May Day 1971 and 2011

05-03-2011 • OfTwoMinds.com/blog

The American public are quiet about everything but their own perquisities. Unprecedented global interventions and manipulations of the economy are accepted without comment, with the implicit faith that it's all justified as long as my personal perquisites of Empire keep flowing to me: the cheap gasoline, the cheap food, the retirement checks, the Medicare, the Medicaid, the fat government contracts, the tax breaks, and all the masking of risk and the cloaking of all the lies at the heart of the American financial system. Just as in 1971, nobody cares about the deception at the very heart of the American government and economy. But the seeds sown by the mismanagement, the misdirection, the bogus statistics, the intentional cloaking of intentions and policies, the unprecedented interventions in the economy and financial system, and mostly saliently, the Central State-wide dependence on deception, has a price. In the 1970s, the American public got exactly what it deserved. It was pleased to accept Central State lies and intervention as long as the crumbling sand castle continued to send out the checks and contracts. Forty years later, we find ourselves in the same place, complacent about a reliance on fraud, deception and lies, complicit in our desire for the music to keep playing as long as we get our serving from the punchbowl and accepting massive intervention and manipulation as long as the Status Quo keeps supplying us with the perquisites of Empire. But history is clear: it doesn't work that way. You can't lie your way to prosperity