 American Purgatory
Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan
www.realityarbiter.com
Dec 17, 2009
Are financial markets a direct
reflection of the overall health of a nation? I wish they were
not, but I fear they are.
I wonder at times if our nation
has entered a state of purgatory - all of us mulling around in
the waiting room to Hell, anxiously counting the minutes until
the grim reaper saunters through the door sickle in hand his
mission to send us off to eternal damnation. Unfortunately, there
is little time to close this door so that we may stave off this
potential fate that looms so near. What we need to alter this
course is a procession of men who possess moral fortitude and
common sense, men of rationality and reason. Men of action who
will set in motion the dismantling of institutions that bleed
this nation dry.
Hope is not a strategy. This
present state of manufactured optimism emanating from the White
House and our news outlets is contemptible. We are in dire need
of new reformist leadership and of new voices that will speak
the truth. A national purification is long overdue. Time is not
on our side. Look at the track record this nation has racked
up over the last few decades and this economic and moral purgatory
in which we find ourselves might very well mark the beginning
of our walk of death down the long road to Hell.
I make this analogy of a national
state of purgatory not in jest, but rather in practical terms.
This nation has gone the way of an absolute meltdown of morality
and ethics. We've reverted to a sort of Wild West where anything
goes. From the halls of congress to our corporate boardrooms
our collective morality bar has sunk so low we cannot go any
lower without disconnecting from the great past this nation is
starved to regain. We stand dangerously close to the point where
immorality begets our undoing.
Personally, I am father to
a daughter of fourteen years. Brett, my co-author, is father
to a twenty-month old daughter and an eighteen-year old son.
We desperately want to create for our children a better world.
But we are fallible men, and certainly not saints. The paragraphs
you are about to read are not written from some moral high ground,
or a Holier-than-thou pulpit, but rather from saddened hearts
when we see that by walking our own moral tightrope, if we were
to allow ourselves to slip below the bar, however slightly, we
would be just as guilty as the worst perpetrators of our nation's
moral destruction. Also, when witness to greater moral transgressions,
by our own inaction, we become part of the problem. And we are
just two men. Amplify this by fifty million, one hundred million,
or three hundred million fold and it is no wonder immorality
permeates our society.
This article is our personal
effort to call people's attention to the truth. The brevity of
our circumstance is immeasurable by past reference. Economically,
we have never been so challenged. Over the past few decades a
gullible US population cheered the halls of congress and the
Oval Office alike as the incestuous bedfellows of money and politics
ushered in a financial Coup d'état - co-opting our public
trusts with the greed and excess of Wall Street. Profits are
now had at any cost - damn the long-term consequences. Instead
of being exposed as the obvious fraud he was, Bernie Maddoff
was coddled by the SEC - an institution whose role as regulator
is a complete failure. As Wall Street and Washington raped an
entire nation, employees of the SEC were too busy surfing porn
on the Internet and running private businesses instead of doing
the jobs taxpayers pay them to do. All the while, young girls
were selling their virginity to the highest bidder in public
cyber-forums where grown men (not hormonally charged teenage
boys) seek out their sexual fantasies in the netherworld of Internet
pornography. What of the wives, children, and even parents of
these men? Do they approve of such questionable actions?
 Think
of our children turning on the television to see people eating
bile, cow blood, and live bugs for money on game shows like Fear
Factor, or Flavor Flav and his hit reality show where he maintains
a stable of women all of whom physically fight each other to
have sex with him because he's a celebrity - and a damn ugly
one at that. And finally, there's always Survivor, the ultimate
demonstration of all things wrong with modern human interaction.
A reality show that pits person against person in a deceitful
game of moral destruction where lack of ethics are rewarded,
instead of punished.
Survivor, this is what our
nation's leadership has become. Win at any cost. Damn the future
of anyone but myself.
Morality is in great part the
measure of a nation. Have we unlearned morality? Is this why
we find ourselves staring down the abyss?
 We are
allowing ourselves to become more corrupt by the minute. We stare
into the face of our future being raped, but we do nothing. We
are as corrupt as the corrupters. We accept the unacceptable.
We fail to understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In what will go down as the greatest financial heist in history
our leaders have chosen to reward corrupt individuals and their
hollow corporations for what are arguably criminal levels of
risk behavior by the moneyed elite of this country. What message
does that send to our children, or to anyone for that matter?
Be as corrupt as possible in the US and you will be rewarded?
Be the biggest failure jeopardizing the fate of others then stand
in the corporate welfare line with all the other wealthiest institutions
of the world, your greedy hand extended for a government bailout
check while you simultaneously foreclose on an entire nation?
Talk about the rich corralling the masses. It's no wonder someone
coined the term "The Sheeple."
The path we traveled to this
purgatorial limbo is both easily understood and misunderstood.
The answers to understanding are sometimes right in front of
us. What are seemingly benign things or actions, those everyday
judgments or decisions we make to do one thing or another, are
not always benign. Tell a little white lie to make that one sale
that will put us into our bonus. Rig the game in our favor so
that we might enjoy a little more opulence for the few decades
we have remaining on this planet. Look the other way while the
Federal Reserve and Wall Street blow economic bubble after economic
bubble and in the process create a six-hundred trillion dollar
shadow banking system that plays by no one's rules but its own.
In the case of Goldman Sachs, and Wall Street in general, lie,
cheat, and steal their way to profitability at the expense of
three hundred million taxpayers. The fact is that we have become
an uncooperative nation willing to take advantage of anyone for
the sake of profit. The idea of building a cooperative future
where everyone wins has been sacrificed at the altar of short-mindedness.
 It might
be this purgatorial limbo I speak of is simpler than it appears.
It could be that we are collectively suffering the consequences
of the "Peter Principle", or getting to the job of
failure. This principle supposes that an individual rises in
a corporate hierarchy to his first level of incompetence.
An assembly worker gets promoted to supervisor then to assistant
manager, then manager, until he next gets promoted to an upper
management job for which he is ill equipped and subsequently
gets promoted no further as he can no longer demonstrate the
competence required for the task at hand. He rather relies on
subordinates who are then stuck with an upper manager who cannot
carry out his own duties. Could this be the state of our nation?
Have we been promoted as far as our competence allows? Are we
in fact incompetent to handle our future? Have we now elected
a man just incompetent enough for the Presidency who is being
manipulated by Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and a circle
of (previous) Wall Street insiders now on the government payroll
as cabinet members and high-ranking advisors? The saddest thing
is that we sit idly by whilst our virtue is being stolen. We
do nothing.
A view of the world through
rose-colored glasses does no one, any good. We are not as resilient
as we think we are. Instead, we exist in a world of synthetic
productivity where multi-tasking renders us incapable of doing
anything effectively or with any level of competence. Multi-tasking,
that art of simultaneous ineffectiveness is a counter productive
weapon that to a large degree has contributed to the potential
failure of this nation. If you were to listen to Alan Greenspan
however, you would believe that multi-tasking through technological
gains by way of the "new paradigm" was the gold at
the end of the Information Superhighway and that exotic mortgages
and the burgeoning spending class paved the road to riches. We
now know these premises to be empirically wrong.
It can now be argued that what
would seemingly be advancements in productivity are proving to
be setbacks. The Information Superhighway has led us to an era
of technological arrogance. In reality all we have accomplished
is to dilute our ability to carry out simple tasks as we click
from a quarterly sales report due in an hour, to Facebook, to
on-line solitaire, to writing an email explaining to our boss
why the quarterly report will be delayed this day. We are a nation
of excuse makers. We look for someone else to keep us one step
ahead of our accumulating debt that smothers the potential of
what could have been an equitable future. Ironically, it is our
technological arrogance that impedes our ability to produce and
manufacture our way to prosperity.
 Craftsmen
who used to flock to this country to fulfill the needs of a manufacturing
base flock here no more. "Made in the USA" used to
mean something. It meant quality. It was the definition of industrial
capitalism. But now through the wonders of globalization we have
exported our craftsmanship through an outflow of jobs to China
and India as we turned everyone in the USA into real estate agents,
mortgage brokers, and web designers - a perfect playground for
bankers to ply their craft, lending money in every creative manner
both thinkable, and unthinkable. "Made in the USA"
has been reduced to the status of punch-line - synonymous only
with "Mortgage Backed Securities" and other "Toxic
Derivatives."
Is it any wonder we have evolved
into the 'entitled society?' If we weren't on the government
payroll, or subsidized by the US taxpayer through social welfare
then we were borrowing our way to prosperity. Enter the God-fearing
middle class. Just dumb enough to buy into the scam a couple
hundred million people began signing over their paychecks, selling
their future for the enjoyment of having things now. We were
transformed into non-productive Sheeple, selling our souls for
an easier life in lieu of a better future for our children. At
our current rate of productive attrition we will soon be a nation
of declawed housecats, possessing no skill-set whatsoever to
survive in a world where the ability to produce real goods still
reins supreme. Yet we remain the 'entitled society', when we
are entitled to nothing.
 We forget
(through economic amnesia) that throughout history all societies
fail. Nicolaus Copernicus maintained that civilizations failed
when bad money, controlled and understood by an elite few, drove
out good money. The same can be said for morality. Bad, drives
out good. This is a reality of which we should all be acutely
aware but rather are immune to its possibility. We dangerously
believe we cannot fail. That, in fact, is the greatest gamble
of all. A roll of the dice against history, a bet against all
natural laws of the universe, all things are in a state of entropy.
All things eventually wither away to nothing. To possess longevity
is to be ahead of the universe. Sadly, we have constructed a
fragile world that produces material things that do not last.
The fiat money we use as the currency of our production is by
design, destructive itself. The Federal Reserve prints greed,
nothing more. But still we covet it. We pursue it as if it had
value. And in this pursuit we destroy earth's resources as if
the laws of nature have no relevance. We believe there is only
now.
 We, the
entitled society, morally and fiscally bankrupt have borrowed,
spent, and bailed our way into a historical corner. Nero should
be so proud. Our public trusts are nothing more than government
sanctioned check-kiting operations shifting liabilities from
one credit card to another faster than our creditors can say
"Federal Reserve." The Ponzi-scheme that is our fiat
currency system is about to go the way of what was for a time
the symbol of American superiority, General Motors. It used to
be said that what was good for General Motors was good for our
nation. As I claimed in 2005 that GM would go bankrupt I will
now guarantee that the US government is soon to follow.
How our ultimate entropy will
take form I cannot say, but form it will. We will default. We
will restructure. It will be at this point our arrogance will
end.
source:
http://realityarbiter.com/2009/12/american-purgatory/
December 15, 2009
Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan
email: brettbuchanan@yahoo.com
website: www.realityarbiter.com
321gold Ltd
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