They will not leave without a fight, even if reality is overwhelmingly against them, and I expect obfuscation, distraction and worse to be used to deny or avoid that reality. Quite frankly, the alternative now, just like in the 30s, is either a full break from the past (a new "New Deal") or a move towards fascism and war - the latter being our current elites' only chance of holding onto power.
I've worked this seam before. I think the pistol wavers would really like to gin up a war, but 1) Their cred is so low these days that all the likely candidates are more likely to become martyrs instead of villains, so it may take a while. Hugo? Ivo Morales? 2) Whoever the next victim is, -even if they just stick to losing their ass in Iraq and Afghanistan, they need dough.
We've discussed a bit the question of where the next infusion of money for the "Hard Power" empire might come from. Now we know. To my recollection, no one ever thought of this. Fucking genius-level con?
Think of the economy as a vast puzzle of plumbing pipes with money flowing in them. The Hard Power players have a thousand petcocks, drains, taps on the pipes, but for the dough to keep flowing, the system has to be reasonably full and pumping. It was getting awfully leaky, and low.
They just filled it up again!
The wall street boys just won their battle,---if my reading of the "plan" is even close.
-They get bailed out, and "regulation" was hardly mentioned. -Equity ownership has become warrants--in some cases. A right to buy or sell shares at an agreed-upon price aint much. Poof. Shares you MIGHT buy don't give you a seat on the board, a dime of income or much influence. -Congressional "oversight" board is balanced by another oversight board that can probably neuter or checkmate the first, and with administration participation. "Oversight" looks thin at best. -Main street? Mom and Pop mortgage holder can just eat cake. It goes on. The real needs were mostly bargained away, it seems.
In other words: nothing short of a revolution will do. Can it still be a peaceful, democratic one?
There will be no revolution, democratic or otherwise, against the amporphous, ill-defined financial plunder artists. Not yet. Revolution against--who? Harvey Wall Street? Where's he live? Another problem with revolution today is that the values of the financial predators that just ripped off main street --are the values of main street. As long as shared values say that greed is just human nature, that life is a zero-sum game, --why, the boyz from Wall street (or chicago) just acted the way we would,--they just got theirs first. Nope. Gotta get a lot worse if any action is to happen. Echoes of the Marxian "Necessary Preconditions" idea here.
--the main argument to give financial markets a free hand - that they have created so much growth and prosperity - needs to be called for what it is: a lie. Not only the so-called prosperity of the past years was highy unequally shared (see the next point), but it was not even real,---
You know that. I know that. But those whose reality is shaped by the MSM would passionately disagree, I think. When I tell people that the U.S. working man's real hourly wage peaked around 1974, and has slipped almost 50% since then, they think I'm nuts. I suspect Marx never had Rupert Murdoch or Foxwits to deal with.
Angst, editorial froth and recriminations, scapegoating and posturing, pompous academic pronouncements--but no action yet. Best thing that could happen (if you want real change)would be a crash of cosmic proportions.
But what does this mean in the real world? Most of us have no idea.
Studs Terkel wrote a wonderful book called "Hard Times", filled with interviews from people who lived through the crash of '29 and the subsequent decade- everyone from several members of Roosevelt's brain trust, to mothers who scratched to feed their kids, community street meals with whatever you had to contribute in the pot, fathers who ran away and rode the rails to hide their shame because they could not provide even shelter and food. A sometimes heartbreaking document, yet one filled with a strange light- the light of hope. The theme that recurs over and over is the theme of a return of the ability to stand in the shoes of others--and share whatever you had as a result.
The guys who engineered the "New Deal" made it plain, in this book and in others, that their success in that incredible endeavor was in large part due to their ability to ride this sense of -- community, of solidarity born of shared misery, of a resurgence of compassion, of the resolve to PERSONALLY do whatever you could for others, without waiting for government to act.
Then the government could act.
Government reflects the people. Not perfectly, not exactly, but in the central values that exist at the heart. This government -all of it,- reflects the people.
It has so far acted accordingly.
When we change, ---it will follow. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
