The consumption-oriented lifestyle could never scale across 7 billion people, hence Globalization was never more than an openly accepted form of slavery. As long as someone else's children were doing the suffering, the wealthy nations never questioned the system.
Global policy-makers saved the globalized ponzi scheme from itself in 2008. Now, having squandered all resources, the odds that they can save it again are somewhere between zero and impossible. The first meltdown was to weaken the model. This next one will kill it, for good...
The New Rome
Third World factory slaves. Worthless political thought dealers. Vacuous media buffoons. Country club CEOs hell bent on liquidating their own country. Wall Street greed idolators. Self-important billionaires sprinkling their Central Bank-inflated wealth on the indolent masses. Hollywood's fake gods and goddesses saving the world one comic book remake at a time. Steroid-bloated millionaire athletes pimping factory slave made sneakers to poverty-stricken inner city youth at $150 a pair. Testosterone-depleted boy-men running around like refugees, incapable of anything beyond their own immediate self-gratification. Idiocratic masses, stewing in a lethal cauldron of junk food and junk culture - preoccupied by modern day Reality TV spectacle.
Collapse-O-Nomics: An economy by and for morons
This just in: the U.S. economy will *grow* 3% in 2014, by borrowing 3.7% - you can't make this shit up. Meanwhile, at 3.7% of GDP (~$600b), the U.S. would still be borrowing 85% of its annual defense budget.
And: "After 2015, the deficit will start to increase again according to the CBO, but as I've noted before, we really don't want to reduce the deficit much faster than this path over the next few years, because that will be too much of a drag on the economy."
Life Without SUVs: Inconceivable
Third grade math indicates that the consumption-oriented lifestyle is in no way scalable across 7 billion people. In the U.S. alone, 5% of the world's population consume 20% of global resources. It's a tale of moral, intellectual and financial bankruptcy that today's thought dealers would allow so much legacy industrial assets to be liquidated just to propagate the fundamentally unsustainable for a few years longer. The comfort-seeking masses can't possibly face the idea that their mission to consume the planet, is ending. What will life be like without Third World factory slaves making cheap junk for sale at Walmart?
MELTDOWN IS INEVITABLE
Anyone who reads this after-the-collapse, must come to terms with the fact that they were financially bludgeoned merely because they took all of the above decadence for granted - "business as usual". And the fact that they were incapable of third grade math or otherwise had their heads buried straight up their own ass. Even at this late stage, the vast majority are totally bought in to the status quo and its inherent exploitation-based mentality. It's totally unquestioned.
What to tell the grandchildren?
"Yeah, we thought it was odd - trying to borrow our way out of a debt crisis. And we really felt bad about bankrupting your generation, but those shopping sprees were fantastic. Personally, I was skeptical trusting the same morons with the global financial system after they crashed it in 2008, but then Bernanke gave them a free bailout and a lot more gambling money, so they seemed happy. I was really taken aback when the Chinese stopped lending us their money - after all, we'd been paying them $.10 on the dollar in wages. Totally ungrateful. Overall though, I'll be honest, I was too busy watching the Dow, the NFL and Faux News, so I really had no clue what the hell was going on in the real world...".
Anyone who reads this after-the-collapse, must come to terms with the fact that they were financially bludgeoned merely because they took all of the above decadence for granted - "business as usual". And the fact that they were incapable of third grade math or otherwise had their heads buried straight up their own ass. Even at this late stage, the vast majority are totally bought in to the status quo and its inherent exploitation-based mentality. It's totally unquestioned.
What to tell the grandchildren?
"Yeah, we thought it was odd - trying to borrow our way out of a debt crisis. And we really felt bad about bankrupting your generation, but those shopping sprees were fantastic. Personally, I was skeptical trusting the same morons with the global financial system after they crashed it in 2008, but then Bernanke gave them a free bailout and a lot more gambling money, so they seemed happy. I was really taken aback when the Chinese stopped lending us their money - after all, we'd been paying them $.10 on the dollar in wages. Totally ungrateful. Overall though, I'll be honest, I was too busy watching the Dow, the NFL and Faux News, so I really had no clue what the hell was going on in the real world...".
Losing My Religion
The New Dark Ages
Christianity was conceived (literally) near the height of the Roman Empire. This nascent religion challenged the Roman ideals of the time and was violently repressed. Over hundreds of years, Christianity spread quietly and unobtrusively until it became the de facto religion of the late stage Roman Empire, by then removed to Constantinople. And when that Empire collapsed into the Dark Ages, and was eviscerated by barbarians - Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns etc., it was the Christian Church - the Holy Roman Empire that maintained order during the darkest depths of those Dark Ages. It was a time when people actually lived according to the central tenets of Christianity - quiet piety and self-less altruism - as opposed to counting their hours spent in church only to recycle their guilt for another week of Ayn Rand-worthy exploitation.
Does anyone honestly believe that today's crippled church(es), riddled with their own corruption, will provide stability in the days to come? Will the masses turn to the dominant religions of today i.e. the ones who turned a blind eye to all of today's iniquities and madness? Will the church have any moral authority left to play such a role? Will credit card collecting Televangelists become our new beacons of hope? With their perma-smiling sociopathic charisma which would be selling used cars if it wasn't selling religion? Highly doubtful. As we all know, Profit Killed that Prophet a long time ago.
Barbarians At the Gate: Medieval Taliban
The Taliban have essentially rolled back their Islamic beliefs to the Middle Ages. They are ahead of the curve. No one would want to live that way, but it's working for them. They have an ideology they can cling to and that is gathering adherents constantly. One can argue that the various radicalized Islamic factions, left to their own devices will eventually annihilate each other, and we can only hope so. However, more than likely at least a couple of these factions will arise intact and stronger than ever. Granted, predictions of this sort are no more than mere parlour games, however, it seems clear that the Taliban have been preparing for the decline of the current world order and are prepared across multiple dimensions. Back in 2001 right after 9/11, B-52s carpet bombed the Taliban in Afghanistan for over a month straight. I know, because they flew over my house every night at 1 am. It sounded like the end of the world - on their way to Diego Garcia for the hop to Tora Bora. After that, we all thought the Taliban were ancient history. Now they're running around like they never left the place. Unbelievable.
Neo-Marxism
I've noticed a nascent increase in references to Marxism recently. It's not showing up in Google Trends yet, but it will, on the other side of the reset. As we see below, there was a spike in search relevance for this term during 2008 and we can expect a much larger sustained spike in interest in the days to come.
Google Trends "Marxism"
Faith In Capitalism
The words faith and capitalism should never be used in the same sentence. That said, after 2008, no surprise, faith in capitalism declined significantly, including here in the U.S. Back in 2010, only 59% of Americans felt that "free markets" were the best system for the world economy. That was down from 80% in 2002. Meanwhile, all of these types of polls show that high income earners generally evince strong faith in capitalism while low income earners evince low faith in capitalism. Go figure. In 2010 only 44% of low income Americans had faith in the system.
Put that above dichotomy in the context of Mitt Romney's mythical 47%. Vulture capitalists laid off half of the country and then scorned people for not being able to find jobs. If that "dependency" figure is 47% now, what does that portend on the other side of the reset? Elitists call this impending scenario, the "tyranny of the masses". i.e. wherein the majority vote for a system that is in their best interests for a change, rather than in the best interests of billionaires who sold their country to foreign interests. In the real world of course, rule by majority is known as "Democracy", not "tyranny of the masses". What we have today is clearly "tyranny of the jackasses".
Which gets me to my point. If, as die-hard Libertarians tell us constantly - this current system, attendant with outsized profit margins, record billionaires, and minimalistic labour protections is NOT in fact true capitalism i.e. if this is not Ayn Rand's wet dream (even though it is). Then it seems that the burden of proof is on today's apologists to invent a better version pronto, while there is still time and (albeit minimal) credibility left. Because on the other side of the "reset" that line above is going to spike upwards in direct inverse correlation to the Dow. And at that point in time, no one is going to give a flying fuck what today's apologists for capitalism have to say about their model.
In A Real Economy Supply Is Demand
I highly doubt that the U.S. would ever turn full blown communist - let's face it, today's phony Obama-socialism is nothing more than foodstamp-based riot control while billionaires complete the estate sale. Those Americans who honestly think that the U.S. is on the verge of socialism, need to take their first-ever trip outside of the U.S. and get some fucking perspective. That said, there are several well known countries where opinions are turning decidedly against capitalism, not the least of which is Japan. Suffice to say, the age of Sociopathic Corporations run by sociopathic frat boys is coming to its inevitable bad ending.
In A Real Economy Supply Is Demand
I highly doubt that the U.S. would ever turn full blown communist - let's face it, today's phony Obama-socialism is nothing more than foodstamp-based riot control while billionaires complete the estate sale. Those Americans who honestly think that the U.S. is on the verge of socialism, need to take their first-ever trip outside of the U.S. and get some fucking perspective. That said, there are several well known countries where opinions are turning decidedly against capitalism, not the least of which is Japan. Suffice to say, the age of Sociopathic Corporations run by sociopathic frat boys is coming to its inevitable bad ending.
Life After Extend and Pretend
What difference can one man make in all of this madness? I've met enough good people in my lifetime to know that they are out there. They are just few and far between. Therefore the hope is that the impending "reset" bludgeons today's amoral self-absorbed jackasses and their dumbfuck ideas into abject oblivion, all while keeping enough of decent humanity and this planet still intact to rebuild upon.
I realize that's a stretch, but it's all I've got...
P.S. Scroll down. My new blog background reflects the end of a graceless age and the (eventual) promise of a new and better one. Not the end. The beginning.
Or it might just be the stronger Prozac. Who knows?
