Which this isn't. Did someone say "mojito time"? Why, yes, I believe they did.
Just whose side are these people on? No longer are they entitled to a presumption that they are acting with the interests of their own people in mind. Moreover, they're clearly impervious to voter outrage.
Charles Hugh Smith has definitely come up with a startling theory that tries to explain this amazing phenomenon of elites hostile to their own people.
His theory is that Western governments (and their financial controllers) initially exploited colonial peoples with the aid of military conquest. Then, when they were forced to give up their colonial empires after WWII, they attempted to subjugate their former colonies financially. However, even the "economic pillaging of former colonies has limits" and the same techniques of exploitation have to be turned on one's own people to keep the profits flowing. In this final stage of rapacious exploitation of every person on the face of the planet, the real rulers taketo fleecing the fringes of the home territory.
Such as with, Greece. On the periphery of the European empire.
If this strikes you as being a bit "out there" well, I'm with you but, when it's as clear as a bell that Western elites are both traitorous and certifiable ("'We' can never have too may Arabs/Chinese/Somalis/Mexicans in America/France/Germany/Sweden"), it's an intriguing theory. Economics as exploitation by a financial elite.
Life is good in the U.S. and Europe for the most part but it's easy to see how colonial peoples thought that the people who controlled their countries did not have their interests uppermost in their minds. The idea that nations represent one people, that the ruling class defends it, and that domestic disputes get worked out by the historic peoples of each nation is passe in modern advanced thinking. State of the art thinking now is that a nation should import discord, parasitism, disease, and foreign competition for jobs and if money can be made by financial manipulation of one's own people then what's not to love about that?
"Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation." By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, 2/19/15.
Revised 3/2/15.
I think even Thomas Jefferson shared those same fears.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of the reasons I wish Aaron Burr had dueled Alexander Hamilton earlier in life.
I wrote off Charles Hugh Smith years ago as a leftist mole.
ReplyDeleteSSDD
@Weetabix, I'm a latecomer when it comes to trying to understand banking and finance. Hamilton has had little appeal to me as he seemed to set to work at the outset to undermine the obvious intent of the Constitution. Don't ask me to prove that. I've got Stockman's book The Great Deformation which I hope will be illuminating.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous, I appreciate Smith for his eclectic approach. His technical analysis is over my head but he's his own man and has many interesting ideas about sustainability or lifestyle revision in these odd times of enormous intellectual and spiritual confusion. Heck, I revised my original post today and think it has a Marxist flavor of its own, though that's not where I come from I hasten to say.
I often observe that we're at the end of the period where the post-WWII paradigm held sway. Rational, admirable, powerful America is no more and now we are led by an actual damn communist who sympathizes with and supports our most vicious enemies while beggaring Americans and trashing their fundamental institutions. Not that he hasn't had a lot of help over the decades preceding.
How does one make sense of that (and that Americans twice voted for this disaster)? Smith's a thoughtful man out there giving it his best shot. If I can sound like a lefty once in 40 years I can spot him the occasional flirtation with, um, original ideas.
Anon-
ReplyDeleteI'd never heard of Charles Hugh Smith before today. Are you saying that the linked post was leftist?
I'm not sure I got that out of it. I think the mechanisms he discussed were probably relatively true. He may have suggested some solutions that I missed.
But on the whole, I think that Col. B's assessment that the "elite" are fleecing whomever they can to keep profits flowing is correct. It was ever thus; it's just that now the "whomever" is primarily inside their nations instead of outside because they've used up outside.
In the good old days, at least some of the elite's interests had beneficial side effects for those at home because the people at home were more the tool rather the victim.
I think. ;-) YMMV