Magisteria

This post is a bit of a blather...forgive me in advance.  The plot wanders about a little too much for my taste, but right now I really don't give a crap, and I suspect, neither do you.  

Anyway;

I am getting very bored by folks in the doomy-financial blogosphere ranting about how crooked things are now.

Huh?

Look cherubs, the game has always been rigged.  Has been since the time of Gaius Gracchus and probably hearkens back to Solon.  What happened in the last fifty of so years is that there was enough disparity in money, energy, and military power between us folks here in the good ol' USA and the rest of the world that the Bon Temps did in fact roullez for everyone here in the USA.

Well cherubs, it was never meant to last.  Once the rest of the world got off of dead center after having had the crap kicked out of them in the second world war, things were going to have to come a little bit back to balanced.

Now, if the forever upwards folks are right (and the data doesn't look too good for their side of the argument) then the rest of the world will just catch up with us and we will all move together into a golden future.

Those of you who read me regularly now which side of this issue I am on.  We here in the good ol' USA have had a nice party while the rest of the world was getting up.  The rich folk took a respite from butt-fucking the poor folks here and went throughout the world screwing the poor folks there.  Gave us low-lifes a nice breather and we managed to catch up a bit.  Burned through a lot of energy stocks during the party and lived comfortably large.

Then the nineties happened and scuzzy bastards such as your humble correspondent started taking apart US factories and productive capacity and moving to not quite third world countries so that the "Shareholders" could reap rentier income from the unwashed masses here in the US by paying ten cents on the dollar to little brown folks who were truly grateful for the jobs.

The "aughts" (2000-2009) brought around the uncomfortable realization that the growth that we were getting used was little more that burning through the planets stored resources at a mind-boggling pace.  The end conclusion that lots of folks seem to be coming to is that perhaps the party is over and we might have to deal with a touch of a nasty hangover.

So, now it looks as though the game is up.  The median wage here in the US is being painfully adjusted to the rest of the world's standards, and the Hoi Polloi here are getting a painful education in how the world usually works.

I expect that during the next little bit we will see some right-wing populism, some left-wing populism, some corporo-fascism, some syndico-anarchism and a whole bunch of other 'isms coming out of the woodwork.  These will be dusty and malformed at first.  Living large has shut down our collective political intelligence and allowed sloppy and self-serving thought to predominate in the limited political spectrum that we have remaining.

'Cuz you see folks, our current stunted and corrupt political system isn't up to the task of reforming itself.  There has not been any thought placed into the political system we now inhabit, only pandering to the "core" and self-aggrandizement.  The elected officials are now merely the servant class of the wealthy.  They have the power and we don't.  What is going to happen is that the full spectrum of political thought is going to be trotted out and chewed over by the country as a whole.  A new set of political goals and constraints is going to be put in place.  This is going to remarkably ugly and painful.

Americans, in the next while, will be dusting off old thought systems and trying to find new ones to recover the political system from the asshats who dominate it now.  The first couple of efforts will be pretty sorry, but we will get the hang of it.