Monday, July 12, 2010

Making Amends: A Mini-Manifesto

This comes from a tip by Bill St. Clair at http://billstclair.com/blog/ thanks again Bill for your surfing of very relevant sites.

Porretto has seen the future and we are now in it. Please read his mini-manifesto in entirety.


Making Amends: A Mini-Manifesto

Francis W. Porretto's Eternity Road - about the necessary actions when the corrupt-beyond-repair US government and economy collapse.

Quote:
"We will never, ever, put an end to the dreams and machinations of the power-seekers unless we punish those among us with proper severity. Among our current officials are several overt traitors: men who took oaths to defend the Constitution, and have done the exact opposite. Of these, I count one president, four Supreme Court Justices, and hundreds of federal legislators. Unless these are dragged from their hidey-holes as was Saddam Hussein, and executed or incarcerated for life, there will be no respite from the pressure of closet totalitarians and social engineers against our polity. Men to whom power over others is the ultimate satisfaction will seek it relentlessly, until the price for doing so becomes both ultimate and inevitable."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fran here. This will be in first-person, as I have some hard things to say. Forgive me, Gentle Reader, but I don't think you'll like them much.

One caveat: When I use the pronoun we in what follows, I don't necessarily mean all of us alive today. I'm using we in its political application: to the polity we call today the United States, to the polity and society it has been in the century past, and to whatever emerges from the chaos I foresee.

Please read carefully, and with attention.

***
"When a man dies, he does not just die of the disease that he has; he dies of his whole life." -- Peguy

We stand, God willing, at the end of the Progressive Era in American politics and political thought. One way or another, the edifice will shortly come crashing down. The only questions that remain are whether a recognizable United States of America will rise from the rubble.

Many Americans, however, will not. That's guaranteed.

Our current political order does not resemble our Constitutional basis in any way. Every stricture of the Constitution has been abrogated. Most states treat their own constitutions as palimpsests, from which any clause may be deleted and to which any permission might be added, entirely at the will of the rulers. As for county and municipal charters...do I really need to go on?

The prevailing order compounds Corporatism[1] with Social-Welfare Fascism.[2] Under such a scheme, persons will flow steadily away from the "economic means"[3] and toward the "political means,"[4] in obedience to the established incentives. As the current state of affairs has obtained for nearly a century, a terrifying number of Americans and pseudo-Americans have made themselves utterly dependent on the State for their sustenance. They own no means of support -- no skills by which they could create value for others.

The key phrase in the paragraph above is "made themselves." Reflect on it.

When -- not "if" -- the Corporate Social-Fascist State exhales its bloody final breath, the economy that results will not have provisions for those dependents' support. As they will be unable to support themselves, their continued existence will depend wholly upon the kindness of others. But, given the immense damage that's been done to our economic foundations by Progressive policies, the crash is overwhelmingly likely to be massive. Many of us who can support ourselves on our own abilities will be hard pressed. Many others will disdain to succor of persons they deem complicit in their own fates.

There will be suffering. It will be massive. Some will die.

Yet the reckoning is at hand. It cannot be delayed much longer: even if the rising some foresee should fail to materialize, our current profligacy and laissez les bon temps roulez insouciance cannot last more than a year or so from here. No matter how well politically connected you are, you cannot consume what no one has produced.

Americans' charitable impulses and capacities, even if nominally quantitatively adequate to the demands that will be placed upon them, will fail to reach some persons in time. That, too, is guaranteed.

As one who holds notions of collective responsibility in low esteem, I dislike to proceed from here, but intellectual honesty requires it:

We brought this on ourselves.

MORE HERE