Index

Dr. Guillotine, I presume

Leave it to a Frenchman, and an economist at that, to remind the citizens of the United States of the inexorable logic of the French Revolution and the Boston Tea Party (the real one, not the brain-dead slogan it has been turned in to.)  Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has published a huge (700 page) study of the economics of inequality that (among a slew of other things) concludes that under free-market economic conditions the rich get richer.

I suppose a hearty “Duh” just doesn’t even begin to do it justice, given the huge and expanding pile of evidence we see all around us every day in the United States.   The reality that most of us live in, with seemingly permanent high unemployment and an obviously falling standard of living for all but the richest, makes a complete lie out of the Republican assertion of the opposite.  The disastrous failure of the Reaganite experiment in “less government” and the resulting destruction of the middle class certainly would seem like sufficient evidence in the present tense, no huge historical study needed.  The fact that the Kuznets curve has been thoroughly falsified by this experiment seems to be lost on the majority of economists, or maybe they just know who is paying their bills - poor folks don’t hire economists. Even if we wanted to, they are too expensive for normal people to hire, and in any case, we don’t need to - we are living much too close to the reality for a rich-man’s economist to feed us his line of shit anyway.

It also seems like the existence of extremely rich scorched-earth free-market-at-all-costs radicals (the Koch brothers come to mind) that are willing to stop at nothing - no lie too big to tell, no body count high enough to make them stop - should also have been more than enough warning for all of us, but Faux News drones on with its ridiculous drumbeat of proven falsehoods, selling its brand of lies and thinly disguised racism to anyone who will listen, and there are plenty of people out there that do listen and buy what they are selling rather than look at the ugly reality around them.  Hitler blamed the Jews, Faux News blames the government - a scapegoat is still a scapegoat, and a lie is still a lie.

So here we have a Frenchman telling Americans what we once knew - that greed promotes greed, and a scam artist is still a scam artist, no matter how rich.  The right-wing stupids that like to promote the morals of whichever bible-thumper they are enamored of need to be reminded that thinking and dealing with reality here on earth are what made the America we had, and that promoting no-brain “morals” and heavenly illusions as a way to avoid reality only works if you they are willing to accept a world of diminishing returns where our children will never have anywhere near the chances or choices we have had.

As a real person trying to deal with the reality of the economy and politics, I am not seeing any way out of the current situation that doesn’t have a large body count.  Since D.C. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the richest people in the world, the government is certainly not going to give us any relief.  The fact that the Republicans have been actively working to shift the blame for the failure of the economy to the government (and succeeding in convincing enough people that their mouthpieces can get reelected) has made even well-intentioned political types throw up their hands in disgust and give up.  The right-wing “morals” crowd has given the rich cover for all manner of character assassination where they could not defeat honest opponents any other way, and the evidence would seem to point to a couple of expertly done assassinations in the cases of a couple of otherwise unmovable opponents.

And so I return to my allusion in the title of this piece - it looks like we are all about to receive a re-introduction to the device that “shortened” the French Revolution by summarily dealing with every member of the ruling class of rich and powerful that the regular folks could get their hands on.  While I suspect that the weapon of choice in the next revolution will more likely be a small-calibre rifle or handgun, the image of the guillotine serves to make my point about what sort of battle it is likely be in the end.  We have the various bloody disturbances going on in smaller countries right now as examples of what is likely to happen here soon.

The complete lack of honest politicians of any stripe in many of those countries and the overweening insanity of the religious forces in many of them are to blame for the continued instability and bloodshed there, and there is no sign that it will be any different here, since the couple of honest people that try their hand at politics here get run out of their government posts very quickly - no matter what level of government, there is nothing but deep corruption due to the merger of money and politics.  The insanity of the various religious groups - the US has its own taliban, they just call themselves christians - and their willingness to destroy the lives of non-members will inevitably add to the anarchy  here as well.

When Obama got elected, I had some hope that it heralded real change, at least a little.  Instead, the Republicans have used his election to solidify their position as champions of the rich and racist, bringing out the worst in the political process and allowing the narrow-minded to get even narrower.  The goon squads are already out there enforcing the dictates of the rich, and doing it in the uniforms of the police, FBI and NSA.  They are doing it under the flags of causes like national security, and using the pretense of law enforcement to destroy as much reasoned opposition as possible.

We are reaching the breaking point that John F. Kennedy was referring to: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Is there anybody out there that can rally the forces of reason and intelligence before we all go off of this cliff like so many lemmings?