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"Recession Officially Over," The
New York Times' lead headline declared around 7 o'clock this morning.
(Watch: they'll change it.) That was Part A. Part B said, "US Incomes
Kept Falling." Welcome to What-The-Fuck Nation. I suppose if you include
the cost of things like the number of auto accident victims transported by
EMT squads as part of your Gross Domestic Product such contradictions to
reality are possible. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross,
where are you when we really need you?
I
dropped in on the Occupy Wall Street crowd down in Zuccotti
Park last Thursday. It was like 1968 all over again, except there was no weed
wafting on the breeze (another WTF?). The Boomer-owned-and-operated media was
complaining about them all week. They were "coddled trust-funders"
(an odd accusation made by people whose college enrollment status got them a
draft deferment, back when college cost $500 a year). Then there was the
persistent nagging over the "lack of an agenda," as if the US
Department of Energy, or the Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs was doing a whole lot better.
This
is the funniest part to me: that leaders of a nation
incapable of constructing a coherent consensus about reality can accuse its
youth of not having a clear program. If the OWS movement stands for anything,
it's a dire protest against the country's leaders' lack of a clear program.
For
instance, what is Attorney General Eric Holder's program for prosecuting CDO
swindles, the MERS racket, the bonus creamings of
TBTF bank executives, the siphoning of money from the Federal Reserve to
foreign banks, the misconduct at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the willful
negligence of the SEC, and countless other villainies? What is Barack Obama's
program for restoring the rule of law in American financial affairs?
(Generally, the rule of law requires the enforcement of laws, no?)
Language
is failing us, of course. When speaking of "recession," one is
forced into using the twisted, tweaked, gamed categories of economists whose
mission is to make their elected bosses look good in spite of anything
reality says. I prefer the term contraction, because a.) that
is what is really going on, and b.) the economists
haven't got their mendacious mitts around it yet. Contraction means there is
not going to be more, only less, and it implies that a reality-based society
would make some attempt to acknowledge and manage having less -
possibly by doing more.
Instead,
our leaders only propose accounting tricks to pretend there is more when really
there is less. The banking frauds of the past twenty years were a conspiracy
between government and banks to provide the illusion that an economy based on
happy motoring, suburban land development, continual war, and
entertainment-on-demand could go on indefinitely. The public went along with
it following the path of least resistance, allowing themselves to be called
"consumers." They also went along with the nonsense out of the
Supreme Court that declared corporations to be "persons" with
"a right to free speech" where political campaign contributions
were concerned - thereby assuring the wholesale purchase of the US government
by Wall Street banks.
Praise
has been coming in from all quarters for the peacefulness of the OWSers. Don't expect that to last. In the natural course
of things, revolutionary actions meet resistance,
generate friction, and then heat. Anyway, history is playing one of its
little tricks by simultaneously ramping up the OWS movement in the same
moment that the banking system is actually imploding, with the fabric showing
the most stress right now in Europe. I shudder to imagine what happens when
OWS moves into the streets of France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Spain.
All
of the action right now has the weird aura of being an overture to the year
2012, fast approaching as we slouch into the potentially demoralizing
holidays of the current year. I don't subscribe to Mayan apocalypse notions,
but there's something creepy about the wendings and
tendings of our affairs these days. OWS is nature's
way of telling us to get our shit together, or else. This means a whole lot
more than bogus "jobs" bills and Federal Reserve interest rate
legerdemain. It means coming to grips with the limits of complexity and
purging the system of the idea that anything is too big to fail. What happens
when Occupy Wall Street becomes Occupy Everything, Everywhere?
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