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.)

“As the U.S. middle class faces its “worst decade in modern history,” a new report says an impending “fiscal cliff” is worse than previously thought and could plunge the country into recession.

Massive U.S. government spending cuts and tax hikes due next year will cause dire economic damage if Washington fails to come up with a solution, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned on Wednesday. Without action by Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” Americans should expect a “significant recession” and the loss of some two million jobs, CBO director Doug Elmendorf said in his gloomiest assessment yet.

The forecast comes as a Pew Research Center study says 85% of middle-class Americans feel it is more difficult now than a decade ago to maintain their standard of living. The report describes them as losing faith in the future. The study says the U.S. middle class is facing its “worst decade in modern history,” with its share of the nation’s income falling for the first time since the Second World War…”

In an opinion piece published in the same National Post, on the 22nd August 2012, the scholar and economist Jack M. Mintz sharply criticizes the attitude of the American political leadership. He compares it to the Europeans, stating that the Europeans are attempting to do something whereas Washington is doing nothing and seems to be paralyzed….The intention here is not to engage in any kind of comparison made by experts, for comparing Europe and the USA and drawing conclusions from this comparison alone would be merely playing the system’s game; Europe is indeed doing something but this ‘something’ is equally catastrophic since it remains within the diktat of the system which leads to catastrophe after catastrophe. What interests us is the psychological aspect, - over here one is trying to do something, over there nothing is being done – and, more exactly, to highlight the kind of (paradoxically) furious apathy, which characterizes the American elites, with a pathology that we could identify as a kind of psychological chronic fatigue syndrome…

“At a European conference on the sovereign-debt crises that I ­attended this week, my overwhelming conclusion, after listening to many experts, is that the U.S. is in far more trouble than Europe. This was brought home by calculations presented by Larry Kotlikoff of Boston University at a lecture held at the International Institute of Public Finance, the biggest gathering of public-finance experts in the world. Greece may be bankrupt, but the U.S. looks like a giant Ponzi scheme.… […] The U.S. reflects the most extreme case of intergenerational inequality. Generation after generation has participated in a Ponzi game, leaving younger taxpayers to pick up the tab for money effectively borrowed by older generations to spend on unfunded benefits. Kotlikoff labelled such practices as “child fiscal abuse,” a rather strong term but not far from the truth… […]

The European are dealing with their severe fiscal problem, even if clumsily. But where are U.S. politicians and the public, who still don’t understand the extent of their potential fiscal bankruptcy? The U.S. has the political structure to get the job done, but seems too paralyzed to address a looming fiscal crisis… […] The United States should be ashamed. While many experts criticize the Europeans for not pulling together politically, U.S. indebtedness is far greater and more dangerous to the world economy.”

Here, we add in another factor, also an economic one but which reminds us of the real dimensions - absolutely, fundamentally apocalyptic - of the general crisis in the System, by adding in the element of natural catastrophe……We choose to highlight here, in a text from the site The Economic Collapse on “8 Economic Threats That We Were Not Even Talking About At The Beginning Of The Summer” (the 22nd August 2012), the specific threat of the river Mississippi, currently drying up due to the tremendous drought which is devastating the United States….The description is of the economic effects of the thing, but imagine the devastation that this phenomenon adds to an American psychology which is already well and truly devastated…..

“Thanks to this drought, rivers and lakes all over the United States are drying up. In fact, there have been reports that millions of fish have been dying because water levels have gotten so low in many areas. Even the mighty Mississippi River has dropped to dangerously low levels.

At this point, the Mississippi is lower than most people living along the river can ever remember. If it drops much lower, it could potentially have an absolutely devastating impact on the U.S. economy. A recent NBC News report described what is at stake... “About $180 billion worth of goods move up and down the river on barges, 500 million tons of the basic ingredients for much of the U.S. economy, according to the American Waterways Operators, a trade group. It carries 60 percent of the nation’s grain, 22 percent of the oil and gas and 20 percent of the coal, according to American Waterways Operators. It would take 60 trailer trucks to carry the cargo in just one barge, 144 18-wheeler tankers to carry the oil and gas in one petroleum barge.”

If all traffic along the Mississippi was forced to stop, it is estimated that it would cost the U.S. economy about 300 million dollars a day. And already there have been stoppages along one 11 mile stretch of the river... “Nearly 100 boats and barges were waiting for passage Monday along an 11-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that has been closed because of low water levels, the U.S. Coast Guard said. New Orleans-based Coast Guard spokesman Ryan Tippets said the stretch of river near Greenville, Miss., has been closed intermittently since Aug. 11, when a vessel ran aground.”

So what happens if the Mississippi gets even lower?”

In the end what you have here, like a mirror effect which has the virtue of making you forget the coldness of economic statistics, is the state of the US population, which is difficult to describe, even using the harshest terms. It is not the documentation that is lacking; on the contrary, that is submerging us, asphyxiating us……. Today is the ‘right moment’ to broaden the analysis, in the sense of an economic catastrophe, reinforced and strengthened by human catastrophe, the two bound together by a psychological collapse in society and the beings that compose it. This collapse applies also, in different ways, to the 1% who almost seem to innocently welcome the worst, most harmful influences, riding with a nihilistic and an almost joyous arrogance in the race towards total collapse - as much as for the 99% who are carried along with it. Chris Hedge’s article in TomDispatch.com on the 21st August 2012 is a must-read, from the co-author of a book which will be out shortly, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, the result of two years of research on the US population, a land where everything happens as if some colossal force (we are thinking at a minimum of the System to which all our leaders and elites are subjected) was methodically, and with the greatest possible efficiency, pursuing an absolutely genocidal programme and following only a tremendously powerful, nihilistic impulse towards a general state of chaos. (The text “Forsaken And Forgotten”, also on The Economic Collapse, the 23rd August 2012 is also an indispensable read with some telling statistics about the evolution of this same population)

We see the System touched in every fundamental aspect, in the USA whose superiority in the domain of catastrophes is now an established fact - swept away by a crisis which inexorably pursues its worsening, apocalyptic course. The American Dream continues to be ripped apart by a nightmarish evolution which confirms the inversion of all the fundamental criteria of this myth. First of all, there is the extraordinary paralysis of a political system which seemed extremely well placed to control and administer, in accordance with its own interests, a human mass of considerable size. Now, this system, organized to be centralized, consensual, etc. has been revealed as extremist and split by irresolvable differences, producing through its very own virtues a dead-end situation which nothing can unblock. As a result the financial and economic system is incapable of getting its breath back, of rediscovering the artificial mechanisms that enabled it to survive. The second fundamental aspect is the extraordinary devastation of the “middle classes”, both the pride and security of the American system, reduced to rags by a process that reveals with an extraordinary violence the totalitarian destructive logic of human beings. Lastly, the intervention of the ecological and climatic catastrophe -  when it is America that has occupied first place in its creation due to the system of production and consummation of energy which has characterized the System for the last  two centuries - seems to have an almost symbolic aspect to it: with the increasingly well-documented establishment of a monstrous climatic system (that one would be tempted to believe organized), which is now hostile to the economic and social organization of the system, one has the impression that nature is taking a sort of revenge, - certainly, this particular symbol  is likely to weigh more and more heavily in our judgments.

it is about the USA, but it is about far more than the USA (for the reason given above; the comparison between the USA and Europe does not seem particularly relevant to us anymore). It is a civilization, a world, a concept which is in the process of collapsing. The USA is leading the way, in spite of all the montages and narratives to the contrary, because it is the rumbling heart of this thing which is devouring us, a heart at the same time rumbling and of an infinite fragility - the fragility of the USA is in directly proportion to its apparent power, as the System’s dynamic of self-destruction accompanies and gradually replaces its dynamic of ultra-power. Even if the old economic, social, political and historical explanations still help to some extent, they are of limited use for embracing and understanding this phenomenon.

Something immense is happening, which exceeds our conceptions and habitual explanations. It is more than ever time for our reflective capacities, and principally for our reason - if it manages to break free from the diktats of the System - to envisage the evolving situation in the light of far more audacious references and inspirations, far more audacious than those the System allows us. This is what we are trying to do, to the extent that we can, by constantly implying the intervention of “meta-historic forces”, of phenomena  beyond human organization…..It is simply unacceptable, and scandalous, that our reason, continually dominated by the diktats of the System, is limited in its enquiries, reflections and hypotheses, to mere human capacities and explanations. When one observes the end result of these “human capacities” and the paucity of the “explanations” for the catastrophe, one is bound to ask oneself what good our capacity to reason serves us if it finds itself limited to these references…   It is extremely urgent for us to liberate our reason from this unbearable human reference, without which all attempt to understand the phenomenon and its consequences will follow the same path as the system, which always proposes as a solution to the crisis the same old approach, that of accentuating that which had caused the crisis in the first place.