Friday, December 25, 2009
Predictions For The United States of America During The Second Decade Of The XXI Century
.H/t to Dimitry Orlov @ ClubOrlov:
Da Buffalo wants to note: These ARE NOT 'apocalyptic' predictions... Just predictions of change in a rather uncomfortable and unwanted direction for the citizens of America, and also, perhaps at some point in the not-too-distant future, for the rest of the industrialized world.
As Sweatshop Union exclaims in this video, it's 'ALL ON US'...
Sweatshop Union @ MySpace. The lyrics. Their Wikipedia entry.
An evolutionary HipHop soundtrack is available @ archive.org
...for blithely going about living in a materialist fantasy land since... the beginning of the industrial revolution? But CERTAINLY commencing in it's greatest haste (for the benefit of "the greatest generation", who disregarded their narcissistic and short-sighted
Wikipedia has the basics on "Market Capitalism" and Consumer-based economies, but I recommend this article at the Boston Globe: "Why capitalism fails (The man who saw the meltdown coming [Hyman Minsky] had another troubling insight: it will happen again)".
Quote: "This wasn’t a Minsky moment. It was a Minsky half-century.”
...and this was the snake oil image we were being 'sold':
That said... Dimitry Orlov:
Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be completely wrong, I would think that they will have been very thoroughly forgotten by the time 2020 rolls around.) And so, without further ado, here are my predictions for what it will be like in The United States of America during the second decade of the XXI century.The decade will be marked by many instances of autophagy, in business, government, and in the higher echelons of society, as players at all levels find that they are unable to control their appetites or alter their behavior in any meaningful way, even in the face of radically altered circumstances, and are thus compelled to consume themselves into oblivion, as so many disemboweled yet still ravenous sharks endlessly gorging themselves on their own billowing entrails.
Governments will find that they are unable to restrain themselves from printing ever more money in an endless wave of uncontrolled emission. At the same time, rising taxes, commodity prices, and costs of all kinds, coupled with a rising overall level of uncertainty and disruption, will curtail economic activity to a point where little of that money will still circulate. Inflationists and deflationists will endlessly debate whether this should be called inflation or deflation, unconsciously emulating the big-endians and little-endians of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels, who endlessly debated the proper end from which to eat a soft-boiled egg...
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