Rule of law

On the Process of Awakening

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moneyCharles Hugh Smith – There is a tremendous amount of pain in our society. There are many sources of this pain: the emotional desertification of dysfunctional families, the knowledge that we don’t fit in and never will, a widening disconnect between the narratives we’re told are true and our experience, and a social and economic structure that tosses many of us on the trash heap.

The lifestyle we’re told we need to be happy is unattainable to many, and disconcertingly unsatisfactory to the top 10% who reach it.

We cannot help but feel a hunger for authenticity, honesty, spiritual solace and human connection, but these are precisely what is scarce in our social and economic structure.

The process of awakening has many paths. For some, the path starts with the incoherence of official explanations and narratives. For others, it’s the inner search for truth via psychotherapy or spiritual practice.

For some, it’s an investigation into the way our economic and political hierarchy function. For others, art is the starting point: a film, a novel, a comic, a song.

For many of us, it begins with this simple but devastating realization: I don’t fit in. I don’t fit in, have never fit in and never will fit in. I play along because it’s easier on me and everyone I interact with to do so, and I value my independence which means I have to find a way to support myself. That is difficult, as what I like to do has little to no value in our economy.

What interests me is how the epidemic of pain and alienation that characterizes our society is the direct result of how our economy and social order is structured. Incoherence, self-destruction, pain and alienation are the only possible outputs of the system we inhabit.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Bradley Manning: A Window Into The American Soul

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Paul Craig Roberts | December 3 2012

citizen controlLiberty consists of government being ruled by law and citizens having control over law. This was the way our founding fathers set up the US Constitution. It is the Constitution that defines the United States.  Every member of the government and the armed forces swears allegiance to the Constitution–not to the government or to the president or to a political party or to an ideology–to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic.

Today the emphasis needs to be on the Constitution’s domestic enemies in “our own” government. America’s foreign enemies are miniscule.  But the domestic enemies are legion. America’s enemies consist, with whistleblower exceptions, of the entire US government, both executive branch, legislative branch (with possibly a dozen exceptions), and judicial branch (with few exceptions).

The three branches of our government have united to destroy US civil liberties in the name of a hoax, “the war on terror.”  Even if the US were overrun with terrorists, how could they harm us more than our government has harmed us by destroying the US Constitution?

If you don’t believe that the US Constitution has been destroyed by Republicans and Democrats alike, read my book coauthored with Lawrence M. Stratton, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions, and the five articles whose URLs are provided below.

Bradley Manning, a member of the US military, complied with his oath of office, with the US Military Code, with the Nuremberg standards set by the US government, with the strictures expressed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the George W, Bush administration, and with his own conscience. Manning, allegedly (we will never know), released to WikiLeaks the video of the US military murdering two journalists and a dozen  innocent people walking down a street. http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/video_shows_murder_of_journalists_and_iraqi_civilians_20100405/

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A Tale of Two Crises

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John Butler | Financial Sense
December 6 2011

Crisis (Marxian)For those awakening to the unpleasant reality that the global financial crisis which began in 2008 has never been resolved, we have some important news for you: There are, in fact, two crises unfolding in parallel. One is phoney and in the spotlight; the other is real yet lurks in the shadows. This is because the phoney crisis is the one that policymakers want you to see: the apparently insolvent banking system in need of a bailout. The real crisis they refuse even to talk about is that economic resources have been so massively misallocated in recent years that sustainable economic growth has become impossible. What is needed to solve the real crisis is not to bail out insolvent financial institutions, rather the opposite. It is through a general bankruptcy and restructuring of the financial systemthat economic resources can be properly reallocated to where they can be gainfully and efficiently employed, enabling a resumption of healthy, sustainable economic growth, to the benefit of all.

A Tale of Two Crises

The powers that be would have you believe that, had they not taken various arbitrary, extraordinary actions in 2008 and 2009, the global financial system would have imploded, tanking the economy and quite possibly threatening society and civilisation as we know it. QE1, QE2, TARP, TALF, the Fannie/Freddie nationalisation, etc, etc, were all therefore necessary, notwithstanding their dubious constitutionality.

We disagree. There is a fundamental principle of western civilisation, known as the rule of law, which could have been invoked instead. Contracts would have been honoured. Failing financial institutions would have been left to declare bankruptcy, their assets would have been seized by creditors and/or disposed of by administrators and eventually the financial system would have reformed into a deleveraged shadow of its former self.

But wouldn’t this have put depositors at risk? Isn’t that what they said when they were trying to get Congress to pass TARP? That depositors would be summarily wiped out and, in the ensuing economic chaos and social unrest, martial law would be invoked to restore order?

That is a complete, utter fabrication. There is no reason to believe that, had TARP not passed, there would have been a general breakdown in the economy and society generally. Yes, there would most certainly have been a great deal of disorder in financial markets. There would also, most probably, have been a severe recession, quite possibly worse than that experienced to date. But unlike the current situation, in which ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial institutions have continued to grow, threatening another crisis in the near-future, had these institutions been allowed to fail instead, they would no longer pose a systemic risk. Indeed, the financial sector would have shrunk and de-leveraged to a size more compatible with stable, sustainable economic growth.

What follows in the next section is what would happen were governments and central banks now to sit back and allow the rule of law, capitalism, free markets and Schumpeterian creative destruction to work their magic and solve the real crisis.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

This is not going to make for light reading. Arguably the most wonderful, magical thing that humans ever get to experience is the birth of a baby, the miracle of life. But boy, is it painful: in the moment for the mother and in the years of toil thereafter for the parents to earn an income, maintain a home and raise the child to adulthood.

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