After Dubya Dubya Two, America transformed from a largely agricultural economy to a raging industrial furnace. The stoppage of tank and airplane and bullet manufacturing took a couple of hard years to unwind, but it soon led to a very consciously constructed consumer/manufacturing society. All stops were removed.

The movers and shakers of that era purposely set out to hold up the Joneses as the American Dream, and whip everyone along to constantly try to keep up with them -- house in the suburbs, TV, car, kids in college, annual vacations, and all the latest and brightest products America could churn out. And jobs, jobs, jobs making all this stuff.

It went on for six decades, and then Dubya Dubya Bush (who cost us multiple times what Dubya Dubya Two ever did) presided over the burnout phase of that manic consumer economy that was actually based on debt-fueled growth.

Debt is a virus, you see, and it kills its host.

An economy that had originally provided good jobs for every man jack so he could buy all the shiny things America manufactured slowly morphed over the decades into the outsourcing of jobs to coolies overseas who would make the same product for a lot less. That eventually included everyone up the economic scale, including engineers, doctors, and rocket scientists.

All that money saved accrued to Wall Street, and moved into international circles. Offshore more and more. Interwoven and interconnected with debt-fueled money-making projects worldwide. If American taxes wanted a taste, well the whole scheme was moved offshore so no taxes needed to be paid.

The American economy increasingly became Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) after Reagan, and this increasingly became an international arena, not fundamentally connected to the day to day American economy.

During Dubya Dubya Bush's two terms, he presided over the looting of the Treasury and the earnings of the next generation or two as well. He took that treasure and firmly bet America's future -- it's economic survival -- overseas. He wagered everything on America winning at globalizing the world economy under its thumb, and winning some tasty resource wars over yonder, in lands where swarthy people live. Those wars were to be highly lucrative ventures from the get go.

After sixty years of chasing the Joneses, manufacturing is long gone, and mad consumption eventually burned itself out, burned right to the core about mid-2007, and it is never coming back. We have entered the post-consumption stage of empire's collapse. People are paying down debts, and saving about 7% on top of that, according to the recent news. They know its over. So does Wall Street.

So do the Feds.

At this point, the Federal Government has no reason to do much of anything for Americans except keep them in line, and keep them from costing Wall Street any progress on its international agenda, the agenda that America's survival depends on.

At this point, America's actual citizens, the point 3 billion of us walking around, are just a labor pool to Wall Street and the Government they own. And they need we, the people like they need a threesome with a pair of porcupines. Having taken our jobs, they now intend to take any equity we built up while we had jobs so they can use that equity on their globalization and war agenda.

They simply have to win that thing. The alternative . . .

At this point, there's no need for Americans to do any work except serve one another drinks and fast food and refinance one another's mortgages. Manufacturing is an overseas arena. Finance is an overseas arena. Empire is an overseas arena. America's future rides on what America accomplished overseas, not at home.

America's government is an overseas government, because that's where America's future has been wagered. The only measure of success for Wall Street and its Washington subsidiary is to push America's FIRE economy to the tippy top of a thoroughly globalized economy. They've got to win at that. Failing at that will be the most indescribable disaster of a financial collapse the human mind is capable of imagining.

So America's had its run, a good run, between the Dubya Dubyas. Sixty years of being the biggest, richest, baddest, mofo of an economy this planet has ever witnessed.

But it is really most seriously and sincerely over. The very forces set in motion back in the post-WWII decade proceeded to flourish, feed on themselves, and finally burn out, go up in credit-driven flames right down to the last phony mortgage-backed security. Since mid-2007, everyone's just standing around licking the icing bowl, but it's becoming very apparent that we had our cake, and we ate it, too.