It’s a tragic fact of history that sometimes societies lose their bearings.
The total tonnage of economic malarkey being shoveled over the American public these days would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Minister of “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”) turn green in his grave with envy. It’s a staggering phenomenon because little about it is conspiratorial; rather, it’s the consensual expression of a public that wants desperately to believe things that are untrue, and an economic leadership equally credulous, unmanned, and avid to furnish the necessary narratives that might preserve their jobs and perks.
By “economic leadership” I mean the consortium of business executives, government officials, academic economists, and media disseminators—and even some bloggers and financial advisers. Some of the latter may be “talking their book,” since they may manage other people’s money and need those other people to believe in the soundness of markets, true or not. And some of the former may be motivated by the fear that even a little erosion of trust in the system could lead to a collapse of the system basted together by little more than blind faith in currencies and dubious “innovative” instruments. But most of these characters are mainly just flat-out delusional.
It’s a tragic fact of history that sometimes societies lose their bearings. They make terrible choices and bad things happen. It doesn’t have to take the form of a conspiracy, but rather a consensus—that is, a simple agreement between people in charge (and the public subject to their rule) about where that society will direct its priorities and make its investments. Proof of this was the behavior of national leaders and the public in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
The system was hugely burdened by the debris of loans gone bad, a lot of it packaged into fraudulent bonds. The biggest banks in the nation were implicated in the creation of these frauds and left holding a lot of their own bad paper when the music stopped. Clearing the debris would have restored structural integrity to the banking system. Prosecuting financial criminals in the executive suites of the banks would have dis-incentivized racketeering and control fraud.
American leadership allowed neither restructuring nor prosecution. Banks (except for Lehman Brothers, the unloved “fall guy”) were not only prevented from failing, they were stuffed with taxpayer bailout money, plugged into a new Federal Reserve carry-trade racket (ZIRP), given a green light on unlimited accounting fraud (FASB 157), and allowed to continue their old rackets in new ways, e.g. the new bundled rental payment bonds, “covenant-lite” junk bonds, and new iterations of shady collateralized loan obligations. And, of course, not one bank executive was prosecuted (not to say jailed) for criminal shenanigans that cost the US economy $22 trillion according to the US General Accounting Office.
The public went along with all this to the degree that few of their political representatives were turned out of office, nor was any effective political resistance mounted besides two movements that proved to be weak and ineffectual: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. (David Brat, who unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the recent Virginia primary, tried and failed to get backing from the Tea Party.) President Obama, who first campaigned on “hope and change” in the very moment when Wall Street blew itself up, and did absolutely nothing to change the racket-riddled banking system afterward, was rewarded with re-election in 2012. The obvious conclusion is that America, from top to bottom, didn’t want to restructure anything about our national life—and still doesn’t. It wants to stay stuck where it is in a very perilous moment of history, and it has enlisted a laundry list of fallacious beliefs to support its “do nothing” spirit.
Number One Fallacious Belief: The USA has unmatched exceptional entrepreneurial spirit.
It is in the interest of healthy adults to remain sane, even when the powerful matrix of society is going crazy around them. I don’t think you can overstate the capacity of societies to go crazy. We still marvel at the murderous cruelty of Germany and Russia in the mid-20th century, the sickening slide into industrial barbarism, and the technical proficiency they achieved in pursuit of their lunatic ends. And what provoked those terrible journeys into collective madness? Isn’t it part of the horror that no explanation seems to suffice. They were both losers in the First World War. Boo Hoo. Many societies sober up when they lose a war. Both opted for organized mass murder instead. Joseph Stalin summed up Russia’s collective psyche in that period when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The regime that promoted that particular view of the human condition lasted seventy years and then dissipated like a mere bad dream, an extremely fortunate outcome for Russia, and not so easy to account for, either.
And so what of US in this new century, faced with the gravely serious problems of resource scarcity, ecocide, climate uncertainty, demographic stress (overpopulation), cultural breakdown, and financial bedlam?
We are on the fast track to crisis until we prioritize truth over comfort.
From our friends at Peak Prosperity. For the entire article go to peakprosperity.com. July 9, 2014.
