john ralston saul comments on the economic crisis

When the elite begin to think that money is real, the crash is coming. That is just a given in history. Because what theyâ??ve done is pull themselves out of the possibility of looking in the mirror and thinking, this is inflation, speculation, this is fluff. They canâ??t do it. And when you say to them, gosh, this is not real. And they say, oh, you donâ??t understand, youâ??re so old-fashioned, you still think this is about manufacturing. And of course, itâ??s basic economics. And thatâ??s what happens every single time.

The difficulty is you have a collapse, you have a loss of face by the people who are there, and itâ??s not just George Bush, itâ??s very, very deep. What weâ??re talking about is the need to rethink the departments of economics, of political science. Then you have to rethink the whole analytic method of the World Bank. If Iâ??m the secretary of the treasury, and not a guy like [Henry] Paulson, but I mean a sort of normal secretary of the treasury or minister of finance, and I say, OK, weâ??ve got a real problem, letâ??s get the senior civil servants in here. Gentlemen, ladies, OK, clearly we have to go in another direction, give me some ideas. Well, those people donâ??t have any other ideas because at this point theyâ??re about the fourth generation of what you might call neoconservative globalist managers, unfairly summarized. So they then go to the people who work for them, and you work down; thereâ??s no one in there with an alternate approach. I mean theyâ??ll have little alternatives, but no basic differences in opinion. And so itâ??s very difficult to turn anything around because theyâ??ve eliminated all opposing ideas inside. I mean itâ??s the problem of the Soviet Union, right?

There are a handful of people who havenâ??t been published in mainstream journals, who havenâ??t been listened to, who have been marginalized in every way. There are a couple of them and you could turn to them. But then who do you give the orders to? And the people you give the orders to, they are not going to understand the orders because it hasnâ??t been a part of their education. So itâ??s a real problem of a good general who suddenly finds that his junior generals and brigadiers and corporals, you want them to do irregular warfare and they only know how to do trenches. And so how the hell do you get them to do this thing which theyâ??ve never been trained to do? And so you get this kind of disorder, confusion inside, and the danger of what rises up there is populism; weâ??ve already had populism in a way, but we could get more populism, more fear and anger.

We may elect representatives to Congress to end the war in Iraq, but the war goes on. We may plead with these representatives to halt Bushâ??s illegal wiretapping but the telecommunications lobbyists make sure it remains in place. We may beg them not to pass the bailout but 850 billion taxpayer dollars are funneled upward to the elites on Wall Street. We may want single-payer, not-for-profit health care but it is not even discussed as a possibility in presidential debates. We, as individuals in this system, are irrelevant.

Iâ??ve talked to several Supreme Court justices, several times in several countries, and I say, look, in your rulings, can you differentiate easily in cases between the social contract and the commercial contract, and to which the answer is, we can no longer differentiate. And that lies at the heart of the problem. You donâ??t have the concept of the other, and of obligation of the individual leading to individualism. You canâ??t have that if the whole legal system has slipped over the last, really, 50 years, increasingly, to a confusion between the social contract and the commercial contract. Because they are two completely different things. The social contract is about the public good, responsible individualism, imagining the other. The commercial contract is a commercial contract. Theyâ??re not supposed to be confused. They donâ??t actually fit together. The commercial contract only works properly when the social contract works in a democracy.

The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury meanwhile is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests. The governmentâ??the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rightsâ??is becoming weaker, more anemic and less able to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Consumption, the profligate engine of the U.S. economy, is withering. September retail sales across the U.S. fell 1.2 percent. The decline was almost double the 0.7 percent drop analysts expected from consumers, whose spending represents two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. There were 160,000 jobs lost last month and three-quarters of a million jobs lost this year. The reverberations of the economic meltdown are only beginning.

I do not think George W. Bush or Barack Obama or John McCain or Henry Paulson are fascists. Rather, they are part of a cabal of naive, mediocre and self-deluded capitalists who are steadily weakening political and economic structures to a point where our democracy will become so impotent that it can be blown aside, probably with broad popular support. The only question is how this will happen. Will there be a steady and slow decline as in the late Roman Empire when the Senate ended as a farce? Will we see a powerful right-wing backlash from those outside the mainstream political system, as we did in Yugoslavia, and the rise of a militant Christian fascism? Will there be a national crisis that allows those in power to instantly sweep away all constitutional rights in the name of national security?

I do not know. But I do know that what is coming, as long as our oligarchy remains in charge, will not be good. We will either recover the concept of the public good, and this means a revolt against our bankrupt elite and the dynamiting of the corporatist structure, or we will extinguish our democracy.

saul is a canadian philosopher...in the summer of 2001, i read his book, 'unconscious civilization' and it opened my eyes to our precarious political and economic situation...this guy is a genius:

The Unconscious Civilization - Google Book Search

Yes, he was the husband of our previous governor general too. His work is fascinating.
Another person you might be interested in is Malcolm Gladwell. Google some of his stuff...pretty awesome.