As we can see, the 'crisis' of the US budget impasse was averted, and the theater came to an end. Now the real work of creating a sustainable budget can begin.
The bankers are going to be unrelenting in their attacks on the middle class and the poor. The attacks will be threefold:
1. resisting financial and political reform which caused the crisis in the first place. Three years after the crisis and no major player has even been indicted, the bonus system is flourishing again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.
2. blaming the victims, and compelling them to take the greatest pain of the bailouts, and continuing bailouts and subsidies to the financial class through spending reallocations. The bailouts and spending on the military industrial complex are crowding out the fundamental public functions of government.
3. shifting the impulse to reform from financial reform to 'tax reform' that further supports the monied interests. Cut taxes for the wealthiest as your primary agenda using a variety of deceptive means like promoting a consumption tax, or a flat income tax but with offshore havens and loopholes, so the burden falls most heavily on those who spend the greatest percentage of their labor on subsistence, their basic needs.
Listen to what Stiglitz has to say, and think about it. He is not perfect, the documentary Inside Job was not perfect, but start thinking for yourselves, and stop taking the easy route of allowing others to think for you, and mouth their slogans. They are only too willing to tell you what to think, what is real even if your eyes say no, if you let them.
Get back to the basic idea of reform, of at least bringing the banks back under control, of restoring them to some useful function that does not involve easy money and wealth without risk or production.
Try not to allow the pigmen and their piglets, who are being paid by the system in one way or the other, either directly or indirectly, and start thinking hard about what went wrong, what changed in the 1980's that took the country into such a state that it is in today, and then go from there.
Start thinking for yourself, and stop allowing crafty wordsmiths to play on your emotions, persuading you to drink their poisons with a happy smile. What they say sounds good, but their cup is full of misery for you and your children.
They are using the money system to control you. The stronger and more pervasive it gets, the more it dominates all human transactions, the more they can charge fees and rents on everything you do, in addition to the more esoteric methods of simply creating money and giving it to their friends using accounting rules and credit.
These fellows like to fool you, to say you can't do this or this will not work. You can't reform Wall Street because they will just find ways around it, so you may as well give up and let them rob you blind. In what other area of human endeavor do people fall for such nonsense? If there was some bully who made you pay them ten dollars every time you left the store would you just accept that?
If you pass a law he would just move down the block? No, you would find those among you with the means and the will to stop them no matter where they went, and to give them the kind of thrashing that might discourage them or anyone else from even thinking about doing it again. That is what has gone wrong.
When a system richly rewards bad behaviour and does not punish it, even when the perpetrators finally make a mistake and lose billions, what do you think will happen the next time?
Time for a change, time for a real reform. Time for people to stop this 'every man for himself' mentality and start thinking about the country again. But therein lies a trap, so devious it makes me shudder, because when people start talking about the national good to you, they often are a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Despair is a trap. Things are broken, and beyond repair, so we must tear down the law and be hard on the people, these sheep, so they will learn by fear and hardship. Leiden macht frei.
What they will learn is lawlessness, to lose their humanity, and to kill you. And then in your fear you will reach for the big man with the iron rod and the will to use it, and there are many distorted, willful creatures who are eager to be that forceful ruler for you, to take up that rod in their pride and lust for power, and use it to knock everything down so that it is just as broken and desolate as they are.
And whoever he may be, he will put 'them' down forcefully, in a widening circle of 'them,' and lead you and yours on a downward spiral into the abyss. This is the lesson of the last century in Russia, China, Germany and Italy.
"What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but efficiency. 'The weak and the flawed shall perish' is the first principle of our charity. And one should help them to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Christian love." Nietzsche, The Antichrist
One way or the other this situation will be resolved. I am very concerned about the outcome and the way in which the US will get there, and the collateral damage that may be inflicted on the rest of the world.
