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