So what is the end game?

We have achieved regulatory capture, with the top four banks that control 60% of the money supply using that to bludgeon Washington into giving them whatever they want. We have an economy that has outsourced most of its good-paying jobs elsewhere, leaving only jobs selling overpriced real estate to one another and that's not exactly a growth industry these days if you haven't looked at the real estate market lately. We have a set of oligarchs, the top 1% of the population, who control over 50% of the assets of the nation and who have instituted "crony capitalism" here in America where in order to be leader of a major corporation you need to be a crony of one of the oligarchs. The economy is in free fall because we make nothing, because cronies are selected for loyalty to their oligarchs rather than competence, because we're simply too effective at creating and distributing goods to have sufficient jobs to absorb all those goods and the resulting job losses mean that we have even less demand for those goods, resulting in a downward spiral of employment whose bottom I cannot see.

So how do we get out of this? The right wing's notion is that the downward spiral of job losses will stop once labor becomes cheap enough to bring jobs back home from overseas is complete fail. The problem is that $1 a day, what someone in Vietnam might make,isn't enough money to survive on here in the United States, so we will never arrive there -- people will have starved to death first. In addition it's not just wages that are lower overseas -- it's regulatory framework entirely. Dangerous factories where one or two people lose their lives every day are common in China. The Chinese government shrugs and points out they have a billion Chinese peasants to bring into the modern era so what's a few dead peasants in the greater picture of things? But we have this strange allergy to volunteering for unnecessary death here in the USA and have thus enacted worker safety laws. Republicans attempted to eliminate these safety regulations via gutting OSHA and via tort reform but haven't completely accomplished that, so the point is that those jobs aren't going to come back just because wages decline. This right-wing talking point is a non-starter.

So, are we destined for Communism? Hardly. Communism has been discredited as an economic system for one simple reason: Because it has been an utter failure every time it has been attempted. Either it is incapable of competing with capitalism on an organizational and military basis (e.g. the communes of Spain, which were utterly crushed by fascists) or if organized with a central committee to handle defense, inevitably ends up falling to strongman rule and runaway military expenditures that destroy the economy because there's no checks and balances. Even without that self-defense flaw, Communism as an economic system overproduces some commodities and underproduces others because it has no real-time feedback system for adjusting supply and demand such as the feedback system provided by money, and has extreme difficulty with producing complex products that have many intermediaries, typically resorting to extremely inefficient mechanisms to produce those profits. For example, the Ural motorcycle factory, prior to the fall of Communism, produced its own engine castings and stampings, had its own steel mill and tubing factory on site to create the steel for its motorcycles, had its own machine shop on site to build the tooling for its motorcycles, etc. None of these could take advantage of the economies of scale the way a steel mill in the West could, but it was the only way the Ural factory could assure that it got sufficient supplies of these materials to build its motorcycles.

So if Communism isn't the answer because of its inefficiency and the problem of military capture, and capitalism isn't the answer because it is too efficient and the problem of regulatory capture by the capitalists (remember, power grows from the barrel of a gun, and money buys a lot of guns, thereby rule by capitalists is always exactly identical to rule by gun once you dig down the layers to the core of a capitalist's power), what is the answer? I suppose a mixed system like in Europe might be one answer. It adds sufficient inefficiency to the capitalist system to keep most people either employed or at least in a position where if there is every a need for their services they could be employed (as vs. starved to death). The problem is that this sort of pragmatic mixing of systems is immune to slogans. "We're going to have a socialist revolution, except with some Communist parts to counter the power of capitalists to rule by gun and some capitalist parts to insure that the standard of living doesn't decline!" doesn't exactly pour trippingly off the tongue. And unfortunately, demagoguery -- getting masses of people to follow you -- typically does require some sort of talking points or slogans to fire up the masses.

The end game here in the United States? I don't see it being anywhere as tidy as in Europe. The US is too big and too ethnically diverse, too difficult to institute changes that require national unity and too easy to institute changes via control of mass media, which is owned by and serves the interests of the oligarchs. What I suspect, in the end, is that someone like Glenn Beck is going to go off the reservation and lead a fascist revolution against convenient scapegoats -- Mexicans, liberals, Muslims, whatever. And as with Nazi Germany, the majority of people will go along with it either out of fear or because they agree with him. And as with Nazi Germany, average wages will continue to fall, but because more people are employed (it takes a lot of manpower to round up all them Messicans and liburahls and put them into extermination camps!), nobody will seem to notice. And of course the end result will be national disaster, as it always is with fascism -- national stagnation, economic uncompetitiveness, endless wars that deplete the resources of the nation -- but I see no FDRs in the wings to stop it.

Let us hope I'm wrong. I was wrong about the chances of Obama getting elected, after all -- I was sure that America would never elect a black President because of all the closet racists who will insist they have a black best friend but never seem to produce him at any gathering you meet them at. But if I'm right... we're in for a ride, friends, and it's a ride straight to Hell.

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin