plus c'est la meme chose. This old French saying -- "The more things change, the more they remain the same" -- is tellingly appropriate for our country insofar as the economic and social order is concerned, subsequent to (or, perhaps to put it more accurately, co-extant with) the greatest financial, market, banking system, and economic upheaval of our lifetimes. The existing social order is successfully protecting the status quo ante, in our view. This does not at all mean that our political and financial leadership has SOLVED the problem, or that it will SOLVE it over time. What is does mean is that the prime beneficiaries of the existing order have demonstrated ample TACTICAL SKILL in the service of preserving their own hegemony. The populace, we think, will continue to be largely narcotized and resigned to its fate. Moral outrage and class anger will be dissipated and will be appeased to a sufficient degree by populist posturing sans any real content. Money will be printed to soothe ruffled feathers. However, we doubt that we will be headed into an inflationary explosion, widespread fear and hysteria to the contrary notwithstanding. The genius of our system is that it is propelled by greed. In other words, it gives near full throttle to the central attribute of the human animal: the insatiable lust for power and money at the expense of all else. We do not here mean to condemn, only to properly note. We are what we are, all philosophy and ethical pretenses to the contrary notwithstanding. Our system also provides circulation of elites, accessibility to and cooption of the smartest and most ruthless among the lower orders. Finally, it possesses an ability and a willingness to find and to punish sacrificial lambs to appease public anger. The system of shaving off scraps from the great feast of money and the incestuous marriage of government and the great corporations and feeding these to the masses is effective. It is a commonplace to say that every Revolution has its Thermidor. We have NOT had a revolution; consequently, there is no need for a Thermidor. The Framers, and the system of government they established, was NEVER MEANT to install a democratic regime. The framers were the intellectual elite of the propertied class, a coalition of southern landowners (and slaveholders) and of the commercial rich of the north. They DIFFERED PROFOUNDLY from the contemporary elite in only one crucial respect: they sought to install the rule of an ARISTOCRACY, NOT the rule of a PLUTOCRACY. These brilliant and infinitely canny men sought to preserve their economic, social, and political hegemony via a regime governed by the smartest, wisest, and most prudent cream of the plutocrats -- in contradistinction to the regime of crass money which actually materialized. The rise and fall of nations is a topic on which we have no particular views. All we can do is quote the title of Jacques Pirenne's book: "The Tides of History." Nations rise, and nations fall. It is, we think, far too soon to close the chapter on the American dominion, and to prepare for the rise of the new imperium of the East. The very level of public clamor and private panic over the rise of China (with India on the screen of the future) suggests to us THE PROFOUND UNLIKELIHOOD OF THIS SEQUENCE. No one has gotten the art of prediction right, we expect, since Nostradamus. Moneysage - 2010 -- copyright |
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