We’re coming up on four years since the financial crisis of 2008 nearly took this nation over the edge. But just as the jalopy called our nation’s financial system started to fly off into the abyss, the banker elites and their hand-picked handmaidens at all levels of government stepped in and bailed them all out. President Bush wrote the check, then President Obama cashed it. Parties no longer matter, I submit they merged into a White Collar Criminal Oligarchy with the election of Bush II and a deal cut over the botched Bush/Gore election of 2000.
So here we are years later and the details of the diabolical crime spree continue to leak out like discharge from an infected boil. A few piddling investigations, a few press conferences with get tough pronouncements but nothing, not a single thing, has been done to punish all of those who caused this hell that we continue to live in today.
Oh sure, for many people things seem okay. They’re not in foreclosure, they have a job. They are getting by. But even those who are getting by are drowning in very real ways that are just not recognized”¦yet.
Have you seen the streets of Greece? If you only watch the network news you sure haven’t, but everyone should be paying attention to the fact that the streets in Greece are literally on fire, with hundreds of thousands of people out protesting. The thing that we all need to understand is that the debt fundamentals that brought the Greeks into the street are even worse here in the United States of America. The percentage of government debt and personal debt for the good ole USA is actually higher than that of the Greeks.
We have not yet felt the crippling pain of massive cuts in social services and extraordinary hits to spending, but we will. We simply cannot avoid the math. Heap together the existing government debt, the personal debt, the student loans, divide that across the working population multiplied by reasonable estimates of growth and GDP and we’re rioting in the streets. And if this were not bad enough, heap on top of that sinking ship the trillions of dollars that we all shelled out to bail out the criminal elite that set up”¦and profited obscenely from this Rube Goldberg minefield of a world economy. They saddled us all with a debt burden that we simply cannot overcome. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in real debt per person that must be repaid”¦.somehow”¦.or else.
I see no leaders on the national scene, but there are a few leaders in this state. Senator Mike Fasano and Representative Darren Soto come to mind. But just watch how Senator Fasano continues to be punished by the Republican leadership for raising the kind of common sense objections that you and I have. And Darren Soto tries to push back, confronting the absurd orthodoxy of the Republican party that has been in power in this state for more than 18 years, but he is quickly drown out and pushed aside by a power machine that dispatches any dissent with ruthless effectiveness.
At some point in time, this will all come home to roost for all of us. The debt collectors for the bills we all carry will come literally bashing down our doors. Will the debt collectors be the Chinese, demanding payment of their bonds and sovereign debt? Will the debt collectors be the corporate oligarchs that are even now concentrating their extraordinary power? Or will it be the federal and state governments themselves, coordinating their strike teams even now with joint ” protection” drills and homeland security exercises in tiny Florida towns?
And when this all starts to happen, thinking and feeling Americans will explode with fury and rage. They will rightly question why the crushing boot of austerity and oppression slams down on their necks while the ” leaders” and the architects of this coming tyranny stare down at them with condescending glares, and absurd comments like, ” if only they would have all gone out and gotten jobs.”
The sickening reality is we are all victims of an inevitable and crushing killer. Our future, and the future of our children is gone, buried under the weight of the debt and the oppression that comes with it. Our nation today exists as a failed political and social experiment. Our government hijacked as it has been by the corrupting influence of corporations that have no moral or ethical obligations to restrain them has failed in its only true function To Protect Us All From Enemies Foreign And Domestic.
And so democracy will indeed come full circle. We are seeing the final act in the tragedy called democracy play out in the streets of Greece. Like the final frames in an old 8 mm movie, the street scenes will play out first in Greece, then in Portugal and Italy, then across Europe and finally here in America.
And as tragedy plays out slowly, we all sit idly by like theater goers who know the tragic ending is coming and can feel the searing heat of the theater on fire, but who are paralyzed and do nothing to leave the building or prevent the end that we all know awaits us.
The only sign that will suggest we might avert part of this fate will be handcuffs and perp walks, jail for the bankers. But it’s unlikely that will ever come, so get ready for the searing heat of a fiery revolution.
