Well America is looking as dirty as the last 30 years predicted. Sometimes I get the sense that there are significant instabilities in North America in general, and that the oligarchy can no longer mask itself and therefore has adopted the obscurantist angle. "Obscurantist?" you ask, mouth agape stupidly. Yes, stupidy, obscurantist as in not revealing anything to anyone AKA dealing with the world sensibly - information-as-necessary style living. Which is a pretty great hypocrisy in a system where your bank is entitled to know your state of employment in addition to the wealth of other personal information they are entitled to. Yes the ability to go to your bank and cash a cheque and go home without them having explicit statements from you concerning your status is probably eroded.
Now it seems a small thing, and it is. Frankly I don't really care so much as I find it odd the bank cannot just simply assume a thing like that. So you know nothing about the people who ultimately shape your reality (unless you think actors, celebrities, and personalities do this) and the global reality, but you share your information on a 'no-need-to-know-basis' because the information of your life is so useless to anything but a marketer or criminal that it is a balm to your existential angst that at the very least you can have a cyber-billboard. This could be protested by refusing outright to identify yourself on the internet, boycotting Facebook, Google+, etc... but of course your networking opportunities would suddenly revert to mid-90's standards. In other words we could go back to making personal statements in person, but then we can't hope 1000 strangers will praise us. We could hope for maybe 10 intimates to admit our ideas have some merit.
Not that protest will mean anything since freedom is still exactly what it was at the dawn of humanity: a dream that can be indulged in only by the most powerful individuals or through the most powerful delusions. Freedom is a pretty goddamned stupid goal, yet it is a noble one Oh, but ironically the idea of freedom has generated the idea of slavery. Currently there is also a pervasive mode of thought which infers that freedom can be bought, assuming freedom is laziness, recreation, or inaction and time is the currency which buys it. Microfreedom does exist - yes in day to day experiences you have a sense that anything could be done; in the macro scale there is no significant freedom at all. You must acquire and spend wealth, dress well, pretend to be contented with the system, and enter automobile culture or else live as an abnormal, stunted, or subnormal individual.
What's funny about the American Crisis in its fourth year (arguably the third) is that things just look like societal collapse should be around the corner. And I'm the type of person who stopped doing anything significant years ago because I was so sure the world was ending. Yes, somewhat of a reactionary idiot. Still even prior to 2008 there were lots of other people who were sure that dark times were ahead and who were not comfortable or ideologically opposed to what existed. Now their numbers have swelled by as much as 10%. Which is incredibly low considering the ongoing level of chicanery, but I'm no expert.
I'm just a commoner, limited by what I hear from media reporting and various hearsay. Now one story which is archetypal of the wastefulness that is undermining our world is how foreclosed homes in America are being demolished by the banks that (legally or 'quasi-legally') own them. This demolition spree is good for the housing market and great for the banks which want to own with as little responsibility wherever 'small holdings' are considered. So basically the banks are saying: fuck maintenance or taxes (budget woes anyone?) or even the growing number of homeless people and continue the rapacious process of throwing weight around.
It stands to reason that if a property will not be bought because of a market that is literally dead then what's needed is to reduce the saleable amount Fine, whatever, I'm no economist but if you reduce supply you can pretend demand is increasing or cause it to panic and increase. What's wrong about this is that the materials of those homes and the land and the entire system that cost resources to make is destroyed, often when nothing is wrong with it. Furthermore those wasted resources are not recycled (presumably to boost the construction/construction materials industry) and the value gained at the end of the day is purely internal.
Well... greed is as greed does so I would advise anybody who is fed up and homeless to squat foreclosed properties until the point of violence (and beyond if you're brave), because if the housing market is bad now, imagine what it will be like when the houses have to be rebuilt. There should be no reason to revolt while entities behave rationally and responsibly, but the longer we ignore and sanction waste, the shorter our outlook. In any logical world an inhabited house is better than no house at all.
Yes this is a fractured and impossible article; yes I advocated the solution which is least comfortable for legalism, but on the other hand I find these kinds of stories so mind-boggling that I can't respond coherently. It seems another problem is thrown on society's funeral pyre each day. Interesting how we can upgrade abstract values at the expense of real (albeit popularly abstracted) lives.
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