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· Collapsing Stock Market: Weak companies will go out of business, strong companies will become weak, unemployment will sky rocket, and consumer spending will finally drop.
· Collapsing Dollar: “Made In China” goods will suddenly get a lot more expensive.
· Credit Crunch: Companies that need money cannot get it. This can shut down the simplest production – truck, farmers, supermarkets and so-forth. No one wants to risk their money given the lies that are starting to appear – and more and more lies will appear, paralyzing investment.
· Possible State Of “Economic Emergency”, including:
o Bank “Holiday”: Like Argentina, your deposits may be government insured but they become “temporarily unavailable”.
o Americans prohibited from buying gold, cashing savings bonds, selling stocks or any number of other things.
o New Terror Attacks: You need something really big to distract people from the current mess.
The problems appear most immediately as an unsustainable US trade deficit combined with a massive investment bubble in the real estate and corporate bond market. Essentially, the US is continually barrowing more money to pay its existing debt. The system is finally starting to crumble. Such a problem is usually dealt with by brutal “belt tightening” which removes unmanageable consumption. But....
· Today, America’s leaders face deep pit of lies they must dig out of before they even understand the mess they are in. There is a huge bureaucracy which has staked its legitimacy on a whole series of false claims, all of which reinforce each other and are dragging the economy down to total destruction.
o The free market is the best distributor of resources.
o Privatizing every imaginable resource is the best route for further development.
o Expanding money and consumption for the wealthy will help the economy and the average person.
o “Financial innovations” like “derivates” and Internet credit cards actually build real wealth.
o Alan Greenspan has managed the markets well.
o The service economy is the wave of the future.
o The economy is growing and recovering.
o Consumption is what drives economic recoveries.
o If you ignore pesky environmentalists, environmental problems like the green house effect won’t cost you any money.
o Fraud and accounting problems are the result of a few “bad apples”, so punishing this bad behavior should stop it in the future.
These fictions have been built, one upon the other, over the last twenty years. They have accelerated and taken the economy to its present unsustainable condition. Certainly they serve the interests of the powers-that-be but they are also the filters that the powers-that-be see the world with. Even more than any one lie, a series of deceptive attitudes and assumptions are ingrained in the culture of the ruling class. And this works perfectly with a powerful ability makes lies universal – in the simplest case, any problem can labeled as . Altogether, there is a single complex of self-serving deception, a single of lump of intertwined lies and ideologies which cannot be abandoned in pieces but must instead be got rid en mass. And there is little indication that they will stop things even with the system under severe stress. When George W. Bush, Alan Greenspan or Harvey Pitt speak, their most laughable quality is their refusal to even say “the system has a serious problem we must deal with”. And this refusal proves things are even more serious . Because, really, this society has had serious problems for a while before the stock collapse. Colleges and hospitals which give worse service for more money don’t constitute progress. Putting more people in prison or in nursing home hasn’t strengthened the economy.
And it’s not that the economy is everything. It’s that over the last twenty years, the economy has been the excuse to discard everything else. Everything has ridden on the economy. Bush, politicians, Rush Limbaugh and company have said “sacrifice everything for the economy”, sacrifice welfare or the environment for “getting more stuff”, and so-forth. If this economy is now tanking, you can see that there is nothing left for most people. On a large scale, it’s over.
How many people will suddenly find themselves bankrupt in the next three months? America’s real growth hit the skids in the seventies. American median income, what a person in the middle of the income brackets makes, peaked in 1973 and has been going down ever since (with a few exceptional years). The country has been consuming more since then, in total. But this means US consumption has been more and more on credit, more and more for the benefit of yuppies who themselves produce nothing. The economy has appeared to expand on speculation, cheap imports, “services” and boondoggles. Yuppies making home improvements and buying inefficient SUV didn’t help things in the end.
The only “silver lining” of the present crisis is that we, the poor, the soon-to-be poor, and the workers, are now thrown completely on our own to create alternative to the present mad world. We have the opportunity to finally have some say about the development of society, finally start talking to each and creating institutions we control. The masses of Argentina have created “popular assemblies” to directly control their neighborhoods now that the government and the economy stopped functioning. It is time start thinking and acting around these and other ideas.
More can be found at: http://www.prudentbear.com/ AND http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ AND http://www.againstsleepandnightmare.net/