The Owners of our Ownership Society are those persons who own actual shares in America’s corporations. These legal entities, who are considered Super Persons under American law, increasingly own all the physical and financial assets of the country, and face fewer and fewer consequences for operating them without regard for the common good.
These legal entities are increasingly international in nature and financing and operations. They have no more loyalty to any one country or currency than they do to raw numbers on a spreadsheet.
These Owners are increasingly recognizable as America’s foreign lenders — the Saudis, the Japanese banks, the Chinese and Asian banks. More and more of the physical and financial assets of America belong to them — every day — than belong to Americans. It’s all legal and correct. They bought them up fair and square with solid money. That isn’t the issue.
It is this: whether these Owners be foreign or native, it is not in their interest to have the huge, consumer-driven American marketplace reverse its mad shopping spree, or drive less, or save more, or become more energy efficient, or reduce its carbon footprint and emmissions at the expense of industry, or to return control of its political apparatus to the people instead of the corporations. None of that is the reason they invest in American assets, mortgages, loans or government.
They want America strung out, baby, and bleeding assets and money. If America decides to start living within its means, and saving for the future, and passing on surpluses to the next generation, and rebuilding its energy and industrial sectors then control of America’s physical and financial assets will begin to slip away from the current Owners, and back to America’s working class.
The American Dream is a real nightmare to the current Owners, be they foreign or native.
The Owners like things the way they are headed right now. No change is welcome, or going to be welcomed, or going to be permitted if these Super Persons have any say in it. They prefer to keep things rolling along, to keep bleeding the remaining assets and efforts of the middle and lower classes into higher, tighter hands.
They prefer to put the whole population, and the next two American generations, in hock up to their ears. That’s the Owner’s goal. Call it consumer culture, write up TV adverts and happy jingles about consumer toys, offer discounts and deals on all sides, make the rubes come to the malls, and mortgage their homes to do so. That’s the goal. Git ‘r done!
These next few years in America’s experiment in self-government are either going to be organized around reversing this class warfare, this bleeding out of a dying empire, or it is going to be a lot of smoke and noise and screaming about inane political puppet shows of absurd proportions, with the end result that things keep rolling along.
Nothing short of a massive, popular uprising against this institutionalized theft will change the absurd course we are on.
Nothing can cause — or prevent — that uprising as effectively as our national media. That means, right now, a free press freely informing an awakened electorate is where the entire battle lies.
Right now, that media belongs to the Owners. And it lies. And lies. And lies. The Owners view is the only view permitted. The only ads allowed are for politicians backing the Owners. All bloggers, pundits, news anchors, letter writers, and unwashed persons are the Enemy, and they are to be hushed, ridiculed, and destroyed.
Once the dollar “devalues sharply,” and the American populace wakes up to find that the dollar in their pocket is worth a dime, and the nation’s physical and financial assets belong entirely to a very few, very wealthy Owners it will be entirely too late. Even bloody revolution will be of little avail at that point.
The only political events of the coming two years that will matter, in the long run, are efforts for a free American press and an informed American electorate.
Change will not come from politicians of any sort or stripe. It is not in their power to make such changes. They are representatives of the Owners, or they wouldn’t be there. They were funded by the Owners, and elected by uninformed lemmings.
The change will come from the people, and it will need to overwhelm the media, and the government, and the Owners.
We citizens pass the bottle, place our bets, stare at this tipping point in America’s history, and face a private choice of gambling on it, investing in it, swimming upstream, or getting the hell out of the river.
Only a precious few Americans will be delighted with where we are headed.
and the rest of you can get back to work — when we say, where we say, and for whatever pay we please.
Welcome to 1890!
You need to consider also 1) the resource substrate, and 2) the ecological crisis.
These things interact–call it the Triple Crisis. Catherine Austin Fitts, who might be even more morbid than I am, calls it the Terminal Triangle–just so you can understand what this really entails.
1) While the agrument continues to rage (and is utterly political) a close reading of geological facts agrees with industrial indicators that world oil production peaked already in November of 2005–last year. Oil production will never again be as high as it was last year–ever. The significance of this is that absolutely everything in our industrial economy–from industrial manufacture to home heating and cooling to transportation to food production–depends on oil. (Or on natural gas, which peaked in North America some years ago.) All of these things are going to become increasingly expensive, and then impossible. We may have a few years of mere price chaos, as we ride down the gentle, upper slopes of the peak, before the real squeeze begins. At some point, the stress will become too great and our industrial civilization will collapse. The big players know this–or at least intuit it–which is why they are no longer maintaining nor re-investing in the necessary infrastructure of our civilization. Since it is all coming to an end, the only sensible thing (in their view) is to loot it out while they still can.
The crisis of the resource substrate contains a mouse-trap: There is no sustitute for oil as a cheap, convenient, transportable, compact source of energy. None. Just none, and there are none on the horizon. Alternative Fuels are today’s Perpetual Motion machine. It takes more energy to produce ethanol than the ethanol can return, under any possible scheme of mass production. Hydrogen is a dead loss, at every step of the process, from generation to storage to utilization. Biodiesel depends on industrial agriculture–and oil–to produce the vegetable oil used at drive-through (more oil) fast food restaurants. Small, local, niche solutions are possible, and their over-riding characteristic is that they are small, local, and niche. They will not power an industrial civilization.
Humans have, of course, used much less energy in the past. And if they survive, will use much less in the future. Our problem right now is that we cannot IMAGINE using less energy, do not WANT to use less energy (our beloved suburbs will have to go!), and have forgotten HOW to use less energy: We have literally forgotten how to survive. We will re-learn, or we will die.
2) The ecological crisis is the biological changes and the climate change being induced by our industrial activities. Species are being extinguished at an accelerating rate, and some of them are species that humans depend upon. Our economic system knows how to exploit resources for profit, but not how to make money creating or preserving resources. As resources disappear, the economic system does know how to exploit the chaos of its own activities. But this takes economic activity out of the realm of planning for the future and into the realm of profitting off of this year’s crisis, knowing only that next year will be worse (with a new crisis to exploit). This is why there are no longer any productive investment activities: Investment is now a game of musical chairs in which the smart players make money off successive investment bubbles while the suckers loose their money as the bubbles pop. As the entire financial system approaches its demise there is no produtive AND profitable place for money to go.
There are many things that are needful for human survival–and I would be remiss if I did not mention local organic gardening as a hope against the impending collapse of industial food supply–but none of these things are profitable, nor can they be made profitable.
The only thing that is profitable is looting the system out, and then hoping that money can serve as a buffer against the chaos of the collapse. History and archaeology suggest this last is but another delusion: Individually the rich can hope to fare better than the poor, but as a group their prospects are even worse. Money itself is likely to lose value, but they simply cannot imagine another way of life and can thus do nothing other than what they are doing.
The coming age, if it exists at all, will consist of local, sustainable activities for human needs, specifically, the basics of food, shelter, and clothing. They will be done in a group or community context because that is the only way they CAN be done. Regions that fail at this will perish outright. Those that succeed will have a chance to try navigating the crises of climate change and biosphere depletion. Acting to maintain diversity will offer the best hope.
Our current political climate suggests a contrary move to monolithic, centrally controlled solutions, utilizing military force. Apparent success will precede inevitable failure resulting in regional and continental dead zones. Those that survive will be those that do not try this route, and have not run afoul of those trying this route.
The ecological mouse-trap is this: Industrial civilization is the chief engine of environmetal catastrophe, and the damage both accelerates with time and persists. So the longer civilization lasts, the worse the chances of post-civilized survivors.
The paradox is this: Most of us are not ready for the transition, but the more time we are given to GET ready, the poorer our long-term chances.
Obviously, most people will die.
Less obviously, ALMOST ALL of these deaths will be COMPLETELY needless.
Basically, I agree with you.
Especially about electoral politics. Politics is important, but only as a rear-guard, or damage-limiting, activity. In the US all politicians must act in a way that precludes constructive action.
Politics is already owned.
The only political events of the coming two years that will matter, in the long run, are efforts for a free American press
Here I do not share your optimism. The media, too, are already owned, and that is not going to change, from here on out. Such hope as there is lies in samizdat: Desimination of information by dedicated individuals or groups–now mostly done on the web.
Certainly the web is going to come under attack. The outcome depends much on where computer nerds throw their loyalties.
But the web is not the only venue for of samizdat. Once communities begin to understand that survival depends upon themselves–that there is no national entity that can or cares to help them–they can learn to seek out the information they need. Very quickly they realize that the media are useless and bogus, and that realization removes the main obstacles. Personal channels of information are many and various.
and an informed American electorate.
To the extent that politics does not matter, the elecorate does not matter either. The Powers that Be have already figured this out, and shepard the electorate to market just like they herd the consumers of any other product.
So why write on a political blog? Well, there is politics outside of politics, and this does matter. It is community gardeners in Los Angeles posting their story as the city’s bulldozers close in. It is the politics of creating communities that can persist and outwit the destructive schemes of the political powers.
From here on out: The US has committed itself to self-destruction. That destruction is now over-determined: It is coming from so many directions that it cannot be evaded and can scarcely even be delayed. The timeline depends on events that are now beyond the control of anyone. This is, such as it is, good news. The needful thing is to think as clearly as possible about post-US North America, about what can be achieved in the various regions of the continent in the after, and about how to get from one to the other.