Awakening

A brother separated from yourself, an ancient enemy, a murderer who stalks you in the night and plots your death, yet plans that it be lingering and slow; of this you dream. Yet underneath this dream is yet another, in which you become the murderer, the secret enemy, the scavenger and the destroyer of your brother and the world alike. Here is the CAUSE of suffering, the space between your dreams and your reality. The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of disaster, all are here. Here is the CAUSE of unreality. And it is here that it will be undone.
— A Course In Miracles

The key in politics is not expression, nor expressing discontent or resistance, but actually transforming things. Collective action can change things, but still implies a separation between the “people” and “representative institutions.” It implies “we” are asking “them” to change their ways.
[T]he real revolution of peer to peer technologies is that it allows people not just expression, but actually a redesign of social processes.
For example, free software communities successfully embed their values in software, and so do the emerging open design communities that are now starting to tackle physical production itself. This is the next great frontier...
— Michel Bauwens, Founder, The Foundation for P2P Alternatives

The Center Is Missing: A Journey Into Oblivion

During a financial crisis caused, in part, by the the so-called “subprime mortgage meltdown,” the U.S. Congress and Senate approved a “rescue plan” authorizing a massive bailout for Wall Street banking and other financial interests. Cost estimates to U.S. taxpayers of the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” range from $700,000,000,000 to $1,000,000,000,000 or more.

¶ “Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944, (is) an economic history which sets out to explain 1929, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Polanyi’s book came out the same year as another influential Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, brought out the central text of neoliberalism, The Road to Serfdom.
¶ Hayek became the founding father of a model of economic management which has brought us to the current crisis; Polanyi, with extraordinary prescience, warned that the crisis would come; he rejected the idea that the market is a “self-regulating” mechanism which can correct itself. There is no “invisible hand” such as the neoliberals maintain, so there is nothing inevitable or “natural” about the way markets work: they are always shaped by political decisions.”
— Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian

Rejected by the House majority for “complicated political reasons” on the first go-round, the toxic legislation’s key architects began feverishly bribing, cajoling and coercing cooperation from recalcitrants by tossing in a “little something for a lot of people.” As predicted, they swayed enough legislators with the added trinkets and baubles to go along with converting the United States into a “toxic debt waste dump” in a doomed attempt to prevent “financial Armageddon.”

As an afterthought, a few worthless scraps were carelessly tossed towards ordinary Americans. In reality they are forced by law to pay for a financial catastrophe perpetrated by the same banking, mortgage and other financial institutions primarily responsible for instigating the “meltdown.” This legislation was passed against the overwhelming opposition from the American public, despite a massive propaganda campaign depicting the legislation as “urgent,” and that “immediate enactment” was the “only option.” It also added to the already-devastating costs imposed on ordinary Americans through deceitful and fraudulent “marketplace activities” perpetrated by these same industries.

Revolutionary Suicide

Perhaps the most coherent way to summarize the insanity all of this implies is to try and put it in the context of a much simpler to understand analogue. When Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones coerced his Jonestown followers into “drinking the Kool-Aid,” they succeed in committing an act of “revolutionary suicide.” It was the largest mass suicide “in over 1,900 years of history” and the “greatest single loss of American civilian life” not caused by a natural disaster until September 11, 2001.

Soon after this tragic event, the “Reagan Revolution” brought a renewed “glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance” to America, and shifted his revolutionary economic model into hyper-drive. Requiring sustained growth and constantly-growing debt to adequately finance it, the “free market revolution” falls ill or dies if growth slows, halts or declines.

“[T]he upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis... Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over... [T]he setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.”
— John Gray, A shattering moment in America’s fall from power: The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over.

That’s because anything possessing an infinite appetite—that also requires relentless growth, and depends on finite resources to sustain it—will ultimately exhaust its fuel and begin feeding upon itself. No amount of free-market fantasy can change this fact. Forging a political economy on such a system means condemning the people who live under this regime to “drink the free market Kool-Aid” and commit “revolutionary suicide.”

The hallucinations driving an “economic” ideology that declares “greed is good,” and demands cut-throat competition, short term gain and infinite growth while ignoring the fatal consequences of such behavior merely proves the insanity of the society adopting it. Examples illustrating the effects of such insanity are nearly endless. For instance, think of the automobile. A more uneconomic human transport method, apart from aviation, is difficult to imagine. Yet the “marketplace” enthusiastically endorsed making this extremely dangerous and catastrophically destructive system the primary mode of human transport in the United States and across the globe.

Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQ)

Question: With a backdrop of foreign military invasions, torture, hurricane Katrina, destruction of civil liberties, suicidal domestic policies and the myriad other executive, legislative, financial and corporate atrocities, why pick “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” as the proverbial “last straw” that finally shoves “America” into the abyss?

Answer: Despite a furious propaganda campaign aimed at the American People, “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” exposes in the most naked possible way the utter contempt for the American People harbored by dominant corporate, financial and government factions. The devastation from the aftermath of hurricane Katrina exposed this same contempt, but its harshest consequences were localized. The brutal consequences that result from the chain of events making up the current economic mega-collapse—of which the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” is merely one, albeit highly-significant link—will will not only pummel virtually every American, but will also touch nearly every community on the globe.

“Of all modern delusions, the idea that we live in a secular age is the furthest from reality...liberal humanism itself is very obviously a religion--a shoddy replica of Christian faith markedly more irrational than the original article, and in recent times more harmful.”
— John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Question: Why did Americans allow passage of legislation that piles further insult and injury upon damages already inflicted on them?

Answer: Americans are insane. They have become politically impotent, have lost all sense of reason, and are unwilling to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. The American body politic is seriously ill and its vital signs are weakening.

Featured Audio
Title: Our Crazy Economy
Featuring Catherine Austin Fitts, Founder of Solari, Inc.
Artist: Madness Radio, 2007-12-12
Length: 55:56 Minutes (51.22 MB)
Format: Mono 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)
A money insider’s view of how crazy and corrupt our US-led world economic system really is, including drug money, military spending, and the housing crisis. Catherine Austin Fitts was Assistant Secretary of Housing - Federal Housing Commissioner under President Bush senior, Managing Director, Dillon Read & Co. Inc., and founder of Hamilton Securities investment bank. She has designed and closed over $25 billion of transactions and investments to date and has led portfolio strategy for $300 billion of financial assets and liabilities.

Question: Why did the U.S. Congress and Senate pass legislation so violently opposed to the well-being of its constituents, whose interests they are sworn to uphold?

Answer: U.S. legislators are psychopathic and insane. They’ve become servants to big business and financial organizations and have fully abdicated their responsibilities to the American people. They’re collective “moral compass” has totally malfunctioned and they can no longer judge right from wrong.

Question: The justification for the bailout is that the financial industry and other Wall Street interests are “too big to fail.” Why aren’t the American People “too big to fail.”

Answer: The American People simply don’t matter. Instead of “too big to fail,” both Wall Street and Washington view the American People as “too small to matter.”

Question: What constitutes totalitarian rule?

Answer: A common definition of a totalitarian system is one that exercises “absolute control over all spheres of human life.”

“[It has become more and more clear that] risks we have collectively dismissed as “in the past”--national fiscal insolvency, a near-worthless currency, widespread hunger, a breakdown of the medical system...--are either possible or increasingly likely. In triage, we need to identify the highest systemic risks and then prioritize our national spending to lower those risks... [W]e’ve lost sight of the government’s essential role: to preserve liberty and protect the citizenry against catastrophic risks: a nuclear exchange, a public health pandemic, mass hunger, a collapse of our currency.... Only a nation convinced of its invulnerability could be so deluded as to spend its waning days of wealth arguing about how the borrowed trillions should be divided, as if they were the spoils of conquest rather than the outright theft of our children’s future.”
— Charles Hugh Smith, “First Step: Triage”

With this definition in mind, when is the last time you thought about the influence that economic conditions have over nearly all aspects of your life? How much “free will” or democratic control to you exercise over your day-to-day reality? Where do you live? Do you have adequate shelter? Did you know that shelter is identified as a “fundamental human need”? Do you--not the bank, mortgage company, some piece of toxic financial sludge or any other entity--own your shelter “free and clear”? If not, what happens if you can’t continue to pay for your shelter, or afford to keep any other roof overhead? What kind of economic or political system would impose the penalty of depriving you of a basic human need if, for whatever reason, you were unable to pay for it? Finally, what kind of society would even tolerate a political system that places economic considerations over human welfare to the extent that the system would even deprive its members of basic human needs?

What kind of work do you do? Is what you do for a living the work you want to do? Do you find your work enjoyable, fulfilling or useful? Does your occupation focus your talents exactly where you feel they are most needed? Was your answer “no” to any of the last three questions? If so, how come? If the work you do is not the work you feel you are best suited for, why not? What would happen if you refused to put any more energy into work that isn’t right for you and instead put your time and energy into work that does? What kind of political or economic system would coerce you into taking work that you are ill-suited for? What kind of society would threaten you with loss of means to feed, clothe and shelter yourself--as well as those for whom you are responsible--if you can’t or won’t accept work you are not well-suited for?