Disarray, Entropy, & Revolution

Disarray, Entropy, & Revolution 

 

His record is not without controversy. In Italy and later, as a vice chairman for Goldman Sachs in Europe, Mr. Draghi was a proponent of nations and other institutions like pension funds using derivatives to more efficiently manage their liabilities. In some cases, many experts now contend, these transactions helped mask the finances of Greece and Italy before those nations were allowed into the euro.

 

-      Can Super Mario Save the Day for Europe? - NY Times

By Gregg Wall (7-23-2022)

 

Like a corpse festering in the road, everyone can see the failure that is libertarian industrial policy, everyone can smell the problem that is neoliberalism, but few leaders, if any, want to address or remove the problem… especially the privileged and the powerful that feed off & have grown catastrophically wealthy off a zombie economic model. 

 

In rapid succession they are falling… the old guard, the authors & cheerleaders of a failed neoliberal, globalist paradigm. 

 

Merkel and the CDU lost last year; 

PM Johnson and a Brexit strategy, designed to appeal to the baser demons of Great Britain, is out; 

Shinzo Abe, former PM of Japan, ultra-nationalist, recently gunned down; 

Macron… recently lost a legislative majority. 

Draghi, the banker, who was installed in Italy, not even elected… appears headed for the exits; and 

Biden is failing miserably, along with Democrats & the U.S. Congress. 

 

At the risk of being direct, it appears that we have a full house of failure.  Fate, poker -- and a spate of failed G7 leaders wedded to corruption & greed as their driving industrial policy -- it seems, are not without a cruel sense of irony. 

 

None of this is by accident.  The pandemic - and the fallout from same - continues to reveal all.  The legacy of the aforementioned generation of leaders is that they oversaw a massive transfer of wealth, and a massive accumulation of wealth into the hands of a few… transferred from citizens, future generations, & nation-states…  accruing to banks, billionaires, multinationals and oligarchs.  Neoliberalism – aka laissez-faire – means anything goes for the exceptionally wealthy, especially if they donated/kicked back to the corrupt centrist, corporatist political parties throughout the West.  But it wasn’t enough to just bailout the oligarchy, it wasn’t enough to make them arrogant & wealthy beyond all measure… citizens and labor must be habitually put down, preyed upon, and attacked relentlessly.   

 

In the U.S., in its most extreme form, we can see neoliberalism at its very worst with Biden attacking consumers & labor – the demand side of the equation – with austerity, higher interest rates, a regressive tax code, and reneging upon his campaign commitments (designed to address gross inequality and structural defects w/in the U.S. economy).  Simultaneously, Biden has done absolutely nothing to address the key supply side feature, or component, of inflation (aka consumer price gouging): big oil, billionaires, cartels, monopolies, and Wall St.  The biggest drivers of unscrupulous profit taking being food and fuel.  Meanwhile, Europe’s centrist, corporatist leadership got in bed with a fossil fuels despot under globalism… and now, European leaders have adopted the Jekyll & Hyde persona of begging Putin for more gas, while sending verbal support and weapons to Putin’s latest target, the Ukraine. 

 

The entire laissez-faire paradigm is rotted through.  The more greed rules, the more a predatory few accumulate power & wealth, the more disarray, entropy, and potentially cataclysmic failure sets in.  And no leader, that I’m aware of, is talking seriously about the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the Climate Crisis.  Carbon capture & credits, ESG, Net-zero have all been revealed to be more of the industry self-regulation – and Wall St. speculation - that placed the world into its present mess.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens, labor, and voters know it and they are reacting by kicking centrist and corporatist parties out of power, when and where they can.  But the system is so corrupt, so entirely rigged, they are often forced to pivot to political parties or alternatives that are also centrist, corporatist.  Those parties that aren’t initially centrist, corporatist all too often rapidly sellout and become co-opted by coalition and oligarchy. Money contaminates the entire process, causing many citizens to lose faith in democracy. 

 

One of the more interesting topics in the U.S., over the last twenty years, concerns the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which holds up equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as sacrosanct, as inalienable rights & truths. The fact that America is about as far removed from these ideals as imaginable is no accident and speaks to the gross corruption & structural defects seen throughout the U.S. economy and government. 

 

But the ideal of equality seems particularly loathed by the reactionary, the privileged, and the powerful.  At issue, does America insist upon equality of opportunity or equality of outcome?  As equality of opportunity is entirely cancelled, by captured & corrupt federal and state governments, and billionaires & monopolies that have wired and own every aspect of the economy and public policy… the only alternative, the only real option is equality of outcome. 

 

That is, the entire libertarian experiment is so tyrannical, that a basic standard of care must be provided for all American citizens, by birthright.  And in accordance with the nation’s founding document.  

 

The alternative, it appears, is nothing less than disarray, entropy, and revolution. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022