THE AMERICAN DREAM CONTEMPLATES THE BLACK HOLE IT IS DISAPPEARING INTO

TRANSLATED FROM DEDEFENSA, 24/08/12

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a report which predicts very serious recessionary conditions in the USA for 2013 - with the loss of two million jobs - if Congress does not manage to get to grips with the colossal public finance deficit. In fact, the CBO is really addressing a paralyzed political leadership, with a report that constitutes a fundamental political and psychological shock for the USA.

Here are a few words from the National Post, taking up Reuters, on the 23^rd August 2012, to give us an idea of the tone of the report – a catastrophic tone also found in other studies like that of the PEW Research Center, which paints a scary picture of the material and psychological state of the population, particularly of the middle classes which have been devastated by the crisis. (We use the term catastrophic objectively, in an approving sense rather than a critical one. It is not an alarmist spirit, but a spirit which objectively observes a general and irreversible drift towards catastrophe as a general state of affairs, much more than any announcement of a specific catastrophe, even if this constitutes a part of it.)

BACK TO THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS

TRANSLATED FROM THE BLOG DE PATRICK REYMOND, 24/08/12

The means of communication destroy information, the means of transport waste time, the health system alienates and kills. And to take up another Illich quote: “schools are factories for unemployment”

I have often said that the ‘American economic miracle’ owed more to geographical circumstances than to the merits of one economic system over another.

The USSR had to struggle with its own space, and its communication difficulties; as for the American model, it possessed in the Mississippi river valley, an advantage and an obvious major transport route, reinforced further by the work of man, in the 19^th Century by the digging of the Ohio and Erie canals, which transformed New York into a Mississippi port and multiplied its traffic tenfold.

Today, the model is limping, and even limping badly, at several levels. The Mississippi is finding it difficult, with the drought, to assume its role as a thoroughfare, through which 500 million tons transits every year, particularly cereal and coal.