Shadows from a Future Arriving

by: Dark Wraith

U.S. stocks declined sharply on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 242.66, or -1.97 percent, to 12,075.96; the Standard & Poor's 500 dropped 28.65, or -2.04 percent, to 1,377.95; and the NASDAQ Composite index slid 51.72, or -2.15 percent, to 2,350.57.

This broad-based stock slaughter occurred despite the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney was not disturbed today by an Afghan suicide bomber blowing himself up along with a whole bunch of other people within earshot range of our war-hero Veep. As I pointed out after the last plunge two weeks ago, the stock markets didn't give a rat's hind end about what had happened to disturb Mr. Cheney's Happy Place that day. More broadly, today's slam on stock prices wasn't merely the result, as some in the media have claimed, of sub-prime lenders shutting down their easy-loan money windows, either.

What's happening is the result of an accumulation of events that are, in their aggregate, deeply changing the configuration of the United States with respect to the rest of the world insofar as financial matters are concerned. Whether or not these sea changes are permanent, they are certainly long-term. Later this week, I shall offer Part Two of my series, "The Economics of Wreckage," of which Part One was published here last week.

For the time being, suffice it to note that there is good news and bad news. The good news is that we shall slowly close the trade deficits we have run for so many years, and we shall eventually close our federal budget deficits, too, the ones—quite ironically but not surprisingly—systematically racked up by the fiscally conservative Republicans over the tenure of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Furthermore, we might even see a nice little side effect of fewer illegal aliens slipping into the country, something that has frothed the mouths of populist neo-fascist commentators like CNN howler Lou Dobbs, who pretends to be for some middle-class America of which he is not a part while he foments hate against people who aren't the root of the decay this country is experiencing.

More good news, notwithstanding the posturing of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), is that Halliburton might not be the only corporate parasite on the United States Treasury that will decide it's time to set up base in more profitable lands of far away places.

Athough we shall become a poorer nation—quite noticeably so—over the coming years, we shall make exports that are cheap in other countries, we shall—quite likely, though, with a considerable amount of pain—learn to lose our appetite for borrowed success, and we shall become less beholden to the fascists, Communists, mercantilists, and all manner of other thugs to whom we have been groveling in this new century for the money to pay for the Republicans' wildly irresponsible tax cuts and the neo-conservatives' wildly irresponsible wars.

The bad news is that we shall make cheap exports in part because we shall be the cheap labor, and the companies that hire us will be those from other countries who gathered American dollars in massive quantities during the years when we were sending greenbacks overseas by buying cheap foreign imports. We shall close our budget deficits because we will have no capacity whatsoever to afford a government that hands money to the people in social welfare programs, universal health care, or even rigorous enforcement of regulations on food, workplace safety, and a whole host of other luxuries to which we thought we might be entitled in the here and now or in some not-too-distant future.

We shall remain, of course, a sovereign nation, but ours will be the sovereignty of the weak, and this in a world of great and small predators building powerful, adventuresome armed forces, monstrous weapons, and exclusionary alliances drawn in a world soil fertile with the toxic stew of ancient sectarian religious bonds, unmitigated economic greed, and unstoppable sensibilities of destiny.

Others of this harsh world will pick up the ball our own neo-conservatives so wrongly thought was our comparative advantage. It wasn't, and the legions of the secular and religious Right simply didn't understand that. Neither did most Americans, particularly those who voted so cynically for the promised fist that never should have been raised the way it was.

On a personal, I shall perhaps live long enough to see life in America become difficult enough that the Christian extremists wagging their finger at me to live by their morally miserable code will be too busy finding food to fund their polemical demagogues. To the same extent, perhaps I shall live long enough to see people grasp that Al Gore's finger-wagging on "THE Single Most Important Issue of Our Time," isn't quite so important for an average American as finding a job that pays enough to keep body and soul together in a degraded economy where high-minded "futures" must yield to daily survival imperatives.

I might even, in my most fantastic moments of hope, imagine people coming to learn the sheer power that arises from a moderation that rejects fear-whipped policies of the extremists and embraces carefully planned, frugal behaviors of far more enduring benefit to the individual and to the society.

I shall do everything I possibly can to suppress those flights of personal fantasy; but should I fail to keep myself from a short moment of false hope, I shall, at the very least, stop myself from laughing hysterically in the aftermath of such fond weakness.



The Dark Wraith trusts that each and every reader has a good place far from the grim land of the future.

---

Excerpted from the unpublished "Open Forum of March 13, 2007" at The Dark Wraith Forums, which will be fully active once again once the Website has been removed from Blogger to the new publishing platform, NucleusCMS.