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The New York Times ran a recent article
about income disparity in the U.S., this time focusing on geography.
It seems that the Atlantic corridor, centered in New York City and
Washington, DC, has far and away the greatest concentration of household
wealth per square mile, and has benefited also as income disparity has
turned into a runaway freight train.
That, of course, is as expected, a natural result of the politics of
no holds barred financial capitalism with a criminal, taxpayer
subsidized underpinning to ensure its continuity. Only the wealthy need
apply.
U.S. financiers and their co-conspirators in Washington have fine
tuned the art of sucking the economic life out of the rest of the
country. Institutionalized fraud is now an accepted way of life among
those who make the rules.
First there were the trillions of dollars in 2008 bank bailouts.
After massive popular resistance to then Secretary of the Treasury Hank
Paulson’s railroad act, Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, decided that he
should hand out additional trillions more discretely, meaning without
informing the public. So he very discretely turned on the printing
presses.
Mission accomplished with no more of that messy interference from
voters as their wealth was diluted and transferred to the East Coast to
prop up domestic and foreign banks, river boat gamblers, thugs and other
assorted criminals.
A far less expensive and less destabilizing alternative might have
been for the government to find a way to guarantee credit and the
pension funds lost in the morass and then allow the banks to fail. But
there was no time for thinking. Mr. Paulson, grifter in charge, insisted
on action NOW, and those bought–and-paid-for lackeys in Congress agreed
without hesitation. Ominously, there was no daylight between
then-Democratic front runner Barack Obama and Hank.
The second thing that has enriched the East Coast are our tax dollars
that pay inflated government salaries and benefits to millions of
Washington-based employees, contractors, retirees and military.
When the average salary
of border patrol agents in Texas was $92,000 in 2009, plus health care,
pension, cost of living and ‘locality’ adjustments, you’ll have to
guess what all those high level managers and super managers in D.C.
bring home and into retirement because official information is hard to
come by. Undisputed is the fact that there has been enormous inflation
in the number of federal uber-managers in recent years. A common
personnel tactic to compensate for a salary freeze is to simply
promote.
How long will the East Coast governing and capitalist classes get away with enriching themselves while depleting the rest of us?
As demonstrations break out in the U.S. and across the globe,
protesting joblessness and an often IMF-imposed decline in the standard
of living, as race/ethnic and class polarization marches on, voices
answering ‘Not for long,’ are beginning to sound reasonable. At the far
end of the looking glass, somewhere in the foggy distance, the
dissolution of the 50 United States may be lurking.
The first person on record to predict the disintegration of the United States was a Russian professor named Igor Panarin,
who survived the 1990s collapse of the USSR, took another look at its
nemesis on the other side of the globe, and predicted the future: the
U.S. was no more likely to go the distance than his country had. He
believed that the US was headed for extinction because of capitalist
excesses leading to high unemployment and the virtual shutdown of entire
cities, as well as the problem of financialization: too much money in
too few hands, too few manufactured goods, too much in personal losses.
He says now that a number of other factors are also contributing to
the fragmentation of the U.S., including political stalemate, civil
dissension and a lack of unified national laws.
He left out the rest of it. In addition to politics and the economy there is also geography.
The continental U.S. stretches 3000 miles from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from sub tropics to the frozen north, across 4 time zones.
It encompasses tens of thousands of square miles of increasing
cultural differences, from the financial and governing centers on the
East Coast, to the wide Hispanic band along the southern border, to the
Asian enclaves of California, to the one-off culture of the Pacific
Northwest. There are other unique areas: the Great Lakes, Texas, the
High Plains and the mountain states, and the Great Plains, once known as
The Great American Desert. (Cadillac Desert by Marc
Reisner). Toss in incipient problems with water resources, the
disappearance of the oil economy, the weakening bonds of a unifying
national language, and come face to face with the possibility of an
eroded nation-state.
If Professor Panarin is right and the 50 united states are destined
to eventually dissolve into autonomous regions, we should expect bumpy
times ahead since the U.S.A. is no more likely to allow peaceful
secession now than it did in 1861.
As others have noted, there is no reason to expect a different
response at home than the U.S. government often uses to get its way
abroad: Those weapons of mass destruction, paid for with our tax
dollars, may be used domestically, along with the many thousands of
jobless, returning military vets who might be happy to earn a living
subduing unrest in the streets.
But there will be resistance. In no other Western nation is the population so armed and prepared to defend itself.
The U.S. is far from the only nation facing upheaval. From Cairo to
Tel Aviv, from Madrid to India to China, anti-government demonstrations
have been everywhere this year. According to the New York Times:
‘…. [Demonstrators] are taking to the streets,
in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box. … protesters
say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering
to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the
system itself can bring about real change.”
Sound familiar?
History-wise, the twenty-teens could be an interesting decade indeed.
Source: opedinfo.wordpress.com