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The story-line behind
the convulsions shaking the money centers of the world is such a hopeless labyrinth of mathematical metaphysics because abstraction
unto infinity is the last refuge of those seeking to evade reality. This is why individual
human beings faced with terrible choices go crazy, and it is true
of societies and nations, too.
Reality is so boringly concrete.
The facts just sit there implacably
like dull cement bollards in a roadway, waiting for impact with objects in motion. These facts are as follows:
The world is dead broke. (By
"world" I mean those
places where the electricity
is on more than it is off.) The world spent all of its future capital
to stage an orgy of blow-out
development and then the
future arrived and there was no money to run everything.
To make matters worse, there are massive interest payments due on all that money misspent. Nobody has the means to pay the interest. All the activity around this fact
is an Olympiad of money games that amount
to musical chairs and hot potato, signifying that 1) there is not enough to go around, and 2) somebody has to end up stuck with a problem.
The orgy averred to above coincided with the last years of cheap and abundant energy supplies to run the development. That's over and done with, too,
despite the strenuous
efforts of wishful thinkers,
cornucopian propagandists,
and corporate racketeers
to pretend that technological magic can make up for dwindling cheap supplies.
The net effect of
all this is that advanced societies all over the planet
have entered a comprehensive compressive contraction of activity and, more ominous, of technological progress. The
world can't cope with contraction. For one thing,
it wreaks havoc in the mechanisms of
capital formation. Capital can only
be formed under conditions where interest can be paid. That is, loans are only tenable when they can be
paid back with interest. Hence, the current insanity in world financial markets and banks - the mad scramble to pretend that interest payments will be made on bailouts tendered to nations that cannot make interest
payments.
The assumption that this craziness
can go on forever without consequence is now dissolving
in an international mood
of frantic despair. The spotlight for the moment is on
Europe because that is where the games of hot potato and musical
chairs with the most players are underway. The mutual entanglements over money
tendered and interest owed are so complex
and abstruse that the number
of moves needed to complete
the games seems infinite. But trafficking with infinity is itself one of the universe's most hazardous ventures - it invariably ends in the death of
the adventurer. What's
more, the trajectory to that
sorry ending accelerates fastest in the last
moments of the venture. Hence, expect
Europe to melt down like
an overheated nuclear reactor, with an aftermath of deadly political goop oozing out to make parts of the
continent unable to support human
life at levels we are currently familiar with, i.e. civilized society.
That is to say I'd expect
a lot of internal disorder
in the nations of Europe in the decade to come, before there is even a chance of anything that resembles war between nations breaking out -
and by the time war does occur, it may
be fought with crude swords
and helmets forged out of
the scavenged detritus of
a bygone age.
The current extravaganza across the
Atlantic Ocean has taken
the spotlight off doings here in our own colossal floundering confederation of
quasi-sovereign American states. Our situation with money spent and interest due - and the resulting
impairment of capital operations
- only seem less dire in comparison. It's just that
we are playing a different game than hot potato and musical
chairs. Our game is more like the old American schoolyard game called salugi (suh-looj-gee), or "keep-away."
The "big kids" (the one percenters) like Jamie Dimon, Jon Corzine, Lloyd Blankfein, et al, have stolen
the baseball mitts of the dweeby
little kids (the 99 percenters)
so that most of the people in this
country feel that they cannot participate
in the national pastime anymore.
The big kids have certain advantages,
obviously, but sooner or later they run
the risk of being torn to pieces by the vengeful mob. Of course, that happens when the game stops being simple keep-away but seems more and
more a matter of larceny
-- "they stole
our mitts!"
When that moment arrives anything might happen politically here in the North America, from a corn-pone Nazi takeover of central government to a complete
dissolution of the republic into
autonomous and even
hostile regions. Similar games and outcomes are possible
in China, Russia, and the nations of the Middle
East. In fact, the tendency
world-wide in the face of accelerating
compressive contraction will be
to break up large political units
into smaller units. The main question is:
how much heat will that process
of global fission generate as we
lurch into a world made
by hand.
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