Socialism for America

There is a lot of fear these days that we are turning socialist, or even worse.  With the government taking over the banks, owning part of the auto makers, and now jumping into modifying medicine, people fear this is the first step in the government taking over the private sector, i.e., socialism.

Well, I would say to those people you have not been paying attention for the last twenty years.  There are three big sources of power in the U.S.,  the two political parties and big business.  The lobbyists are the go-betweens, the grease that makes the machine work.  This was called, the balance of power.  No, the people, the electorate didn't really matter, still don't.  Only 20% of the electorate vote any way, they don't care and they gave up power a long time ago. 

The balance of power has gone amuck since the republicans under their fearless leader shot their wad on Iraq (I almost slipped and said Vietnam, being from that era of time).  All their political capital was used up with the illusion that we, the U.S., still controls the world.  We don't and we control less with every day that passes.  The world is being remade as we speak, primarily by the Chinese, but many others like the Indians or the Middle East are not far behind.  They have the money, we have the debt.  While we worry about petty things like illegal immigrants, with a country we should be in bed with to improve our competitive position with China et al, we haggle over immigrants and continue to fight a war on drugs that has not worked for fifty years.

So now, we are left with just the democrats and big business.  We probably have sixteen years of democrats to look forward to, eight with Obama, eight with Hillary.  Sixteen years is probably enough time to recover from Iraq since eventually the electorate will forget how it all got started, and/or they will remember the democrats were more midgets and funded the effort.

But, what we all forget is that MONEY controls the world.  MONEY and power are very close cousins.  So, who controls the money, China.  China controls the money that the democrats need to continue their illusion of being in control of life in America.  If you are familiar with fishing, I would say that China is about ready to set the hook.  When a big mouth bass picks up your plastic worm on the bottom of the lake, he sucks it in and starts to swim away with it.  If you jerk too soon, you pull the end of the worm out of his mouth.  If you wait too long, he feels the hardness of the hook embedded in the worm and spits it out.  But, if jerk hard at just the right point in time, then the hook pulls through the plastic worm and embeds itself into the jaw of the big mouth bass.

When should the Chinese jerk the line and set the hook.  I would say right after we have sucked in the big juicy worm of health care.  Let us put one more bag goodies on our shoulders that we cannot afford, and then ask the Chinese to fund it by buying our bonds, bonds that we can not possibly repay already.   In this case, setting the hook just requires them to purchase the debt of Europe for a few months instead of U.S. debt and/or move more of their cash into their own domestic economy, which is harder than it sounds while trying to remain in control of all major decisions.  Market chaos could be China's friend, but they are not likely to embrace it too hard or too soon.  In short, we might get lucky and they may not set the hook.

Turning to socialism, nah.  We already have a system.  I struggle for words to describe it, but  lobby-ism, nepotism, oligopoly, etc. are all close cousins.  We don't even have any serious journalism challenging the system, and even if we did, the electorate doesn't read anymore, even the ones that vote.  We get our thirty minutes of news, superficial, negative and self-focused with the illusion that only what happens in the U.S. matters.  The news is only one step ahead of our obsession with reality, or more properly phrased, nonreality shows.  The public is there ready to reprogrammed as required by skills first learned and developed by the marketing people that sold us commercialism, but now used to sell us Presidents and weapons of mass destruction, whatever it is required for us to believe. 

So where does it all lead.  Its simple, are children are going to be indebt to the Chinese.  The Chinese communist party to be more exact.  We have been in the feed yards for twenty years.  We are now fat and ripe, our children have been delivered like veal to the fat business man, and there is really no way out.  I suppose we could all bolt and charge the fence, but I suspect that we could go more like lambs to the slaughter than our forefathers that dumped tea into the ocean.  Hopefully we are at the bottom of the cycle and it is not all doom and gloom like I painted here, but at the moment where we are headed looks like a continuation of where we have been going for twenty years.  And yes, all things are self correcting and eventually the pendulum will swing the other way.  After all, even the dark ages only lasted a few hundred years.