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Month: February 2014

Thoughts on the Next American Civil War

Song idea, describes an old southern man walking in Amsterdam looking for a place to hide in the next Civil War. That’s about all I have. It’s a slow thoughtful kind of song. But for today anyway I am convinced or deluded that another American Civil War is a real possibility soon enough that maybe I really am looking for a place to spend it.
Why I think this… I realized that seen in a certain light, the last Civil War arose from a situation where the richest 1%, the high-flying plantation Moguls of Mississippi and South Carolina, had far more wealth than anyone else, and it was all reckoned in slaves, and the expected production of X number of slaves and their offspring forever on the (still) best cotton-producing land in the world where the demand for cotton was projected to rise with Industrialization. So it was kind of ‘speculative’ in nature, this wealth they had more of than anybody. Paying for the slaves at fair market value reckoned the way they were would have caused like half the nation’s ‘wealth’ to disappear, and a substantial portion of what’s left to be paid to the 1%.  And THAT was not going to happen…  Notice that the future in which the fertile slave was immensely valuable relied on Industrialization, which is often seen as necessitating the replacement of slavery with wage workers. [The argument is that slaves would break the machines if it got them a day off, while wage workers will take care of machines because if work stops, their wages stop.]

Now we have a similar thing. 1% are swinging a HUGE dick about how things need to be, to the expense of just about everyone else, including some Very rich and powerful families that just have not been on the War on Terror or Wall St Rip Off Gravy Train these past 2 decades, and so now are down in the meaningless 85th percentile or something, measured in raw dollars, but which still have clout and brains. The 1%’s Wealth is reckoned in terms of what you and I and our children’s children are supposed to keep paying for ‘intellectual property,’ and even Currency is a form of or has much in common with ‘Intellectual Property,’ on into some future when paying and paying and paying does not buy you anything new, but stepping into the Pirate zone, you find a whole world where people are USING knowledge instead of playing games denying it to one another and Pretending that we go on and Buy shit out of anything but kindness and a desire for good karma.  How many Generations do you expect that to hold up? I say Zero. Which is all good, until that fact gets figured into the profit projections of Viacom and Nintendo, where it means a substantial portion of global ‘wealth’ might simply disappear.

So let’s say today I am stuck thinking along with some writers I read years ago, that when it seems like the masses are rising up, what is really happening is Dissent Between Elites. I think when 1% require and arrogantly push for a state of affairs that really cuts against both Tradition AND Progress, and works to the detriment of even a few percentiles down, you are BOUND to get Real Conflict Between Elites.  And I can see the 1% locking in exactly the same people it did last time, with exactly the same talk: Racist Nationalism, Blood and Soil, Jesus leading them into Battle against the forces of the Devil. Half the Angry White Dudes in Murka are waiting for their chance to shoot Liberals, Blacks, Artists, Yankees, Pagans, whoever they don’t like, and call themselves Patriots for doing it. The rest suppose the police and Army will defend them against that bunch, but I would not count on it…. Or I see a strong chance the Military itself could Split, and THAT is when you get a Real Civil War.

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