The John Brown Moment
When Gaia gets pissed off enough at the antics of humanity, she
sends in her hit-man, Reality, to settle accounts. Reality is blessed
with a cloak of invisibility. The human race is so busy concocting
stories about what it is doing, that Reality steals onto the scene
unnoticed - until bodies start to fall over, and the sort of bad
political weather known as a shit-storm fills the skies, the streets,
and the assembly halls.
One of the cockamamie stories
circulating this week is that the Euro bailout of broke member nations
is fait accompli, baked in the cake, a done deal, no problemo, because
the December 2011 Long Term Refinancing Operation makes it so. The
European Central Bank can supposedly eat bad bond paper until the cows
come home without choking to death at the same time that it can run a
back-door money-printing racket without the results showing up in
currency degradation. And the Greeks will bend over and receive what
they've got coming good and hard because, well, they are Greeks, and it
is their way!
Excuse me, but something's got to give.
History is a lot of things, but it is not silly putty. Its cousin,
Reality, slips through it performing its deeds one way or another. The
Greeks have lately remembered some of their own history. The Germans
have beset them before, they now recall, and some of the money
currently labeled "debt" may have been filed incorrectly, the Greeks
say. It actually belongs in the folder labeled "war reparations."
(Granted, it is hard to read folders when you are bending over so far
that things look upside-down.) Germany, it happens, remembers too the
last time that this folder was flopped out on the table. Things didn't
work out so well for the Weimar finance ministry in those dark days
ninety years ago.
Meanwhile, Athens and several other Greek cities ignite in an overture to what might come to be called the European Spring.
Reality steals onto the scene bearing a message from Mother Gaia:
"None of your shenanigans make the numbers add up. The European
financial arrangement will blow up because it must." Therefore, expect
it to blow up. Germany will not keep pounding sand down the rat-hole of
PIIGS insolvency for another year. Anyway, the proverbial can that
everyone was kicking down the road - it fell down the rat-hole, too, so
there is nothing left to kick except Greek civil servants, both current
and retired and, alas, they represent that part of the Greek economy
not occupied by olive cultivation, which is to say most of it. It turns
out, when you kick Greeks down the road (probably Spaniards, Italians,
Portuguese, and Irish, too) sparks fly off them and things catch fire.
The bottom line seems to be that Europe can either go broke or burn
down, or do both. But it can't go back to what it was doing before:
pretending to be rich and care-free.
Over on this side
of the Atlantic, America's experiment in pervasive control fraud took a
new turn with the pretended "settlement" of massive, widespread,
robo-signing allegations that will allow a bunch of "the usual suspect"
TBTF banks off the hook from future liability and criminal prosecution
resulting from hundreds of billions of dollars worth of swindles. The
TBTF banks will have to pay, when all the "principal reduction credits"
and other dodgy subtractions are made, a couple of billion altogether,
which is obviously little more than a cost of doing business for such
supernaturally fabulous returns. And then that is supposed to be the
end of the whole disgusting episode.
Last to cave in on
this legally squooshy agreement between fifty states was New York's own
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, newly enlisted in the elite
national corps of cads, bounders, and sell-outs. This was the week that
the same Schneiderman agreed to lead President Obama's so called
Mortgage Fraud Task Force, which, any child of eight can see, is a
smokescreen to conceal the fact that the US Department of Justice has
failed to initiate any action whatsoever in the vast and gruesome
pageant of fraud that has transformed the rule of law into a rule of
larceny.
Do you think the late Whitney Houston was a
lost soul? Then look for the soul of your country - if you can find it
in the wilderness of self-denial, self-double-dealing, and suicidal
self-perfidy that it has blundered into with eyes wide shut. No lie is
now too big for the United States to swallow. If Europeans ignite and
blow up when kicked down the road, here is what will happen to America:
it will blunder down its own road until it reaches the next John Brown
moment. John Brown put his proverbially famous body in the middle of
that road some ways back. He mounted an insurrection at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia, in an attempt to fast-track the abolition of slavery. Brown
was hanged in 1859, but less than two years later the Civil War
commenced, the greatest convulsion in our history. So far.
Slavery was yesteryear's abomination in America as pervasive control
fraud is today's. Somewhere out in America right now is the new
American John Brown, a righteous fanatic whose act is waiting to alter
the course of history. The next John Brown will also precipitate what
was a long time coming. Reality is busy in the background, even while
we blog and dither, setting things up.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/02/the-john-brown-moment.html
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/02/the-john-brown-moment.html
