We’re being ruled by aliens
How much more will it take? Will our living standards need to regress through the 19th and 18th centuries before we wake up and realize Dick Cheney was right and “deficits don’t matter”? What dark forces are taking us backward in time?
We’re being commanded to sharply reduce living standards in order to “live within our means”. Our means, mind you, have nothing at all to do with productive capacity – we have plenty; rather we’re told we must live strictly within the means that are distributed through a “market economy” that’s structured to send almost all “means” to the very well connected. Majorities have limited means and are being told they must accept it.
The stark reality is that the owners of the world are like deadly parasites attacking greater society. Their allegiance is not to human well being, it’s to profit and they’d have no qualms investing their hoards on Neptune should earthly enterprise and the human commodity prove unprofitable. We’re being ruled by aliens. Many feel defenseless against this onslaught but the good news is that the cure is easily available and only requires a rejection of the fairytale diet we’re being fed.
Counter to what we’re told by “center-left” economists, there’s no shortfall of “demand”; there’s a shortfall between actual living standards and potential, and the demand to live better is great. There’s no shortfall of resources either as many would have us believe; there’s plenty of resources to allow everyone to live well. The most essential shortfall is in leaders who are willing to serve the great majority rather than the moneyed elites. There’s no shortfall of the Euro in Europe and neither the “peripheral” countries nor Germany need to beg “markets” to obtain their own currency. The ECB can produce as many as are needed without cost. The same applies for the currencies in the United States, Japan, and throughout the world.
We live in a world of austerity only because we believe we must live that way. The elites have the power they do because they’ve convinced majorities that this is the way the world must work. They’ll lose it as soon as populations begin to discover that it doesn’t.
Comments on Inequality 
Me thinks in Europe things will change quite rapidly. Why? The German government thinks this crisis will take at least 10 years to go away. No kidding. My answer: a youth unemployment rate in Spain of almost 50% is like sitting on a nuke which will explode any minute. No way this crisis will go on for 10 years. People will take matters in their own hand. We will go through some nasty violence but at the end of the day the plutocrats will surrender. For them better that than the lamp post option.
I agree. Change is in the air. It’s also what I think makes the Summers type articles I posted about yesterday so damn funny. Similar articles were written by the contented well fed in France in the early 1780’s and in Russia around 1915 or so.
Bring it on!