I was right to avoid comment on the debt crisis in the United States. Primarily, I do not know enough about American politics to be able to comment sensibly. We see supposedly knowledgeable US analysts comment on British politics, and they invariably get it wrong, making fools of themselves. It was best that I avoided making the same mistake in the opposite direction.
But I also suspected this was political theatre – but did not have enough to go on. But in this, I was right also. According to Zerohedge, the deal is smoke and mirrors, unlikely to achieve anything of substance.
It is a psychological stop gap. It solves nothing, but it keeps the masses from rioting in the streets for a few more months says Zerohedge writer Brandon Smith. But not as many are fooled by this as you might suppose, says Smith.
With the global markets plunging, the explanation is simple – it reflects the starkness of the situation - nothing has been done to fix the core economic problems - and the same fools who caused the crisis are still in charge. This, most likely is just the start. And things like this are certainly not going to help - Italy rumoured to be restructuring, with fears of a run on the banks.
Politically, this has the smell of a pre-revolutionary situation. The economic collapse is overdue, to the extent that virtually anything could trigger it. The EU players – particularly Barroso at the moment – are beginning to lose it, and are, according to Ambrose, making all the wrong moves.
But stand aside from the strictly financial issues, and look at the determination of our masters to destroy our electrical supply. Never before has society been so dependent on mains electricity, making a loss of supply extremely serious, with huge knock-on effects – economic, social and political.
Combine an economic collapse with major electricity outages, and overlay that with the general aura of corruption and incompetence, mix in a long-term fall in manufacturing, rampant inflation and mass unemployment - and you have all the elements needed for a revolution to succeed.
What is particularly terrifying about all this though is not that our masters are only incompetent – it is that they do not realise quite how incompetent they really are. The net effect of this is that their attempts to improve the situation are making it worse, and will continue along that path.
The precise nature of the trigger, and the timescale, we cannot predict. But experience and a wide reading of revolutionary history suggests that it always takes longer than one might expect. But when the turning point is reached, events occur at a terrifying speed.
Nothing, of course, is pre-ordained. But the trouble is that the age-old aphorism - if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck ... etc., then it most certainly is a duck. Within the broad sweep of history, revolutions tend to follow a pattern, and there are certain essential preconditions.
Thus, it would be a very rash or stupid person who rejected, out of hand, any idea of a revolution creeping up and then exploding on our consciousness. And in times of trouble, it is we the people who are going to have to clean up the mess and survive - with little help from out masters.
We would be wise to be thinking in terms of what we should do when the possible becomes the inevitable.
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