GreeneWave TV Presents: America – Systemic Collapse

by TopherMorrison on May 8, 2012 in Economy, Featured, Most Read

Editors Note: Video “America – Systemic Collapse” is featured at the bottom of this article.

The world has never been smaller.  Thus far the culmination of human experience has yielded us complex financial, commercial, social and transportation networks fueled by virtually instant information.  These technologies while they are gifts can also be knives in our backs.

We have reached the stars, seen beyond them, touched the bottom of the sea, mapped the human genome (then recreated it) and offered the possibility of perpetuity in digital form – the singularity – save some future discovery that would preserve our organic existence.

The mistake often made as we bask in our achievement is  in the modern linear view of history, when we look “backwards.”  We remember when the world was flat, when life was short, brutal, dark – when savages roamed ignorant and wild and we breathe a sigh of relief as if we have nothing to fear.  We are enamored with the idea we are arriving as a species at our apogee and assume that we, that is – humanity – have thus evolved or “progressed.”

Quite the contrary, while men may evolve – mankind does not.

At the conclusion of the enlightenment era when the musing, theorizing, research, debate and reform had subsided application became the task of the day.  The reality of it was mixed.

The 19^th century experienced astonishing growth, transformation and peace especially in the United States (save the Civil War and elimination of indigenous people), what has been referred to as the 5000 year leap.  The 20^th century’s epilogue, by contrast, features a vividly dark summary about a kaleidoscope of hitherto unfathomable carnage, plight and destruction, all at the hands of the state.

The advancements provided by the innovator, the genius, the philosopher, the scientist, the merchant businessman – unbridled individuals – were collectivized and usurped through the state and by its coterie of powerful interests.  It seemed as if when we had reached the end of the New World, the Old World was bound to catch up.

As it is, the 20^th century is a testament to our technological evolution – the system we created and its upward trajectory – rather than final realization of our collective wisdom.  As Christopher Greene puts it:

“…stability has produced a situation in which we can no longer afford – instability.”

Both those unwilling to tolerate perceived injustices and elites who refuse to stand idle sought in irony to capitalize on what achievements had been wrought thus far.

Rather than allow this system to adjust and expand organically, reflecting the natural ebb and flow or cyclical nature of markets; rather than protecting the rights and liberties of the people who perpetuate the system an unholy pact was made.  You might even call it the birth of the Right and Left.

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From Purple Serf – August 25, 2011

The prospect that public officers and elites could wield control over our economic environment was (and still is) intoxicating and considering what we had achieved since our founding it was a pretty easy sell.  The very idea of control is incredibly self aggrandizing and antithetical to free markets as Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, according to Joyce Appleby: “described an economic universe that was not subject to the laws of the state, but on the contrary, subjected the state to its laws.”  In other words, the government can’t make the grass green.  We may be able to isolate and explain many parts of an economy because of these known laws, but to expect to steer the fluidity, dynamism, and titanic scope of modern economies with any sort of precision parallels only the naïveté and results of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The motives for abandoning over a century of limited intervention was not to create an army of patriotic economic sentinels through the Federal Reserve, economic councils, or the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies.  The United States scuttled sound economics because of a newly landed elite’s common desire to accomplish what European aristocracy had achieved, government sponsored capitalism also known as “crony capitalism.”  It is imperative to understand this was not the necessary evolution of capitalism, quite the opposite, it was a return to feudalistic if not mercantilistic economics! According to W. Cleon Skousen:

“In Europe, certain confederations of wealthy families had gained control of their respective governments and were making a financial killing.  Some of the wealthy families in America coveted the rich government monopolies of their trans-Atlantic cousins.”

Look no further than J.D. Rockefeller, “competition is a sin.”  The “robber barons” of the new world sought to harness central government to wipe out competition, expand their interests, and bail them out in times of need; all on the backs of the American public.  This desire should not be used to deride capitalism and definitely should not be considered laissez faire.

Capitalism, an economic and political system where trade and industry are controlled solely by private owners, is a novel idea to this world.  The relationship between the state and the economy, until the 1700s, had historically been an intimate one; the nostalgia, therefore, to recapture lost conventions was persuasive.  In the words of Mrs. Appleby:

“…the mores of a more traditional organization of society do not die out with the dominance of capitalism.  Rather they regroup to fight again with new leaders and new causes.  Any history of capitalism must contain the shadowy history of anti-capitalism, sometimes carried out in the name of a new theory, but often as a re-expression of values that prevailed before the eighteenth century.”

This is what was sold to the American working class and all over Europe, a repackaging of benighted policies, by an odd amalgam of interests including, but not limited to eager politicians, “…wealthy industrialists, heads of multi-national banking, leaders in the academic world, and some of the more innovative minds in media” according to Skousen.  While their goals were progressive, as their moniker insinuates, their methods for achieving those goals were in fact regressive.  American aristocracy required a powerful and gullible ally in its quest to fend off the waves of creative destruction inherent within capitalism, the working masses offered that alliance.  From Appleby:

“…critics saw industrialization [brought about by capitalism] as a rapacious transformation engineered by an upstart upper class eager to destroy both the aristocracy and the peasantry, which had once been protected from economic turbulence.”

No doubt!  Who wants either peasants or aristocrats in a modern economy?  The new socioeconomic organization of capitalist economies resembled more a tomato than a pyramid, however, the foundation of the New Deal was essentially integrated by the Great Depression even before the legislation by the same name was passed through Congress in 1933.

The grand bargain was achieved.  In turn for 8 hour work days, minimum wage, elections for nearly all public officials, social insurance, etc. the elite received the keys to the castle: the Federal Reserve, a public cartel of private banks, introduced plans for a fiat currency and proclaimed their members immortalis corporatus, while an income tax fed their cause and pooled massive wealth under Washington’s discretion.

By dismantling the Senate and its strict allegiance to the state legislatures a centralized and seemingly endless regulatory bureaucracy arose with the powers to legislate, adjudicate, and enforce most laws and without democratic deliberation beckoned legions of lobbyists.  And the grand prize, an emboldened executive, with what would become the most spectacular military in human history was proffered to carve up the world into spheres of influence under the guise of making the world safe for democracy.

Here we are over 90 years later still wrangling over similar issues: pensions, benefits, workers rights, depression/recession, and blaming it all on capitalism again while our currency is debased, we prosecute multiple foreign wars and occupy foreign lands, our benefits teeter on the brink of insolvency, while we bail out the aggressive multinational and foreign banks which wrought this travesty upon just us as they did in 1929!

All of this old baggage rehashed only to fight amongst ourselves over how to pay for it all in some apocalyptic pincer move on what is left of a middle class first created almost a century ago by ideals almost forgotten.

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From Christopher Greene’s “America – Systemic Collapse”

“At any given moment the paradigm of modern finance and civilization as we know it can come to a grinding and violent – end. Just like the collapse of the stock market in 2008 and the May 6^th 2010 flash crash proved when the big players want out, namely the institutional investors and hedge funds, they get out and they get out fast.”

Most importantly they get out first.  They’ve designed it this way.

 

Watch “America – Systemic Collapse” Written and directed by Christopher Greene of GreeneWave TV:

GreeneWave TV Presents: America – Systemic Collapse, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating

Tags: america, austerity, bankruptcy, christopher greene, debt crisis, economic collapse, economy, Elites, federal reserve, finance, greenewave tv, prosperity, Repeal 1913, taxes Print article