No Exit
No Exit
by Rajani Kanth
What an epoch in history!
Every rule broken, every norm violated.
Economy in shambles, ALL Games rigged.
Politics in disarray.: each day, further assaults on the rights of women, minorities, immigrants, the poor, the impuissant.
Major Prices managed: gold, oil, value of dollar.
Gold to shore the dollar, oil to bring down adversaries, dollar to save Empire.
Oligarchy, Everywhere.
Aside from the few, the filthy rich, most people now eke bare livings (wehn/where possible) off (self)love, (un)fresh air, and oodles of exorbitant, usurious, credit.
Yes, the Vampire drinks deep.
Bubbles, bubbling, all round.
Bubble, bubble – with no toil, no trouble!
Mortgages, all over again.
Stock market, yet again.
Even Student loans!
Wages , stagnant, frozen.
Inflation, rampant (despite canny, ‘revised’ formulas of estimation)
Unemployment , ditto, as above (index: decline in labor force participation):
Income skew, abominable: glory be, now to lead the putative ‘Third World’ in this datum.
War and Finance, Lead Sectors, with hypertrophic, runaway , growth.
Taxpayers paying for both (taxes for one, bail-outs for the other).
And the Fed (also the BOJ, the ECB, and the BOE) merrily keeps on printing/lending.
Come midnite: what’s to become of all those gaudy, pumpkin coaches?
Think.
Even more , major Central Banks, jump directly in , to shore up stock markets, via purchase of equities, through wide open trading windows.
Interest rates held to zero, if not negative, by brute force.
Mega Banks using free funds to buy back their own stock, paying execs mega bonuses.
Profits from sheer off-shoring via lower labor costs, while the worker/consumer base slumps, by the day ,domestically.
Glass Steagall Unrestored, so investment banks continue running amok, with Dodd-Frank wholly ineffective.
Just the Derivative Trades, bigger than planetary gdp, voluminous enough to crash it all.
Who, there, to regulate the Big Financials?
Why, They are the Regulators (have a glance at the Directorates of the Fed Reserve Banks).
The System’s cannibalising itself , both financially and economically, but in growing self-awareness, pushes the , world , astutely, to war: after all , two global conflagrations gave it the Grand Hegemony it still carries.
Why not a Third?
Just prepping for it boosts state outlays/corp. profits, whilst slashing vital social spending for but bare minimal safeguards for human well-being.
Yet, a pleasure dome of cellophane and straw.
If interest rates spike, All collapses.
If the world goes off the dollar, it is Over: who then to shed tears for it?
So, it’s no more than a waiting game (begun centuries ago).
Close your eyes, and count: 1492…
Yet is it an ill wind that blows no one any good.
Such a gala time for billionaires, and morons!
These two tribes appear to thrive, gain numbers, by the day.
Maybe, soon, they’ll both join together and ride one of Musk’s super-rockets off to Mars, leaving us plebs, gladly , behind, to restore the quaint mores of a Bygone Age.
Should we be trying to recall those heady, halcyon, days?
You know.
When you could let mom into your house w/out first deploying facial recognition technologies.
And one could still , for the most part, drink the municipal water.
Tempted?
But this gratuity , whilst They were yet busy putting in overtime: carpet-bombing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
There’s the rub…
Whoever said ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ (Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr), was an imbecile.
What was merely ugly, then, is now turned seriously, radically, grotty.
Welcome to Human Devolution.
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R E F E R E N C E S
R. Kanth The Post-Human Society, Warsaw: De Gruyter, 2015
Farewell to Modernism, New York: Peter Lang, 2017
© R.Kanth 2017
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