Zero Hedge Lays It Down, Mead Sort Of Picks It Up
Posted on | January 31, 2013 | 17 Comments
by Smitty
For most of the past four or five years, I have spent the majority of my time studying the dominant forces that fuel the power structure that exists in these Unites States today, and indeed throughout the world. My education began quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the last decade when I started understanding fiat money, Central Banking and the global monetary system. Since then, I have expanded my understanding to mainstream media brainwashing, the military-industrial complex, the role of the political oligarchs in Washington D.C., the corruption of the food industry under the complicity of the FDA itself and much more. The more I peered under the curtain, no matter what the industry, the clearer it became that the system had no chance of survival under its current form. What’s worse, it became obvious that the very small 0.01% of the population that I call oligarchs (financial and political), who are actively gaming the system for their own pleasure, are well aware of the system’s terminal nature. That’s why they are rapidly putting in place the police state grid.
That said, this article is not about the implementation of the surveillance state. I cover that pretty much daily these days. This post is more of a philosophical stream of consciousness; a guilty pleasure that I have not engaged in as of late.
Read the whole thing. I don’t disagree with the big picture being offered here. I also don’t thing the surveillance state is going to prove feasible. Walter Russell Mead, via Instapundit, enumerates seven trolls working for “the oligarchs” that the Middle Class must vanquish, and then he concludes:
Add to that the worries about federal deficits and debts (Troll 6) and the palpable unease about the financial system (Troll 7), and it’s easy to see why the middle class feels harassed and defensive.
These problems are real and they are serious; people are not wrong to worry. But attempts to perpetuate the blue model don’t help. Many of the seven trolls are the results of the high cost blue model approach to governance, the health system and higher education, and in any case the forces ripping the blue model apart are too strong and too deeply rooted in the way our economy works to be stopped.
Yet if the worries are real, the pessimism is excessive. The information revolution destroys jobs, but it also creates them, and we are already in the early stages of a jobs explosion. And as it proceeds, the information revolution is likely to propel the rise of a middle class that is more productive, better educated, more autonomous and more interested in and capable of civic leadership than the Fordist middle class of the late industrial age.
We need to distinguish between, say, entertainment industry jobs created because so many people can do their own media, as distinguished from economic activity pertaining to over-regulation.
I more or less agree with Mead’s assessment, but I don’t think he’s a big enough nerd to grasp some key points. Information is a fluid. Power (in both economic and political phases) is derived from controlling that information. Thus, we se an unholy alliance of a permanent political class using legislation to milk the stock market, and by extension, the people.
As I was noting earlier today, Senator Coburn is doing yeoman work identifying just the easy overlaps in our beloved Federal government. The amount of churn, legal action, and re-work triggered by
- sheer bureaucratic bloody-mindedness,
- obstructive conformity*, and
- malicious compliance
is astounding.
Actual reform will arrive in waves of decentralization. Sadly, I’m no longer sure that a purely political expression of the voter’s will at the ballot box is going to get it done. That information technology Mead touts has not overcome the human capacity to avoid paying attention.
No, I think that this lousy opening January to 2013 is only going to worsen as we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Woodrow “Effing” Wilson. It’s going to be a long eleven months getting through the rest of this lousy year, I reckon. God grant this country peace due to all the firepower out there.
*You ever start up a blog to test out a piece of software, write one post, forget about it, and then discover it 6.5 years later as the top return on a Google search? Scratch that. Too far-fetched. Never happens. No one would believe it.

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