Ten Bears comments in California failin’ is becoming a reality.
Physics is everything, everything is physics. Wheels coming off implies momentum. Momentum implies a degree of anticipation of where the wheels will go.
Is it not far better to view not accounts in dusty old tomes but to live each turning page as times so interesting unfold?
Might as well! An attitude of “Fortune favors the brave” and “Fall mountains / Just don’t fall on me” could work.
Someone, maybe you, wrote earlier today about how to traditional socialists and their ilk the lack of motivation lay in this not being “their” moment, or the traditionally perceived moment, the proper “revolutionary” moment, too which I’d simply disagree: it’s really a stunning disbelief, or disregard, that the moment is actually upon us [them].
Maybe socialists, like many others, are simply stunned at what’s happening. Rooting for the collapse of capitalism is one thing. Realizing the mountains might fall on you too is quite another. Then of course comes deciding what is to be done.
For years I’ve wondered if the system was corrupt at the core and was being gamed by a few profiting off the many. Well, we have that answer now, and it is Yes. Enron was the opening bell. Following that was subprime, the securitization of mortgages, a deliberate bubble, and the inevitable collapse of major financial institutions. Then came Madoff, Allen Stanford, and now the Galleon insider trading arrests. Ponzi schemes stole tens of billions while the government slept. Hedge funds report gains that are not possible without insider knowledge or cooking the books. There have been serious allegations that drug money is being laundered through them and the stock market. Quite a parade of slime and corruption, isn’t it? And it appears to be the rule, not the exception.
Much of the California failin’ is due to a precipitous drop in tax revenue, which is a direct result of the cratering real estate market. Lots of folks now are stunned, wondering what to do, and what comes next.
See Dr. Zhivago. Middle-class “what-if” games come true.
Let’s hope that is NOT what comes next. What’s needed is building genuine mass coalitions that span political, racial, and ethnic divides, and use them to get real change in this country through the ballot, mass protest, lobbying, and whatever else we can think of. I don’t mean a few Marxists using an antiwar coalition as a front to build their dinky little socialist party either. Screw that approach, it’s worse than useless. I mean something along the Alinksy community organizing approach, like what overthrew apartheid in South Africa or the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Both were non-violent revolutions with huge support from the populace. That’s why they won. They were broad-based, had moral authority on their side, and swept aside seemingly invincible systems of government.
I doubt even the vampire squid could stand up to that.
“Rooting for the collapse of capitalism is one thing.”
Personally, I’m rooting for a return TO capitalism from this despicable post-modern anarchy/feudalism. Screw the banks– and Wall Street. I’ll do business with you, you do business with me. And I’ll hire my neighbor to help me.
Despite the corporate juggernaut, small business still employs half of U.S. workers. So the question is not “How did we get so far off track?”– we’re NOT that far off track. It’s “How did we let them make us believe we’re that far off track?”