Sadly You Have it Right

A Friend recently wrote the following:

"The economy collapses due to crooks in the private sector with the aid of crooks in government. The crooks in the private sector get bailed out by the same crooks in the government. The rest of America gets left out of the equation and gets downsized. The market is restored and bonuses flow.

Now, to divert attention to this theft and fraud, the same people who created this mess form and fund a fictitious reform movement of not too bright and anxious Americans and help them focus their attention on the government as the bad guys, not the people who really screwed them. The media's in on the scam as well.

All of a sudden we're concerned with deficits. But obviously, the trillions of dollars wasted on War conveniently gets left out of the discussion.

So, the Teachers, Union Workers, State/Federal workers, people on state aid, mexicans, etc. become the target. Elections will come and this furor takes over and more and more public jobs will be eliminated, services cut, stimulus attempts gutted and more government programs privatized.

Boy, we are in trouble, aren't we?"

Response from EU

Very good analysis.

This is what happens to empires at the end of their life cycles. The orthodoxy that runs them, or I should say, the people that wield the orthodoxy that provides the overarching structure of the society (a set of ideas that in one moment may have been passably functional as policybut clearly are no longer), become so incrusted that all debate about how to confront the society's challenges comes to a virtual stop.

As I suspect I have said before, the history of Spain is very instructive in this regard. The very social ideals (basically a religiously fueled militarism) that allowed Spain to become an empire more powerful than any the world had ever seen (much grander than Rome) by 1530, had become by the end of that same century an albatross around the society's neck.

But did Spanish elites respond to the new historical reality with creativity and new ideas? Hell no.

They kept on looking out for themselves and plying the people with fear-based patriotism and superstitious religious bullshit. (For a hilarious send-up on this read Cervantes very short but brilliant Dialogue of the Dogs (available on-line for 2.98)

Meanwhile the British and the Dutch (that days's version of our Chinese and Asian Tigers) were glad to sit back and take Spain's gold while the leadership class of that country committed stupid folly after stupid folly in the international arena, mostly with wasteful wars in the Mediterranean

They (the Brits and Dutch) used the gold to create the foundations of their more enduring models (one's that not coincidentally made social mobility an ever-increasing reality) of imperial power.

Meanwhile, inside Spain the normal people got poorer and poorer and dumber and dumber. At a time when the the combination of the Enlightenment and the Reformation (with its emphasis and rationality and the person's status as and individual before God) were throwing open the doors to new and creative ways of solving problems Spain mired itself in diversion and the idiotic memory games of Catholic Scholasticism. As a result, they virtually missed the scientific revolution

Its almost as if our elites are painting by numbers from the Spanish "plan".

p.d. In a related vein, there is a very funny (but actually very sad) article in this month's Le Monde Diplomatique about how the powers that be keep applauding the Irish economic model (with its slavish obedience to the austerity dictates of the international market) even as said model generates disaster after disaster.

The upshot is that it no longer maters whether the Irish model works or whether the Irish people are doing better or worse. The only thing that matters is that that Tom Friedman (wonderfully referred to in the article as the "ineffable Tom Friedman") and the people who pay him to create pithy, if wholly juvenile. provincial and idiotic myths of how the world works, make sure that the ideas they need to promulgate to insure their continued enrichment continue to be presented as "Common Sense".