What began as an economic storm has blown into a full-scale political crisis. Amid popular discontent and separatist protests, Spain has stumbled towards a crossroads: without decisive action by the government, the post-Franco democratic settlement is at risk. Financial Times
It is said that every historical phase carries within it the embryo of the next phase to be born in the future. If this is so, then someday we may come to consider the mountain of debt that threatens to crush our present system as an explanatory, broken condom.
One of the paradoxes here is that the enormous robustness of the United States, its size, population, its natural resources, military power and perhaps most of all, its ability to create money out of thin air to pay its debts, probably means that it would not see the total systemic crisis arriving until it was too late to really do anything about it.
If Americans wonder where the world economic crisis is taking them, a look at what Spain is going through right now might give them some serviceable hints.
Spain is one of the world's oldest nation-states, with a population of 40M and a large economy somewhere in the world's top ten. Thus, unlike Greece, it is large enough and complex enough to serve Americans as a guinea pig.
Spain is infinitely more fragile and vulnerable than the USA, but for that very reason it is able to provide a valuable early warning for Americans... in much the same way that coal miners used to take little canary birds down into the mine to detect odorless, poisonous gases. Long before the burly miners noticed anything, the tiny bird would keel over in a faint from gas inhalation. When the canary passed out, the miners would run for the exit. Spain has just keeled over...
The distress signals coming from the American system are much more subtle than those emanating from Spain.
Here, for example is some socially ominous data:
Lower-paying jobs, with median hourly wages from $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for just 21% of the job losses during the recession. But they've made up about 58% of the job growth from the end of the recession in late 2009 through early 2012. Los Angeles TimesWhether people are actually "entitled" to "to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it" is open for discussion. But, the fact is that if enough of them don't have any plausible way of getting health care, food or housing, finally they are going to turn against any system that denies them these things. And if the number of the disgruntled is sufficient then, to maintain some sort of order and domestic tranquility, the system will have to give them health care, food and housing, whether they want to do so or not.
Probably the reason the American right wing has become so grotesquely strange and wacky of late is that the extremely lucid money financing all the zany craziness is aware that somewhere down the road, if the trends of growing middle class impoverishment continue, some sort of serious redistribution, strongly reminiscent of socialism, is going rear its head.
To me it is clear that the people who are willing to pay $50K to hear Romney talk over rubber chicken are trying to deny the declining middle class and the growing mass of working poor any kind of clarity of thought, if possible. If the Spanish crisis is any harbinger of things to come, it will be the people's stomachs however that will finally do the talking.
The first realisation that the American populace must come to, it the one that the article states. America is going to fail economically. It will fail in this manner because it has failed in every other manner necessary to maintain its economy. Whatever grand dream out there makes believe that a constitutional republic prevails, it has turned into a drunken nightmare. There are few realists out there that will examine the scope of the damage done and the repercussions that will come from it. I hope these are people that do not fear the future, as the future is hardly ever what the masses make it out to be. It is the masses that fear the future, and knowing their own pathetic helplessness and incompetence, will do anything to prevent it, even selling their own souls into hell.
The second realisation is that the Federal government, the national debt and the banking reserve and all subsidiaries of those 3 et al are all rogue organizations, operating without sanction or constitutional prescription, operating outside social contract in a veil of secrecy. Sure, you can stand out front and look at the sign above the locked doors, but the American civilian has no idea what goes on inside, except for nicely worded plausible explanations occasionally slid under the door. The acceptance of this relationship is what keeps things like Federal, national debt and a banking conglomerate in play. In reality, it is a complete usurpation of life, liberty, happiness and future, all stolen by strangers few of us have ever seen or met.
There can be no law without contract. Law is contract. But we are presented with a new set of terms sans agreement daily now, each one more horribly egregious than the last. None are directly agreed to by the masses, but somehow this assumption that a representative government rules our lives like the divine right kings of old (and queens of current) is what makes it all OK. It makes it OK that people we can't even reach can pass orders and have any one of us arrested without cause, warrant, reason, trial, due process, or notification to family, and hauled away to hell knows where they commit their aberrations. No, law was out the door the second sneaky lawyers came up with the legal system. Since then, people have NO RIGHTS within that system and the corporation has indefinite rights. Realisation: there is no law. If there is, it is legal slavery.
There is no national debt. How can there be a debt of which no man has agreed to, of which there are no terms, there is no payment schedule, there is no final balance, and there is no payoff. How much of the debt do you owe? 1/1,000,000th? How about all of it? That's right, you personally owe 16 trillion dollars (stated) to foreign banks. If not, argue against it, and show me your stated amount. You cannot, because yours and everyone else's stated amount of the debt they owe is infinity. It can never be paid off, was never intended to be paid off, but is instead an extortion scheme of the grandest scale that an entire nation has bought into and continues to pay into. The entire debt, as printed on their debt notes, belongs to the Federal government and not the people. Realisation: there is no national debt. If there is, it is economic slavery.
The power of everything Federal is presumptive. Federal presumes the people comply, the people do not act contrary to Federal and therefore Federal claims universal authority. Federal's banks also claim universal authority. Did anyone here really think that Ron Paul was going to be allowed to audit the Federal Reserve? Him and what army, because it surely isn't Federal's army? If he was allowed to become president, that whole charade would have been upended or we would be mourning him come the end of January.
All of the necessity and reasoning and creation of Federal came after the fact of the constitution and without constitutional mandate. The whole thing was a setup by most of the 'founding fathers' to ensure that the only representative democracy that existed was that which represented them and their banking masters. The creation of the Federal Reserve Banking system was an extension of that. The civil war was an extension of that. Every war has been an extension of that. We are a warrior nation in constant battle against ourselves. Realisation: Everything Federal and below is a rogue government run by foreign agents.
When things go south, we can each white knuckle to the decrepit system that has been calling itself one thing and acting 180 degrees contrary since near its inception. Or, we can lay claim to our own dominion and take the next evolutionary leap in government. If you don't know what that is, take the current pyramid system and turn it upside down, then start there.