1789, Folks. 1789.

More and more, it's looking like we're on the cusp of some kind of revolt or revolution. Whether it will be as thoroughgoing and overwhelming as the French and Russian Revolutions is impossible to say. But there is no doubt that an encompassing movement toward "reform" and "transformation" is taking hold.

The initial salvo was fired by the Gingrichites in their determination to undercut, hamstring and then impeach Bill Clinton from the Presidency while overturning whatever was left of the Progressive Revolution that had transformed government in this country decades previously. For those who lived through it, Gingrich-time is fairly recent history, and yet it was fifteen years ago now, and it's not as if there haven't been titanic developments since then, not as if -- to continue the metaphor -- the Titanic hasn't sunk, in fact, and some of us are in the lifeboats trying to survive with no rescue in sight.

What do you do then?

Populist outrage is normal under the circumstances, but the genius of the TeaBagger sponsors was to be able to channel ordinary populist outrage against the others who are suffering rather than toward those who are causing the suffering -- not just causing it but profiting from it.

When I saw the video of Obama being confronted by TeaBaggers in Iowa, I thought, "You know, this really is a pre-revolutionary act. I wonder if those who brought this 'movement' into being are prepared for where it could lead?" It can easily get out of their hands, after all.



Polemicists and propagandists are having a field day, of course. The point of their screeds seems to be to discredit the electoral process itself and to denounce all the candidates because, the best you can get through the system we have is the lesser of two evils. And who wants that? If your argument is that the system cannot produce anything better than the greater or lesser "evil," then your proposition is essentially that not only is the system "evil" but so is the government that results. This frame of reference all but requires the overthrow of the system and the government -- because they are both... "evil." Choosing the Lesser Evil doesn't end the evility of the whole.

By 1789, Le Royaume de France had reached its financial limits -- in no small measure due to its financial support of the American Revolution. More to the point, however, the Ancien Régime had reached its political limits. The King and his Court had nowhere to turn and nowhere to go to get out of their political and financial impasse -- except to call an extraordinary session of the Estates General, something that hadn't happened in 175 years, but which had to be done in 1789 because there was no other option but to have the representatives of the People decide among themselves (with the support of the Crown, of course) what to do about the crisis.

At the time, the Ancien Régime was roughly three hundred years old, having come into being through the consolidation of the territory and rule of France under the Bourbons beginning in the late 1400's. It was a drawn-out process, however. We could say it was something like the drawn out process of establishing and consolidating the United States, which came into existence in 1776, didn't achieve independence until 1783, didn't have a functional central government until 1788-89, and continued the expansion, consolidation, and integration of domestic territory until 1959.

And, like France under the Bourbons, the United States has sought to project its power and influence far and wide -- including through colonial and imperial wars of aggression.

France began hitting the financial wall during the reign of Louis XV whose incessant wars (and the upkeep of the Royal Court and His Majesty's Presence and Mistresses) essentially bankrupted the state. Louis tried to solve the financial problem by asking his nobles to pay taxes. They laughed to scorn; they told him to get any money he needed for wars and upkeep from the common people -- where all taxes are ultimately paid from anyway. The nobles' excuse for not paying taxes was that it cost so much for them to hie their households to Versailles (which is where they lived, not necessarily well, either) and to wait in attendance on the King that they had no other ready money with which to pay additional revenues to the Treasury. Let the peasants pay.

And so it would be.

Of course disaster could not be held at bay forever, and as the ruin of France's peasantry continued, hunger and disease and misery stalked the land. When the price of bread skyrocketed due to the unwise deregulation of grain and flour markets, the French people commenced to starve -- and to riot and to raise more and more tumult.

Calling the Estates General was seen as a way to manipulate the masses into quiescence while forcing ever more revenue out of them. "See, you are being listened to!"

Yes, of course.

Of course things went awry almost immediately. There was the Bastille Incident; the incident at Versailles when the fish-wives of Paris stormed the Palace, killed several of the guards, and paraded their heads around on pikes. This would become a theme. The nobles continued to refuse to pay any significant amount of tax. The King dithered. The representatives of the People became infuriated. And soon enough, there was a revolt: it was the revolt of the first two estates, the clergy and the nobility, against the representatives of the masses. Wouldn't you know.

And that's when the world turned upside down. The representatives of the People (actually, it was mostly the representatives of the tiny French middle-class, but who's counting, right?) formed themselves into the National Assembly and declared that they were in charge now and demanded the King's assent. Which they got. This was no small accomplishment and it put the nobles and the clergy on the spot.

Things had gotten out of hand, and there was no way back to what now looked like the stability of Royal Rule from the Throne.

The path forward was uncharted. The American example was not really applicable to France, and the philosophes of France were not exactly masters of political organization. All that was understood was that the Old Ways could not continue.

The working out of New Ways took a very long time, and there would be rivers of blood shed along the way.

Yet most of the New Ways developed by the French through trial and much error are still in place throughout Europe and a significant portion of the rest of the world. No matter how much we might deplore the violence of the French Revolution(s), the social and political structure that they eventually settled on has served them well.

I noted quite a while ago that we were entering a period that resembled the prelude to the collapse of the Ancien Régime in France, and now I've taken to seeing growing parallels with the Crisis of 1789. We're almost there.

I am still convinced that if there is a widespread revolt, the Revolution will be led from the Right. And what we will witness is factions of Rightists fighting among themselves for pre-eminence in a more or less Post-Modern variation on Fascism which will effectively be direct corporate rule over us all. We are getting there step-by-step. The only real question is whether the final steps to this end result will be accomplished through peaceful acquiescence or through command and violence.

I don't have an answer at this point.

The rich are on a Tax Strike

I've made this point many times, but it's time to make it again:

the High and the Mighty, The Gods Who Walk Among Us® are refusing to pay taxes on behalf of the Common Good. Period.

They won't do it, and you can't make them. Nyah, nyah.

Of course, you cannot have a successful society on this basis. Our leaders have been attempting to negotiate a compromise with Our Betters, to no avail. They will not pay to support the Common Good. They will not. They will not. They will not. And nothing we can do can make them. Nothing.

I've pointed out that this was the situation in France when the Nobles refused to be taxed to pay for Louis XV's incessant wars, and told the King to make the Common People pay instead.

The King got all he could out of the Common People before they were completely destitute, but it wasn't enough, and his successor, Louis XVI, had to call the Estates-General to come up with some additional revenues from the Nobles as well as the Common People. They took it upon themselves instead to declare an end to the Ancien Régime, and to separate the heads of any number of Royalty and Nobility from their bodies. As I've said, it didn't end well for Louis and his family, nor for many of the Highest and the Mightiest in the Royaume de France.

We know this to be true in the context of France, and maybe to some extent (who knows) in the odd case of Romanov Russia. Maybe in a few places here and there in Asia, Latin America. Europe. Africa. Now and then, here and there. Tumult and civil unrest appear. "They say they want a Revolution." And any nation worth its salt will put it down. Hard.

Compared to much of the rest of the Western and Near-Eastern Worlds, the United States has almost unimaginably calm in the midst of worst economic catastrophe most Americans have ever experienced. As the Ruling Class consolidates its wealth and position -- in the face of increasing misery for the masses -- the People do not rise up. They protest, yes, and they march and they demonstrate and they blog, but they don't rise up to seriously challenge the Rulers or even to slightly inconvenience them.

We have what must be the most rigidly courteous protest community on the face of the earth.

It is bizarre.

Even the thought of (ew) rudeness makes people take to their fainting couches clutching their pearls. We cannot do that, it would be wrong, and we are better than our opponents!

Bizarre. Telling.

The Gods Who Walk Among Us® have so completely bamboozled the People to believe that their salvation can only come through subservience to those who rule them that the very idea of The Demand (which is a key to any successful action or protest) -- that, for example, the Rich pay at least their fair share of taxes -- is too direct to be considered. The Demand, not "request" or "suggestion," that taxes on the Rich be increased is therefore not made.

And so we're stuck, and we'll stay here until the next collapse, and we'll wonder why this keeps happening, and then it will happen again. Until there is nothing left to collapse, and then it will be time to dust off the tumbrils and oil up the guillotines, and everyone will wonder why nobody predicted it.

Bizarre.

On What Works

The Ruling Class and their tireless agents in the Republican Party have it made it very clear that they do not retreat, they do not surrender; neither do they negotiate in good faith, nor do they compromise. They are the Ruling Class, after all. They declare, they command, they order, they rule.

Everyone else has the choice to submit. That is their only rational choice. Should they choose to do otherwise, they will pay a heavy price for their insolence.

This behavior of the rentiers and their tireless agents has been going on for so long now that it seems to be the normal state of affairs. Orders and commands are issued and by and bye they are obeyed.

Of course, it means that ordinary people are sacrificing practically everything they have on the command of the Ruling Class and their tireless agents. If they can manage to keep a job at all, ordinary people are working harder than ever and they are earning less, sometimes 75% less, than they did just two or three years ago.

They are paying more and ever more for necessities.

Their retirement security is being stolen from them piece by piece: first their pensions, then the value of their retirement accounts, then the value of their homes and property, then their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

More and more overseas wars of aggression are started in their names, others are continued into the indefinite future.

We see in the protests in Europe that the Ruling Class is not just unmoved by popular unrest, they in fact have doubled down on their demands for austerity, imposing even harsher conditions on the hapless populations than previously thought.

The nominally Socialist governments yield, without any fight at all. They believe they have no other rational choice than to yield and by yielding, they seal their own political fates, but maybe that doesn't matter. Perhaps they are rewarded by their Owners and Sponsors for "doing the right thing," ie: putting the entire burden of the financial and economic collapse on the masses, putting none of the burden on the financiers and rentiers.

That is, after all, the point of "austerity," no matter where it is imposed, and no matter the precipitating cause. The masses, the People, must and will be made to pay for the recklessness of their financial Overlords.

Street protest, which has roiled Greece and the other countries being squeezed dry by the Financial Interests, has had no positive effect at all. Governments ignore the Street in "Peripheral Europe" just as they once did in the Arab World. Oh, but that changed, didn't it?

In the Euro-Core -- ie: France and Germany -- which is ostensibly being "protected" by the austerity measures being imposed on Peripheral Europe, the public is being propagandized to believe that they are being "forced" to work harder and longer to bail out Greece and the other Peripheral countries, and they are steaming mad about it.

But they're being lied to. "Greece" as a nation, and the People of Greece are not being bailed out. National sovereignty is being extinguished, and the People of Greece are being forced to pay off the gambling debts of the financial class, in full. With interest. The People of Germany and France are being forced to pay off those same debts, not Greece's debts, the gambling debts of the Euro-Banksters, just like here in the United States, where the Banksters have been paid off for the same losses over and over and over again. Once the cycle starts it is almost impossible to stop.

Governments are so completely in thrall to their financiers and Banksters, they cannot imagine saying "No!" to the extortion demands they face, and when Iceland, alone, said "No!", the propaganda went into full cry insisting that's not what the People and their government said at all. It's astonishing to witness.

But as usual, peoples are being set against one another in these trying times.

Iceland said "No!" Years ago Argentina said "No!" All over Latin America, governments came to the conclusion that the austerity measures that were being demanded of them for more loans simply weren't in the national or popular interest, and more and more they said "No!"

Surprisingly, the world did not end.

Nor did these nations collapse. Saying "No!" was what these governments needed to do then, and it is what the governments of Peripheral Europe need to do now, but they are paralyzed with fear of the consequences to them, personally, of saying "No!"

They cannot do it. Not yet.

The plug has to be pulled on the financial class once and for all.

The way that's done is the way it's always been done: by effectively nationalizing the banks, strictly regulating currency and financial transactions, prohibiting and punishing speculation, and seizing assets of the hyper wealthy. The financial class may try to fight back, by freezing credit, but they can only go so far in that direction before they are face to face with their own intrinsic vulnerability. As we have seen whenever the demands of the financier class are refused and rejected, the financiers rather quickly back off and seek out other marks for predation.

The class is highly vulnerable because they don't deal in either a product or a service, they deal in fantasy. Most of the bubble wealth and the extortion they thrive on is simply phantom wealth; but it's all they know.

Convincing governments to do what's necessary to free the People from the predation of the financiers is no simple task, though. We see that the pleading of the People -- such as has been taking place in Spain and Portugal -- doesn't work. Anarchist riots (as in Greece) don't work. Replacing governments (as in Ireland) doesn't work.

What does work are sustained General Strikes. Surrounding and shaming the wealthy can be very effective. Making their lives miserable, and making it impossible for their companies to function are the key ways of bringing about necessary liberation from their thrall, but it is necessary to shut down the operations of the complicit governments as well, and all of this involves greater or lesser physical and financial risks in the short term that, for the most part, ordinary people are not particularly willing to endure -- unless they are relatively certain of success.

Ian Welsh posted an outline of strategies for resistance and change that's worth considering. There is more, much more, to effective resistance. The key is to shut down the operations of the Overclass -- which is probably easier in this technological age than many of us realize -- and hamstring their governmental servants. Make it impossible for them to function. Suddenly, their tune changes, and what was once implacable is suddenly yielding.

Right now, of course, they are yielding nothing because they don't think they have to. In fact, they are redoubling their demands. Governments are yielding en masse.

But that can change in a twinkling.

The New Normal Ain't What We Thought It Would Be

The local PBS station has been running a BBC series on NASA and the early days of the Space Program called "The Space Age: NASA's Story." (Yes, we're very deluxe here now. We have some broadcast TeeVee, meaning lots of PBS and Religion stations. Amazing.) It's a remarkable series in part because it is so fascinatingly able to evoke the spirit of an Era of Endless Possibility that is now long gone. An era so distant in the past now, it's like it never existed. It's all a myth, isn't it?

As if there never was a Space Program and Mankind never went into space. Or if it happened, it was just a Big Mistake. Never mind.

Isn't that something?

What with millions of Americans being forced into poverty every year of this Endless Recession, and millions of Europeans being forced into poverty every year, and millions of Arabs and other Muslims not only being forced into poverty but being subject to random Death From Above thanks to an extensive American drone program, and millions of Russians long since forced into poverty and on and on, all to pay off the gambling debts of a number of high flying private sector financial interests, the Future Americans and Europeans and Russians once thought would be theirs is now barely even a memory.

Space? Who cares? How about a little more interest in what goes on down here on Earth?

Paying off the gambling debts of financiers at 100% is more important to our governments than anything else in the whole wide world, and they choose to pay those debts on behalf of the financiers at the expense of the People, and without the consent of the People.

Naturally enough, this is a somewhat volatile situation, which apparently Our Rulers are aware of, but for which they seem to have no effective answer apart from outright repression.



What's going on in Greece is very dramatic to be sure, but it is merely a heightened version of what has been going on in much of Europe for months, even years. The public is up in arms -- well, unarmed, but that's another issue -- over the draconian impositions and cutbacks required by the EuroBanksters. The People are up in arms because they know full well that the Banksters are demanding full payment (with interest) from them for losses the Banksters incurred through their own gambling obsessions and addictions. The People are up in arms because their Future is being stolen from them right before their eyes with the full complicity of their nominally "Socialist" governments.

It seems to be dawning on the truly frightfully stupid and greedy Powers That Be that squeezing the People endlessly in order to fill the coffers of the Banksters in perpetuity may have a Downside that ought to be considered. Austerity for the People may not be the answer to the Banksters' dilemma, though they still call for it in unison, not only in Europe but everywhere in the West.

In the East, particularly in India and China, not so much. Not yet, anyway.

The People are seeing all of their governments in total thrall to a handful of financial interests, without the slightest concern for the interests of the People. Governments all over the West simply ignore the People and their OUTRAGE!!!!™ at being constantly pillaged and plundered and impoverished to serve the Banksters and their pecuniary demands.

This is quite a different situation than any of us -- that is, the Common Folk -- could have anticipated even as recently as two years ago. It's certainly not the Future any of us believed would come about through our hard work and dedication.

One of the things I think many of the Common Folk realize is that our hard work and dedication has already paid for the Better Future we... thought... would be ours, and that Future has been... stolen... by a handful of incredibly stupid and incredibly greedy individuals (think Enron on a global scale) who are convinced they are Smart and Generous to a Fault, and that all wealth and the fruits of other people's labors are theirs by right.

The problem, as always, is that the People do not know what to do about it, and they are very reluctant to take on the additional risk of doing anything about it when they are being pillaged.

The people (and dogs!) in the streets of Greece -- and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East -- are taking those risks in part because they have little or nothing left to lose. Not only is their Future gone, their present is being squandered and shuttered, and their history is being sold off for pennies. All to pay off the gambling debts of a handful of Banksters.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature seems to be knocking on the door. Fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts should be reminders of just how puny our little lives really are in the face of the Omnipotence of Nature.

Then there are the nuclear meltdowns and what have you.

The question is, who will understand what's happening better and sooner?

Le Roi -- il se est vivant!

[I've never been very good with reflexives... sigh.]


Over the years, those of us of a more rebellious bent have often alluded to the tumbrils and guillotines, the French Revolution, and the end of the Ancien Régime in our many unsuccessful attempts to rouse the rabble to La Révolution Maintenant! And of course Americans continue to sit on their hands, stare blankly at their flat screens and munch contentedly on their take and bakes or their bowls of hot butter-flavor microwavable popcorn.

The movement to Revolt seems to get nowhere.

Blaming it on the People is standard practice. They are Too Lazy and Too Ignorant to get off their ample duffs and DO anything about the Monstrous OUTRAGE!!!!™ that is our daily lot.

Meanwhile, life for ordinary Americans continues to deteriorate at an alarming clip, the seas continue to rise, and Our Rulers continue to ignore the People while serving their corporate masters slavishly.

Of course there are signs of incipient revolt everywhere, from the rabid rightists sucked into the TeaBagger movement to the impending revolt of air travelers over the invasions of personal space and privacy now standard with the TSA.

We can see that even The Powers That Be are engaged in a revolt of sorts in their refusal to have their taxes raised to fund the Government, indeed their refusal to pay taxes at all.

That last, of course, is the key to the parallels between the econo-political situation in America today and that of France during the reign of Louis XV, not Louis XVI. Of course the parallel isn't exact; these things never are.

But we shouldn't be blind to the similarities.

France's empire had reached a zenith during the previous reign. Louis XV -- great grandson of his predecessor Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil -- ascended the throne in 1715 at the age of five and he reigned for the nearly the next 60 years. He ruled for almost 50 of those years and for at least 30 of them, he was fully in charge of the government of France and its Empire, although it would be wrong to say he was an absolute monarch.

Louis XV's reign seemed full of hope and promise, but it ended as a huge disappointment. Louis is said to have been irresolute, dissipated, and irresponsible, and yet from some points of view he was anything but.

What you can say about him is that he tried and largely failed to reverse the slide of la Belle France into the economic and political turmoil and chaos that would lead to the French Revolution some 15 years after his death.

His reign was the predicate.

He did what he thought he could. It wasn't enough. He couldn't do more, at least in some respects, because France's political and governmental institutions were too rotten and too corrupt to cope with the needs of the nation and its people. There was no way to go forward without overturning the whole system, a Revolution that would come in due time, but one that could not be pressed before its time.

When the institutions of the State don't work, there's not a lot you can do to correct matters that have gone awry. That was the case with France under Louis XV. Yet life could go on, apparently as usual. Active rebellion from Below was all but inconceivable; such rebellion as there was during the reign of Louis XV was at the top, not at the bottom of French society, and it was a rebellion of the Church and the Aristocracy against paying taxes to fund the Government.

To me, it's obvious how that relates to our situation today and for long years since. Our own Corporotocracy refuses to pay taxes sufficient to keep the Government from gross insolvency, and has essentially declared that any enhanced government revenues must come solely from the Little People, those of Lesser Means.

Wars must continue unabated, fully funded. Subsidies for the rich and well-connected must be maintained. Programs for the benefit of the poor and middle classes must be eliminated or "scaled back."

This is the American equivalent of France's Rebellion of the Rich under Louis XV. The People's complaints were being "heard" in the Parlement of France, a very fractious and polarized body, but the upshot was that the economic burden on the People was increased rather than mitigated.

All the time, Louis was trying to find some way through all the aristocratic bullshit, but he could not imagine doing anything outside the Institutional Norms of his day, and as the institutions could not encompass anything outside those norms, his efforts failed.

The People of France knew full well what was going on, but they didn't know what to do about it. Nothing they tried seemed to work, but then there was little imagination in their efforts to remedy their deteriorating situation. This lack of imagination was mirrored by their Betters who simply used the economic and financial crises of Louis' reign to enhance their own position while the People starved.

After years of rhetorical animosity toward the King in the Parlement, in 1757 a man named Damiens decided to take matters into his own hands one evening at Versailles* and stabbed the King as he was about to enter his carriage and canter off to his petit palais, Le Trianon, in the Gardens.

Of course this act of lèse-majesté was shocking (!!) to the People of France, and Damiens paid with his life in a very grotesque -- but apparently highly entertaining -- public torture and execution in Paris anon.

The King, it is said, was disconsolate at the whole affair and resolved to change his ways forthwith. Good luck with that. In fact despite Louis' reform objectives, nothing got better. And despite the entertainment value of brutal public executions, the People were not amused with the course of events.

They simply did not know what to do, and they would not come to the understanding that they could do something about their plight until they witnessed the example of the American Revolution across the seas.

THAT was the catalyst for the French Revolution -- and many other revolutions to come.

Ordinary Americans will not be able to remedy their own plight without a catalyzing event that shows them the way. I used to think that would be the uprisings in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and eventually the Soviet Union itself. But as those events fade into the mists of time, I'm not so sure Americans even remember them, let alone see them as catalysts.

At the moment, then, perhaps there isn't a contemporary example of "what to do." But one will come in time. No doubt...

[NB: Isn't it astonishing that literally anyone and everyone had access to the Palace at Versailles during the reigns of the Bourbons? It was quite possible for individuals of any -- or no -- estate to approach and petition the King or his ministers as they perambulated around the chateau, and the idea of preventing the People from doing so was inconceivable. The absurd levels of Security -- and the Security Theater -- behind which our own government operates would be considered unmanly and insane by the monarchs of yore.]