You left out "jack-booted", Norm. "Jack-booted police power" has a nice ring to it, and helps hide the fact that I can only guess at what you're talking about. By the way - the Martin Armstrong who wrote the article you posted earlier - is that the same Martin Armstrong who spent a total of eleven years in prison for a combination of running a ponzi scheme and failure to surrender assets. This is your guru? Oy!

I didn't leave out jackboot. You put it in. So what fact did you cleverly put in front of to hide? Come on, don't be evasive. Fess up! Frankly it's a modifier that doesn't move the poem forward. You're one dystopian vision behind Michael. Manufactured consent retired the jackboot. It's all about soma.

Armstrong is a colorful and controversial character to say the least. I think he spent seven of those years for contempt of court, then a plea bargain. That link has him offering some reportage and commentary on Australia's Abbot which is reflective of a global trend.

As goes Australia, so goes France, just today...

http://www.leparisien.fr/economie/la...15-4613779.php

There's an Armstrong documentary out right now. Unfortunately no promoter will carry it in the US. However it's doing brisk trade in Europe and Canada. How about a poem or two for we blind mice behind the curtain?

I was wondering whether you'd mention the movie. Here's a review. I know, I know - it's the New York Times and their jack-booted critics. But the review isn't by Judith Miller, so I'll go with it.

It's futile to debate a movie that we, as Americans, may never have the opportunity to see. I share your wariness about Armstrong. Nonetheless he has some good ideas. If you insist on moral paragons how would you ever buy a stock?

Now about these jackboots, are you hearing them too?

I noticed Armstrong mentions "Atlas Shrugged". That's usually a good way to get people to dismiss you flat out. I read it when I was 32, thought it was great, except for some terrible writing towards the end. Rand's one great novel was "We the Living", but people are fixated on "The Fountainhead" and AS.

I loved "The Fountainhead" too, when I read it; but years later, on reflection, I decided that Roark should have been thrown in prison for destroying property that wasn't his. So he was the architect, and his plans were not followed to the letter. But did he pay for the material, for the labor-hours of the construction workers? No. Not to mention arson is a dangerous and serious felony. Therefore: Prison. A nifty, polemical speech doesn't redeem such a crime, nor make it defensible.

I lasted all of 4 posts at the Objectivist board I joined, right when I was losing touch with the whole movement and leaning more and more towards the left, or, to be correct: somewhere in the middle. I found most members to be at about the same intellectual level as the average Rapture Ready member. I was shouted out of there by a handful of angry people who had forgotten to think for themselves.

Sorry for the brief derail.

One more note: If I were Armstrong, I'd get a proofreader. Posting on an obscure blog, or a discussion board, is one thing: Nobody cares too much about typos and/or occasionally careless writing; but if you have as large an audience as Armstrong, I'd pay more attention to cleaning up my entries.

That being said, I agree with Norm that he has some good ideas - but I'm saying that based only on that one article. I'm not a supporter, or a fan.

The Polling Place

by Joshua Mehigan

Same place as four years ago. The people arrive
tired by daytime. Nighttime is ten after five.

The flag is lit, and the sculpture of who knows who.
Here’s the fire door, wedged open with Voting and You.

From inside, a floor-wax smell. Shy people come after.
I walk past them into bright light and social laughter.

This could be Bingo. It could be a twelve-step meeting.
It could be a bake sale. I could be home eating.

The bathroom is closed to all but volunteers.
Democracy is slow. It can take many years.

Somebody’s take-out cancels the floor-wax smell.
I could be eating and doing laundry as well.

Suppose the will of the people was as heavy
as our bag of laundry out in the back of the Chevy.

Measured on that scale the will of the person counts
a fraction of a fraction of an ounce,

and if that’s correct my will is not very strong.
Still, if the right one wins I was right all along.

The bathroom is closed to all but the volunteers.
Three tons of dirty laundry is made in four years.

Today my will is the weight of a grain of salt.
But then if the wrong one wins it’s not my fault.

I'm not sure how Martin Armstrong and his checkered career and shoddy writing skills became the main topic. He does a good job of chronicling the global war on cash so I pulled a link from his blog.

In Abbot, you have an ostensibly conservative Australian politician imposing a tax, not on the interest income your savings account is generating, but on the asset balance itself. Think of it as a property tax bill levied on your savings account. Alas, this is the future. Private property is revealing itself to be little more than a silly affectation permitted during good times. When the police power of government (necessitated by crushing debt) is driven to really gets its game on, we find we own what the government says we do and nothing else.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, you have the ostensibly Marxist government in Greece coming to terms with the same reality as it submits to the transcendent primacy of debt obligations. So much for ideological approach.

Indeed all that ideological stuff we used to fret over --liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist-- is in the final analysis 'ostensible'. It's evaporating under the onslaught of a government-banker alliance determined to ensure its survival above all things. Banker-driven nihilism is destroying the economic and cultural fabric of the planet, nation by nation, belief system by belief system.

I'd suggest Nemo is capturing one microcosm in his ongoing photo essay on NYC's 'gentrification'. Neighborhood character, what one might call life's poetry if not its humanity, is being being ground down to maximize cashflow and optimize debt service. Humanity is sub-optimized productivity. Culture is a loss-leader. Return on Capital becomes the only ideology left standing. Except it's not an ideology. It's disembodied will-to-power.

Many people identify with the government-banker alliance, at home and abroad. Do you think they can be talked out of it? I just read Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson. Jackson Democrats were strongly anti-central bank and anti-paper money. Back then, both were seen as anti-democratic engines of dispossession. Now we should probably call Alexander Hamilton the "Father of Our Country." He wanted to recreate the British Empire here and has succeeded to a remarkable extent, given the early opposition.

"Do you think they can be talked out of it?"

Abbot talks. Syriza talks. Talking exposes the futility of ideology and the supremacy of numbers.

There's nothing that can be verbally imparted to arrest the silent and relentless rule of 72. Rhetoric versus arithmetic. Every moment you pause for rhetorical effect, the numbers only get bigger.Power concentrates.

Bill, that is one of the best ( ie. most interesting) books I've read on US economic and political history.