The Baseline Scenario
What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
Who is Carlos Slim?
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
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But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
Many states have been taken over by bankers; there is no shame in fighting and losing against what Jefferson called the “monied aristocracy.” But few governments, even the weakest, have handed over the keys as quietly as we did. As Lloyd Blankfein said, to an aide, on their way to the greatest sales job in the history of the republic, “You’re getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You’re not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha beach.”
The winners among our financial elite are very far from the Greatest Generation, but they are the Best Paid Generation for a reason.
Phi Beta Iota: We the People are a power that government cannot repress. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed fairly quickly by a combination of an Electoral Reform Act of 2009 and a Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act of 2010. The capture of the US Government by Wall Street was done quietly, non-violently, and unethically. We are quite certain that the creation of a public intelligence network by companies such as HP and Nokia, surfing the Google and Amazon waves but not being captured by them, can enable an equally quiet, non-violent, and ETHICAL restoration of the Constitution and the Republic. Capitalism can and will find its soul again–John Bogle and William Grieder have been heroic in their writing to this point. The land is forever–banks and corporations cannot “own” land if the people occupying that land stand fast. It's time to tie return of the land to the bail-outs and do as the French do–100 year family leases. “This land is our land.” Get over the past and start building the future.
