The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The Redux Future

1 December 2010

Volume 12, Issue 47

Access now the fresh insights of “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday This column also now appears each Wednesday on Deep Woods Moola, Redux Rendezvous and “The Creation Leadership Center”.

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Contrary to what we have all been taught, to use the lyrics from the song from the 1972 movie Cabaret, “Money Makes the World Go Around” IT DOESN’T, at least anymore.

In that musical tone in 1976, “Money, Money, Money” by the Swedish pop group ABBA doesn’t seem to be working anymore either.

Yet no matter the reality that the world is drowning in a world of fiat monetary electronic bits and bytes and the loss of wealth through massive leverage continues — money still seems to be as popular as ever.

In the thirty plus years since the first expression of these songs in the global market place, tangible money has been replaced with plastic. Until recently that plastic was the source of at least a short-term credit card floating loan, or unsecured financing of an over leveraged personal lifestyle.

Especially in the United States, where before the current Great Recession began, seventy percent of the economy was financed by this consumptive obsession, we truly seemed to believe that “If Tomorrow Never Comes” someone else would handle the consequences. At least this Garth Brooks song still relates to a real world populated by real people attempting to live their lives in meaningful ways.

Tomorrow has suddenly become today, and it seems that those who said that the future would take care of itself, now have only the line, “Trust us, we know what we are doing.” That doesn’t seem to be the title of any song, but it seems that the time is right for some country music composer to do just that. When they put out the tune it should have a track that plays it backwards, so that you could get back what you lost — like your house, your truck, your kids, maybe the wife or husband, but especially your dog.

Business Insider recently had a post “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America.” The first chart of that series shows that in 2006 the wealth of the top 0.01 percent of the American people was 976 times the bottom 90 percent. In 1928 just before the market crash that led to the Great Depression that number was 892.

What we currently see on the streets and our business oriented TV screens is basically what is described as a Plutocracy Reborn. Just like all those socialist-communist terms like bourgeoisie, laissez faire, proletariat, that I some times use for effect, but never can spell, many times even with the aid of the spelling checker, government ruled by the wealthy is something I never really thought about. America is, or more properly was thought of as the land of individual opportunity.

This Plutocratic rise of a new class of robber barons began after the cut in high marginal tax rates under the progressive era of the New Deal and the Great Society. From the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 until the Reagan Era, or more precisely through the Greenspan reign at the FED, we fought two world wars, a police action in Korea, and undeclared wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Lest we forget we also won the Cold War, where Ronald Reagan altered the ‘”Great Society” into Eisenhower’s fear of the Military Industrial Complex, to where it became part of the world’s new reality.

So here we are, a century later, which somewhat compares with the early 1930s, with the Obama Administration and their followers (including FED chairman Ben Bernanke) that truly believe that the New Deal saved the republic.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, and anyone else who might be reading this, what we have seen is a century of fiasco leading to debacle, then altered by farce, to be messed up again by either a disaster or a snafu. In this contextual process is where we, the ninety percent, live our real lives. We now are beginning to see, that they really don’t care about us at all. A better model of our world and their world is probably a paradigm of two parallel universes.

Just like the setting for Cabaret, in Berlin during the Weimar Republic of 1931, there is a possibility that there is a Hitler waiting with fascist plans. That seriously means our redux future short term, will be only the transposition to a form of a German holocaust, that goes far beyond the desire to exterminate the Jews, but also includes the elimination of all, worldwide, who are not Aryan and have access to capital or political power. It is important to remember Germany’s Nazis only seized power, they were never honestly elected, and their attempted reign only lasted a little over a decade total.

Thankfully, while a lot of Americans are of German ancestry, along with others from virtually every tribe and nation on this earth, the United States was basically founded on an anti-plutocratic, or any other elitist ‘cratic you might like to put together. That includes true democracy, which the founders understood was not a viable method of governance, but rather a recipe for chaos and anarchy.

As Ben Franklin, well stated at the close of the Constitutional Convention, “We have a republic, if we can keep it.”

The time is now where that republic is under peril, like probably no time in our history, because all of a century of what we thought were successes are now turning out to carry a stupendous amount of unintended consequences. In the language of the 90 percent, we hold the keys to a future to accomplish something that was only a vision of the founding fathers.

The answer that we can understand, was written on the wall in the model of Biblical Babylon and plutocrat king Belshazzar in the prophetic book of Daniel chapter 5: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin. Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weight in the balances and found wanting; Peres your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

The best dating we can find for this feast of Belshazzar is in 538-539 BC. However these events seem to have no extra-Biblical reference to the king or his lineage, which for our usage is most significant, for even though Belshazzar thought of himself as magnificent, other recorded history doesn’t hold him in any esteem.

Which brings us to the relevance of any of the current leadership of the United States or the world for that matter. Will they be remembered as having any lasting importance even fifty years into the future, and even more doubtful five hundred or twenty five hundred years?

What we do know is that God was working to overthrow ancient Babylon and in the process of the establishment of the Mede and Persians as rulers, the Jews were able to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their nation and their temple to God.

What shall be the work that needs to be done as the world of the Plutocracy becomes more out of touch with reality?

Make sure your personal redux understands the applied knowledge and wisdom learned through the sacrifice of what is historically called the “Greatest Generation.”

As I wrote last week my mother was the eldest child of a family of five, and had just turned ten when the Great Depression started. The youngest sibling was just then two. That time had a dramatic if not traumatic effect on my mother all her life. My father was seven years older than my mother, and his only stories of the time were about working in a CCC camp and together with his older brother they sent money home to their parents, because that was what the CCCs were all about.

Somewhere through it all however, both my dad and his brother worked their way through college, my dad spending his career as a teacher and school administrator in rural Eastern Washington. He retired in 1974 and a few months later he died through a blood infection he got from a cut finger. That was just shortly after I finished graduate school at WSU and had gotten a good job in Seattle, making more money than he did when he retired.

I bring this up to point out something you will not hear or read anywhere else. Not from the left or the right spin-masters and pundits. Neither will you hear it from what remains of what was in the 1970s called a voice of moderation. The track of the plutocracy ascendancy truly began when the Greatest Generation began to retire and pass the torch of leadership to the Baby Boomers.

Under our Boomer leadership the country as gone from the greatest nation in the history of the world, to the most material and arrogant bunch of losers in the history of human civilization.

Bill Clinton was a draft dodger from a Podunk state, who through mutual benefit schemes with his wife ascended to the presidency.

George W. Bush was really a plutocratic preppie, who, as the story went, couldn’t qualify for the University of Texas Law School, but with connections was able to get an MBA from Harvard. During Vietnam it is thought, as a fighter pilot, he may have flown missions along the Mexican border that kept the country safe, but records are truly scarce.

To the benefit of the country, both were successful governors of their respective states. Bush was also the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. They both had run something that provided some substance to their total of sixteen years as the president. That brings us to Barack Obama and what he brings to the table.

Moving right along. The Greatest Generation passed the leadership torch to the Boomer ME generation and ever since, it has been a slow demise for the ninety percent of the American people, while 0.01 percent have amassed most of the money, and kept it to themselves, like life is truly a game of Monopoly. Come to think of it the Monopoly Game money has more intrinsic value than our ocean of non-energetic leveraged debt; that cannot produce wealth but only consume it.

The redux future of the United States needs to look back to the Greatest Generation for the skills that allowed them to build the country in spite of the best efforts of their progressive political leadership, to save the world from a crazy fascist socialist, and hold an evil communist empire at bay until internal structural weaknesses forced the restructuring of the Soviet Union into the Russian Federation.

This brings us to the important question about the redux future. Do we have leadership that can put the nation ahead of selfish gain, and seek not to continue to build a federal tower of Babel to the god mammon and the redistribution of extinct national wealth, but rather seek opportunities in line with the energetics of natural law, human individuality, with political sovereignty as close to its application as possible?

When you look at it energetically, financially, and administratively, the problem with the United States is that the redistribution of wealth, if that is the proper term, truly has taken place, and it is towards the top 0.01 percent against the 90 percent of the people.

What hasn’t gotten through to seemingly anyone yet, if an effort is started to begin to make financial capital available to that 90 percent, without government interference, crony capitalist special interests, bureaucratic regulations and restrictions, the problems of the United States and the world will quickly become manageable.

We here at the Wonder Springs Chronicle have begun to work in that direction, with the resources we have at our disposal, and others we hope to find. The time has come to let the me first people of all generations, continue to arrange the deck chairs of the global Titanic, and let them perish in the cold ocean of the worthless debt they have and attempt to continue to create.

Using that metaphor, this means run a tight and efficient ship and provide for those near, family and community, and stand amazed at how well what we currently have will serve us as we begin the redux of the future.