euro is increasing daily. It will fall apart, it will be limited to a hard core of Northern countries, it was a bad idea to begin with, you can't have uniform monetary policy without uniform fiscal policy, etc. The cacophony is so loud it is making common sense impossible to break through, particularly since "the free market" is screaming at the top of its lungs.
Let's try some perspective on that "free market", eh?
* Gross Folly #1: How come the eurozone's financial center is... London?!! What this means in practical terms is that a scrum of bottom-line-is-everything bonus-hungry twenty-somethings hardly out of school are running the show. And to top it off, they and their country (the U.K.) are not even members of the eurozone. They don't use it, they don't believe in it and, if anything, they hate its guts. Literally. [Republicans all, this lot, eh?] This like trusting a bunch of juvenile delinquents who amuse themselves with setting cats on fire to run the pet shelter.
* Gross Folly #2: We let those same kids deal in sovereign bond CDS (credit default swaps) in an unlimited amount, without any regulation, in a completely opaque OTC market. They don't have to hedge their positions with the underlying sovereign bonds, they don't have to account for their actions to anyone but their immediate boss - who is also in line to make a huge bonus from their profit - and they don't give a damn if they push some poor country into bankruptcy and its people into starvation. Literally. This is like giving the nuclear missile launch keys to a bunch of manic-depressives and telling them they have to compete amongst themselves for their meds.
* Gross Folly #3: We have allowed huge amounts of public and private pension monies to be managed by "alternative-investment" firms, e.g. hedge funds who are compensated on the outrageous 2/20 schedule. (The US Social Security is still OK, as it can only invest in Treasuries, but it came close to succumbing a few years ago.) This is like giving a bunch of convicted arsonists a tank-farm full of gasoline, asking them to put it to profitable use.
* Gross Folly #4: The people of Europe have entrusted management of the whole shebang to politicians, their appointees and committees of clueless bureaucratic mandarins who wouldn't know the difference between a CDS and a CDO if it sat up and hit them in the face. (Again, the US is somewhat better at this since key government positions are frequently filled by experienced financiers.) This is like staffing Bedlam with a bunch of South Italian city managers, soviet-era Russian chefs from Vladivostock and over-sized German nurses named Helga. All overseen by the ghost of Joe McCarthy come back to life. No doctors. Oh, and only Wagner allowed in the rec room.
Have a nice weekend…
Perhaps that last wisecrack illustrates our perilous position best (The whole thing, not just the Wagner part!)
If it weren’t for the bloody mess this is all going to end in, it would be outrageously funny!
The disturbing part is more than a small percentage of us can ‘see’ this unfolding yet nobody is doing anything.
Naturally, the unanswered question here is ‘what can you do?’. The average stiff isn’t in a position to do anything, the most they can hope for is to save their own sorry asses!
As least that’s the plan from where I’m sitting.
That and I (naturally) intend to ‘take control’ once civil order collapses. How long I’ll be able to hold on to it is the wildcard.
We’ll see.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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