House Of Cards

As I sit here cranking up ye olde Time Displacement Neutrino Particle Accelerator, I once again wonder to myself: "How ever did it get so bad?" 

In your day, it had gotten to the point where governments had been refusing to uphold long existing laws, and often even altering them, in order to better accommodate large financial institutions, which were then perceived to be critical to the smooth functioning of our civilization.

Some of these institutions had been caught laundering money for drug cartels and terrorists, and were simply never prosecuted based on a perception of being "too big to jail".

The same can be said for other institutions who were fined a pittance for making huge profits by short selling assets they had duped their unsuspecting customers into purchasing.

Yet, others still continued to make their dirty deals, fixing interest rates, and reaping profits far greater than any fines imposed, meanwhile playing roulette with the lives of the poor on the commodities exchange, while driving up the prices of food staples essential to those living in third world countries. Other financial giants had received little more than a whack of the paddle for willfully pillaging and squandering their clients investments.

Through all this, those hapless ones protesting these injustices over in the 'Occupy' movements, were being arrested in the thousands, yet none of the criminal elite banksters, save for those in tiny Iceland, had ever been charged with anything, let alone imprisoned.

The meme in those days had been the "one percent" versus the "ninety-nine percent". The reality was more like, or as great grand papa used to say: "the have-nots versus the have-yachts".

The public treasuries had been pillaged to fund illegal resource wars and bailouts of the "too big to jail". The national debts of the western nations continued to accumulate, excluding even the vast sums of other financial obligations, like the pensions those governments would be obliged to meet sooner rather than later.

That private company, which had been over-non-printing the US money supply, were playing sugar daddy to the other Central Banks, and keeping interest rates as close to 0% as was inhumanly possible. This unsustainable scheme was continuing to inflate a bubble-based pseudo-stock market, in order to keep a quadrillion or so dollars of derivatives from imploding, while sacrificing the bond market to do this. How ever would the debt get paid off if there was no one willing to buy the debt? Because the moment interest rates would begin to climb, would most certainly be the moment the stock market would inevitably plunge, right?

Wars on several continents, in distinctly brown-skinned third world nations, were being fomented not only for the acquisition of vital resources, but as a method of obfuscation from the impending demise of our economic/financial system.  

Those entities then known as 'Keynesian economists' had proven themselves to be at worst 'charlatans' and at best 'alchemists', given their complex methods of money printing, bond creation, bundling of securities, and tinkering with interest rates. Yet their schemes only seemed to work in an economy fuelled by cheap petroleum. Once prices for that once precious, now obsolete, commodity began to skyrocket, the large energy corporations, engaged in their frenzied drilling bonanzas in geographically hostile environments, had engaged their crusade to extract as much black gold necessary to keep 'we simple folk' from turning in our minivans and 4x4's for skateboards and razor-scooters.

The 'Powers that Had Been' hadn't the gold nuggets to tell us that they didn't know what the fuck they were doing. What was even worse was they were fomenting as much chaos (shit disturbing) around the globe as possible, to confuse us, and help obfuscate blame.  

At that point, the methods of petroleum extraction had reached 'loony tune' proportions; from deep water drilling to the folly of fracking, the surmounting ecological disasters were being relatively ignored by their desperation to maintain an economy based on insatiable consumption and debt. It wouldn't be long before Porky Pig would be giving us his final: "tha-tha-that's all folks".

We all knew, except for those sailing blissfuly up 'de-Nile', that everything was quickly going to 'hell in a hand-basket'. The 'Powers that Had Been' had planned for this by slowly transforming western nations into neo-police states. The largest of these nations even endorsing the torture of both perceived and real enemies in their diabolical prison camps based in foreign countries. Other law makers were thumbing their nose at 'due process', and opening the door for the indefinite detention of any citizen the rightfully elected leader had deemed sympathetic to enemy combatants. This shade-tree morality continued to escalate in the form of predator drone strikes and hand signed 'kill-lists', all in breach of international law.

The 'Powers that Had Been' had at some point realized, probably sometime in the late nineteen nineties, that the 'gig' was just about 'up'. An infamous event, presaged by a document entitled: Project For The New American Century, had called for 'a new pearl harbour', necessary to advance the insatiable appetite of western imperialism.

Alright, enough about the past, It's beginning to depress me quite frankly. Besides, I've got a whole barrel of potatoes to peal for our communal supper tonight, after which those who haven't already passed out from our feast, are going to attempt to build themselves the biggest damn card-house ever seen here among the gentle slopes of Temperance Valley.

Future CT     Village 5,  Nova Avalon.      Year 17 P.T.E.