Sorry for the incoherence of this diary, I’m really just trying to get this down on paper, so these thoughts are rather hastily slapped together.
The answer to why all these really smart people are making such stupid decisions today is that it is better if everything crashes now rather than later.
Lose Capital, Gain Marketshare.
If it takes 30 years to fall apart, those super important people, and artificial people (corporations) are going to get clobbered. All will be lost: legacy, legal exemptions, wealth and power; First Class will take a beating.
It’s kind of a perversion of the Pottery Barn Rule, that Powell created for Iraq, instead this time it is: You break it, you take it..
I have been long perplexed as to why.
Why stoke the flames of a World War when ‘the Enemy’ is such small potatoes?
Why push against CAFE standards at the onset of Peak Oil?
Why run unbelievable national debt, and allow personal debt to create a negative net worth?
Why give creditors the ability to take people’s homes if they can’t pay?
Why do away with Habeas?
There is an answer. Make it fall apart now.
While those in power have all the cards.
If it takes 30 years, then those in power wind up penniless and pariahs of history. They lose their power and possibly face jail. Thrown out on their flabby asses.
But, if it happens quickly, say in a couple of years, given the power structure currently in place, they lose money, but gain market share.
No oil? Good, that means that MBNA and B of A can just take people’s homes and assets if they are not capable of paying off their debt or serving as slaves to their debt.
No consumers? Good! That means that there is going to be a serious fire sale of American assets. Sell off the infrastructure: private water supplies, private roads, private everything.
No access to courts? Good! That means that there will be no challenge to the consolidation of assets by giant corporations.
No right to Habeas? Good! That means that those who choose to speak out will disappear.
All of this in a time of war will give the narrative ‘we had to do it’, and lay all of the blame on the Other and those traitors who stood in the way of what needed to be done.
This is the only thing I have been able to come up with that allows for smart people to make such colossally stupid ‘mistakes’. It also fits in nicely with all of the reduction of power of real live breathing people, and the increase of power of unaccountable power hungry institutions. We will be forced to take what they give us.
It is the endgame of conservatism. It will be the scene where America is drowned in a bathtub.
If they break it, they can take it.
Sorry about the disjointed nature of this post.
hasitly cobbled together idea with an old comment…
I hope you can find some value in it.
Your explanation makes pretty good sense. I, too, have been continually asking “why?” My only other thought is that they are psychopaths, bent on destruction. Or maybe it is a combination of psychopaths and a whole lot of people caught up in the very immediate, short-term wealth – power – wealth gambit. Maybe they live in such an insular, bubble-wrapped world they have no fear of the consequences – just hire more security and build higher compound walls with wider perimeters.
I think your “30 years to fall apart” is optimistic. Yesterday’s news on Raw Story included: Forty Countries Face Food Shortages and in the News Bucket there was: World Hits Annual Sustainable Resource “Overshoot” (Ecological Debt Day or Overshoot Day, measures the point at which the consumption of resources exceeds the ability of the planet to replace them — and it gets earlier every year) and Steven D front-paged:“The century of drought” One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100, say climate experts in the most dire warning yet of the effects of global warming.
In ejmw’s diary Have we not learned?, scribe gives an answer:
Who is ready to listen to her answer? And who is ready to act on her advice?
Whew – some moments it is hard to put on “my happy face.” I will share two sites that Knoxville Progressive and blueneck shared, respectively: Astronomy Picture of the Day and Earth Science Picture of the Day.