Obama was such a one, but he is obviously like the character of Robert the Bruce in the movie Braveheart, or perhaps the Bruce's father, who chooses practically and cynically to support the nobles. He is finished; no one will follow him as his betrayal becomes too painfully obvious. Will it be the banal fascist with the easy answers, the vile leftist with retribution to offer, or a 'braveheart' who has nothing to offer but hardship, and freedom? America is not alone in this. The UK is further along the path. We may see the first expression of the future of the West in London than in Washington. Only the future will tell.
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Warren Buffett New York Times, November 26, 2006.
"The class warfare is over -- we lost. I want to make that announcement today. Working people lost. The middle class lost." Dennis Kucinich, 18 December 2009And in the short term there will be quite a bit of jostling at the middle of the ladder, by those who fancy themselves, or their children, suited for the new nobility and so seek to perpetuate the status quo, with a lot of kicking and dog eat dog going on at the lower levels as the ladder shortens, trying to knock the immigrant, the less connected, off into the abyss, to feed the beast. Out of all of this will come something different, and most likely something unexpected. Its an old story, one that replays over and over. The remedy is sound reason and the Constitution, but these forces have been in retreat for the past ten years at least. Reform and justice have few friends while the looting of a generation is in progress.
"For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future. That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media - which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes - is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game. The essentially complicit nature of the two ruling political parties was in this way covered up for decades, as the crimes of the Democrats were greedily consumed as entertainment by the Limbaugh crowd while the crimes of the Bushies became hot-selling t-shirts and bumper stickers for the Air America listenership. The abiding mutual hatred the red/blue groups shared consistently prevented any kind of collective realization about the structure of the overall scheme... Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means. My own personal feeling is that our recent bubbles weren’t much different than pyramid scams and lotteries; they’re the handiwork of an essentially regressive and deeply cynical political organization that systematically hoovers up taxes and investment money mainly from middle-class suckers, where it eventually gets eaten in short-term cashouts and mostly blown on sports cars and tropical vacations and eye jobs for the trophy wives of Wall Street executives. Crackonomics: take literally all the spare money from four square city blocks and turn it into one tricked-out Escalade. For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up. Of course my seeing it that way might have a lot to do with my own personal psychological prejudices, and I get that some other person with different hangups might choose to focus on Barney Frank deciding to “roll the dice on home ownership” with the GSEs... This GSE story is a big one, but if it gets used as a path back to a “The Market Reacted Rationally” version of history, we’re screwed. It has to be looked at as an important part of a diabolical whole, a symbiotic scheme in which the banks and the state were irreversibly intertwined in an enterprise that on both sides was never about market economics, but crime. Because otherwise… the diversionary notion that one side or the other is wholly to blame is part of what makes the whole scam possible..."Why would you care? Why be concerned about the other? Because when the time comes, there may be no place to hide. Madness makes few rational distinctions between what is and is not worth preserving. Time to listen to the survivors, and not imagine that this time it will be different.
"First they came for the intellectuals, and I did not speak out - because I was not a intellectual; Then they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-because i was not a communist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a working man; Then they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out - because I was not disabled; Then they came for the gypies, and I did not speak out - because I was not a gypsy; Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out - because I was a Protestant; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me."
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