Sunday 22 August 2010

lest we forget...

Ilargi from The Automatic Earth writes:
the "economic recovery" we've been fed for a year now, is, and was always, fake. We never left the first dip, and so we can't enter a second one. And no, this is not a recession, it's a depression, one that Celente labels "the Greatest Depression". Yes, things will get a whole lot worse than they are today.

The Raw Story quotes Gerald Celente saying:
You're going to see it all over the world, what they call austerity programs ... What are they doing? They're bailing out the banks and they're making the people pay for it. And the people don't like that.
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One of the good businesses to get in to may be guillotines, because there's a real off-with-their-heads fever going on.

However, Joe Bageant does not expect outright revolution:
when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
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Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class.
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the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken.
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This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.
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the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years.
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Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country's economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class.
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the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority
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In the face of all this stands a very diverse public.. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks.
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the ruling class.. do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.

However, Dmitri Orlov points out that those with the money are not happy either:
these are very difficult times to be rich. It used to be that having a million dollars made you a millionaire—but not any more! Now, to be perfectly safe and completely insulated from economic reality you need at least ten million, if not more, and the more you have, the more unnerving become the wild undulations of the financial markets and the dire prognostications of the experts. It is getting to the point that you can make a plausible guess at a person's net worth based on how nervous and miserable they look.
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They have long forgotten what it means to be happy and carefree, and their labored attempts at feigning enjoyment are painful to watch. You can be sure that the sight of poor but happy people makes them quite livid.

Finally, in the words of James Howard Kunstler
because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us.

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