Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [213]
This "financialization" of the global economy has triggered unintended consequences; the end-point of all these machinations and manipulations is global financial implosion.
Now that consumers have maximized their debt and the last global asset bubble in housing has burst, global capital has no new windfalls to exploit except rising tax revenues diverted by the State and funneled to Power Elites via government "programs." But as credit expansion fails to create new spending, then tax revenues are collapsing; global capital and State Elites are both reduced to creating money/credit out of thin air and funneling these new trillions into the State/financial-rentier Elites' coffers.
But this fraud, this giant con game, cannot long endure. Thus the citizenry will face a choice: slip into fatalistic acceptance of ruin, or form a new government from the ashes of systemic financial ruin.
The State is the only concentration of power strong enough to counter over-reach by global capital Power Elites.
Yes, the State can be co-opted and captured by Power Elites; that is the current status of the U.S., where the citizenry are passive, fractured, besotted by consumerism and distracted by ideological propaganda and theater. But an engaged, active, well-informed citizenry can wrest control of their State, or reconstruct it once it has imploded into financial insolvency.
The role of the State is simple: to limit the over-reach of Power Elites and deny them the non-competitive monopolies and State-enabled cartels they ceaselessly seek to impose.
The role of the citizenry is to be engaged in governance to limit the over-reach of the State and to fend off the very partnership of the State and Power Elites which we have described in this analysis.
If the citizenry slip into passive complacency, the Power Elites (which exist in all eras and all civilizations) will gladly exploit the open windfall/power vacuum and grasp the reins of the State.
I have already described how the "balance of powers" in the U.S. Constitution has failed to limit the emergence of a "shadow" system of governance and banking/finance which flourishes within the Federal State/Elite partnership. Once again: no regulatory system, even one as thoughtful as the U.S. Constitution, can operate without citizen feedback and engagement. There is no system on Earth which can be set up to counter Elite influence and then left to run on automatic.
We in the U.S. have become complacent and disengaged, and as a result our government has been co-opted and captured by the financial-rentier Power Elites, whose mass media have obscured this reality behind a "we live in a consumerist paradise" politics of experience.
As devolution takes hold, technocratic "solutions" will be presented by all the engines of Elite control: the think-tanks (conceptual lobbyists), the "liberal media" which represents the high-caste, well-educated technocrats who serve the Power Elites, and various theocratic schemers hoping to exploit the vacuum left as the intellectual framework which supported the State/Elites partnership for the past 60 years is discredited.
The Power Elites' media and technocrat/high-caste intellectual flag-bearers will ceaselessly tout essentially worthless "reforms" (as if tweaking the parameters of an imploding system will fix its structural flaws) to extend the dominance of the Elite/State partnership. Rather than succumb to these wily blandishments, the citizenry must make the key economic decisions in their own best interests; the market and the State regulatory agencies are the two primary mechanisms of implementing democratic decision-making.
Thus the citizenry must focus on insuring