Friday, October 2, 2015

An Interesting if disheartening view of Americas future.... From Charles Hughs Smith

You Can't Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism: It's One Indivisible System

October 1, 2015
The great irony is what's unsustainable melts into thin air no matter how many people want it to keep going.
 
Disagreement is part of discourse, and pursuing differing views of the best way forward is the heart of democracy. Disagreement is abundant, democracy is scarce, despite claims to the contrary.
If you think you can surgically extract Empire from the American System, force the State to serve the working/middle classes, end the stripmining of financialization, limit crony capitalism/regulatory capture and get Big Money out of politics--go ahead and do so. I'm not standing in your way--go for it.

But while you pursue your good governance, populist, Left/ Right /Socialist/ Libertarian, etc. reforms, please understand the system is indivisible: the Deep State, the Imperial Project (hegemony and power projection), the State, finance in all its tenacled control mechanisms (greetings, debt-serfs and student-loan-serfs), crony capitalism /regulatory capture, money buying political influence, media propaganda passing as "news", and the evisceration of democracy (something untoward could happen if the serfs could overthrow the Power Elite at the ballot box--can't let that happen)--it's all one system.
 
Should any one organ be ripped from the body, the entire body dies. The entire system defends each subsystem as integral as a matter of survival. As a result, the naive notion that big money can be excised with only positive consequences is false: restoring democracy places the entire system at risk of implosion.

No more bread and circuses, no more Social Security checks, no more state employee pensions--it all melts into air if any subsystem stops doing its job.

The system is interdependent. Each subsystem needs the others to function. I drew up a chart of the major components (but by no means all) of the system:


The system is a machine in which each gear serves the whole. So go ahead and try to "reform" the system by extracting whatever gear you don't approve of: the Deep State components, the Security State organs, the Federal Reserve, cartels/monopolies enforced by the State, the suppression of democracy, crony capitalism, whatever.

The machine will resist your "reform" to the death because should you succeed, the machine will implode. Take out the financialization gear and the financial system collapses.

So go ahead and reform to your heart's content. Go ahead and believe the system is reformable, if it makes you feel better. Vote for Bernie or The Donald or whomever. Go ahead and disagree with me. Prove me wrong. Prove the State really, really, really wants to serve the working/middle class rather than the Empire that it is. Pursue your Left/ Right/ Socialist/ Libertarian fantasies of righting the Imperial Project by ripping the gears out of the very center of the machine.

It doesn't work that way. We can't remove the gears we find distasteful. Either the machine grinds on and we get our share of the swag--bread and circuses, corporate welfare, State jobs and pensions, Medicaid and Medicare, and all the rest of the immense swag of hegemony and the Imperial Project--or the system implodes and all the swag melts into air.

The great irony is what's unsustainable melts into thin air no matter how many people want it to keep going.

But go ahead and disagree. It's your right, by golly. Go ahead and try to "reform" the system and see how far you get.


 http://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct15/one-system10-15.html

5 comments:

  1. If someone believes what this author here does, why bother to keep writing about it? He's essentially saying, it's all fucked. Everything. Nothing can change. Nothing can be good. No one can make a difference in anything. Ironically, I think he's about 80% of the way to describing an enlightened view. Suppose that somehow, everything was removed and there was nothing but the constitution in the middle. Despite the belief it is as solid as if God himself delivered it on stone, it's importance would also melt into thin air if people chose not to live by it. This interconnected blob he seems to hate so much is driven by the irrationality of being human.

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    1. “Despite the belief it is as solid as if God himself delivered it on stone, it's importance would also melt into thin air if people chose not to live by it.”

      I would suggest that it is precisely because people have chosen not to live and more importantly not require our government to live by it that we have such a system. But you are right, if the system is this intractable, what is the point? The machine will give you what you need to live on...Tell you what will make you happy and regulate medicine, nutrition and contraception to manage the population so that any manner of sexual exploit is available for entertainment... Enlightenment? There was a movie back in the 60’ calls ‘Wild In The Streets’. Essentially 14 year olds got the right to vote and anyone over 30 went to ‘retirement camps’ where they were fed LSD and required sustenance and wandered aimlessly smelling the flowers.... Enlightenment. Better to be an amoeba... Hell perhaps that’s what public education is for.

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    2. A cynical and I guess completely expected response. Can't type more, need to head to clinical

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    3. Anyone can draw a bunch of circles, connect them by lines, and write some stuff in each one. You can then claim to be an innovator and prophet and publish a book or two. Try it yourself !

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    4. You have a great point Mick. I won't retell my "lightening bolt while ready Ayn Rand" story for the hundredth time, but TS's response to me again highlights what I keep dwelling on. People who have free will can choose to live any way they want to, and for time immemorial, from before and after the constitution, people have done exactly that. In the strict constitutionalists, I find the same motivations that I find in liberals; they have a belief that if only individuals made the CORRECT choices, there would be no strife in society.

      perhaps it is a fair point to say that the lack of desire to live literally by the constitution and hold the government to the same is responsible for the problems we have today. However, to stand back and say, "Well, there it is, that sums the whole thing up" is kind of childish and really not that far removed for a child playing peekaboo who believes the whole world vanishes when they cover their eyes. Free will is what gives people the ability to accept or reject something. I don't like that some smug, asshole buys the patent for a generic medicine and jacks it's price to 750 dollars a pill. Much as I would like to think some law would fix that, it won't, because that guy would still be a greedy fucking asshole. Laws are changed by social desires. Simply forbidding the creation of the law because it doesn't agree with founding father Scalia does not make the desire to fix something go away. I don't always like it either, but I'm willing to accept that this is how real life works.

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