When Things Fall Apart

Financialization and centrally planned speculative credit bubbles have undermined the real economy: that's why things are falling apart.

There is no pleasure in "I told you so" when things fall apart. Many of us recognized the artifice and folly of the credit-housing bubble "Bull market" as early as 2004, but few cared to listen because they were deeply complicit in the Status Quo's legerdemaine: their home was rising in value, their pension fund was being fattened, their sales were rising on the onrushing tide of abundant, cheap credit, their tax revenues were soaring, and their benefits/perquisites were notching higher with every tick up of the stock and housing markets.

Faith in a centrally planned economy operating under the flimsy guise of cartel-State "capitalism" was supreme, as were greed, self-absorption and an overweening sense of entitlement to consumerist "prosperity."

Both corrupt political parties enthusiastically embraced the bubble-culture of fraud and speculative excess, for they too benefited from the illusory glow of "permanent economic growth" and the ever-richer contributions from the fiefdoms, cartels and Financial Elites who gained the most from the credit-based frenzy.

The "prosperity," "growth" and "wealth" were all illusory, but the pain is real.Hardworking, dedicated, smart, experienced people are being laid off into an economy with few prospects. Young people are graduating from university into the same bleak atmosphere of a paper-thin facade of magical thinking and propaganda finally crumbling.

Things are falling apart because the economy has been undermined by financialization and the extreme concentrations of capital and State power. I think these charts tell the story rather well:

Here we see the Federal Reserve-engineered credit-based speculative financialization bubbles and busts reflected in the stock market. All that cheap credit sloshing around created asset bubbles which sucked in capital and borrowed funds seeking extraordinary returns. Then when the bubble inevitably popped, the players were left with the debt, which remained real, while their illusory wealth vanished.

Here is the dynamic: cheap abundant credit fuels malinvestments and speculation, the acme of financialization. Real production can't match the enormous profits generated by financial leverage and legerdemaine, so real production atrophies as capital and talent migrate to financialization.

Financialization rewards concentrations of capital that can off-load speculative risks onto the Central State while keeping profits private. Thus financial capital comes to dominate the entire economy and mechanisms of governance.

Empoyees no longer share in the gains from rising productivity: those gains flow to capital/global corporations who influence or control the political machinery.

Corporate profits have skyrocketed as Cartel/Monopoly Capital captures an ever larger share of thenational income and buys political power with that cash flow that enables Capital to offload risk on the State and insure a steady supply of cheap/free credit from the central bank (the Fed) to fund its speculations.

This concentration of wealth leads to extremes of income inequality. The gini coefficient for the U.S. is .47; researchers have identified .4 as the triggering threshold for social unrest. (0 is perfect equality, 1 is total inequality.)

The substitution of money-printing/credit creation for actual wealth creation has led to an explosion of debt across private and public sectors. This debt will soon require crushing interest payments; once again, Capital that owns the debt will profit at the expense of real production.

The cost structure of the real economy has exploded higher as the tide of cheap abundant credit has created vast imbalances. As long as the Sovereign State can borrow trillions of dollars every year to paper over inefficiencies and fraud that could not otherwise endure, then costs can rise forever. Sickcare (operated by cartel-State partnerships) is a prime example:

With tax revenues climbing along with the speculative gains, government costs also lack any limiting factors. Now that the speculative cycle of ever-greater imbalances and financialization is reaching the endgame, tax revenues are plummeting even as costs ("we were promised," etc.) continue rising.

I have often addressed the theme of things falling apart:

The Unique Benefits of When Things Fall Apart (March 15, 2010)

Things Fall Apart: But Not Just Yet (July 26, 2010)

China's Towers and U.S. McMansions: When Things Fall Apart (Literally) (April 14, 2010)

It is a phrase drawn from THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Though the poem was penned in 1919, just after the Great War destroyed all the illusions that trade and interdependent prosperity spelled the end of war, it speaks presciently to our era. The falconer circling ever farther away from the voice of its master could be interpreted as a spiritual metaphor for a culture lost in self-absorption, complicity, Empire, greed and resentful entitlement, or politically as a metaphor for a populace slipping away from the Founding Fathers' principles of liberty and limited government and their distrust of central banks' potential for financial destruction.

In a nation increasingly diverging into hackneyed, hardened ideological camps whose sole goal behind their soaring rhetoric is defense of their own preferred cartel-State fiefdoms, clearly the center (common ground, common sense) is not holding.

Things are falling apart because artifice, fraud and facsimiles have purchased complicity, and engineered concentrations of financial power that inevitably over-reach and implode.


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Fed Goldilocks Ignites Firestorm, Three Bears Now Homeless

Under the guise of engineering a "Goldilocks" recovery, the Federal Reserve has instead heated up yet another bubble which is now imploding.

The Fed has long played Goldilocks to the U.S. economy, claiming the ability to avoid overheating ("too hot") or contraction ("too cold") and thus engineer a "Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold" economy. Let's look at a long-term chart of the S&P 500 to see how successfully the Fed's Goldilocks has achieved a steady-state of merely "warm."

Things swung from mighty hot to mighty cold and then back to boiling from about 1995 on. This chart shows that the Fed's claim to Goldilocks powers is pure hubris: what the Fed excels at is not maintaining a "warm" economy of steady employment and low inflation but a bubble economy of rampant speculation that inflates huge asset bubbles which then boil over and take down the real economy, which quickly chills to contraction and recession.

In its hubris-soaked over-confidence with matches and the gasoline of credit creation and market intervention, the Fed has cranked up the heat and lit a conflagration which is burning down the three bears' home and indeed the entire global economy. Exhibit B: a chart of the NASDAQ:

The Fed got cocky in the late 90s bubble and once again in the Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham 2003-2007 "Rally." It certainly seemed to those adjusting the flame that constant manipulation of the credit markets and cloaked intervention in the equities markets could be extended forever.

But heating up credit, leverage and risk bubbles only offers a facsimile of "warm."The more apt analogy is a pressure-cooker set on a burner cranked to high heat. Eventually the pot explodes.

There's a funny little thing the Fed thought itself above: unintended consequences.By cranking up easy credit and zero interest rates, then you loose the dogs of speculation, not wise investment. (Duh!) By lighting the fire of speculation in the housing market and inviting everyone to join in the bonfire, from people with no capital at all (love those no-doc loans, baby!) to those with the craftiness to originate "risk-free" mortgage backed securities via the legerdemaine of embezzlement, misrepresentation of risk and fraud, the Fed created a bonfire of extreme vanities.

Quelle suprise, another bubble is conjured up and then implodes. (Why oh why couldn't it expand into the stratosphere and then head for the moon?) Only the housing bubble was different: unlike stocks, housing was the bedrock asset of two-thirds of the nation. It wasn't just a $5,000 IRA account which blew up, as in the 2000-02 stock meltdown: it was the core of their lifetime assets.

Supremely confident (or was it just supremely desperate?), the Fed cranked the burners up to high in 2008 and then started a roaring fire in the fireplace with its massive QE1 and QE2 interventions. Having learned nothing from the firestorm created by its last credit-speculative bubble, the Fed once again pumped trillions of dollars into the wrong hands, encouraging rampant speculation and abuse of credit in all the wrong places. The result is: the current "overheating" bubble is popping.

The big fat classic wedge that stocks traced out has now broken down. Feast your eyes on these charts:

It's a cycle that the Central State and its proxies cannot abandon. Keynesian intervention was supposed to work only in key moments of massive credit contraction. (It took a global war in 1941 to "prove" the value of that proposition.) But the political pain suffered by politicos during the necessary ebb tides of capitalism was too much to bear, so the Central State sought to "fine-tune" the economy continuously with ever larger applications of fuel.

By the time the Fed moved to straight gasoline, nobody in the Central State even batted an eye: whatever it takes to create the illusion of "growth" was fine with scared politicos.

So now Goldilocks has burned down the house and the three bears are homeless.Who can blame them for wanting to evict Goldilocks and take away her matches and gasoline?


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What Public Employee Leaders Could Be Saying (But Aren't)

Public employees and their leaders could publicly recognize the structural and demographic changes in the U.S. economy, and vow to tax the top 1% instead of supporting terribly regressive junk fees and sales tax increases on the working poor and the middle class tax donkeys who pay most of the taxes. The fact that they refuse to acknowledge these realities and refuse to take on the Financial Elites speaks volumes.

Here's what representatives of public-sector unions and public employees could be saying, instead of what they are saying:

There are over 20 million Federal, state and local government employees, and about 106 million private sector workers. We work for you, and for the good of our communities and of the nation. That is a big responsibility.

Back in the stock market bubble of 1995 to 1999, our wages, pensions and benefits were "sweetened," sometimes administratively and sometimes with voter approval. In the years since, what looked at the time like it would be paid by stock market gains rather than additional taxes has been revealed as wishful thinking.

We recognize that the U.S. economy has changed structurally, and it cannot return to 1999. We also recognize that the demographics of the nation have irrevocably changed since 1999, and thus it is wrong to burden future workers with pension and benefit costs which only made sense in an era of stock prices rising 10% or more annually.

In response to the shortfall between what we were granted in 1995-1999 and what the "new normal" recessionary economy can support, state and local governments have aggressively raised the most terribly regressive taxes: junk fees--parking tickets, vehicle license fees, and so on--and sales taxes.

These taxes are paid by everyone, rich and poor alike, and so they are deeply regressive.

Most of the Federal and state income taxes are paid by upper-middle class workers and small business, including sole proprietors and independent contractors. Almost 40% of all workers--those with lower incomes--pay no income tax at all. The top 1%, meanwhile, pay on average about 17% of their income in total taxes--less than half the rate paid by upper-middle class wage earners.

We understand that roughly two-thirds of the nation's households are measurably poorer in income and assets than they were a few short years ago. We understand that gains in productivity have not flowed to the incomes of most private-sector workers, but have instead flowed to the top via corporate profits and bonuses to the top slice of private-sector employees.

We also understand that the American workforce is aging, and that demographics are dictating that we as a nation need to work longer if our retirement plans are to remain solvent.

In recognition of these realities, we in the public sector are voluntarily renouncing all the "sweeteners" which were awarded during the bubble years of 1995-1999, as they have been revealed as unaffordable. Our retirement and benefits will revert to the base year of 1995, before the bubble distorted the system and the economy, and be adjusted for inflation since then as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

In recognition of the nation's demographic realities, we are moving our retirement age up to those of the Social Security system: 62 for reduced benefits and 67 for full retirement benefits.

We understand that raising "stealth taxes" via junk fees and highly regressive sales taxes places great burdens on households which are already straining to make ends meet.

As a result, we are putting our political weight behind an alternative way to bolster state and local government finances: "make the top 1% pay the same tax rate as the rest of us." If the top 1% paid the same 40% rate as higher-income workers pay, then that would only be equitable.

We will also fight to reverse the regressive increases in sales taxes and junk fees which have been imposed on those least able to afford more taxes.

The super-wealthy--those households with incomes above $1 million annually, and with financial assets above $5 million-- are the most politically powerful group in the nation, and so getting them to pay the same tax rates as we pay will be a difficult battle. They own or control the political class, the tax attorneys, the tax-avoidance scams and the offshore accounts.

But taking more money from households who are struggling to get by with highly regressive taxes and junk fees is simply wrong, just as it is unjust that the super-wealthy avoid paying the same tax rates that ordinary workers pay.

We ask for your support in this campaign to reverse regressive taxes and make the top 1% pay the same tax rate as the rest of us.

What is not being said is this: public employees are dependent on, and benefit from, the State's monopoly to collect taxes and fees via coercion. Private-sector workers cannot rely on a coercive monopoly to extract their wages from others. This is the key difference between the public and private sectors.

To the degree that junk fees and taxes have been raised administratively by a political class that is beholden to the super-wealthy Financial Elites and cartel-State fiefdoms, then the imposition of regressive junk fees and other taxes is taxation without representation, i.e. tyranny.

Public employees benefit from this tyranny, private-sector workers do not. That is a key difference between the two.

Given that the political class only represents cartel-State fiefdoms and Financial Elites, then the only taxes which aren't a form of tyranny are those approved by voters.

While there is always a danger of "the tyranny of the majority" in the ballot box, it is certainly less tyrannical than administratively imposing regressive taxes and exorbitant junk fees on the working poor and the middle class tax donkeys.

The consent of the governed (and thus of the taxed) can be revoked at any time.


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The Paradoxes at the Heart of the "Conservative" Project

What passes for "Conservative" now is not in the least conservative.

The agenda of the so-called "Conservative" ideology is based on hypocritical paradoxes that its proponents conveniently ignore. The key paradoxes can be summarized thusly:

So-called "Conservatives" claim to want small government, but they can't resist fattening themselves at the trough of the Central State/Savior State. Reaching for the very pinnacle of hypocrisy, not only do so-called "Conservatives" greedily lap up all the State largesse enjoyed by proponents of the Savior State--the overflowing troughs of Medicare, for example--but they do other welfare recipients one better by gorging on tax breaks, oil leases on government land and offshore tax-avoidance scams that others at the Central State trough can only dream of.

The number of "small government Conservatives" who renounce their Savior State largesse-- Social Security and Medicare--is essentially zero.

And no, you did not "pay your fair share." The vast majority of these State benefits are welfare, paid by other taxpayers. But so-called "Conservatives" aren't interested in looking at spreadsheets detailing how their lifetime contributions, including interest, have been paid out in the first few years of these Savior State benefits, and from then on they're just another form of welfare.

So-called "Conservatives" are against Central State ownership, except when the State gives the immensely profitable mineral rights to their cronies for private exploitation. In other words, as long as public lands can be exploited for private gain, then public ownership of land is OK. But if the lands are reserved for the public, then "Conservative" righteous indignation explodes like a volcano.

So-called "Conservatives" love to pronounce their support of "national defense," but this is just another form of self-serving complicity--i.e. living large by leeching off the Central State. A staggeringly rich slice of spending on "national defense" and "national security" is just swag distributed to "conservative" cronies.

The Undersecretary for Warming Coffee in the E-Ring, for example, retires one day with a fat government pension and shows up at the Pentagon the next day as a well-paid defense-industry lobbyist.

Just how "small government" is that? Yet so-called "Conservatives" are silent when it comes to reining in Central State spending and power, because they're too busy exploiting the coercive powers of the Central State for their own personal gain.

So-called "Conservatives" are for "limited government," unless they can wield its coercive powers to shove their value system down everyone's throats. The paradox is obvious, isn't it? A truly limited Central State has neither the funds nor the will to force "social values" onto its citizenry. In this way, the "Conservatives" are just like the "Progressives"--they both love concentrations of "top down" State power because that enables them to force-feed their own "solutions" down the entire food chain.

There is nothing remotely "small government" about a Central State with the power and money to force "solutions" down the throats of its citizens.

So-called "Conservatives" fail to distinguish between the Financial Elite's cartel-crony capitalism that depends on the Central State and true capitalism.

Cartel-crony capitalism is actually the very antithesis of real capitalism. Real capitalism is the taking on of risk to invest capital in a competitive, i.e. transparent, market.

The essence of cartel-crony capitalism is the exact opposite: cartel-crony capitalism eliminates risk by offloading losses and risk onto the Central State. It creates illusory capital via issuing dodgy debt ("marked to fantasy") and derivatives that claim to lower risk but only obscure it, and then leverages that illusory capital into mountains of credit. It is totally dependent on this obscuring of risk and leverage, and on the complicity of Central State regulatory agencies which effectively enable this fraud by looking the other way.

Recall that the revolving door between Wall Street and banks and these regulatory agencies is spinning all the time.

Cartel-crony capitalism uses the power of the Central State to eliminate competition and create cartels and quasi-monopolies. The U.S. sickcare system, for example, is presented by "conservatives" as the epitome of "free market" capitalism. Yet if you actually try to buy insurance on the "open market," you will find the insurers in your area number either one, two or three: in effect, a cartel which partners with the central State to insure their own profitability by the elimination of competition.

In industry after industry, cartel-crony Elites have used the power of the Central State to erect regulatory moats and barriers which effectively limit competition and thus guarantee profits and market dominance.

In other words, there is nothing remotely capitalist in cartel-crony "capitalism." Yet it is this simulacra "capitalism" that the "Conservatives" fawn over and support. Why? Because their cronies benefit from non-competitive, risk-free, immensely profitable cartels, and multitudes of other phony "conservatives" are personally profiting from the ecology of cartel-crony "capitalism"--the lobbyists, the government contractors, the faux-conservative think tanks, etc.

What would be truly conservative would be to eliminate the cartel-crony/Central State partnerships that are bleeding the nation dry and demand real capitalism that deploys real capital and accepts risk in transparent markets.

What would be truly Conservative would be to stop demanding the central State impose one's own value system on other citizens.

What would be truly Conservative would be a limited Central State that no longer claims to be a Savior State or an Empire that has "interests" everywhere on the planet, a State whose mandate is restricted to safeguarding civil liberties and limiting the concentrations of wealth and power that have corrupted the machinery of governance and spawned a vast array of ever-expanding, unaccountable states within the State that benefit the cartel-crony "capitalism" of Power Elites.

What would be truly Conservative would be to champion the dispersal and diffusion of concentrations of monopoly-cartel wealth and power, including all the monopoly-cartel-State fiefdoms which are failing so visibly.

Living honestly within our means, with transparency and accountability rather than excuses, denial, self-indulgence and a reliance on exploiting the State's power over others--now that would be conservative.


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The Paradoxes at the Heart of the "Progressive" Project

What passes for "Progressive" now is not in the least progressive.

The agendas of both so-called "Progressive" and "Conservative" ideologies are based on paradoxes that proponents conveniently ignore. Let's start with the so-called "Progressive" agenda, so-called because beneath the ideologically "Left" bluster there is little actually progressive or forward-looking thinking.

A recent piece from The Nation entitled "Stockton Goes Bust" instructively communicates the monumental paradoxes implicit in the "Progressive" project.

Stripped down to its essence, the piece would have us feel sorry for a citizen who lost her $138,000 a year job (not including benefits) with a school district and as a result lost her suburban McMansion. Now, we are told, only her fancy clothing remains from her luxe lifestyle of international travel and all the other trappings of an upper-middle class lifestyle.

The implicit message is that this person somehow "deserves" a job that pays $138,000 and all the goodies that salary bought. That this person took in over $1 million in less than a decade and basically squandered that fortune on extravagances and fantasies is carefully left unsaid.

Implicit in this point of view is the basic "Progressive" assumption that all workers in America "deserve" a job which supports the "American Dream" of a suburban home, two cars in the driveway (the garage is filled with the other trappings of consumerist "success"), designer clothing, and international travel.

In other words, the "Progressive" view of what's good and right is circa 1946, only the "good life" "deserved" by all American workers has been upgraded to higher levels of consumption.

Yes, "Progressives" give copious lip service to "green" suburbs and "green" hybrid vehicles,but it's all a nostalgic fantasy of leafy suburbia and long commutes magically devoid of any value creation.

The truth is there is nothing "green" about a large, sprawling exurban community: building a house that requires vast consumption of energy in the middle of nowhere with faux-"green" materials is not sustainable, and a vehicle that depends on lithium-ion batteries isn't sustainable, either (peak lithium is a few years out, but it's coming).

Missing from this "Progressive" program is any recognition that this American Dream lifestyle which we all "deserve" as a birthright depends on cheap, abundant oil and a global Empire to secure it for our private consumption.

The "right" of American workers, some 4.7% of the world's populace, to consume 25% of its oil and resources is unchallenged by this "Progressive" agenda, which stripped of pretensions is basically the Consumerist Fantasy of ever higher consumption and ever more "growth."

In 1946, America supplied its own oil and energy. We didn't need a Global Empire with "interests" everywhere on the planet that needed "defending." You want to stripmine 25% of the world's resources for 4.7% of its inhabitants, then you need a Global Empire to enforce that stripmining, and a Central State with the power to skim trillions of dollars from others via arbitraging the world's sole reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.

The paradox is obvious, isn't it? In demanding our "rights" to endlessly rising "growth" and consumption, then you have to stripmine the planet to feed our extravagance, and you need a Global Empire to enforce and control the flow of resources to the home country.

The standard "Progressive" disapproves of all Pentagon spending in support of Empire, and heartily approves of domestic "growth" based on rising consumption, conveniently ignoring that this "growth" requires Empire.

In a similiar fashion, "Progressives" decry 10% annual increases in Central State spending on the Pentagon and heartily approve 10% annual increases in Savior State spending on their own favorite cartels/monopolies, education and healthcare.

But you can't have 10% annual increases in Central State spending in an economy that is shrinking or grows by 2% per year at best. Borrowing or printing trillions of dollars out of thin air leads to insolvency, regardless of what the trillions are spent on.

"Progressives" don't like The Patriot Act and other Central State over-reach, but they are passionately wedded to an ever larger and ever more powerful Savior State that can impose "solutions" on the planet and the nation.

The "good" Savior State and the "bad" Central State are one in the same. You can't create a Central State that collects ever more powers to control, intercede, intervene and manipulate and not get a Central State that over-reaches and bloats into a collection of self-aggrandizing, self-serving fiefdoms and State-chartered monopolies like the Military-Industrial complex and "healthcare," to name but two State-cartel partnerships.

So-called "Progressives" love these State-monopoly partnerships because they invite "top-down" "solutions" which can be shoved down the food chain. The idea that people can sort out their own lives is anathema to "Progressives" because it would deprive them of the large-scale bureaucracies and concentrations of power that they see as the foundations of "solutions."

But stripped of ideological niceties, this is just another example of the State buying complicity. Once you depend on the fiefdom for your perquisites and power, then magically, the fiefdom becomes not just essential, but expansive.

Once again, the "Progressive" view is essentially nostalgic for 1946, when the American Empire was "good" because it had expanded to defeat fascism, and American workers shared in the largesse of vast Federal borrowing and spending.

"Progressives" ignore all the paradoxes implicit in their nostalgic fantasy worldview: that $1 trillion borrowed and spent in 1944 bought quite a bit of goods and services, and in an economy with plentiful labor and resources and little debt, there was a substantial follow-through of "growth" from that massive debt-based spending.

But now that the Federal government borrows and spends $1 trillion a year more than it spent a mere 3 years ago in 2007, the "Progressives" are silent. Marginal return has set in with a vengeance: now we borrow and spend $1 trillion to create less than $1 trillion in measurable "growth." The money is simply being squandered to support fiefdoms that are failing to do anything except consume more money and resources to maintain their own perquisites and power.

This is the ultimate paradox at the heart of the "Progressive" program: if we want to pay people $138,000 a year to shuffle paper or data (and add another $20,000 or $30,000 in pension and other benefits to their pay), then that person has to create more than $160,000 in actual productive wealth.

But we don't. As a nation, we are living a great lie, and the so-called "Progressives" are just as committed to continuing that lie as any "right-wing" "conservative." The "Progressive" agenda boils down to wanting to pay everyone $138,000 for doing $38,000 (or $8,000) of actual productive work. The $100,000 difference between the value of what we actually produce and what we want to consume is either skimmed from others or borrowed into existence: in effect, borrowing from future value creation to live large today.

There is absolutely nothing Progressive about this rapacious "growth" of consumption based on stripmining the planet and borrowing from our future.

Rather than live within our means, we stripmine resources from others via the implicit power of Empire and the masked arbitrage of the dollar's reserve currency status.

Only the world is getting tired of our gaming and self-absorption. Now the Federal Reserve has to print the money to buy the debt we are borrowing from future citizens. Abolishing the Fed and just printing the trillions in cash just takes us on a slightly different path to insolvency and collapse. The bottom line is we can't live beyond our means forever, because the gaming, arbitrage, skimming and fraud that we depend on to fill the widening gap between what we produce and what we consume are not sustainable.

"Progressives" are fixated on income inequality as the root cause of all our problems. I too rail against the Financial Elites, for their highly concentrated wealth has naturally led to concentrated political power which has corrupted and distorted the machinery of governance.

But even if we throw off the chains of serfdom and break up the banking cartels, Wall Street and the Fed, that won't change the facts that we are facing The End of Work, the End of Empire, the end of cheap, abundant oil, the bankruptcy of our dueling paradox-ridden ideologies and of our Savior State, a.k.a. the over-reaching Central State.

What would be truly Progressive would be to articulate a new vision of sharing resources and a prosperity that rejects the "American Dream" of ever-rising "growth" of consumption. What would be truly Progressive would be a complicity-free vision of a limited Central State that no longer claims to be a Savior State or an Empire that has "interests" everywhere on the planet, a State whose mandate is restricted to safeguarding civil liberties and limiting the concentrations of wealth and power that have corrupted the machinery of governance and spawned a vast array of ever-expanding, unaccountable states within the State.

What would be truly Progressive would be to champion the dispersal and diffusion of concentrations of monopoly-cartel wealth and power, including all the monopoly-cartel-State fiefdoms which are failing so visibly, including education and sickcare.

To be truly progressive, we need to dump the "American Dream" birthright to ever-higher consumption and all the unsustainable elements of the American Project. Living honestly within our means, with transparency and accountability rather than excuses, denial, self-indulgence and a reliance on exploiting others--now that would be progressive.


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